Memory of Time

I read about a mystical experience someone had on an underground train in London. The presence of Christ was suddenly revealed, according to this twentieth century mystic, among the many commuters, the ordinary and diverse people heading home after a days work, now seen to be the incarnate God, Christ living and dying, rejoicing and suffering, in each of them, the whole world on that train.

I didn’t know what to think about that vision. A nonChristian might not like being told that they are Christ or have Christ “in” them.

A Christian might not like being told that nonChristians have Christ in them. And people are confused about what the word “Christ” means. I’m confused about what the word “Christian” means, or if it means anything.

I never see the people on the J train as the incarnate God. Each of us has the Buddha nature, I guess. Maybe the potential for enlightenment is embedded in our DNA. OK, cool, I can dig it. But I can’t say I SEE it on the subway to work.

Workers of the world ride the train. The train crosses a bridge. On the other side of the river the train goes underground and the workers go to the various workplaces and clock in to perform alienated labor, and clock out to perform alienated recreation, clocking in and out until the end of their lives and the great summing up, the great all in all at the end of Time.

I don’t know if I can say this without an ironic tone but I want to have that vision of the messiah in every passenger, every one of these sleepy unhappy people struggling to make a living or to just get through the day and I want to understand their struggle as ultimately being messianic labor, even the struggle of those stretched out on the benches or those walking through the cars begging for money or ranting to the universe and to God.

Some friends were in town and were going to the September 11 Memorial and they invited me to join them at the museum. I hadn’t been to the museum. I was avoiding it because I was suspicious that there would be an element of the nationalistic mythology and propaganda inflicted upon us twenty three years ago as the government drummed up support for war against anybody, against everybody. Indoctrinated by a culture that can only imagine violence as a solution, some young people were susceptible to the war propaganda and the call to kill and die in a display of American Power that left the world and our country worse off and many brave soldiers and innocent civilians dead.

I didn’t need to be reminded of what happened on 9/11/2001. My memory of that never needs to be refreshed. But I wanted to see what people are being shown now, the official story, and how the events are being presented to people who weren’t there or weren’t even born.

My friends were late and I stood in the rain until they arrived and then we stood in the rain together in a long line that took us to a security check with metal detectors, the sort of security check I go through when I go to work, each of us considered to be a possible terrorist, if not a possible Christ.

Inside, we took a long escalator ride down into a crypt called Memorial Hall where unidentified remains are stored behind a big wall. The wall is covered with 2,983 squares of different shades of blue. They represent the 2,983 who died in 1993 WTC bombing as well as 9/11. The blue water color squares are attempts by an artist to remember the color of the sky that day. As you descend you also see a quote from Virgil, the poet who guided Dante in his trip through Hell. That line is displayed on the wall of blue sky patches in letters forged by another artist from steel recovered from the ruins of the World Trade Center. The words are taken out of context from The Aeneid and their meaning repurposed for the memorial:

NO DAY SHALL ERASE YOU FROM THE MEMORY OF TIME

For a few weeks or days New Yorkers liked each other, one of my co-workers recalls. I remember. And America liked New York and the World liked America. Even Rudy Giuliani acted like a human for a few minutes, I remember.

Maybe its that sense of human community that we need to recover and remember, the kinds of community consciousness, the love for a neighborhood, that form in response to a disaster and emergency. The desire to do something to restore ordinary life. The desire to do something, and the need to do something, to donate blood and money, to help with recovery.

Any ordinary work day can suddenly become extraordinary, extra ordinary terror, or even joy, I imagine, and either way, terror or joy, your life can be changed, all lives changed, so that even in Lower Manhattan people are on the street, looking into each other’s eyes as if recognizing each other for the first time, and recognizing the city we love, as we witness the towers burning, something we had not imagined would be happening today.

I remember that and remembering that I can see that my fellow passengers in this world really are children of the creator spirit on a train bound for Golgotha or Glory.

Draw a line

 12/16/24

At last.

I make it to the free zone.

Eight and a half inches by eleven inches of liberated space where a Bic pen can say whatever it wants to say and show whatever it wants to show.

The soul can gallop over the surface of the paper like a wild horse in a meadow like a free spirit or a god and the only fences are those produced by imagination.

A line goes for a stroll and chooses a direction and maybe chooses a destination, a point to direct itself to, or maybe the line becomes errant and wanders pointlessly, carried by an unknown and indeterminate cause and one imagines it to be free.

Learn a rule and follow it and break the rule and create a new one and make a mistake and learn from it and make new rules and new mistakes.

 

A line goes for a stroll, drawn by a hand, following a rule or free

hand.

