I read recently that half the men who make seventy don’t live to eighty. And while I was just getting reconciled to more chins and wrinkles, rebranding them as a severe beauty, a new humility, they were simply preparing me for that final desiccation.
So how do we reconcile the chasm between our received history and an intuitional hope fo the future? Is there a way to break through? Is there room for the possibility of an alternate reality, an afterlife, in the plausibility structures we currently carry. Can the models we currently carry allow other modes of being that might be beyond our present time-space continuum: some “there” where we are not yet? Are there some options for newborn insights towards an unforeseeable future that we can follow with some good faith?
Yet I write this sentence seven hours after I awakened and started the page above, and the world has changed beyond expectation. I ended up going to the gym, diving into the pool for senior water aerobics to early Beatle songs, afterwards showering and snaking on yoghurt and nuts with friends. Later I ate lunch out, picked up laundry, returned home and ended up spending the afternoon sitting and writing as a somewhat different person than I was just a few lines back, a few hours before.
That day may be unique, but it is not uncommon: it is like that every moment of life, every morning I wake up, every day that I live. But how do I enhance this awareness of the curving continuum of past, present and future?
I used to see myself as incorrigibly incomplete, I now believe I am unfinished, a product in process. And that makes a large difference, makes the balance better, because the “incomplete” side of the equation might mean a fear of being found out as lacking, losing the game before it’s over; where moving to “unfinished” can be transformational. Incomplete closes in on judgment where unfinished opens to new perceptions, new birth and beginnings: something old might die but a new creation can show up right at the same time. Maybe recent technology can offer fertile avenues and images for larger realities and new connections to emerge.
Anyone over the age of fifty knows the vast difference between typing a page back then and writing a document now. Here I blithely run through this black and white world of keys and symbols, pushing squares and watching words appear, both the operating system — which I experience as a benevolent force — and the craft required to attend it has become gentle and more tender than it used to be.
For thirty or forty years ago writing required carbon paper and mimeograph masters, a paste labelled whiteout and sometimes thin and easily crinkled erasable bond. I remember one existential moment when I decided not to sharpen a particular sentence because of the effort required in correcting the choices already committed to the paper.
But now this old man revises with abandon with no erasable bonds being broken, no paper torn asunder; for technology has made me a new creation, offering a graceful process akin to what one mystic called “continuing renewed immediacy,” and moving from process to product even while keeping an appearance of conceptual virginity on each and every page. I find it an exercise that comes close to approaching the God-head and a deeper ecstasy — for every time I touch Command/S, all things become new again and we are not far from heaven now.
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