Boom-a-rang

She is a person who prefers the enigma to the idea.  Out of assemblages of words, she works miracles of mystery.  She muddies the world to assure herself that the glass--half darkly--is full.  The water is sullied but her confidence comforts her.  She is sated by the configuration she has made from her doubts.  Her questions have constructed the underground tunnels, the temples tall and trembling, the house in which she dwells.  She has not said this (perhaps, she does not know it...in the way one "knows") but the fact of the matter is that enigma itself is an idea.  The agnostic describes god by his or her ambivalence.  The zealot describes doubt by the hunger in his or her certainty...

Others are easy to adopt the mechanistic universe.  Cause begets effect becomes cause begets effect.  And this linear beginning and its linear end are the staples of logic, of science, and of the religions of punishment and reward.  Yet how can one live in the present if one conceives as the present as the product of the past?  How can one live in the present when one conceives that the present will have its accounting in the future?  This is the burden of the boom-a-rang, the sound it makes as it leaves your slippery grip.  This is the boom-a-rang's return.  Do not catch it.  Do not acknowledge it.  Let the object be nothing (it is nothing).  Let it drop at your feet.

The Present

Time--not as measured but as experienced--is repetitive disorientation, a constant dissolution of expectation and continual adaptation to emerging "facts".  That is to say that time, as the necessary fulcrum for change, must at its core be off balance and capricious.  No matter how successful one's distractions or how apathetic one is to the concepts of ambition or progress, time will always be the precarious, unraveling rope bridge spanning the plumetting gorge.  

Time is the tension of the water droplet as it shivers in taut suspense.  It hangs there, suspended, on the underside of the shelf, a glossy ceiling painted a comforting pea-coat blue.  It is almost invisible as it materializes, slowly, as if this were the blooming of a flower or the delicate construction of a tiny, tiny house.  

And the world stands still.  

This is not ice.  This is a diamond, a differently constructed planet, with sharpened angles and the power to refract light.  The crystals are like the prisms trapped in eyes.  They see backward through the imperfect art of memory, and forward through the arrogance of augury.  The only clear image, cut to dazzling precision is the vision that is now, a vision unfoundered by the doubt learned from your last week, last month, last year, last lifetime and unburdened by some impossible idea of an untenable future.