Abolishing Time

“Your love is like murder.”

- Alexander Bogdanov

There is no simple way to present my frustration, other than to lay it on thick, rever mind inaccuracies. The reason, it seems, that I have studied so long, the same subject matter, is that I have noticed that something is lost. Or, at the very least, that it has gone unperceived though it is still there, and lingers in shadow. This is my love of Russian literature, and the Russian past, however dark and overcast it might have been. The completion of my dissertation looms months too early because I have always known what it was that I meant to say; it has always been on the tip of my tongue, even before all this learning took place. What is learning, and what is knowledge if there was no compassionate love to attach to it in the first place. Russian poetry and literature in the transcendental age had such rapture and love of life, regardless of what that was or whether we could explain it. Thoreau's love of nature and the wild stretched into the imagination of Tolstoy and he wrote perhaps one of the most touching humanist works of a lifetime, War and Peace.

I held this testament in my hands in my History class nine years ago and couldn't perceive what was inside it. Only more suffering, it seemed. More suffering alongside the blithely taught classes on Holocaust and mass suffering on a scale never seen before. How can anyone suffer successfully, and penetrate the meaning inherent in suffering? Strange irony, that I left the book aside for five years when I couldn't handle the way in which the Holocaust became subject matter and I left it, along with the magic of Tolkien. I left everything aside because ideological tyranny still left its indelible mark upon my conscience. It was a difficult step to take to try to believe in human dignity afterwards. I forget sometimes how bright I used to be, before we callously tried to forget something that had happened,  something that should always be a living memory.

I feel that a certain moment that should have come a long time ago has now approached. Anyway, what is time but a greater distance? A distance between here and there, that we have somehow abstracted and forgotten how to understand. Everything happens, in one moment. There is only ever one moment, and as we recall we are entrusted to hold ourselves together, not as separate, but as the children who inherit a moment of so many possibilities and so many chances to understand and learn. And we are hopelessly caught in the new moment, and the expectations of a world to come. What is all this in the gospels, about abolishing time, ceasing work to recognise one another, and seeing that the world is always eternal, and always has been. To see that time, just like space is always the same in one moment. Can it really be such a difficult matter to understand that memory is alive, and that whatever is forgotten haunts us because it is no less real than it was in that much hoped for but never quite real yesterday? 

Now, if the world were to perceive the reality that was before them, that absolutely depended on and gave it its independence... wouldn't that be extraordinary? To turn the seeimingly ordinary back upon itself, so that what was seen was not the ordinary way in which the moon and the stars offered themselves to the night, and the sun pulled the earth to itself in such an extraordinary and rare moment. It happens every day, yes. But what is it about this every day that is so commonplace. For that matter, what is commonplace?

What an strange and disconnected remark.

And as I have retrieved everything that remained buried in what we all refer to as the past I feel somewhat entire, and somewhat more dumbfounded by the very nature of this place. As T.S. Eliot says, it is this journey that we have been making; where we will all arrive exactly where we began, but knowing ourselves for the first time. What unusual tendencies we have to separate yesterday from today, and expect a tomorrow, where we will somehow be better than we are now. In which not only will we have forgotten yesterday, but we will have forgotten today if it does not seem rare enough to remember. And so, still alive and buried in the murky subconsious, or even deeper, is the recognition that even a life can be perceived as a moment. But what a rare opportunity, and what a deep mistrust we have of recognising it.

Anyway, like T.S. Eliot, that is not what I meant to say, not even at all.

I have a dissertation to write, and the only difficult thing about it is that it is a struggle to be honest.