Time

Time has no need to be merciful, and at any rate, all it can do is pass.

Its passing is felt in pauses: when I realize I have been on 9gag for the better parts of three days, when I could - and should have been - doing anything else.  While wasting it, it remains wasted to us, and to those priorities that remain unchecked in our tick boxes; and having wasted it we pause to reflect on its having passed.  Its passing is felt in pauses, pauses that do not pause the passing of time, but pauses us in the wasting of it.  In our pausing we become more aware of how time passes: time can do nothing but pass, no matter how we pause.

Its passing is felt in losses: I remember a friend whose mother died a few years ago.  In the death of anyone we know, time looms large; it is a reminder that does not need a reminder - which does not need any toll - for it is that which makes presence, and therefore, absence.  Death does not stop time for those still in it; death only stops time for those with no time any longer, no presence, no pausing, no living, not in time, any longer.  In death we become more aware of how time passes: time can do nothing but pass, no matter who dies.  It is especially cruel when it is a mother that dies.

Its passing is felt in feeling:  when we hurt, or when we rejoice, we feel time inevitably pass.  Feelings take time, they happen in time, and end in time.  It is perhaps in the realm of feeling that the greatest of pulls - that of eternity - is most felt: we want this happiness to last; we dread not being able to move on away from time that hurts.  Its passing is felt in feeling; and its passing is unmercifully one way - we can neither anticipate the past nor regret the future, but there will be feelings, and there will be time enough for feelings.

Its passing, after all, is felt in its very passing - passings which stretch, freeze, stop, regain momentum, carry inertia, but does not end - it cannot.  It is the most perfect promise, and the most perfect despair.

We are all creatures of time, we are masters of it in one sense and slaves of it in another sense, until we, too, are no longer.

But time has no need to be merciful, and at any rate, all it can do is pass.

Comments

  1. Anonymous21 June 2015 at 18:35

    Hello. I'm a passerby who stumbled upon this entry of yours. I want to thank you for this nice and insightful read that has pretty much turned my ...passing... Sunday into a period of much need reflection.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sketch: "Eye Contact" in Shawn Wong's American Knees

Shawn Hsu Wong is a second-generation Chinese American, born in Oakland, California in 1949. He obtained his undergraduate degree in English at the University of California at Berkeley in 1971 and his Master’s Degree in Creative Writing at the San Francisco State University in 1974. After teaching in several colleges and universities, he is presently a Professor specializing in Creative Writing and Asian American Studies, at the University of Washington, where he is also the director of the University Honors Program. His multi-awarded works include Homebase , first published in 1979, as well as edited and coedited works Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers (1974) and The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese America and Japanese America in Literature (1991), among four other anthologies. Wong has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation residency in Italy, and has won several awards including first pr
Read more

Mental disorders: Thoughts on a whatever something or other

I suppose I could start in plainer English discussing who I am as a layman not trained in psychoanalytic language, and if so will revert to the language that I do use when discussing anything worth discussing: half academic and half wit (indistinguishable at times from being a halfwit). As a layman I chose to major in philosophy, for better or worse, which is a fast track to being witty, or being a halfwit, and other things besides. Or I could start with a bombardment of links mostly pertaining to The Diagnostic Statistical Manual   IV and V  and increasingly technical accounts of co-morbidity and dual diagnoses involving bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder until we both drown in jargon I will not be able to understand, much less simplify. For DSM-IV diagnostic criteria regarding bipolar disorders types I and II, look at  this  if you want a full jargon drowning, or  this instead  if only for its simplicity and overall pleasant color scheme. For both DSM-IV and V'
Read more

Of finding something again

Image
I just sleep. I sleep to rest, to be away from the world that has given me so much and that I am not a part of anyway, to reset, to die. If only for a while.  I wake up and look at my phone, as all of us do now. The world painfully worlds, with no pauses and preambles: it elbows you in the face with all its glory, its vapid bitches, and all the iterations of the Andrew Tates of humankind. In everything we have a choice, save for one: this world. It is the ultimate given, the ultimate, ungentle, fact, and that we are in it. It doesn't stop. It can't; it doesn't have to. Immediately upon waking I close my eyes and dive deep into the recesses of whatever that was young that's left of me to desperately hunt for reserves of a desire to get up from bed, to work, to be . Two days ago I joked with my lover that I had been tired since 1984, and I think I mean it.  If not for him and another friend that gave me the time of the day in the MMORPG that I returned to, I would have ro
Read more