On The Threshold Of a Dream...

-



I picked up on probably the most piquant philosophical statement I've yet heard to date, on Woman's Hour [BBC Radio Four] this morning. Toni Collette was being interviewed and dropped '"Pretty much all of life is memory..."' into the conversation. A stunning observation which was almost a throwaway. It just sums up exactly what human experience is about. It's like the old conundrum: 'What's always coming but never arrives?' - tomorrow, of course. Our experiences of the present are always the past, outside of whatever frame-rate and size our slices of perception are. Once perceived in the moment[?], they are already passed, and therefore only exist in the memory of those fleeting moments. Pretty much all of life is memory: sobering thought, but oddly comforting. We often talk blithely of living in the present, but to be frank that is all we are capable of.

Im augenblick, man ganz Lebe jetzt: I'm sure my German is shriekingly inaccurate and poorly styled, but the sense of it seems to me to work better thus. We live only in the moment: our brains and our given perception allow us only that fragmentary nicety: all else is memory and past. Living in the past is merely recollection, even if we are talking of mere seconds ago: in fact, that is all that we perceive; the immediate-past. Exactly what our present/past frame-rate ratio is I don't know, and to be frank, I don't really worry about it. What is now is already passed into my personal history: each word I type was already part of my history before my fingers hit the first key of my laptop to form the word: the start of this post is now firmly logged in the annals of my past. I think that as a reflection on life and existence, Toni Collette hit the nail firmly on the head this morning. The most Zen thing I've heard uttered for a long time, and I thank her for it. May the dream continue: Blwyddyn Newydd Dda, i chi gyd, a hwyl fawr!

Comments

Post a Comment

Followers

Popular posts from this blog

Of Feedback & Wobbles

-
Image
Many years ago I came up with an analogy for poorly damped feedback loops. The feedback loop that prompted this frankly tart analogy was indeed a horror. Anyone who remembers shame-faced their first attempts at clutch control resulting in the good old kangaroo launch across the lights only to stall in the middle of the crossroads will have some idea of the kind of data transfer lag involved in said system. The analogy I made was that of a large blancmange. Untouched, a model of stasis and eminently stable and predictable; but prod the bugger and the resultant chaotic behaviour needs a very complex physical model and some very decent computing horsepower to predict its outputs, if at all. The system in question was a large and complex audio-visual display at what eventually became 'The Electric Mountain' in Llanberis. We were ultimately contracted to maintain the thing having been witness to and peripherally involved in its installation. Certainly not involved in its des...
Read more

A Time of Connection

-
Image
I was just reflecting on the vacuum of continuity that's left behind when someone dies: that sudden sense of disjoint, of fracture, in one's personal history that takes one completely by surprise at the oddest moments. These pinch-points in memory can often yield some surprising revelations of fact about periods in one's past. One such occurred to me tonight, tending my rather lazy meal of pizza in its journey from shrink-wrap to mouth via the oven. Al's recent demise still catches me out from time to time: the space he left bounded by forty plus years of friendship. But the thing that struck me tonight was just how much change was happening on a personal and social level in the very early years of our acquaintance. Between moving here from Birmingham in September 1980 and our buying our first proper house eighteen months later, all manner of things occurred that would chart the course of our lives to the present day. At around the time of our meeting Alan & Irene [...
Read more

Messiah Complex

-
Image
A spectre is haunting... America; and it isn't communism. It isn't radical Islamism. It isn't even capitalism itself. It's Christianity. A particularly pernicious, politicised Christianity. 'In God We Trust', One Nation Under God', etc., etc., are the tropes of a 'nation' that is the result of the colonisation of a foreign continent by a motley bunch of assorted European disaffects several hundred years ago. That much is history, and the native peoples of America are still struggling to cling on to what is, after all, their birthright. Whatever good was squeezed from the sour pith of colony in the middle part of the last century: civil rights, racial emancipation and equal rights for women and LGBTQ+ people of all stripes, is not now simply being eroded, but actually bulldozed over the cliff edge that separates human rights & freedoms, and the return of enslavement by difference. Difference of skin colour, race, gender or sexuality: a pick 'n...
Read more