When We’re Not ‘Making’ Sense

Had another sense/thought –

sense/memory re: time past & time present.

What first comes back, or at any rate came back

when I was sitting on my bed a while ago,

was something I'd call the 'texture' of time –

that it 'moved' for me in childhood (it never moves

of course, but the experience of existing moment

to moment is a kind of imagined thought-movement,

a superimposed narrative) with exactly

the same mystifying unknowability (I want to say

'slowness' but it can't be expressed

with any word that suggests passage of time)

as it does now. I remember feeling it

(if 'feeling' is even right) as a small child in exactly

the way I feel it now. "To make us feel existence" –

that Keats line from Endymion I keep repeating –

I'm drawn to that line because whatever it is

I'm trying to describe is 'feeling existence.'

It is unlike any other experience because any other

experience is bound up with intention: wherein time

'goes slowly' because you want to be somewhere else

and aren't, or goes fast because you can't get

what you want done fast enough, or it feels weightless

and happy because you don't want to go anywhere.

‘Affect' – feeling – directs your notion of 'time' moving

either because you like the feeling and want time to slow

or you don't and want it to speed up - and it does!

Time is entirely a function of narrative;

it obeys whatever story we put it into.

But when there IS no narrative –

when you're just sitting on the bed –

what is it then?

It is this 'sense' of something – it's not nothing –

maybe felt as a kind of inner & outer envelope,

maybe pressing lightly on you and in you –

you're in, indeed are indistinguishable from, something.

There's no such thing as nothing. But it doesn't obey

any of the laws of life as we are taught them

by instructors whose abiding first aim is always always

to get from point A to B to etc. That’s a useful aim,

of course. It permits us to align with gravity

and periods of light and dark and seasons

of warm and cold and therefore survive incarnate

on the planet. But however useful this may be

for getting us into and through and out of pragmatic

coherences and rhythms through the day –

so that we feel like we're making sense – the 'reality'

of time or matter or energy we need for this alignment

is a fiction. We literally are ‘making’ sense.

We conjure it up out of a desire for it.

But it’s a dance, a game, a sneaky maneuver.

When we're not “making” sense –

what’s happening then? We feel existence.

And that’s a very strange centrality,

more interesting, I think, than my little
primate brain so far can fathom.

.