now as then

sea kayaking. a visit with C. to Nim & Phillip on the coast. ping-pong is a religious duty. longboards that let you carve skate-wheel lines to the liquor store at night. and the Atlantic coast, it just wakes you up from oversleeping.





this is all two weeks ago now. and is it not a matter of Great Wonder that jet fuel is the magic carpet of our century \\ to carry you from Carolina sea-salt to the middle of the desert by the day next? it is no exaggerating to say the air is full of grapefruit in Arizona.

There, the flowers are almost neon,



and the neon, well its almost something else altogether.



Talking, smiling, seeing if the desert is a place you could work and live. and also by chance the chance to see friends after two years time. B. lives here. and yes, ants are everywhere, but if you are committed to your trade, you do experiments in your extra bedroom like B. And how incredible is that.



dear Ehab happened to just be down from Canada and in the desert the very same days as me. those things happen by happenstance, but about as often as never.



…
A few days after that, and jet fuel can make a visit to Chicago for the third and fourth times in a month a matter of reality . By now I can walk through O’Hare with eyes closed and ears plugged and still find my way to the CTA station, Blue line. The light is still playing funny inside the tight crowds of building, and the lake water turns kinds of blue that you’ve considered in dreams you’ve forgotten. but only dreams, and only what you can’t find it in yourself to remember.



<<<>>>

B.w. sent me some Franz Wright poems the other day, the last part of one which quietly read (and in a very small font):

but how
How does one go about dying?
Who on earth is going to teach me
The world is filled with people
who have never died.

And who is going to teach me how to die? What a hard, and perfect, poem kind of question. I think it only underscores the fact that everything we do is always //and in every instance\\ for the First Time. Any thought that it is otherwise is a gross but convenient untruth.

Because I can’t see but that we are just really just these fancy analogy machines, fitting one idea of one time to the new-another ... and all at the risk of obscuring the fact that This has actually never ever happened before, even though it seems really déjà-vu-ishly the reminiscent. In our “been there, done that” kind of culture, it is an easy mistake, but no less worse for its easiness. And so I am suspicious over whether learning from mistakes, learning from your peers, or learning from history are all in fact notions that do any useful work but to mislead.




..
We thought we were somewhere before, but we weren’t. I thought I was in Chicago four times in the last month. but if I could manage to be a more honest person, or more attentive, I could tell you really it was in fact a different place every time. what’s done not re-done, a city of versions rather than addresses.

I read a line in a book the next day, and it felt as if I were eating a meal from the same plate of thoughts, the page saying:

everything we hold true is a trick we play on ourselves, a redemption on past experience for the purpose of trusting the present

and I will admit, I have the hardest of times trusting the present to its ways. as a Good Scientist I’d simply and efficiently call this whole thing the issue of "induction," of reasoning from past and repeated instances of experience, to generalizations that cover our beliefs of all cases – future included. But even Hume had a problem with this promise of Knowledge from Experience, rather than Speculation. and he wasn’t even a poet either/even/still. so really, I can’t see how the Trick We Play on Ourselves isn't anything but evident.



and I wonder if the redemption on past experience enough to save us from an uncertain future. Is it like my mother says, that I constitutionally really hate surprises? Then I’d have to hate everything about this moment, and its uncertainties. and maybe, sometimes, I completely do. but it is the worst sort of thing to admit to. pity if induction was really a matter of taking things for granted; the New! simply taken for the old, for the déjà viewed.

<<<>>>

I can’t take for granted Ehab happened to be in Tempe when I was. If I believed in sin, it would be one to do such a thing. if I believed in ESP, I would have known beforehand and otherwise; if I believed in telekinesis, I would have simply floated into and out of that moment.

But I believe in none of that. I trust instead in things like cousin S. driving through the night 11 hours to visit for this weekend on a whim. for Phillip and Nim to be in town again. and so to playing Life-Size chess at the botanic garden on Saturday,



To shimmying and jumping through spinning hula-hoops in the evening,





and then: Taking the First Quarry Swim of the season this next day Sunday afternoon.





(this moment was mistaken for the one before)

A question:
Was there any way to guess a pair of Canadian geese were nesting there at the quarry’s edge?

No, there just wasn’t.

and she had a nest of her own feathers, sitting on five eggs, each its own color. each the size of a mango.



and I assure you -
none of this has ever happened before.

it is a short life --all firsts and lasts -- packed like gunpowder in a firecracker

!*!

so keep the matches handy.

......