Fleeting Moments

Sometimes, suddenly, everything slips into place, and there is a brief moment of clarity. Observing the world through a pair of binoculars, perched high up in a lighthouse tower, rain lashing at the windows, high winds pound the old stone walls. The ocean scene scrolls past as I look from right to left, until, there, a person alone bobbing in a boat, face filling the circular lens, looking quizzically back at me, and then gone. Was that my face? Is that how people see me?

I pick up meaning like I pick up leaves on the floor. Holding them softly in my fingers I cast my eyes upwards and wonder which tree they came from. Sentences contain words, but words are merely a facade, meaning is not as simple as understanding the words. Words and sentences are just advertising, the product sits within a cardboard box, anemic, fragile, enclosed within polite social decorum. It should never be spoken of, outside of the box it quickly deteriorates.

I’m transfixed by a desire to peal back the layers of unnecessary decoration to

reveal a fundamental reality. Simple, logical, complete. I gather books around myself, unread words that offer an interpretation of other words and sentences, and books. I wall myself in, I try to decide which words are true, and which are a double bluff, but the shifting sands of popular thought make this impossible.

And there you are. There are those who believe they understand and there are those who know they do not. Confidence in knowledge is no barometer for intellect, and intellect is no barometer for understanding.

About time.

Time is a slippery transient concept that slides past at a pace I’m often add odds with. Falling just beyond my grasp, I catch it only when I fear that failing to fix an exact spot upon its swift current, will mean my missing a plane (or something else important). Such times call for a vast amount of concentration and I must plan a point in time prior to that of the occasion, to act as the occasion itself, so that when I miss it, it is, in fact, not missed.

I enjoy time, like I enjoy traveling. It is much the same thing in my mind. I travel in space, and now I travel in time.

I thought I could see everything if I had the money, I could journey endlessly throughout the world, in fact time itself forbids it. If I’d started traveling in 1992 and finished today, what I’d seen then, would no longer resemble what it does now. I met a woman in America when I was there in 1997, she had spent her college years in 1960s England. She described what she believed England still was, a quaint, quiet, silly place, populated by white people with plumby public school accents. Or a woman in Australia, who was adamant that, despite my testimony to the contrary, Britain still used pounds shillings and pence. I realised the place I was from did not resemble the descriptions of people who had visited it.

I thought nothing changed. Old people had always been old, grannys were grannys and babies would remain so forever. I thought of life as a story, its characters eternal. Bart simpson is always a boy never a man. I was the person in the audience, characters acted out their parts in the play and the next day resumed again from the start. My youthful arrogance was born from the assumption that time is something that happens to other people.

Now, given the time I have traveled through I know this not to be true. I have moved less in space recently, but more in time. I have played the part of several of the characters in the play. I’ve moved from one to another, so that although the play remains the same, the story plays eternally and the theatre remains on the same spot, I have shifted from one roll to another, and if I’m lucky enough, I will play every part before I shuffle off and a new actor is hired to begin the process again.

When I was in the throes of labour, giving birth to my son. I let out a noise I’d never made before, a strange wail, it was the sound a woman makes when she is giving birth. It came as a surprise to me that I was that woman and that the sound had come from me. It felt like I was saying someone else's line. In a way it was a wail that marked the beginning of a transformation into a different person. I’d created a new human and in so doing had shifted along the sofa of life to give him space to sit where I once did.