dead\line

It is April 30th. I have not written in 4 days.
It's felt like a tourniquet was tied around my tongue.

A few nights ago, I drove back home into the valley after 10pm. The mists were so thick I couldn't see in front of me. I was driving with my brights on. I heard my friend's voice in my head reminding me not to use high-beams in the fog. I turned them off and suddenly a clear path separated itself out for several yards, a few feet below my headlights. I drove home, three yards at a time, until I reached my front door in the diffuse darkness.

I've been talking a lot more about time now to people. Every time I say it out loud I see something I didn't see before. Last night I decided what time is for after all. I decided last night what the purpose of all this is, all this remembering.

I have been haunted by two things all of my life: my memories and my fear of the future.

The future stretched out before me in an invisible timeline that I have carried with me since I was a child. I have an idea in my head of where I'm supposed to be at a certain time in the future. By 15, 16, 17. Time was something to be feared, to erase, to deny, to avoid. Something lorded over me like impending doom. Time was not my friend, I raced against the clock, watching it, hearing it, ticking, ticking. The sound of the clock was like someone banging on my door abre la puetra are you done yet? Are you there yet? Better hurry, better hurry. I hated time and time kept moving like a river that wouldn't flow downstream. I have watched each year as another age passes and another birthday goes, and I miss deadline after deadline after self-imposed deadline.

I have to ask myself now, here in this timeless place, this Happy Valley - where do these deadlines come from, from what sources have I built my timeline, culturally, socially, biologically, familialy?

The admonition of my American culture is to deny time: erase it from your face with surgery, makeup, better lighting, lie about your age, hide it, cover it, conceal it at all costs, do not recognize it. Mourn it and its passing if you must, but most of all ignore it and spend all your energy suppressing it. Dream about living forever, eat raw and never die, drink bluegreen algae, get facelift acupuncture, even meditate the years off your face, off your body. Don't ever "date" yourself by revealing that you've been doing something for 20 years, do not show your experience or the breadth of your life knowledge.
Stop. Time.
And if you can't stop it, pretend that it is not happening.

But Time will not be denied. It so patiently, patiently passes on into the second and final acts until the curtain call. How can I live in peace with such a hostile relationship to the most inevitable and unflinching fact of existence?I always thought that time was the evidence that I am behind my fellows. Time is the marker that proves I will not make it because I have not made it yet. My memories are the way that I relive this truth again and again in my own mind.

In the last 26 days, I have come to a new understanding.

I wrote earlier, Time is the measure of change and exists because we remember. If we did not remember, we would not count, record, take note of the changes in the seasons, the light of the day, the birth and death of others. But why? Why remember when remembering is painful? Why not live in the constant bliss of the present moment with no past and no future, no measuring and no measuring up? No failing and no falling short?

Because: Time exists as memory so that I may benefit from the experiences of those who have gone before me. So that I may pick up where they have left off. Time is a gift to me, it is my gift. Memory is how I re-member the broken pieces of the lives past and pull them together into the fabric of today so that the story goes on. In this way, the object of the game cannot be to succeed, it cannot be to arrive at the right place on the timeline. It has to be to take personal responsibility for each moment I have, to learn from the past in the choices and mistakes of myself and of others to try again a different way, or to keep doing what's working. My faculty for remembrance is a Great Gift to me and to human kind. It is through remembrance that the universe is articulated and expressed. It is good to be older, to grow. To change and develop. It is like a second chance. Without remembrance there can be no creativity. Without remembrance there is only error and inevitable tragedy with no chance of rebirth. No passage. No diatoma. No transcendence.
Without remembrance, there can be no life.

Last night I decided the Future is not something to be feared. My Memories are not something to try to forget. They are the map. And the map leads to freedom. It is cyclical and never ends. It is a spiral that ascends and it is worth it. I will not hide time anymore. I will not fear the sound of the clock or the evidence of my birth and my passing age. Because Time is the point. I won't make a choice or not make a choice based on how much Time it will take or how old I'll be when I finish. This is my response to Beatrice Wood and Annie Besant. And I do it in remembrance of them. Because without them, I would not be here today. Without them, I would not have remembered.

I think I have to make a great change. It's like these winding roads up here on the way into the valley. Those curves so sharp you can't tell if you're turning or turning around. But each one is practice for the next. And then, finally, a real turn comes, one that changes the direction I am headed entirely. I think such a turn is upon me.

"And time, itself, the magic length of god."