Time

Why am I?

Why am I?

A coast line
where sea and shore
engage in a never-
ending dialog
of silence and sound.

Who sees such things?
The man or woman
who has eyes to see.

Who hears such words?
The person who has ears
to hear and a heart
with which to feel.

And who am I,
this old man walking
life’s sands at the tide’s
foaming edge?

With a clarity of vision
that morphs light into shadow,
and then back out again,
would you tell me, please,
who, and why, I am.

“The chorus of the ocean, the silence of stone.”
John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, p. 78.

The End of Time

Meditations on Messiaen.
Quartet for the End of Time.

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The End of Time

A thin violin crying
its cat-gut heart out
in tears of sound, falling,
rhythmic raindrops,
down a grey-streaked face
tight with stress and pain.

Such concentration,
such soulfulness packed
into each mindful note.

An audience of one,
I sit, head bowed,
meditating on the meaning
of meaning and nothingness,
the nothingness of being condemned
to oblivion yet oblivious
of the how and when.

Each note a hammer-blow,
then, the piano hammering nail
after nail into this coffin body
I drag through the motions
of extracting meaning
from this meaningless life.

Click on the link below for Roger’s reading.

The End of Time

Time

Spotify:
Remember to scroll down to the appropriate audio episode.

Time
A Theory of the Absurd

I wonder what I’m doing here, so far from home, sitting
at the bar, with my beer before me, my face distorted
in half a dozen fairground mirrors, surrounded by
people half my age, or less, all smoking, cursing, using
foreign forms of meta-language, gestures I no longer recall:
the single finger on the nose, two fingers on the forehead,
the back of the hand rammed against the chin with a sort
of snort of disapproval. It’s way beyond my bedtime, yet
I am held here, captured, body and soul, by foreign rhythms,
unreal expectations of a daily ritual that runs on unbroken
cycles of time: morning brandy, pre-lunch wine and tapas,
home for the mid-day meal, a brief siesta, back to the café
for a post-prandial raising of spirits, more blanco, then back
to work at four and struggle on until seven or eight when
the bar routine begins again with pre-supper tapas and tinto.
Time, comprehended in this new life-cycle, lacks meaning.
Time, in a cycle I have long abandoned, is absurd as well.

Thursday Night Football

Thursday Night Football

Once a month, they stick
a needle in my arm and check my PSA,
cholesterol, and testosterone:
blood pressure rising, cholesterol high,
body clock ticking down.

The doctor keeps telling me
it’s a level playing field
but every week he changes the rules
and twice a year he moves the goal-posts.

A man in a black-and-white zebra shirt
holds a whistle to his lips while another
throws a flag. It comes out of the tv
and falls flapping at my feet.

Yes, I’m living in the Red Zone
and the clock’s ticking down.

Time Flies

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Time Flies

… bends like a boomerang,
flies too rapidly away,
limps back to the hand.

Endless this shuffle of unmarked
days dropping off the calendar,
extinct so many animals
that exited Noah’s Ark.

Hands stop on the clock.
The pendulum swings:
time and tide stand still,
do not move.

‘As idle as a painted ship
upon a painted ocean.’

The print in my grandma’s house:
seemingly moving seas,
sails swelled out,
the ship stays firm in its frame.

Our garden fills with birds
and squirrels, light and dark.
Morning ablutions: each day
a twin of the day before.

The TV screen fills up its washbasin:
tired, shadow faces boring us
with endless wit and wisdom.

Time flies:
an albatross around the neck,
an emu, an ostrich, a dodo,
all flightless,
an overweight bumble bee,
too clumsy, too heavy to fly.

Avila 2007a 102

Comment: The top photograph shows the year 1555 marked in standard figures and in glyphs from the Mixtec calendar (Oaxaca, Mexico). … time flies you can’t they fly too fast … This is a conundrum from the General Knowledge Paper in the school leaving exams (1961). Punctuate this sentence: time flies you can’t they fly too fast … Proposed answer: “Time flies? You can’t. They fly too fast!”  I seem to believe there were about ten of these on that paper. However, never trust your memory.

