10:17 am
Oh the darkness of her eyes. She pulls the sheet up to her Peruvian eyes, smelling herself. Skin. Feed it nettles and rainwater and oatmeal steeped in buttermilk. Skinfood. What perfume does your wife? Peau d’Pérou. There’s dirt rolled up in my omphalos. Curious longing I. Could use a. Time enough for a massage. Body shampoo. Sweet waxy perfume. Pity no time for a happy ending, combine business with pleasure. Would be nicer if a nice girl did it.
10:36 am
Look. I’m not going to bullshit around. Everything depends on our understanding of Time. That’s the bottom line. Deasy’s memory of history is not my memory of history, and it is not yours either. Deasy exists in a world of final causation. He divides past present and future with mirrored boundaries all reflecting one great goal. An example. You want an example? Here’s an example. Today in his idolatry of Ronald Reagan he remembered the glory of a miraculous and masterfully designed arms reduction accord with the Soviet Union. But under Reagan’s presidency the cold war’s arms race escalated to extremes and the reduction made only a small dent in the pile of history destroying weaponry. History destroying. If only we could. How do we destroy the nonexistent? Deasy remembers a great immortal statesman. His version of temporality cannot remember the Alzheimers, the shaking, the fumbling of words, the confusion, the memory gaps, the days filled with photo-ops starting at noon and ending at five, the disappearances to his rooms, the handlers, minders, babysitters, doctors, the wife feeding him his lines. There are people who hold this history. Who? Whose memory is this? Whose history? Is it created through symbolic causation? Deterministic causation? Probabilistic causation? Does it matter? It does. I know it does. Look. If you divide past present and future and picture it on a line with the past receding back there somewhere and the future in front of us, then history moves away from relevancy. That’s one way to understand time. But is time a line? Oh our memory returns things to us we thought had long drifted away. Nothing drifts anywhere. Think of a memory now. Go ahead, root around in there and find a big one. See that scar over there? That one with the nasty scab? Ew that looks bad. Pus. Infection, it has spread into memories around it. What was that horrible thing that happened to you? Jeez. Ok, pick the scab. Go ahead, you can do it. I’m right here. It’s ok. Pick it right off and let it bleed a little. That’s it. There you go. That memory sure feels like it is happening again now, doesn’t it? Still hurts. Or rather, it hurts again. It’s not back; it’s always been there. It’s real. Is time a line? You tell me.
10:20 am
Scene: [A narrow street in 12th century Cordoba, Spain. Two men are huddled together, tussling over a cracked mirror. They are fighting but palpably they are not angry. These men are close in age and have known each other since childhood.]
Abulguailid Muhammad Ibn-Ahmad ibn-Muhammad ibn-Rushd (aka Benraist, Avenryz, Aben-Rassad, and regionally Averroes): Give it back!
Moses Maimonides: No!
Averroes: [letting go suddenly so the mirror strikes Moses Maimonides in the chest] Fine. Go ahead and try. But you know you can’t reach him without me.
Moses Maimonides: (defeated, with a sigh) Together then. But I speak first.
Averroes: Agreed. Now make room, I can’t see.
Moses Maimonides: That better?
Averroes: Yes. Ok go.
Together: We call upon the ani
Moses Maimonides: Stop! I’m speaking first.
Averroes: Fine. Agreed. Let’s get on with it.
Together: We call upon the anima mundi, the great soul of the world, to show us in this mirror the face of the one we most believe, the seeker of pure truth.
[The face of Aristotle appears in the mirror. He is irritated.]
Aristotle: You two again. Sheesh, can’t you leave a man in peace? What do you want now? I’m busy. Aquinas and I were trying to prove some nonsense of his with algebra over lunch. Well, he was having lunch, I was in the mirror. So what now?
Averroes: I have found two words in your Poetics that I do not understand.
Moses Maimonides: No. Stop. Don’t listen to him. We want to ask you about resurrection. I think that once we are dead that’s it for the body. In the world to come we will be souls but won’t need bodies. I’m certain you believe this is true.
