I have begun deleting old blog posts, posts that have not been read in years, thinking to eke back a little of my free gigabyte allowance, though at just over 3% used I’m hardly in danger of running out. It’s more the sense that old stuff just doesn’t matter, that the past is of no relevance to the online world at all. Our history, our heritage, ever since the avaricious eighties, is casually disposable at a click. The blog appeals only to the present moment of the written world, as the Instagram stream appeals to the visual, and neither being an accounting to be trawled through very deeply, for there is a sameness to things, and in maintaining the regular drumbeat of one’s online activity, it reveals itself merely as an existential radar ping: that the moment is now, ever persisting, and for a while at least here I am,… persisting in it.
The past has nothing to say, though paradoxically the past at one time was very much the present moment. But we reinvent ourselves with each new dawn, and the selves we were, we do not recognise or trust any more.
One of the posts I deleted was called “The Mowing Season Opens”, this being the mowing season of 2008, yet in all essential details no different to the mowing season of 2016, but what I wrote “then” lacks the indefinable essence of “now”. Like yesterday’s news I discount its relevance. It becomes old and dusty. No matter how true or authentic or sincere I felt it was at the time I wonder if it could really have happened that way anyway. And how can I trust it, now?
On Instagram posted a photograph of my car at the seaside. There was a moody sky, the colours blown by HDR fakery, and though there was undoubtedly a uniqueness to that moment, visually it is not significantly different to a photograph of the same thing I posted a couple of weeks before. Both photographs are of equal value, but we take the more recent to be of greater importance and all because it happened within the nearer reach of memory, and there is still the illusion we are less changed by time and therefore more trustworthy than the person who took the earlier picture, that indeed the earlier person no longer exists.
This is another symptom of the all but universal western paradigm of consumerism. We consume the present in all its recorded forms, digest it down into the bowels of the past, from where we assume there is no longer to be found any nourishment at all. And always there is the want, the craving for something new, freshly minted, something no one else has touched, or seen or heard before.
When I meditate, I possess an awareness of my self as a unique individual, yet I am not lost in the memory of past things, so it is not memory that defines me, more perhaps the mythical hero’s quest for wholeness, and the chance of discovering the secret key that will unlock the harmony I have sought all my life. But this is another symptom, that we are all pitching headlong into death, yet only subliminally aware the fabled harmony, true wisdom, enlightenment and all that wishy washy existential stuff, are only to be found on the other side of the Styx. We try to square this with the fact of our lives and the Egoic imperative to search for meaning in the details. We know it cannot be found in the past, for if it could it would already have been discovered, and since the future does not exist, all we have is the present moment, today’s post, today’s words, today’s fleeting capture of colour and light and shade.
But the significance of life lies not in its material forms, nor in any of its forms of thought, all of which we scurry to record as if in fear of the setting sun. Here, this is me, see me. See how I live, and think and what it is I love. But what we truly seek is not a thing at all. It is more an opening into formlessness, the blinking of an eye in the material world, and so subtle we shall always miss it. Yet it is reflective of eternity, rising sweet like the brush of an erotic love. It’s always there, always open to us, yet we cover it afresh each day with all the dross of what is new. Perhaps we think we have glimpsed it, in a word, in a turn of phrase, in a relationship, or in the picture of an old blue car at sunset, yet each in its turn sinks into the sedimentary layers of discarded experience. And there we let it lie, perhaps because we fear the truth – that we did not find it then, and shall not find it now.
The fact of our persistence is a mystery, the worthlessness of the shape of all our yesterdays an awkward fact that can do nothing but reinforce the need for humility in the face of infinity. This is not lest we should offend the gods by our arrogance, but more that we should not be driven mad by the paradox of our sense of self importance in the face of an overwhelming material irrelevance, that though we live we might so easily be deleted, and none would know we had ever been this way at all.
The Rivendale Review 
Nicely whimsical…with an inner curl at the end!