Time After Time...

Time may change me
but I can't trace time.
----Changes, Ziggy Stardust

Time is the great healer.
But what if time is the problem...
----from Wings of Desire

Seven seconds away
Just as long as I'll stay
I'll be waiting
------Yousson'dour

Time is the space between me and You.
-----Prayer for the Dying, Seal

If you're lost you can look
and you will find me,
Time after time.
If you fall
I will catch you,
Time after time.
-------Cyndi Lauper.


The swami would listen to the music on full volume. 'The walls retain something of our voices, even long after we're gone. That is why I sometimes still hear my father's voice calling me', she said. When other people hear silence, I hear something else; where others see a blank wall...

What's the name of this song?

What good will it do to know the name of this tune?

But I don't understand the words!

Then leave the words behind.

By playing it loud one could dissolve time, bring it to a halt perhaps?

Such a thing is not possible. But if such a thing is not possible then at least we can disappear into time...


Time, the deer, is in Hallaig Wood.
I'll go to Hallaig,
To the sabbath of the dead,
Down to where each departed generation has gathered
Hallaig is where they survive.

And coming back from Clachan and Suisnish,
their land of the living,
Still lightsome and unheartbroken,
Their stories only beginning.

And their beauty a glaze on my heart.
then as the kyles go dim
And the sun sets behind the Dun Cana
Love's loaded gun will take aim.

It will bring down the lightheaded deer
As he sniffs the grass round the wallsteads
And his eyes will freeze: while I live,
His blood won't be traced in the woods.
-----Hallaig, Sorley Maclean.

The tragedy of life is that the heart never completely breaks; we die many-a -time, slowly fading, rarely sparkling, easing into the familiar, well-worn shapes by which we are recognized, by which we identify ourselves, and thus we grow to our limits all too readily; the world always intervenes, either slaking our thirst or canceling out the lives we would have led; the death of a Mozart is of no concern, there is a cold heaven where all is mind, all is intellect. But the passing away of a single soul intensifies the blueness of a flower, deepens the pain in our heart... the afternoon shadows lengthen and a black bird takes rest in the boughs of a tree, knowing that he will remember nothing of today in the morning light, that he never has, time out of mind.

How strange! Youth dreams of maturity and the old for a day in the sun; humans pine away, longing for that eternal sunshine, whilst the immortals sigh for a taste of finitude...and who says that God is without a sense of humour!

We may sing songs and write poems to celebrate the beauty of a transient moonlit evening, the moon whose same light dwells at one and the same time in puddles, on marble seas, in the mind of a poet, on the face of the beloved; we marvel at the celestial dew on a November morning, the sunlight that dances on the spring stream; we convince our minds to hold time at bay, dreaming of pure spaces, abstract landscapes, a love that never fails, stone idols that will, we hope, stave off time's running down of the universe but nothing, neither philosophy, nor wisdom, nor pleasure can give us solace or prevent this slow slippage to other lands; waiting and departure: the human story; the chaos that throbs in our blood, the anarchy that irrupts in our minds is nothing before the quiet afternoon stillness, the settling down of the dust in the suicide hour.

Time after time we struggle, trying to free ourselves of this dust.

And still we wonder, and still we wonder, after all these years, why is it that I am still 'I' and not you , and why are you you, and not me? Why is it that I, who now am, who strides with such confidence, will soon not be? And why is the world so heavy, so mournfully heavy, with the past and yet at the same time so empty to seem dreamlike? Anything can be endured except the succession of fine days and yet still we are dazzled by the heart's endless desire to break.

Every moment is lost and the knowledge of the saints is naught before a single instant of our early days. What of it? To lament is already to die a little, to be born is to die time after time..