Time goes traveling
I have been sticky with Time, lately. Covered in it. Craving its glutinous, slow-sliding presence as I might a lover. I’m used to Time as a quality, even Time as a utility: that sour constant against which we sum the sugar of all our successes. But I am just getting to know the other face of Time. Time the Lover who stops everything in a proper or un-proper place and who demands an utter and unabashed awareness as her just due, her portion.
So much of my life was spent traveling. I remember Nepal. Kathmandu before the earthquake. Great flocks of birds like saints’ shadows rising and wheeling above one of the temples. I remember a yogurt delicious enough to stop Time. I remember 20 miles in New York, in San Francisco, in Singapore, in Seoul. All on foot. The rush of the rhythm of the pavement, which is a kind of dance of longing continuously exerting tension against the kind of Time I mean. When I walk, I can feel Time stretching her hand, walking down the street opposite, perhaps. Or, better, moving and bustling step-for-step in a world that is the exact opposite of mine in every way and which lies just beneath the pavement as I walk it. We touch and tap, heel for heel, toe for toe.
People think you have to be a yogi to write about, or to experience Time in this way. Someone our culture allows to be safely alternative, permitted to set up a little shack by the rattling hum of the commuter trains, by the buzz of schedules in the human brain. (Have you realized your schedule commutes too, and generally arrives for work after you wake up in the morning, which is why your first few moments are always—if you wish at least—with Time the Lover rather than Time the Clock-Builder? It’s true.) Anyway, we generally accord a class of holy men (usually men) special privileges as sacred dalliance-havers, as sommeliers, perhaps, or courtesans of Time, loving and tasting the rich excess of Time’s love for the rest of us, who fight continuous running battles to accord our time between various sized pieces of glass in a way that makes us feel balanced.
Time waits. Time accepts the love of yogis and of grizzled 22-year-old backpackers in Kathmandu who need a shower, and of little five-year-old girls who are growing up by the busy railways of Jakarta and who need a school, or at least attention from another human who’s kind. Most of us leave it Fate to find out whether or when we experience this face of Time, and I think Time and Fate are not particular friends. Or, at least time resents being thrust so often into Fate’s society. A little Fate goes a long way.
This bit of writing, completed on a Saturday afternoon stolen from the sun, is not an essay in any commuting or clock-building sense. It does not have five parts, as I was taught an essay must in school. It uses capital letters for qualities traditionally considered in English as possibly utilities or possibly dimensions of physics or just possibly Greek ladies of the night. And regardless of the definite identities of the Beings written about, it lacks the sort of crisp point that makes busy readers pay attention. Deliberately. For this is an invocation more than an essay. An invitation rather than a menu of facts which can be rapidly glanced over and put down with a slight sigh and a nod to the waiter for a single gin and tonic, please, and make it quick.
I venture to suggest that we all know we want Time as a lover, but perhaps we don’t know if we quite believe she (or he, time is rather androgynous, I think) is quite real. Even to me this kind of sticky time is a haunting in the wood, a sounding of the pipes of Pan. It is the one thing I want most in the whole world (especially as a father of two), and the kind of enchanted fairy glade one can only find when one is searching aimlessly and a bit sideways, as it were. I did this once, on another trip in Scotland. On the island of Skye, up on the lid of the Storr on a misty afternoon. Time held the door to Faerie and I stepped through for just a moment and the Black Cuillins and all of Scotland opened before me in sun.
May this invocation bring the smell of Time like heather in the sun to your nostrils. May they flare. May your eyes squeeze shut tight in unexpected delight.
Here’s to traveling with Time in 2021.
