Time ought to drive in circles, not a wagon train to the
always-unknown horizon, but a ring around the unexplained,
facing familiarity and reflected places, standing always in
a position with which we have acquaintance.

Summations and trivia; exotic pagan dances, staking a claim
for human un-knowledge, and commercial balms soothing that
same discomfort, organic creams from zoos that once were
plains; and all the while, the colossus begins to smolder,
the vines creep.

Inside disparate accountings, brief moments reckon
themselves: the feel of cool water in Eagle lake, a Rum
punch in eighty degrees evening, familiar summer’s play on
wide fields.  None of these are the invention of the flying
loom; none discovered potassium.  Such is the self.

Tomorrow is to be the same sunrise as today, with no
tabulations among squirrels; they or we are oblivious -- and
the discernment of which is a matter of mystery; whether the
pull toward skyhooks is natal illusion, or God; whether the
Rule is right or wrong; whether the shape of the calendar is
human avarice or earthly wisdom; in short, whether our
artifice reckons right or not is the same dilemma as the
mechanics of mind and the ordering of acts.

Certainly the circle is right on the facts: simply, the lava
has not overrun the city, the sky has not rained blood.  But
facts are calisthenics for theory, not more.  We possess the
urge to re-invent explanations, even where unnecessary; the
impulse itself a cryptogram -- a redundant genome?  A long-
lost cognitive spade?  A stirring of transcendence?  This
desire does not hunt or cook or reproduce; but for the
gravity of the matter, this strange-stirred libido would
seem the most extravagant of frivolities.

The indulgence in signification turns the clock with heavy
hand, expectant heart, portentous moment; the reasoning of
birds seems a Scrooge.  The ache for doom, rescued by bits,
attaches itself to anniversary; in an irony it is the
disbelief in catastrophe that engenders... melancholy. 
Possibly, the fantasy seeks only not to be bored.

Lonely-hearts tick the days; spinsters, singles stare at
diversions and employ them as measure-marks in place of the
blank doorposts; but neither circle-time nor linear drive
will at last announce reprieve.  For that no month is
appointed, and no instance preferred above another; the
false business of exchange is itself diversion.  
Timetables are poor bread, worse gauze; they well color
operas and guide shifts from gin to rum, but in the main
datebooks seem lone convention, with no claim to
instantiation in the world of is; comfortable crutches as
their greater suppositions are notoriously cowardly, often,
it seems, deceitful; rarely solace.

Whether the craved tree over apparent is mere surplus often
interests only the didact; for the rest the chain’s reality
matters only if the enjoyment of a picnic-basket is
postponed by relative worth, only if the next drink is
rightly or wrongly deplored, in sum, only when the heart is
denied; on these occasions, the path’s question and its
costs seemingly reinsert the doubt one had thought banished;
they ask if the line, more than arbitrary, occludes.

On New Year’s Eve, the ceaseless march of grave
signification is itself, paradoxically, occasioned by
carnival and Lethe; precisely those who most venerate
geometry plead the most urgent escape from it; the most
ardent zealots for signification sing and dance a troubled
reminder -- that lines are false and the knock is not at the
door; that there is no knock and no door; that there is only
here, only sand-bars and carbon, with no measure of a man
reckoned in years or dates or virtuous behavior; and only
the listening tidal oblivion.
 
 
 
 
 

Jay Michaelson
jay@metatronics.net