Stop Time

 

27 March 2022

Strategy woman, the one who lives next door to Snoring Man, tweets today’s photo of her window. We see through it, too often without seeing it. Not the frame, which enforces order, but the panes. Does a person exist other than as her identity? I asked a student once, and she said no. Cardboard cut-out at a store, filling in for a celebrity, flat fixer, seller of merchandise, mute singer. The blues are not narrative, but lyric, the professor tells us. Time, says the philosopher, no longer coheres. There are my bird songs and her bird songs, but all we can claim in common is our coffee.

I wake up to her evening. She’s had her coffee, looks forward to more. I grip my mug, drink mine down. Losing It was the symposium; Losing My Grip was something else, a book about arthritis by a former athlete. If an athlete does not die young, she’s still precocious at grieving. Mark had grieved for his mother for a year before she died, not so much after. It was her time.

This morning, dementia comes up over and again. The world is crazy, my correspondent says. It’s only apt, this repetition of the process of losing, mind and body, identity and mass. If we are not our identities, we change less when we lose our minds. She resembled my mother, which meant that she was. There’s some use for images in this life.

Photo is marker, not anchor, like us. We wander the length of our tape measure and then we’re gone. The tape measure ripped to shreds, we lose our place in our own time. It ceases to matter how much we’ve lived, because we can’t remember the thread. A life not of seasons but of gun shots, not of gentle repetition, but of ends that mean nothing.

Russia calls for the surrender of Mariupol, which they’ve destroyed. What a trophy, that, the rubble in the streets, the bombed out theater, the burned cars, the bodies. You break it, it’s yours, our general said. At least seven of theirs have been killed. A colonel run over by his own tank. “I want to get the fuck out,” a Russian soldier says to his grandmother on the phone.

The nightmare is double, like eyes that don’t see straight, or see two things straight that blur together, as if we’d put on the wrong glasses, the ones that refused to acknowledge astigmatism, and instead went for the direct correction of. She changed her meds, remembers her dreams now. Most of them are nightmares. Another friend dreamed over and over of having to flee. “This really happened,” Ginsberg wrote, as do a million people in the Ukraine.

The cadence of his speech. He talks to us through phone, across space, in his time, and ours, which are not the same. Our time pretends to ribbon itself on, day to follow day to follow some notion of there being a history to be recorded. His shatters, though the lens of his phone still coheres. He still speaks in sentences, those that echo and repeat, laud and chastise. We know the sorrow of sentences destroyed. We grieve for them each time we set them down.

There is too much loss, the Black dharma teacher said, for us to have the time to grieve. We start, and we start, and we start, but we cannot come to the end of it before another man is shot dead by police, another Ukrainian woman finds her son dead on the street. If time accelerates, grieving cannot. Stubborn of time and place, it fixes us. You might call this unresolved grieving, as if it’s we who can’t complete our task, but it’s time shutting us down, stopping us. Time, like a fossil fuel, runs out. We need clean time. Next time.