Averroes: Incoherence! That is the incoherence of incoherence! There will be no personal immortality; we are all participating in the same intellect. Now as for those words I cannot translate
Aristotle: Have you read nothing I have written. Read first before you bother me! Look. I’m going to give you a piece of advice. Focus on the here and the now. That should be enough for both of you. Stick with the observable and above all, break that mirror and leave me alone!
Averroes: But I must understand! What is the meaning of comedy and tragedy? What are these things?
(In a blaze of pyrotechnics Aristotle makes his exit. Moses Maimonides obediently, and also in an attempt to reach the other side, smashes his face into the mirror. It shatters and in the reflected multiplicities of the shards still falling, Moses Maimonides sees the reflection of Averroes and the bloody mess of his own face, perplexed, gently disappear.)
9:12 am
My dad says he doesn’t believe in being a stern father and he makes a point of talking to me as a friend and an even bigger point of telling everybody he talks to me as a friend. Wants to be my brother, but my big brother who can still eclipse me and be the better man for it. Or fade me out like he is the sun and I’m a shadow that doesn’t stand a chance. He’s like that. Likes to think he’s so badass he’s everybody’s daddy. Lazy bitch. He called me that once. We’re as old as we feel he says and he is feeling my age. Buck called me Japhet in search of a father, looking for atonement. Iapetos more like. The Greek version of Japhet fits the bill a bit better I’d say. Iapetos the god of the mortal life span, who with his brothers the other Time gods turned their father into a bitch. Their mother Gaia, the earth, started it. She wanted a divorce. An old school divorce. Their father Uranus was an asshole of mythic proportions. He would hide the brothers in the earth once they were born just to keep them down. You can be a man, sure, but not as good a one as me. Mama Gaia got sick of this, as you can imagine, and made a plan. Then she gave Kronos a sickle. Now Kronos is the god of all-devouring Time so Mama’s plan fed right into his destructive side and he hopped on board fast as lightning. The rest of us needed little persuasion. Krios, my brother who runs the measurement of the year felt ripe for it, and Hyperion with his days and months always wanted to be a part of whatever Krios did, so he came along too. It took just a little longer for Koios to come around. He is the god of the axis of heaven and even though he said he saw it coming he couldn’t decide what was in it for him. Sheesh, you’d think the world revolves around him. He’s the one married to Omphalos, that blowhard, you know her? She’s full of hot air. Anyway, the only one of us who didn’t want to get one up on the old man was Okeanos, but he’s just in charge of moving of the planets and he does a piss poor job of it too apparently, with them going backwards whenever they want. What does he know about Time? So here’s what we did. We knew Uranus was on his way to sleep with our mother (the less I describe about that the better, don’t want this thing to start sounding like a Greek tragedy) and just as he was spreading himself all over the top of her, Krios, Koios, and Hyperion each grabbed a corner of daddy dearest and I grabbed the fourth. Then Kronos, who had hidden himself somewhere near the omphalos, jumped up fast and cut his dick right off. Just like that. One slice. Balls too. He howled so much you can still hear it now. Listen, hear that? Blood splashed all over the place like Carrie at the prom and a whole lot of shit happened after that, but that’s another story. The upshot is there was no atonement; it was an ambush plain and simple and now dad sings soprano. And Kronos still likes carrying that sickle around. He’s working as a travel agent these days. Wait. Hold on. Who is telling this story?
8:27 am
Yes this is a blog. Omphaloskeptics unite; we are a society of navel gazers. You read these words and trust my voice to speak the truth, from a first person. Read on pastfacingwise and you skip. You’re scanning. And you trust me maybe. So I speak what has been written for me to think according to the will of the creator, that writer of the great book into which we are all recorded. Or at least into which I am recorded and a few others. I don’t know what you believe. I don’t believe it in the slightest but I am telling you that I do. Some believe, like Phillip Gosse whose book Omphalos (written last thursday) that all the world was created with past intact and fossils of dinosaurs were created to be found, but the dinosaurs themselves never were: effect without cause. Sometime after last thursday Borges wondered if he had ever heard an ancient (that is to say, written around last thursday) sentence quoted by Rafael Cansinos Assens’ Talmudic anthology: “It was only the first night, but a number of centuries had already preceded it.”