Chapter 5

 

The way she sliced time was far from simple: as an illustrative memory and reminder, she thought of her ex-husband, James.

He was an alcoholic, and, like all alcoholics with the IQ of 185, promised every day to be better. Of course, he didn’t: she had to take him to hospital twice out of withdrawals from sheer sleep. She finally recoursed to rehab, and he stayed sober for three months.

The 175th day of sobriety, however, was too much for him: he decided to reward himself by drinking. She let him. 

Telling Lord this story, he simply said, “Why did you let him?” He continued, “You could have stopped him right then and there. I mean, that he was an alcoholic wasn’t his fault, or had been so long that fault is no longer an option, but that you allowed him to go back to drinking is all on you.” 

She stopped sipping her coffee. Goddamnit, he was right. The way she sliced time there was to ignore it altogether: It’s just today. It’s just one beer.

The beer, of course, turned to eight within less than three days. Two years later, she was staying at her sister’s a province away, waiting for him to leave the country and sign the annulment papers. It was small mercy that he didn’t die in the airport during his flight. 

 Brandon was far from impressed, himself. “His IQ is 185? What is he, a theoretical physicist?”

“Actually, yes,” she replied, having breakfast with him over the phone. 

“Why wasn’t he smart enough to know he’s his own murderer?” 

“It’s more complicated than that, baby,” she started to explain. “He started self-medicating with drugs and alcohol by the age of fifteen, both to slow down his thought processes and socially lubricate his own relationships with what he saw as people beneath him.”

“No, it’s simple. He’s a moron. His medicine became his poison, and any man worth his salt should catch himself in that moment.” 

They had to say goodbye after that, since he had to lift kettlebells with his friend and video editor. 

She mused at his bipolarity, and, as increasingly as she was wont to do nowadays, hid him within the guise of Batman and the Dalai Lama and proceeded to write, with more wit than usual:

In Sir Pratchett, a Procrastinator makes history and the cosmology of time be in balance with each other, ensuring that one moment proceeds to the next, without pockets of time hiccupping, no historical event a pregnant wrinkle that did not take the time it should, of course, in the trousers of time. 

Batman, however, (whew, what a transition!)  is such a wrinkle in time. So is the Dalai Lama. 

Let me explain. Wait, take a breath first; I will wait while I make some tea and milk, for your brain to get acclimated to my absolute raving lunacy when talking about time, in time. Take your time.

A moment in time, no matter how perfect, needs a second moment of the differently same, to be real. A moment, say, of an eye blink, regardless of im selben Augenblick, regardless of "in the same moment," there is a duration to an eye blink, and we experience that duration. If we didn't, and if that same moment is truly the same, then it cannot have a duration, then that duration would not exist at all. For durations, of course, are promises: this will happen again. It must. A moment that cannot be repeated is not a moment: it is nothing that does not take up space in time. (In the same way that a word that cannot be used again is not a word: it is not part of language. A signature that cannot be in its very uniqueness iterated is not a signature.) All discrete things are promises and bastards (as only a promise can be, yes?): this will happen again. A hapax legomenon even needs the label, for it to be true.

Batman does not like first moments; he built an oath and a life and a rather interesting career out of it. It's ultimately an impotent oath, for it refuses to budge even in the very real threat of deaths numbering to tens of thousands (The Joker's actual body count, if not even considering that he decimated Metropolis in Injustice. If we were to include that, then his body count is 11 million people.) Who would bound himself to an oath of the sanctity of human life that includes one with a body count like that? It is the realm where the sacrosanct becomes the sanctimonious: Batman, in refusing to have a first killing moment, damned himself to never experience anything real anymore - to begin with, even. In the world of violence he chose to be an innocent until the very end, injuring but not taking a life, exactly like how "an agnostic is an atheist that didn't come," as my lover put it. (She shivered out of… what, exactly? Fear? Excitement? That she smuggled Brandon into one of her pieces, revealing that it was all about him throughout this whole time.)

I understand, of course, the threat of first moments, and the underlying assumption behind the value of them. Being a virgin only once, your first moment of impalement should mean something: you have given the purity of yourself to a man for the first time, yada, yada, yada. Having yielded, then, to the inevitability of sex, you have doomed yourself to the snowball of avalanching, ultimately indistinguishable dicks throughout your lifetime. I get it. You are only a Vestal virgin once; and the rest of the time you are Santa Claus hauling bags of dicks for your life. Not a pretty picture, of course.

But, I will maintain, that the second time is more real: for it is only in second times that one walks, with the grace of intention and the knowledge of a grown man, into what he was buffeted along in the first one. It is a soldier going again to campaign that makes him what he is, not his first battle, where he was sniveling like a recruit and putting on the bravado of an uncooked general. In that second war is the real soldier: convinced, convicted, molded, as promised. In that second war should the sergeant say, "Welcome to the Army, baby." (The world, after all, became what it is only after the Second World War.) It is at first that Michelangelo’s David hits you like a thousand suns; but it is the second time upon seeing him that you approach him. It is in the second time that you have sex where the promise is kept: your first sex is never as memorable as the second one, for it is when you become a woman.

The Dalai Lama (what a transition!) is a wrinkle in time in the opposite direction: he is eternally reborn, determined by the circumstances of the birth of a baby upon the previous one's death. It is in repetition and only in repetition that one transcends the curse of first moments, and thus transcend time and have the only right to forge an identity in a world where identity is never achieved in a lifetime. Only in reincarnation are you made to be who you are, for you even rewrite the past ever anew to be the present, and thus ravage the future with a mathematical certainty: not it "must," but it will happen again, because it is thus. Thus is history always a complete Orouboros. History is written only by men who understand this.

Ah, history. Brandon has talked a lot about history, and his process philosophy is that it is always already complete: neither linear nor cyclical. In this he is a conceptual thinker, a perfect Orouboros of the grandest scale.

She has a soft spot for the grandest scales. James, after all, before he went into the brink of insanity and came back a broken man, attempted to make one: the physical universe is dictated by Special Relativity and electromagnetism in different scales, and using a mathematical topography he cannot quite obtain, concluded nonetheless that the universe is a balloon. (Well, she understood him, when he was explaining his version of a Grand Unification Theory, after several shots of vodka.)