LIVING IN THE FUTURE
Much of my life I have lived in the future. I have lived in what could be rather than in the present, what is. I have lived in imagination rather than acuality. And there is good reason for this. This is the way that my brain works.
This image which I saw in the New York Times last week is an example of why this is the case.
This seems to be the image of the entry to a tunnel and as many people see it, the tunnel darkens and you get sucked in as you move into the tunnel. It is an optical illusion that the the image is actually moving as you move into it. This is because for many of us in our response we are not seeing what is on the page, our brain is anticipating what is about to come and our brains are dilating our eyes in anticipation of entering a tunnel and as our eyes dilate the tunnel gets darker and darker. Not all of us do this so don’t disbelieve me if it doesn’t happen to you.
For the past week I have both been in Swannanoa and in Washington, DC and Glacier National Park and in Bellingham and in San Francisco and LA and New Orleans. I fret about how I am going to get on and off the train in Greenville or how I will find my way to Chinatown. I know I am here but I am also not here and in the very back of my mind is the realization that if I am going to go somewhere in October this might be the last chance I have to find a cheap ticket. Yesterday Greece was $513 round trip from Charlotte, but I want to go to Sri Lanka and no ticket is appearing. So I am really living in the present and two places in the future. Last month was a year since Kathe died so many times a day I flash to the past s I feel her presence beside me. Where am I, when am I? I am quite aware for that for 13 billion years I wasn’t and for the rest of time I won’t be. It seems a terribly odd coincidence that I am here now, alive, for a brief moment. I am here among the living dead (soon to die) and same time not here because I am in the future among the dead in the Warren Wilson cemetery where so many of the dead, when living I knew well, are buried. I am non existent, but also very solidly here while also ashes at the bottom of hole by my gravestone at the same time.
And this week before my Amtrak trip this feeling is particularly intense. I can both anticipate sitting here at this table a month from now and imagine coming back from the trip as ashes if something goes wrong.
Is my life here an optical illusion or is my life in the future an optical illusion. Where, when, am I?
And when I think of the insurrectionists storming the Capitol as they try to preserve the past which is slipping away from them as the world changes, their Quixotic and futile effort seems to be the same confusion about when they are living in time as they seem to be trying to return to the American revolution or the Civil War, refighting both of long after they were over.
Joseph Conrad said that we make our way through life with life enhancing illusions.
Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.“ — Joseph Conrad, book Victory
So I guess we live where we feel most comfortable. Make your choice.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 