Of days gone by and days yet to arrive
X you can count your blessings. You can count the times you tripped.
You can mark them separately or together on a time line. You can see
life as knife-set or titbits, yearnings or fishnets, what-ifs or so-whats,
the love that was lost in loving and the life misplaced by living.
Things like that.
And then you can turn around and imagine futures. The years left can
also be segmented, in terms of career path, income level, the changing
face of household (babied households, teenaged ones, their youth and
your aging, infirmity and dependency and then lapse into the
unimaginable incomprehensibilities that only others fall victim to and
consequently suffer).
Number of times
How do you read the past? Do you think of the number of years, the
number of certificates, the number of residences, number of countries
visited, number of people you’ve helped and the ones that helped you,
the number of times you felt you ought to have done or said that
something which didn’t get done or said at the time? And the
future...will it be chartered in terms of bank-balance extrapolation,
portfolio value, the number of classmates who you believe would pass on
before your turn arrives or the sins you haven’t quite been able to
forgive yourself for committing?
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Or would you prefer to do it with names? The names of the places
you’ve visited, titles of books that inspired you, favourite authors,
unforgettable personalities you’ve encountered, those who gave without
asking, those who took when they thought you weren’t looking? And would
you chart future in the same manner, i.e. in terms of names, places and
people, titles and taglines, brands and pay-off lines, certificates and
obituaries, quotable quotes and the thinks that you are determined never
to say?
Reviewing past
Would you do it all, this business of back and forth, reviewing past
and charting future, in images? Would you do it by joining the dots of
things and people seen, events witnessed, other peoples’ representations
in sketch, painting, collage, sculpture, photograph and installation of
event, personality, metaphor, memory, dream and horror?
Would you prefer to store the avenues of recall and the pathways into
the horizon in different formats, some as number, some as word, some as
image? Would you arrange them in terms of colour, as textures,
fragrance-sets and the heart-rates they produced? Would you hire a
professional archivist? Would you tear your hair because these things
defy ordering? Would you mix it all in tremendous sweep of mind and
madness, like a child playing in a heal of dried leaves, let it all fall
in whatever way moment and wind and insanity decrees? Would you weep
then, or smile?
I don’t know, to be honest, how I would do it all. But my friend
Errol Alphonso sent me a wonderful quote yesterday. Woody Allen. ‘Why
are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?’
Got me thinking. I believe there’s very little in this world that
compels one to remember in ordered ways, very few reasons to plan
meticulously and too far into the future. There’s a caressing called for
that lies between the insanity of perfect recording/blueprinting and the
insanity of w-t-f irresponsibility.
I think our days are numbered. They are lettered too, although we
don’t say it. They are also imaged.
Our days, come to think of it, more than all this, are silenced. This
we don’t like to acknowledge or be reminded of.
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