A Meditation

A Meditation

 

How does one tell time? Why do we tell, rather than read or decipher or measure, time? What does time give away? What if a crystal should survive the humanly measurable universe in order to keep on ticking, in imitation of a human heartbeat, with attracting and repelling protons and neutrons, long after there is no one left to smile, no one left to care about measuring the duration of mere duration. It would appear that its length is the same by any measure.

I profess time. The subjective slip into tempus fugit, having a good one, it flies rather. I survived to tell it—yet so many claim that death is not the end—and this crystal, attracting and repelling itself for eternities beyond the life of matter, will visually expose the bomb’s ticking well after its explosion. Humankind is only, at this point in time, up to this postscript, tale told, into empty and cold eternities of circumlocution.

Let us rather measure time in the degradation of our world—the creeping chaos of the market economy, the useless technological inventions that function merely to redistribute wealth, distract the monkey from his banana, and chip away at our ability to think, to concentrate, to read, to study, to ponder. You shovel television, the Internet, and cellular phones down our gullets—limiting our cognitive horizons to smaller and smaller screens—and invent ADD to explain away the creeping stupidity among our children. Sky flowers: the 4^th of July; they stole our world away while we, a population of frozen, flesh-eating zombies, stood and watched the spectacles, ever more tawdry, ever more expensive, in these sad, shrinking simulacra of the sky.

Time is really measured, by the masses, through inflation, which should be called deflation, by the noticeable emptying of humanity’s collective coffers.

At one time we defined and overcame our own concept of measurable time through thought, through the contemplation of static images, in what our monkish ancestors termed prayer but what is really more correctly called meditation. Every technological innovation that I have witnessed in my lifetime has been directly inimical to this once creative and sacred exercise of our cognitive and imaginative powers.

The images move too fast for contemplation now. We are no longer given any space in which to think—time?—but are rather trained, continuously, to receive, to eat, to gorge and consume, but never to taste, nor especially to cook. It’s even considered bad form to throw the food back at our keepers in disgust, or just for fun. (Because they look so funny with spaghetti hair and tomato sauce face powder.)

Take your time. Hide it away in a text, in a picture, in music, in a shape—something that does not move; a static crystal whose eternity remains chainlinked to the history of matter, of humankind, and of our so little known universe. Leave mysticism to the physicists. Quote Dante Alighieri: make more love by taking love away from those who offer it. Be a working contradiction.

Bologna

9/27/2012

Inspired by this.