June 19, 2021

No idea why yesterday's post didn't publish - I'm sure I clicked the Publish button last night. But there it was, still a draft, when I just logged on. 

Ironic, considering what I wrote about.

The book I started yesterday, I Will Never See The World Again by Ahmet Altan, also touches on the subject of time going peculiar in confinement, although his confinement was of course a little bit more severe than being told to stay at home during a pandemic. He also expresses it rather more elegantly than I ever could:

Each minute was the same as the last. It was as if a tributary of the river of time had hit a dam and formed a lake. We sat at the bottom of that motionless pool... We couldn't tell in which direction time flowed. Sometimes it flowed towards the past, towards our memories. Sometimes it flowed towards the future and our worries. But more often it stagnated in this strange-smelling gloom.

...There was no clock dividing it into seconds, minutes and hours. There was no movement, no thought, no image dividing time into pieces.

Time had become a single entity... When one can't separate the moments, they stick together and become swollen.

They surged and collapsed on me like a translucent mountain of jelly smothering my mind, my soul, my body, filling my mouth and nose, choking me.

Tempus absoluto. Absolute time, which Newton said was moving with an uninterrupted speed beyond anything humans could sense, had arrived, gliding in from the universe, and was casting itself over me in this dusty sickroom, leaving me with no room to escape. 

Now I understood why human beings invented the clock, why they put clocks on the streets, the squares, the towers. 

They did this not in order to know the time; they did it so that they could divide and escape from it.

I decided to conquer time today by going across town to see Billy the Seal in Victoria Park. I don't often stray into the badlands of Canton so it was good to go walking somewhere new.

When I arrived, it was difficult to get a photo of Billy without a million kids swarming all over it. Nice to see Billy is as loved as s/he ever was:

The park was packed, with lots of children's birthday parties going on. I sat on a bench and enjoyed the happy vibe, entertaining myself with the thought of what adults would look like if they behaved like the kids I was watching. For example:

- grown man in a business suit fumbles an easy catch, declares "I nearly caught it!" then drops immediately into a downward dog.

- middle aged woman talking to friends outside a coffee shop suddenly runs away from them, stops dead, then runs back yelling "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH" for no discernable reason.

- father of two bellows "It's my birthday today" at fellow commuters as they wait for their train.

- in a work meeting, Bethany from accounts suddenly starts rolling around on the floor; nobody bats an eyelid.

- at the supermarket, a man is jumping, then he stands still with his arms over his head, then he rugby-tackles someone further up the aisle. They wrestle for a while.

I wonder how we get to be so self-conscious when we start off so pure.

Today's Photo: Taff Crows