[This appeared in the May issue of Pari Perspectives]
6am: Long Shadows
The morning shadows are a memory of night. They seem to long for the dissipating darkness. Reluctantly, they retreat, until they are cowering under our feet by midday; and then by late afternoon, leaning once more towards the returning dark.
How can a timeless “now” squeeze between these ceaseless shadows?
The clock, too, is ceaseless. There is no space on the clock face to mark a “now”.
Maybe the clock is only a map of a timeless territory.
Or, perhaps the clock is a spinning prism through which the mystery of time and timelessness can be seen in different slants of light and shadow.
But even a full circumference of 24 hours will not resolve this mystery. Because everywhere I look, I see only the limitations of human perception, not the limitations of reality itself. So, I can’t “know” time, only these slanted perceptions.
Perhaps time can’t be known because there’s no replication possible. Look, this golden-hued sunrise doesn’t hold quite the same golden hue as yesterday’s. Every morning, the clouds change, branches and leaves have fallen, breaking the light a little differently. And my sensitivities change also.
So far, the earth has experienced about 1,658,195,000,000 mornings, and every one of them was different. Maybe the clock never completes a perfect circle, but spirals beyond measure.
Maybe the techno-futurists are wrong, and we’ll never travel to a previous time, or live forever, because something always dies, no matter what. We will always leave someone behind, or some part of us. Or, we’d return knowing what we didn’t then; which would make it something new; not the past at all.
Our desire to escape the anxieties of time leads us unwittingly towards an inanimate repetition of a deathless world; a perfectly circular and repetitive mechanism; an escape from the spiral of renewal, which requires dying to the past and future, as Krishnamurti pointed out so clearly.
Look, already, the early morning hints of spring have vanished under a wintry sky. I have never known a morning like this.
Negative Geography 