December 29, 2005
time X place
Posted by bopuc at December 29, 2005 12:52 AM
Past
The past is a comforting place. It is your old room; a box stuffed with boxes stuffed with memories. It is warm and cozy, everything in it's place; predictable, known. It is stuffy, the window hazed with condensation and outside, the sun has set long ago. The past is all memories, bound in and limited to them.
Future
The future is an anxious place. It is a field stretching out; as far as the imagination that makes it. It is windy and agitated, in a constant flux of boundless possibilities and desires; unpredictable, unknowable. The future is all imagination, bound to and only limited to it.
Present
If the present where a place, it would be the door between the Past and the Future. But there is no such place, just as there are no lines between colors on a canvas. The present is an infinitely small, non-existant point between memory and imagination. And on that point is where you are. The present is a transition.
Just as non-existant as the present, just as much an illusion as memory and imagination: I just am / not.
Couldn't resist the clever little punctuation trick there and the pedantic explanation for it. The slash between am / not is meant to signify this same concept of being / non-being, as expressed in the description of the present. The slash is also known as a "separatrix", which also has a meaning in mathematics. I had also heard the term applied in a presentation given by Greg Lynn in reference to a line created by the meeting of two bodies. There is also a term in art theory for this but I cannot recall it at the present. hah! Totally unintentional pun. Anyways, this is all intellectual diarrhea of course...