True Confessions

Time and tide wait for no man.
– Geoffrey Chaucer

As I down my second espresso shot, I jolt myself from the blissful state of sleeping until noon. I don’t regret the bliss, but it dawns on me I will never get a refund for this lost time. Post caffeine, I scan a week ago Sunday’s LA Times and today’s breaking news in the NY Times. What transpires in less than ten days shocks me. Not only humanitarian deeds, scientific advances and creative breakthroughs, but episodes of unreality stream. Political sideshows offer their wares, smear campaigns unleash and possible acts of terrorism go down. Seven centuries ago, Chaucer earned his burial place in the Poet’s corner of Westminster Abbey, not only for legitimizing the use of the vernacular or we would still be reading Latin, but for his insights into the poetics of tides and time. I should have reread this mantra sooner!

Forever is composed of nows.
– Emily Dickinson

Most of us succumb to rust forming tasks involving reams of time and hours of excessive paperwork, bouts of doubt and elaborate forms of procrastination. When I Windex my vision I see how these roadblocks, constructed by some invisible team of “learned” men, foster waste and idleness. If a 19^thC woman who seldom left her home and rarely received a visitor, can leave a legacy of forty hand bound volumes of nearly 1,800 handwritten poems (full of dashes) on the subjects of romantic love and death, in her brief and isolated life, then perhaps we might consider creative possibility in a new light. And do it now!

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.
– William Gibson

The forward impulse of time doesn’t care about the murky past, glossy or noir. Imagine twin escalators, time and memory, one up, one down. Now try riding them simultaneously. Canadian and American speculative fiction writer and essayist, William Gibson, who coined the term “cyberspace” in his short story “Burning Chrome” and pioneered the science fiction subgenre “cyberpunk”, envisions a (now not so distant) future version of time and tides. You can keep your boots securely mired in the quicksand of another time and place but with the escalating speed of Internet time you may lose your grip. Already, in 1999, The Guardian described Gibson as “probably the most important novelist of the past two decades,” his work influencing design, film, literature, music, cyber culture and technology. Hindered by endless ricochets of memory, it’s too tricky to keep a foot on both sides of the escalator. You can only dwell in that precarious limbo so long, before you have to choose to ride the escalator up – otherwise you’re heading down.

So ok – I will keep the remainder of this post concise. But as we commemorate Memorial Day, it may be timely to contemplate the liaison of memory and time. 

We must use time wisely and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.
– Nelson Mandela

TRUE CONFESSION: I spend a lot of time shrouded in slippery memories searching for a recipe to sandblast their barnacles – keep only the crystalline components. Flogging what’s wrong in day-to-day mundane practicalities and pettiness also occupies way too much space in my head. And I’m a sucker for any elixir that promises to halt the ravages of time.

I can also say with certainty, I will never cease to remember and celebrate those I have loved and lost. I will no doubt continue to search for answers on the distant horizon and be seduced by the ever-changing constant of the sea. And I’m pretty sure I will never abandon my quest for the fountain of youth – including snake oil. But henceforth, I will attempt to otherwise, use my time wisely!

And you?