Plague Journal, Future Contained In The Past
Getting started is the crux of the matter. The ending depends upon the beginning, or as T. S. Eliot wrote in Burnt Norton:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
What immediately follows, the very next line dumbfounds me..
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
The potential for utopia, for humans to learn from past “mistakes” to try again, and to fail less egregiously, making the painstaking journey from when we roamed grassland savannas 2 million years ago as vulnerable tribal bands, to gleaming 21st century cities girdling the planet, — learning to be more just, more mindful of a planet filled with life, is nil. Speculate as much as you’d like, the end is present in the beginning suggests Eliot.
That hinges on the “if,” that veiled conditional. Somehow I take no comfort from the possibility that things might not turn out so grim, so despair filled, a future increasingly inimical to life.
It is difficult to deny
the significance of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, followed by Ma’khia Bryant’s killing in Cincinnati. Bryant a 16 year old, threatened another teen with the knife, and consequently was shot dead by police. This occurred as the jury was announcing it’s verdict in the killing of George Floyd. Just a few days ago, another Black man died in a hail of law enforcement bullets. The killing of Andrew Brown occurred while he sat in his vehicle attempting to avoid being served with a warrant. This, in the state of my birth, North Carolina. This drum beat out of time, is a dissonant secret of life in America. Encounter with law enforcement for Black citizens runs a high risk of death.
What about a song, a tune to modulate the rhythm of life today? One of Meatloaf’s biggest hits: Paradise By The Dashboard Light, is covered here by The New Directions. Listen carefully to the lyric, the antiphonal exchange between male and female expressing the ecstasy arcing toward an enduring future. And yet, the end was always present, veiled, overlooked in the excitement, the passion of youth. Yes, this is a long song, four minutes of operatic intensity — worth listening to.
[Boy:]
I swore I’d love you to the end of time
[Both:]
So now I’m praying for the end of time
To hurry up and arrive
‘Cause if I gotta spend another minute with you
I don’t think that I can really survive
2 thoughts on “Plague Journal, Future Contained In The Past”
The exercise of pinning down time in any form is impossible. The present is an illusion, the past is transformed by faulty memory a nano second after it is formed, and the future, as noted, remains rooted in speculation. We have come to rely on technology in the form of film and photographs to help us sort through all that has happened, yet that source is normally only from a singular perspective and therefore immediately suspect as to its veracity. My life is different than when I typed the first letter of this reply. I have grown closer to the end of my life and my heart has beaten many times since the , so my perspective changes (perhaps imperceptibly), since that capital “T” at the beginning of this thought, so how can we ever expect consistency? We can’t. We can only go with the flow.
As per my usual self-aggrandizement, I offer here an absurdist abstraction of a poem that somehow relates to this subject:
Human Nature
“There,” I say,
“just to your left.”
as I point towards ground.
Huge does not describe
the man’s size,
grotesque perhaps,
though impeccably dressed.
He does not look down
while stating once again,
“I cast no shadow.
I have spoken,
and my truth is truth.”
The words roll from his mouth
splintering into shards
around his spit-polished shoes.
I look again, for I could
have been mistaken.
But there it is.
His silhouette beside him,
flat, vast, unmistakable,
coating the darkened earth,
masking it from warmth
as the ground shudders
under his hulking eclipse.
As the day wanes,
his shadow swells
covering the landscape.
Still he does not move.
I stand, transfixed.
At last he speaks again,
gazing into the distance,
his lips ridged and fixed,
“You question me?”
he whispers
to no one in particular,
though I think he must mean me.
“I only sought to show you
what was real,” I state.
Pulling a silk handkerchief
from his breast pocket,
he dabs a spot of blood
from his cheek,
then lightly touches
the corner of his mouth.
Carefully he replaces the cloth,
never wavering,
never altering his stance.
The orange-bellied sun exits
past the horizon,
as it does every evening
with no judgment
over affairs of men.
Nighttime stars
shower down ancient light,
yet still he gapes,
unflinching,
darkness enhancing
the menace of his nature.
Slowly the man
points towards the ground,
“I said I had no shadow,”
and laughs the laugh
of someone
who is never wrong.
I try to speak
but words fail within
this senseless, absurdist,
scene of the surreal.
No sound fills this night,
the birds have all escaped,
but the behemoth stays.
Then from deep within his pocket
he extracts a white-handled
length of grey-blue steel.
Continuing to stare
at nothing in particular,
he points it towards my chest.
“This is not a gun,” he says
and slowly squeezes the trigger.
“spit-polished shoes” all the way to “this is not a gun.” Surreal, absurdist, but to the point. Surely “the man” does not notice his shadow as he is transfixed by his image in the polished surface of shoe leather…
Is Human Nature a recently composed poem?