The second photograph shows fledgling storks in Avila, Spain, trying to fledge, to fly, to leave their nests. Some will succeed earlier than others. Those who do not manage to fly, who are not brave enough to leave their nests, will sit there. After a while, their parents will not feed them. And then they must fly or starve. Sometimes, time flies. Sometimes, time sits on its hands and the clock hands refuse to move. Think: time enjoying yourself (it just flows by). Think: time in the dentist’s chair with a root canal, time lying prone having an anal biopsy for prostrate cancer, time spent, those everlasting ten minutes, while a cataract is being removed and a new lens is inserted.

Oh yes, time is flexible. Not only is it flexible, it is insistent, inexorable, unstoppable. Those clocks tick on, whether we are awake or asleep. The seconds lull us with their security, the minutes lull us with their monotony, hours lull us with their harmony, days faze us, daze us … hours: each one wounds, the last one kills. Time marches on. We can rewrite the past (revisionism), but we cannot relive it, except in our dreams.

Avila 2007a 150

 Doors close.
We can never go back.

Self Isolation Day 21

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Self-Isolation Day 21
Bakhtin’s Chronotopos
Man’s dialog with his time and place

Chronos / time + Topos / space = chronotopos: the time and space within which we live.

Chronos: this morning, when I woke up, I moved back into my own time and space. But what is my time? It was 5:45 am when I awoke, so was that my time? I stayed in what the Spanish call the duermivela, that drowsing dream-world in which we all wander, half-conscious. I stayed there until I decided to get up at 7:45 am. Was that my time? Well, yes,  all of that is / was my time. But time extends further than that. Real time is static and only exists in this second as I type the s of second, but look how it has flowed or flown. So my time drifts backwards into a knowable and then an unknowable past. I knew my parents, and my grandparents. But I know nothing of their childhood, their war days (WWI and WWII), their courting, their marriages. Their time is time lost for me. Sure, I can invent it, renew it, recreate it … but it can never be mine. All I can possess is this Second when I preSS the S key, a Second that haS already flowed paSt me, flown and gone. The same with future time. It is there, stretching out before me, for how long, I do not know. It is not yet mine, and when I come to possess it I will only posses it, really possess for those precious Seconds when I inhale, or exhale, or press the S key. And now I have bewitched you, and your concept of time, and your keyboard will never be the same.

Topos / Place: so what is my place? When I awoke this morning, it was the kennel-cave of the bed in which I hibernate each night. Then it morphed into the bathroom where I dressed and prepared for the day. After that, I walked downstairs. Descending the stairs, a step at a time, feeling for the steps with my cane, as I do, I find that each step is my place. Luis de Góngora, one of my favorite Spanish poets, wrote, a long time ago that “Cada pie mal puesto es una caída, / cada caída es un precipicio” /  each footstep, badly placed, is a fall, / each fall is like tumbling down a precipice. Ipso facto, I must take care not to fall each time I place my foot on a stair, and each stair, therefore, is my concentrate of time, and this moment of time manufactures my space.

Then there is my breakfast place, my office place, my work place. Time spent in each of these spaces is a link backwards and forwards, past, present, and future all inexorably bound in each passing second that I live.

But there are other spaces, spaces in which time flows at a different rate in objective time (the thirty minutes you spend in the dentist’s chair) and subjective time (the hours and hours those thirty minutes take to pass as each second limps by, like a three legged tortoise with gout). hen there is creative time: and creative time, especially on the computer, leads us into a different space, a sort of hyper-space, in which we hover between this place (the place of the office and the house) and that place (the place in which we create our visions and dream our dreams). Lost in that creative hyper-space we drift in a timeless amniotic sea where all time is one and all places are one and we are the masters and mistresses of our own creative universe. Y aquí, as my good friend José Hierro once told me, el tiempo no tiene sentido / here time has no meaning.

Jane Tims wrote these words to me today. “The idea that some of our words will live on, on the page… I wonder where our WordPress and Facebook words will reside in 300 years? Will some antiquities student make the headlines having managed to upload the forgotten words of people who wrote about the days of the coronavirus?”

My reply: “These are very true words, Jane. It looks like you have gifted me with the topic of tomorrow’s blog! Thank you.”

