what path, what future?
"Then I reflected that everything that happens to a man happens precisely now. Now. Centuries of centuries, and only in the present do things happen. Countless men in the air, on the face of the earth, and in the sea. And all that is really happening is happening to me." [jorge luis borges]
I am packing. Because of my tendency to make piles which eventually become boxes which eventually come to rest in my basement, I have been doing a lot of sorting-through. It's a kind of personal archeology, digging through weeks and months and years of my life in papers. i've scanned some of them below to try to explain what this looks like.
included: the 'energizer bunny' quote, a clipping of ME saying something inane about bruce springsteen in an artsy national magazine, a flyer i helped design for our march from DC to NYC, a shutoff notice from the gas company, and a to-do list from july 1999:
what's striking, as i leaf through this mangled scrapbook in a box, is how much slower my life has been in the past year or so. in the year or so following my graduation from college, there is a flurry of papers. tonight i went through pages and pages of daily to-do lists from my (then) very new and exciting job with the kwru; i went through journals in which i was actually writing, notes from political study groups, letters from a girl, various bills & receipts. i found a souvenir from a group-affirmation exercise i did at the end of my first summer out of school, where my co-workers/friends each wrote someting nice about me on a paper plate. you can see it above: one friend wrote, "you just never stop going, you're like the energiser bunny in that way."
but the papers trail off at some point, sometime in mid-2000. after that it's mostly bills. any good archeologist would suggest that either i started throwing stuff out (not likely), or that my life, measured by paper output, slowed down. i could dwell on the reasons this happened -- taking on more and more responsibilities at work, becoming increasingly impoverished myself, slowly losing connection with other young people involved in the same struggle -- but the reasons are not the point now. what happened is that my life slowed down, that when i was 21 everything was fresh and exciting and by the time i turned 23 i found myself exhausted and overwhelmed. i stopped making to-do lists. i stopped writing in my journal. i stopped taking pictures. i stopped writing to a girl.
this May, i watched a group of college students moving out of their dorm, saw them every day as i walked home from work. i realized i had seen the same group of students move in the previous september, when i started a temporary job that stretched to over a year. i could almost see the blur of their lives over those two semesters, the classes and the gossip and the dining hall meals and the changes. next to that blur i could see my life, stationary and staid.
college kids now become a reminder of semesters coming and going, and digging up the paper artifacts of my past three years uncovers the ebb and flow of my life. but it takes these outside reminders to give me any perspective on my own history. is this, by extension, also what Borges means? all the diverging paths in time, the escape routes i took -- all obscured to me except looking back, in the third person.
all that is really happening i am going to argentina to jump-start my life. is that possible? is that ridiculous? i want to know what happens. here tonight without a master plan, among all this dust of false-starts, i want to see myself, want to know what path, what future.
previously there was 911
afterwards you have last days in the big apple
Then when we take up the next cause or carry out the next inertia, we're generally a little bit better at it, and because we deal with it in a more mature and somewhat more measured way, it has less of an emotional impact. Less energy is involved. Efficiency tapers enthusiasm. It's the heat death of the universe in little.
But I don't mind it, not really. I never bought into saving the world, or even changing it very much. My approach has always been more pragmatic: get her to like me, get this job, make sure the move is well-researched, take good notes in the novel 'cause I want to remember it, otherwise time spent reading is time wasted.
I've never believed the claim that life is short. It's tremendously long. The days keep peeling off of each other. It's okay to waste some time. But it's better to jump-start. Remember _Pulp Fiction_ when Ms. Thurman gets the needle through the chest? Yeeehhhhhaugh! Sure, it hurts, but it's for the best, and it restores order for a while longer, or at least comfort in the appearance of it.
Argentina, ho! [submitted on 26 Sep 02]
Sometimes I do miss those days. Then I'm glad we have a little time to relax AND think about poverty...all over the world. [submitted on 29 Dec 02]