11,950. RUDIMENTS, pt. 762

RUDIMENTS, pt. 762

(dredged channels, running freely)

There are so many things you

just never know. Like rubber

bands. How they dry out; who'd

ever think of the band itself

needing and having a moisture

content to stay pliable. Here at

the corner where I live, the

local mail delivery guy parks,

and always leaves a few rubber

bands behind, on the ground,

as he sorts and un-bands the

mail for his walk. Each day,

usually, I collect two or three.

Nice rubber bands, nice width

and strength, and fresh. Yet, if

there are any that I miss, in two

or three days of being in the

hot sunlight, they're already

dried out and brittle enough to

snap at the first stretch. It's

like an amazing, invisible

process, always underway; a

million and one things we never

see or think about. The entire

world, all of Reality is, in that

respect, one giant act of suspension,

a process of change and mix and

alteration constantly at work.

And that's only in our seen,

tangible world - something

like, for example automobile

paint. Look at it today, as a new

burgundy color, and look again

in 10 years to see the results

of fade and sunlight and

ultraviolet rays and the crackings

in the clear coat and all that.

'Build ye not up, treasures in

this world; for they fade before

the calling of dawn.'

-

The cool thing about life is

the way it was composed - by

how and by whatever ongoing -

how you DON'T have to know

this stuff, nor be aware of it.

Your participation is neither

needed nor invited. Like the

'active' God which we all

just consider active no more,

the presence of all this change

and alteration remains ongoing,

quiet, and stealthy. Like the 
act of breathing itself. And it all

operates without our sense

of time, and our 'Time'

of course means absolutely

nothing to it. St. Augustine,

in his 'Confessions' becomes

obsessed with the nature of

'time'  -  or what we refer to

'time' as  - and his own existence

within it. Feeling himself

'scattered through past and

future, with every 'now'

becoming a 'then' the minute

his attention touches it, yet

all the while intuiting an

existence that transcends

time altogether,' Augustine

comes close to despair. Oddly

enough, he gets over this

despair by finding in Scripture

something that leads him to

a realization that 'life in God

entails forgetting the past,

and moving not towards

those future things which are

transitory but to the 'things

which are' before him.' I'm

still not sure what that means,

but I know that I've disagreed

with it and find it opposed to my

own worldview  -  even though

I do not know why that would

be. Life seems to entail, for me,
NOT forgetting the past, and
building onward from that
whole and learned knowledge. 
Otherwise  -  it seems to me  -  
we just scratch blindly. Merely 
look around you, to see what 
I mean  :  Scriptural or not ,

(which only makes it more

suspect to me, frankly).

Sometimes I have found

Augustine to be so full of

BS that his work is a poor

underpinning for 'religion.'

Faith as a form of forgetting?

No wonder churches pave

their parking lots and install

elevators and air-conditioning.
That's not humanity serving 
God; that's a 'God' concept 
being used to serve humanity;
which apparently only wishes to
worship when it's comfortable.

Ridiculous, from all angles.

-

No, I'd rather walk with the

past and hang with the dead than

imbibe with the living and waste

time with today.

-

I'll get back to that in a moment,

but, in the meantime, the jangling

nerves of steel which we are all

supposed to carry with us have

long ago failed. There's little

left of substance anywhere;

just look around you. Notre

Dame burns, and all they can

do is trivialize even that, by

making it a frilly, tourist

disaster with no bearings or

underpinnings to the world far

behind us (and burnt away?)

which we've long ago left. One

day it's the yellow vests; the

next day it's Notre Dame, and

then it all moves on anyway.

Nothing gets aired, unless

maybe they can hang an ad

or a commercial onto it. I've

always liked solid ground,

places with long story-lines,

with a past and a back-story 

that a person can draw from.

I write, I document and delve

Most people don't do that, so 

I guess that's how and why

the past gets dissolved away,

can be made to disappear, and

have no more meaning. Not

for me; all of that remains too

vital and too important.

-

I fault people who deny this,

in fact, again back to Augustine,

who just ploddingly twists it all

into doctrine, something that

makes little sense : "Faith is

a from of forgetting. A faithful

person doesn't merely forget

the past, that collection of dead 

nows. One forgets the future.

That is, to have faith is to live

forward, and very occasionally,

in, a future devoid of any of the

attributes of time. Forever and

eternity are not synonymous...

One needs a 'now,' in order to

be released from it." As the

Roman philosopher Boethius

said : "The now that passes

creates time; the now that

remains crates eternity."

(And people say I'm write

obscurely?). What any of 

this means, outside of me,

is probably nothing. I've

already dredged all my 

channels, and they're 

running pretty freely.