Indeed, the online medium is so ephemeral and can be wiped out in seconds. Tweets can be erased, changed, and altered. Written words and written histories have also been erased and wiped out. In our brave new world, the truth changes from day to day with no vital record attached to it. Historians always say that the conquerors write history … and when they do so they usually destroy the writings of the conquered. I think of all those Mexican Codices, destroyed by the Spanish priests on their arrival in Mexico as the works of the Devil. We know so much from the surviving ones, for example the history of Ocho Venado, born in 1063 and sacrificed in 1113 in accordance with the fifty two year annual cycle. Only five Mixtec codices now survive, one, the Vindobonensis, still bears the scorch marks from when it was plucked from the flames that were meant to devour it. Man’s inhumanity to man. How much have we lost? How much are we losing? How much will we retain? And what is truth …?

As for us and our chances of survival, another good friend of mine, the poet and philosopher José María Valverde once wrote of nosotros, los pobres poetas de hoy, destinados a ser polvo seco de tesis doctoral … we poor poets of today, destined to become the dry dust of doctoral theses. In spite of all this, it is our fortune and our duty to exist within our time and our space, to live letter by letter, painfully tapped on the keyboard, and to engage in our dialog with our own time and space, for that my friends is all we have, the single instant of that one letter S.

Comment: The watch in the photo belonged to my father. I wind it up and wear it on his birthday every year. It now measures my time, as it once measured his, and its place, at least once a year is on my wrist. Its function is to tell me the time. One day, it will do the same for my daughter, and then my granddaughter and they too will have their dialog with their own time and place.

Waste Knot

 

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Waste Knot
(6th Century BC)

finger-nails crack
red sealing wax
liberating gathering
knotted parcel string

broken finger nails
hard scarlet chips
blood flash-frozen
beaded on blade

underground
clawing for clues
damp walled
this cave-walk
distant the exit
thread leading out

reef knots slip knots
sheep-shanks bowlines
bowlines-on-the-bight
tight he tied them
used them
to measure distance
to distance him from doom

behind him
the bull head
boisterous
bellowing him on

Chronotopos

 

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Chronotopos

Chronotopos

A dialog with time and space.

But what is time? A river flowing? A long line leading from our beginnings to our end? Alpha and Omega? An instant held between finger and thumb and so swiftly forgotten? A dream we dream when we are awake. Or asleep. And which is the real dream, waking or sleeping? Sleeping or lying awake?

And what is space? This house in which Billy lives? The garden Billy watches from his window? What is Billy’s town? His district? His county? His province? His region?

And how does Billy relate to his “time” or his “place” and what is this being called “Billy”, this dream Billy dreams, this post-amniotic ocean of life in which Billy floats?

Billy dreams he is male. When he reads Carl Jung he learns a large part of him is female. Billy thought he was masculino / macho / male, yet when a large part of him is femenina / hembra / female, he’s no longer sure what he is.

Billy has ten fingers yet he uses only two to type. Two fingers manipulating twenty-six letters and Billy turns his black-and-white keyboard world upside down when he thinks his subversive thoughts and types them onto the page.

Time and place, male and female: Billy lay on his side in hospital and the young urologist shot him full of female hormones so his prostrate cancer would not takeover his inner organs and destroy his life.

Place and time: Billy lies awake at night and shapes disturbing dreams, dreams he never before dreamed of dreaming.

Billy senses the end is drawing near.

He fears it. Yet he loves it. He loves it because it’s his and nobody else’s.

In Billy’s beginning is his end.

Beginning and end: both belong to him.

Time and space, so sacred to Billy’s life … they will continue with or without him.

Billy may not be there to bear witness. But he has been here and parts of him will remain embedded in the mind of each and every one of those who knew him.

On an unusually Odd Sunday at Corked: raise a glass to Billy’s name when he is gone. Leave an empty glass on the table for Billy and he will be back.

Dreams

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Dreams

Sometimes, when we dream
there is neither time nor space:
all things are ever before us.

That child’s swing in the orchard
suspended from the apple tree,
primroses and bluebells
at the garden’s edge, delicate
their dance in morning’s light.

