Two hundred and twenty four. It's nice to say it, it has a nice cadence to it. Everyone wants a nice round number to hang their hat on, but when you're writing the good write against nothing of historical record to speak of, two hundred and twenty four seems like a good deal of a number. It's a lot of posts, a lot of words here and there. I don't feel like I've arrived, when I think of this number, but I feel like I'm far, far away from when I first started walking. That's the trick to it, isn't it? Putting one foot in front of the other, you get somewhere eventually. Leaving is brave, isn't it? I think the excitement of entering a different world, the joy of moving forward, being anew in the sense of stepping fresh into a new world, casts out my fear. Moving makes me feel safe. It always has.
As for moving, I think the theory is that we all live in a space-time reality, so if we don't move in Cartesian, three-dimensional space, we still "move" at the speed of light on the fourth, i.e. time axis (see: link). So imagine it as you, sitting there, warping1 ahead in time (it forms a weird little graph, fourth dimensional, can't be pictured - think melded toroids, past and future cones of information, etc.). The theory goes that the faster you move in reality, the slower you project on the time scale - since the speed of light in space-time is always constant, it acts as a limit by forcing time to vary; see: link. Well, imagine that. I once daydreamed, in a primary school Chinese class, that everybody had their own little time bubble - you could add hours if you wanted, or less, to your own bubble, but you had to sync with someone before you could be with them. It was a translucent green bubble in my mind, I think you used a sort of watch to set it. So it's interesting, years and years later, to find out that everybody has, not only a subjective (which is to say, individualistic) sense of time passing, but that time passes differently if you move at different speeds. Imagine that2. Sure, it's on a scale of 10 to the minus bajillion, but it makes a solid, physical difference (as the clocks on space satellites show). And if you kinda step a little bit further back, everyone kinda sets their own schedules in life anyway. An hour here, an hour there. Messages waiting to be read later on. We're worlds apart here, that's what I'm trying to tell you. Time is essentially, necessarily, dogmatically, enigmatic. We have conventional ways to deal with it, one moment to another3, and abstractly theoretical ways to represent it4, but that's about all we can say.
1 The metaphors are regrettably mixed - "warping" is a sometime reference to a sort of space-time skip, like the concept of a "worm-hole" connecting two parts of the fabric, rather than a smooth transition; but the streams aren't crossed (classic ghostbusters reference).
2 Can you imagine what real time passing is like? If I could paraphrase Borges, time is not necessarily an infinite line; it could be a finite line with infinite points in between, each of which is neverending and inconceivable.
3 A moment - what a shorthand! The audacity - to transmogrify the passing present into a brief amount of time.
4 It is posited that the shortest meaningful quantum of time is the Planck unit for time, i.e. the time it takes for light to move one effing Planck length in a vacuum. It's short, really short - in the sense that we cannot predict what happens on a scale shorter than that - none of our crazy theories work (see link).
I was thinking to myself, the other day, that I haven't written anything for so long. Haven't done any real writing for so long. It's one of those things that bugs you, isn't it? Beating on, rafts against the tide. Every week passes like the next, you run out of ketchup and buy another bottle. Clean the floor trap, turn on the vacuum machine, spray chain lubricant for the bike. Take grandma and the kids out to lunch, run in the afternoon, fry an egg with tomatoes. I mean, what is this? Faded, lime green table walls, office keyboards, browsing the phone in the toilet, eyes firmly on paper during meetings. What fills life with joy, when is it the time when leaving turns vital? How can I only be living between the spaces, the interstices pre/post the commute? No, no, no. Time can't weigh so heavily. A plan must be had. (Attenborough's voice: it is had).
I made a friend recently. She finds me funny. I think we're going to be alright. How do you describe feeling fond for a woman? A sense of pervading desire. I was thinking the other day of how to describe what "love" means. A self-centred desire to own something about one you love - it's a needy thing - chiefly, time and physical space, inner, secret space, suppleness, tenderness, warm scents and soft textures, coupled with a dream, an idealised future together, of what is possible, what is at hand, the appearance and form of a man and his good wife, handling the world together, forgoing other sources of fulfillment (and to the envy of all, delicious). That idealised thing is a sort of trap, one begins to suspect, self illusionment. It's not pessimism talking, it's a knowledge that idealism is always fraught with something. It carries you away. Learning to live in satisfaction with the present as it presents itself, reality per se, is a real sense of joy, plain as it is. But to give up the self-sustaining notion is also a part of the deal, to give away time spent in contemplation, a relationship one has, inner self to the world. I am afraid, I think, of being tired. In Chinese, 倦了. It's my deepest bête noire, I've always known it, the dark beast, as it knows me, as it is me. Well, we'll see. Yeah, I believe we're going to be alright.