A ruler or template can be used and then set aside.

The line starts at a point. The point is located, selected, with the point of the pen applying ink at the the upper left corner, following English convention for writing, but then the pen is dragged down to make a vertical line about a half inch and then a quarter inch horizontal to the right and an acute angle, about forty five degrees, an irregular zig zag and so on, like lightning bolts, or a curve that curves back on itself, following along side of itself more or less parallel and then intersecting itself, crisscrossing itself, or flowing like a river or exploring like a root growing underground or telling a story of no interest to anybody about the pen’s travels on paper,  a map.Or draw a picture. A simple face of two dots and a line in a circle. Draw stick figures, simple pictures, to tell a story, or use the symbols of the alphabet or write it in a secret code. 

Why not use this language to say something meaningful instead of describing what I’m doing with a pen and paper? Why not use these free minutes to develop new symbols and signs?

Why not make remarkable marks that change the given symbol system in some way?

Draw a face that speaks like thunder with lightning bolts and lightning comes from the hand. Create lightning bolts that crack open the sky and blast into the ground. Create a line flowing like a river, flowing from an unknown source behind the hand and behind the face.

Make your mark in the invention of human language. Invent a new mode of signification and communication.

Why not singlehandedly expand and extend collective consciousness and unconscious experience? Collaborate with cosmogenesis and co-create a noosphere? Co-create a mind?

A mind wanders beyond the brain that holds it, beyond the body it is part of, and beyond the room in which the bodymind is sitting, beyond the city in which it resides, beyond America, beyond the world as it is and as it was, beyond whatever world it can imagine,  

A mind wanders within and beyond the material from which it emerges, newborn, screaming under electric lights and gasping for air. A new mind in motion, moving in electrical chemical events in a body in a physical environment, like tiny lightning bolts of neural signals interacting with the physical behavior of the life system it inhabits, organizing its environment, conceptualizing the sensations it receives.

Why not make an effort to do something no one has ever done before with a pen and paper?

Invent an alphabet.

Invent new words with this alphabet.

Write new stories with these words.

A wise one, maybe an unemployed wizard, even, follows a star, not knowing what the star is following or where the star came from, except that it came from the East, like all stars, from an unknown source beyond the horizon, and wanders to the West, to an unknown destination beyond the horizon, and leads the wise one here, bearing gifts to greet the arrival of a newly awakened mind in possession of infinite possibilities and facing the unimagined future.

Interstate

Imagine that after many millennia of warfare and environmental crises, humanity finally learned from its mistakes and evolved into a relatively happy family, a cosmic community at home in the universe.

The following fractured parable takes place many years before that happy day.

Diogenes lived in a tub. 

The tub was round and made out of wood.

It was his mobile home. He would stay in one place for a while, and sleep under the tub, Or he would relax inside, naked in the twilight our endarkened world calls daytime, and enjoy the memory of sunshine. The nude bather would  receive his philosophy students and lecture to them until outraged parents and police officers chased him away for violating social norms.

Then he would turn the tub on its side and roll along the ancient broken highway, I-95, along the Eastern Seaboard, where cities used to be —

Wilmington New York City Philadelphia District of Columbia Baltimore Richmond Jacksonville Miami — all of these now names for holes burned into the ground, giant ashtrays that held the dust of a cremated democracy. He sifted the dust with his fingers in search of relics that would offer clues to what had happened and why.

He scavenged along the roadside, interviewing the refugees who walked in sad caravans. He carried a flashlight that burned out long ago but he’d forgotten what he was looking for anyway and now the flashlight was a club for self defense.

To the young he was a folk hero but ordinary good people regarded him as a cynic who was only infamous for being infamous.

In spite of his obvious poverty and insanity some influential people believed he possessed valuable information about how civilization used to work and these powerful people were interested in getting the old world started again, making it great again.

You have all heard the story about the time the Big Man offered him a priceless gift for this knowledge.

Diogenes was camping outside of the crater named West Palm Beach when a vintage golf cart pulled up. The Big Man’s driver parked near the tub and a security detail guided him so he could present his offering to the naked philosopher.

What he offered was a bucket of meat. 

Many people say this is the best meat they ever tasted! the Big Man boasted. They can’t believe it!

No, said Diogenes.

In the old days this meat would have been worth many billions of bitcoins, the Big Man claimed.

No, said Diogenes.

What can I give you? the Big Man persisted. What favor can I grant you?

You can step away from me, Diogenes answered. You are eclipsing my sunshine. 

Sunshine? the confused visitor asked, tilting his head back and directing his empty eye sockets upward to where the sky used to be.