Yesterday was the fourth day of May which was a bit of a farce when people joked, "May the fourth be with you," bouncing off "Star Wars" Force. But we always joke and make frivolous whatever scares us. How can anything be funnier than numbering day/night cycles, impossible to get entirely orderly, worse even than the planet wobbling on its axis to make seasons and climates, worse than the gyre around the Sun, one little nuclear nucleus in a world unimaginably forever spread through cosmic space until it isn't and neither are we.
On this scale distance is the same as time, so we measure distance in terms of the time it takes to get there. County seats here are apart by a day's travel by horse and wagon, which translates to thirty miles, which might take thirty minutes to drive in a modern car. So time and distance are both relative, esp when we number them.
We also measure relationships with other people as somewhere between just now and a lifetime. That's living relationships because Time gives and Time takes away. That's what life IS, time forcing change. Boulders crack into pebbles; sand aggregates into sedimentary rock. Sometimes a blessing and sometimes a curse. This is because Time is a factor of Attachment.
I choose Attachment to name the opposition to Time, trying to slow everything down, bring them closer, use our senses to shape Time into songs, dances, writing, and the other time arts. Even data. Remembering and imagination are important and can reach outside reality. But forgetting and only occupying the state of being-present are part of that. They just won't make you famous because other people won't care.
In our time we have reacted to the sappy possessiveness of romantic preoccupation by translating it into hard-boiled sex or merchandize. I have a relative who prides herself on relentless hugs -- too long, too hard, possibly autistic -- which I hate but have not been able to discourage, because society has declared that hugs are always benign, a sign of affection and inclusion. It is ruffles and kisses on top of robotic hostility. I always expect a knife in my ribs -- maybe not something so dramatic, maybe a kind of insect sting in the middle of my back where I can't get at it when it digs a little pain pit in the middle of the night.
When I was clergy, people would ask, "Do you hug?" because they came of age in the years when everyone was careless and over-inclusive to the point of never building any relationships worth hugging. Being clergy turns out to be a kind of whoredom. supplying what people crave but don't know how to find. I remember when I attended a dignified Presbyterian group when some damned progressive asked them to "pass the peace" with handshakes. Luckily many people wore gloves. They never would have accepted hugs. Contagious diseases were still remembered. The new wave of them hadn't begun.
Sex and love are often terms used to indicate intimacy and connection. We've just about exhausted the investigation of sex, all its permutations and possibilities. I won't number them. Love is sneakier. People with no connection between them, not even commercial, will claim to love this and that, proclaiming "God is love" and "Love will heal the world." They don't mean anything implying force or (erk) violence. Just a kind of pastel wing-beating implying supernatural forces.
Time is natural. And cruel beyond insanity. But also endlessly generous, far beyond human scales of life, whether aeons of hominin life we still can't guess, or quick as a mayfly on a pellmell stream descending a mountain. But we grab, rend, scream at time to let us keep what we have already attached, what is part of us now. We deny aging, as early as teens secretly grieving over the loss of childhood, enchained by sex.
When our pets die, when our hoarded objects are lost, and most of all when people to whom we are attached leave or reject us, it takes a long time to recover. One of those hippie sentiments -- I saw it on bumper stickers -- said, "If you love something, let it leave, and if it loves you, it will return." That sentiment again. People build up such fantasies and then -- because that's all they pay attention to -- miss any real chance of attachment.
I have a more sardonic, satanic opinion which has caused me never to have children because I would not be able to bear losing them. I had not intended to ever fall in love and when I did anyway, I said, "I'll never do THAT again!" But attachment can't be controlled. I've minimized it but still the fragile little filaments of knowing something connect to the world. Five kittens are born. One is already dead of no particular cause. The mother cats (there are three of them) mourn. I slip their babies under warm water as soon as they leave the womb. The "queens" walk around the house, calling in phrases of promised milk and licking. The filaments don't break. It's impossible to evade all of them.
Writing is numbering, calling, braiding the filaments of attachment, even if one keeps the gloves on while at the keyboard. It takes time, which is why so many people aren't very good at it, because we're in a hurry. But it's powerful enough to demolish agendas and get writers up in the wee small dark cold unmarked time of the night/morning to address some sting, some shake, that's in a place one can't quite reach. People think writing is about words, flashy vocabulary, status jargon, trends and fashions. They aren't attached, just selling.
I write. I don't publish. It's mostly secret because these days to know something is to have the capacity to destroy it and sooner or later the attack begins because people know it is one way to attach. For moments it makes Time intense and saleable. Better to wait until the times change.
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