PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
Two days ago in responding to Stephen Jenkinson I satisfied myself that since the future wasn’t here yet and was unknown that it wasn’t real and I could live my remaining days in the present only as I have lived most of my life. Death is a fact, but I will never know it because when I arrives I will be gone. I can live contentedly in the present and never worry about anything.
But Jenkinson didn’t believe this. If he was called to change the world and the world was degrading year by year, it is this degraded future that he is called to prevent. We have to change direction into the future in the present to avoid a dismal future. We may not know what will happen in the future but we can change direction and change the future.
The photographs of Paris that I posted yesterday are from the past. Memories of Paris in the past were taken in the present, but immediately after taken they were a record of the past. In the present I took the photographs because something sensual touched me and I enjoyed responding to it through a photograph in the present, but now when I see the photograph it brings back warm memories of the past, but when I look at the photographs in order to enhance my visit to Paris I am living in the future.
An example is a photograph of an old woman that I saw sitting in the doorway of a Himalayan village near Mussoorie, India. When I saw her sitting there the pastel shades of her clothing and the wooden door behind her, but mostly her presence, touched me and in that moment in the present I took her photograph. But when I came back to the village a couple of years later with a printed book of the village to give them, I discovered that she had died. Suddenly the photograph was very much a record of the past and I felt the sadness of her death and absence. She was, when I took the photograph, in my terms one of the living dead, a person still alive while briefly here who would one day not be here. Looked at that way made her more intensely alive. But two years later she was one of the dead living, a person who had been very alive and was now dead. But the intensity of both of these ways of feeling her sensual presence intensely are part of what is drawing me back to India now. That sensual aliveness of India which sweeps over me will be there in Mussoorie when we visit for a week. These photographs of Paris draw me into the future week in Paris in the same way. And then in the blink of an eye both of these experiences will slip into the past again along with the photographs I take when I visit.
So my comforting feeling of never being able to reach the unreal future which insulates me from the fact of my imminent death is a nice feeling if I could only stay in it. But in my passage through life I either have to accept all three, past, present and future, and transition continually between them or I have to balance awareness of all three and the tension between them. On this trip I will live in all three.
In the end maybe all I am doing is simply playing with perspectives as I try different perspectives to see what makes me feel most alive. And in the end I pick what makes me feel most alive at the time.
So there is really no reason why anyone should pay any attention (and they probably don’t) to anything I figure out for myself because in the end everyone has to feel his own way through.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 