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egarding possessing awareness of the hypertrophic nightmare-grade realities of global-wide late capitalism, we are so few against so much denial and mass delusion.
We, the few, possessed of a grasp of the situation, of honestly gathered scientific facts, propelled, as we are, by sacred vehemence and sincere intentions — but time is against us. Of course, it is nothing personal. What is a personal affront is the lies and slander of capitalism’s apologists and their operatives and stooges e.g., Climate Change denialism shills and their muckhead dupes; the hagiographers and beneficiaries of militarism and flag-fetishist sub-cretins; capitalism’s fool’s parade of mercenaries, suckers, and somnambulists.
We face a tsunami of stupid.
The old gospel standard reports, “Pharaoh’s Army got drowned, O’ Mary don’t you weep.”
Sorry, to break it to you, Mary old gal, due to the lamentable fact that pity-devoid time does not choose sides, it is likely, we, Pharaoh Capitalism’s tribe, are all going down in the tide, and, as a certain Nobel laureate howled in his youth, “For now’s the time for your tears.”
Trains evince an image of the forward motion of time. Tom Waits conjures an apropos lament. We, as a species, as is the case with the hapless protagonist of the song, just can’t seem to help ourselves.
One of Carl Jung’s favourite quotes regarding time was from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, in which the White Queen proclaims to Alice: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards”.
Numerous artists and great thinkers e.g., Jung, Rilke, Philip K. Dick intuited that an illusion of biology, a habit of mind, caused us to perceive the nature of time was exclusively linear… that time, on an exclusive basis, flowed, like a river from the past into the present then towards the future. Instead, they posited, time was more akin to a porous, supra-dimensional, interconnected hive, implacably intertwined with consciousness.
We are embraced by phenomena that exist far beyond our mortal sightline; there are paths of apprehension that lead towards expansive vistas of seeing and knowing that, in turn, stretch into eternal intelligences that blaze within trillions of eternal intelligences.
In our limited perception, these intelligences appear to us, often in dreams, visions, and poetic expression as beauty, terror, even humour…. People, throughout the ages, have referred to the phenomenon as communion with the sublime, even encounters with gods and angels.
Time is eternity, gripped by a transitory (but biologically imperative) episode of self-absorption. Yet: One must dare to turn towards the horizon line of acausal knowing, and walk a terrain of impersonal, monstrous beauty, all the while, clasping one’s tattered humanity like a weather-shredded flag.
The dream-fecund human heart, an inveterate time-traveler, knows its way through the honey-hived portals of time. But one must forget all pretence to catch a glimpse of its nature thus become christened with one’s true and timeless name.
Image by Dan Booth. Not to be reproduced without express prior permission.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City.
Yet a bio amounts to dharma for dimwits: It defines a human being in the same manner and degree of veracity as a restaurant menu describes the various slabs of meat offered … commodified things that were once living beings.
