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by Hana Ibrahim

Half past fantasy, a quarter till an illusion!

As 2002 moults its freshness and settles down to being just another bromidically blah year, with perhaps the prospects of peace pink tinging the horizon, this weirdly wacky aphorism has me pondering our perception of time. And also our predilection to this tick tocking tediousness.

Someone (I can't recall who) once said that we were all living in Mickey Mouse time. His hypothesis was based on the assumption that time was and is just an elaborate fantasy. A comic illusion, in other words.

Maybe, he philosophised, there is no such thing as a past, present or future. After all, one blends into the other so quickly that who's to say!

What he meant was that only the present mattered.

At that time - that is before Mickey became Uncle Tom Mouse and changed his name to Mustapha bin Mousetrap; Minny discovered feminism and realised life didn't revolve around the almighty Mousetrap; Donald become Governor Duck of California; and Goofy was proved to be a faggot in disguise, meaning before I grew up - I thought it was a great notion. Even an acceptable corollary.

I mean, it was nice to know that somebody had sufficient gumption to break away from the shackles of tick-tocking slavery and view life as a capricious commodity that had no basis unless you lived for now, not moth-balled it for a hazy future.

Now, however, I have to gainsay the deduction, not so much because I digress from the theory of Mickey Mouse time, but because the assumption was more in usurpation, than a proper surmises. Something like a finagle factor or fink's constant. Or as my aunt Jemima would say, arriving at the right answer with the wrong question.

For, now that I am older, wiser and a whole lot smarter, I still think we live in Mickey Mouse time, but only to the extent that we allow a few incidents, good or bad to colour our outlook of a particular period of time.

No, I am not being capricious, although having a Mickey Mouse clock does make time a comic illusion. But whimsical notions aside, take a look at the conventional perception of 2001.

Someone, most probably a disheartened pessimistic mortal, looked back at 2001 the year that was, rewound the images of the World Trade Centre attack, American retaliation in Afghanistan, and perhaps the LTTE attack on the Katunayake Airport and the Airforce base, and promptly tagged the year 'annus horribilis'. And many of us promptly agreed it was indeed horribilis.

Of course the tag was first pinned to a twelve-month span in the early 90s in Royal tones by Queen Elizabeth, who looked at what her lovingly moulded family had disintegrated into, and in a moment of abject despair couldn't think of anything worse that 'annus horribilis'.

Back then, when nothing was working right for the royal siblings, butler, corgis or even the horses, Her Majesty had ample cause to call the year so....

But last year? Did we forget the trees for the forest when we looked around at what was happening around the world, and agreed that it was indeed a horrible year?

Sure the larger picture read like we've retrogressed into, what George Mikes would call 'an age of constructive decay', where the world, or at least our so called big-brotherly states retrogressed to primordial swamps, basic humanity took a back seat and allowed terror to become the accepted rule of law and tit-for-tat vengeance as a form of justice, mass starvation to become just another news story and justified murder, mayhem and all other despicable acts as just a way of life.

But was 2001 all that bad? What about the trees? The other significant and even less significant events that meant something at the time of occurrence?

What about the personal milestones that shattered the blahness of life, infused a sense of buoyancy, put a lingering smile on our faces and had us viewing life through pink hued glasses? What about weddings, births, professional achievements? What about good grades at the GCE O/Ls or A/Ls, final year university grades, new jobs, new cars, new house, new friends? Didn't they mean anything in the year gone by?

And at a more national level, didn't we savour the joy of our cricketing success and didn't we exalt the recognition awarded to Pandith Amaradeva when he was nominated the Ramon Magsaysay award? And what about the sense of camaraderie and fellowship exhibited by a majority of us, when the populace of Hambantota and its neighbourhood were reeling from the effects of one of the worst droughts?

On a lighter note, there was some good even the Queens annus horribilis.. For, the Royal shenanigans back then showed us that the noble clan, despite the pomp and the glitz that were part of their social milieu were indeed living , breathing , hurting human beings who in trying to live a normal life, &%$#@* it up royally. And spoiled for us for ever the exalted perception of imperial bliss.

I could go on, but to get to the point, sure time is a comic illusion, but comedy is only how we perceive it to be. Saying we live in Mickey Mouse time isn't all that wrong. My watch does indeed read half past fantasy and a quarter till an illusion.

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