scruta

Every time I say the words “break a leg” I’m suddenly reminded of a shampoo commercial from my childhood, late 1980s to early 1990s… and I realize that this is something I’ll never have back. There’s something about the way that this seemingly innocuous advertisement for hair care product haunts my adult life that I find incapable of expressing to anyone who’s never seen this commercial.

It’s something that I don’t feel comfortable sharing either, those public moments that suddenly become private connections, bridges that once linked my consciousness to the world destroyed forever, known only to the souls that dare to walk through the ruins, scrape off the moss growing on them and ruminate on their existence.

Is this what contemporary consciousness has been reduced to? A semantic wasteland waiting for us to play archeologist? To fill out the meanings of the past for a crowd that grows less and less attentive?

I do not feel bad about writing terrible poetry anymore because I have been consumed by the idea that given infinite (or near infinite) time for the progression of humanity all variations, all possibilities of language have their moment, their genius.

BUT

Then I think of history. I think of the change of the world, the atrophy of language, the evaporation of time meaning fewer and fewer people will be able to know that genius.

BUT

Aren’t there timeless ideas?

Yes, but they are only accessible to the timeless.

BUT

Aren’t you just stroking your oh-so delicate ego? One that could be crushed by a snide remark at some cocktail hour? Or even just the terrible – oh, dare I say it? – mispronunciation of a word while trying to pontificate fluidly on the weather?

BUT

Don’t you have your own writing to save you? Don’t you have the internet? It is open (in some locales) and (barring the destruction of the servers that host your content) eternal. Yes, you ARE eternal. Oh scream it out in silences in cyberspace! Here nobody will know about the cluttered events of your pathetic existence! Here everything is neat and straight and pure!

BUT

You get ahead of yourself. Relax, poet. Dare to be terrible and perhaps you will make a small contribution, a subtle change in the way that people discuss having a cold or meeting a potential lover or mourning for the dead. This is still the immortality you live for, a glimmer of permanence in this vast sea of change.

BUT

But nothing…

I had it wrong about the present. I thought because it was something I couldn’t grasp it was constantly fleeing me. I thought the only thing I could hold onto, the only thing that would save me were my memories and my dreams. I was wrong.

Memories fade. Dreams are bent and warped over time, sometimes erased altogether. The present – fickle and fleeting – is the only thing that remains. There it sits, always before you – the great, eternal now.

Parturient

喁唼

(yóngshà)

(For Chinese geeks, I found this word in 徐志摩’s poem 《私语》.)