The Moment

There is no such thing as "time"; as soon as we name it , it slips out of our hands. Serial, objective time is mechanical, cold. But there is no such thing as a time that is completely 'outside' of us, independent of our perception even though we dimly suspect that time's arrow is another name for necessity. Time, the mystery of mysteries, is the bitter wound within us, secreting its poison-ink with which we write the stories of our lives.

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Science, philosophy and theology only skirt around the hems of its outer garments...the truth of it lies elsewhere; the world, insofar as it is causality, is but the "veil of God", the antechamber that leads to an infinite hall of mirrors.

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We act, we think in time but our thoughts are "in" time not as an object like another object; they occupy the nunc stans, being neither future nor past.

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She fell into my arms,

and the world stood still

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No saint or 'thinker' reaches the same height of awareness as one who is conscious of roads that have been denied him, of the loss of a loved one at the hands of time; but time is not just memory, she is desire. We need to 'think' God and love Him (Anselm)...one wants to feel the stars and not just see them.

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Eternity is the style of desire.

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Forgetting.

A terrible case of amnesia; he could only remember things he had said within the last seven seconds....beyond that was eternal silence. One is forced to think what a life without continuity and memory would be like (even the 'saved' remember how sweet the fruit on earth tasted). The complete fragmentation of a life, where one raw sensation is followed by another, is unbearable and is nothing but a description of Hell. His life is a raft beyond which is a void. To live in the fleeting moment is to live without recollection and without hope, with the sovereign becoming of a Dionysus or a Bacchus.

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Sometimes one would like to lose oneself, to forget by finding joy in contingency. But a sober awareness always returns to the world...

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Every time he meets his beloved it is as if he is meeting her for the first time..she is the only person he recognizes in this confusing world of images and half-fallen beings. But to live for such a moment is a curse. ..it is to live a totally closed life, one in which there can be no dreams and nothing but an empty landscape stretches behind and beyond him.

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This man who is 'walking death' remembers only one other thing-music, the piano music that he could somehow, miraculously, still play with an intensity of feeling that was unparalleled in his life; he could draw upon this hidden reserve of emotion at will, it was the only thing that persisted, that anchored him to something in the world; it was as if this was the only home in which any feelings could survive, the rest being but a frenzied dash across a tightrope. Below the abyss, nothingness.

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He wondered how certain notes could evoke particular states of being, how they could pull on the strings of our heart as if there was some sort of hidden relation-mathematical and spiritual-between all that was in the universe and all that was in a human heart.

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The creation of a single self is as the creation of a whole universe.

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It is said that all moments are the moment, each one is, if we are but open to its possibility, the time in which grace or love make their appearance; and it is only our turning away that allows the moment to fall away. And since each moment is connected to the next is anything really lost? Does not one prefigure the other, hold within its very heart a trace of the other? A heart that is broken is always receptive..is it not said that I am with those whose heart is broken for My sake (and here one wonders if there can be any other form of breaking, is not the heart always broken?)

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But the sages and old men will tell you otherwise. There are but a few moments in life that arrive unheralded, a brief interlude amidst the cyclomania of the world...what are often called the "window of opportunity" and these are the moments that we are most desirous of. It is they that, like an invisible axis of our lives, a golden thread that runs through our being, structure all past events and all future ones too; it is that very moment in which one is awestruck by beauty, love, knowledge, that all of time collapses to this single gaze; it as if all meaning is condensed in our response to such a moment, this fork in the road. This moment does not annul all other moments but contains them in a loving embrace...the keystone of our lives.

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Listening to Arvo Part:

There is dissonance and strife, a discontinuity in the narrative and then, as if from nowhere, a chord suddenly emerges and acts like a balm on the open wound; it draws all other voices to it, bringing them home, resolving them in what only now looks like a pre-determined harmony.

The first note emerges from the silence and carries with it something of the mystery of all that is unformed, unspoken. The first note opens up the possibility of infinite worlds...which way it goes is something beyond human comprehension. But the longer one holds that note, avoiding resolution, the longer the options remain open. Do we search to replicate such a note, do we try and elaborate its unfolding in time, seeking the pattern that is weaved around this centre?

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This moment that starts from nothing and which disperses in no-time whatsoever, is destined to return to nothing as well. But in such a movement it tells us that there is a past, present and future since the present, the moment, never lasts and always recedes into the past and the future always breaks-up the 'now'. Such is the fate of all moments. But from amongst all the moments there is a realisation that some, more than others-and not just the first- give shape to the whole sequence.

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There are times when we feel that everything fits: that we're in the right place at the right time, that there's been a dazzling co-incidence of fate, an alignment of the stars and the trajectory of one's life, the perfect intersection of lines of causality with one's own haphazard choices; but with this comes the apprehension of how horribly wrong things go, how for most parts we seem to be out of sorts with the turning of the heavens, out of tune with its harmony.

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Even worse, there is an understanding that time is lost, irretrievably so, and that some choices in the decisive moment cannot be undone (could the man who rejected Christ have foreseen that this one elemental gesture would determine his eternal destiny?, had we the chance to love again would we make the same decision?, and there's the paralysing knowledge that our life which traverses but a small span of the great arc of being, had to be, could not be anything but, the way it is. Which is to say that time is a falling away from singularity , a dispersal, and from this follows the tragedy (and beauty) of life: we chose and are chosen to live but one life amongst many.