That old woman in the kitchen,
humming her morning hymn
as she bakes the breakfast bread.
That old man in the evening,
scything weed and dry grass.

Time’s fragility dwells ever
in our bones, not our minds.
Though dreams fade fast
with morning’s light, our day-
dreams will rule the day,
and we can still dream
those other dreams, at night.

Return to KIRA: Thursday Thoughts

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Return to KIRA
Thursday Thoughts
27 July 2017

“You cannot step in the same river twice,” according to Heraclitus. And he was perfectly correct. Yesterday I returned to KIRA. But it wasn’t the same. How could it have been?

Geoff, Hanna, and Cherry met me at the door. Geoff shook my hand, Hanna gave me a big hug, and Cherry pushed her wet nose into my crotch. Some things don’t change and one of them is a favorite doggy’s greeting. Mary sat at her desk just inside the door and she got a big hug too.

One Small Corner, the book that I wrote while at KIRA in June was in my hand. I had a signed copy for each of them. They also had a present for Clare and I: lunch at the Garden Café, courtesy of KIRA and a trip there on KIRA’s latest acquisition, a new golf cart, driven by Hanna. We were early for our lunch booking and Geoff suggested a quick tour of the gardens since Clare hadn’t seen them.

We all climbed into the Golf Cart, Mary and Hanna in front, and Geoff, Clare and I on the back seat, looking back as KIRA slowly vanished behind us. Another quote: “History,” said Marshall Macluhan, “is like looking at the past through the rear-view mirror of a rapidly advancing car.” This is a wonderful metaphor for my feelings at the time.

I had just met the young lady who had inherited my room, the Red Room, and my studio, #1. Neither the room nor the studio belonged to me anymore. They were now closed spaces, occupied by another. It didn’t hurt. It didn’t drive a spear through my still suffering heart. It did, however, underline that the waters of the stream had moved on and were not the same.

The gardens had changed too. Gone were the splendiferous rhododendrons of June, present were the multitudinous colors of Late July. The tiniest alpaca, born just before I left at the end of June, was now a sturdy one month old, larger and much more self-contained. Moe was a month older too as he sat on the roof of his shelter and nickered away at the world in general. Our lunch table was reserved for 12:30 and we would see them all later, parading on the lawn.

The gardens were fuller now than they were in June: more flowers, more blossoms, more color, more people, more children, more hazards for Hanna to slow for as we made our way back to the Garden Café, past the Sensitivity Garden and the Therapy Garden, past the Labyrinth and the Maze, past the Dutch Windmill, past all those magnificent sculptures … new sculptures had appeared … the blue piano wasn’t there earlier … this month’s artist had erected a new piece in the Secret Garden … change was all around me … and I viewed it from the backward-facing seat of a slowly advancing Golf Cart.

We had lunch in the shade beneath the apple tree. I looked around for Carlos, certain that he and his shadow were both close by … but I could hear no pipes. I spoke to Clare in Spanish, just to hear that language once again, but Carlos still didn’t appear. How could he? The river had flowed on and he was back with his family in Brazil.

Friends dropped in at the table to chat: Brad, Tim, Stefan, Mikah …lunch came and went speeded on by reminiscences and plans. After lunch, we visited the exhibition put on in the Garden Café by the latest group of resident artists. We admired the pencil drawings, loved the paper-maker and her art, and were wowed by the rug hooking and the photographs …

I thought of our own exhibition, held in the same place in June. We had our paintings, courtesy of Anne and Ruby, our sculptures, thanks to Elise, but the silence of July’s exhibition had been broken by the sounds of Carlos’s pipes and the viva voce reading of my own poetry. We were not a silent group, but a noisy, head-banging, drum-beating, piping, singing set of selfie-videophiles … the river had flowed on.

Ghosts of our voices clung to the back porch when we returned to KIRA. Hanna and Mary returned to their duties. Geoff, too, had things to accomplish. We met with two more of the new resident artists and complimented them on their skills. Then we slipped silently away to join the river of traffic that flowed down Water Street and up and away and back again to Island View.

Yes, I enjoyed myself. Yes, I will return again in August for I have promised to do that. But each trip will be different and no two trips will ever be the same, for old man river … well …he just keeps flowing along …

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