The War of Now

Dear Felicia,
The hyper-real. The Present Moment. What else is there right? If only it were that easy.
What’s gone is gone has been once was.
I’m longing for the present moment.
Where have I wandered? From what? Where to?
What’s seen and felt is here and now.
For what’s seen is contingent on the collapse of a potential future, for another believed to take place sometime at the end of the temporal Now?
There were no other options. How it happens is how it was always supposed to happen. I am dealt no other cards. If only. If Only wrought struggling into ambiguous form. Does this read like rambling? I’m simply rambling. What is now was somehow then of a particular glimpse of the future. The present moment is nonsense. If I’m making sense, I’m not here and now. But I don’t know things, nor do I pretend to know things, but if you perceive my attempts at making some sort of sense, then I come more into the present moment for you.
Time is relative, as is seeing and feeling. Where do we begin, where do we end? There is no beginning, all moves to, from, and through all. And although this reads like a declaration, I’m simply rambling.
In dreams, we are kings and queens of all time, hero’s to our evil villains, and villains to our evil heroes. Save me. Save me. There was no end. It all began where we determined to end by the laws of a past I made sense of in a present moment long ago. I saw the dream and inside was an outline, to underline, to make notes with a red pen when the ovens got hot. The bird I’ve been baking is almost cooked, and I’ve set the timer by the code of an annual catalogue. Sticky crust, gravy, peas, and carrots never change. Three hours, 425 degrees. The layout, more efficient, another adjustment, aesthetic precision, different smells somehow we’ve changed. Wrapped in tin foil when the bird got cold. Leftovers in a different time and a different place. Same old bread meat and vegetables. Set this moment in the microwave, even if the chicken gets soggy. I don’t feel like waiting right now.
In another world chickens wore armor and carried axes. The peas were frozen and took longer to cook. The kitchen hands were in a hurry, couldn’t wait for the peas to defrost, sent them into battle before they could prepare. Stodgy critics sat with napkins in laps, suspiciously savoring first bites with a squint, in wry contemplation of something that didn’t seem quite right. There’s something strange about these peas, set the critics with salad forks dismembering the potpie. Perpetual frustration with consecutive bites makes the critic like an ornery toddler, discarding the fork, succumbing to fingering the meal of all frozen peas, which gather in a pile on a bread plate and are flung ruthlessly at the manager. The kitchen hands go home to melancholy apartments. The manager rewords his catalogue, making red crosses over names of patrons and employees. This ends here, he says, and retires to sleep in a dug out furnace on the coils of his mattress.
We talk of real things, because we’re making sense of a war. We’re at war in the end. The war was making sense, but we didn’t know. The war was knowing how to know, and that was never known, of all the other things that we know. I don’t know things, nor do I pretend to know things, I’m simply rambling.
Perhaps all of time is the end, in the end. Because if time was always beginning, we’d have no need for an end. But if time is the end, then we’d need a beginning to justify the direction we’re moving. But words are an end in themselves, and there was no end before there was the word for the end. Maybe that was the beginning of the end. When the call for the pie was flying across the room, splattered the kitchen-hands face and produced guttural curses that resounded around the dining table. And the critics laughed after it was all over, and they could fall asleep standing drunk at the bar and wait for a new beginning, to which they’d attach the same end, from the outset, where it all ended. And the words never mattered. The end existed without words, because the end came before the beginning. It was simply happening before it began. The bread, meat vegetables and gravy can’t realize it has begun until its already begun happening, until it has already ended. But there was no end and no beginning falling asleep standing up drunk at the bar, because falling asleep had not begun until it had already ended, and by then it was all over.
In dreams we’re asleep, but I don’t usually remember my dreams too well, until after they’ve ended, and then I’m not as likely to remember what I was seeing and feeling when it was happening, because I wasn’t aware it had begun. I was a king and a queen, I was a hero and a villain, but I wouldn’t make sense then, only after it had ended. Then it would all seem so clear. And why I didn’t know then when it was happening what I know now after it has ended, that is the dilemma. It never even started, so how could I know? I’d been trying to make sense, and then it ended, and it all made sense. It all makes sense now that it has ended, because I’m aware of the beginning. Now it makes sense now. But am I here Now, now that I have the beginning and the end. Now I can re-access my catalogue with a red pen. Now I can take the bird out of the oven. Now, I can be awake and realize it was all just a dream.In the beginning, it was just happening because I wasn’t aware of the beginning. Now that I have an end, I have a beginning. But what did I do with now. I’ve made brackets. <> There it was, but now is before. Now is before the word. Before I call this now. Because by the time I can say now, I’ve established the beginning because I’ve reached the end. There was no present moment. There was only Now, which is not the present moment, because I must analyze a word. A word is an end in itself but words never mattered, until Now. Now that I have gotten to the end, I’ll tell you that before it began happening, I knew what I was beginning, but only until after it had begun had I realized that what was happening was not what I’d planned before I began. What had happened was completely different from I thought would happen before it began. But I still have more to say, in fact, I still have a completely different set of things to say that are more related to what I was planning on saying before it began happening. But now that what has happened has reached its end, perhaps I’ll just be settled with what I have now and try beginning again later.


July 31, 2008


Dear Matthew,


Is the War of Now truly a war of now? The phrase doesn’t seem appropriate when humanity seems to be fighting for past histories and future utopias. It seems to be a war of ideology – something that doesn’t exist in the now, but exists somewhere in time and space where minds introduced themselves to the concept of now. But we are not somewhere, we are here, and we have already been introduced. Longing for the present moment is longing for the introduction. We want to start over. We want to begin again. You say, “But where have I wandered? From what? Where to?” That is our Present, the gift of Now, where we can ramble on all we want. And we can talk of chickens in armor carrying axes…

In the end, the war we are making sense of doesn’t extend itself to the full scope of the mind, its eye, and its heart. The war doesn’t extend itself to the swelling of the soul – instead, it bursts, or it diminishes into nothing. Our present must not rely on the technological advances of war, that is only one way, a way from the beginning to the end. Do we want this to end? I don’t. And all of us, as artists, creators of our world, deep down do not want this to end. We must go back to the beginning over and over again in the present moment using the future as a metaphor. The future can only be a metaphor because it does not exist, same with the past – the past can only be a metaphor because it does not exist, so, right now we can go to the end, and go to the beginning, as artists trying to fill ourselves with what we, can only understand as life – the gift, the present, the excitement of that gift and opening it, rediscovering it, being afraid of what is inside but too curious with faith in the verve which we cannot control; the energy from which we are made.

A writer reminds me of the “siren song of Pythagoras”… the mind is more powerful than any imaginable particle accelerator, more sensitive than any radio receiver or the largest optical telescope, more complete in its grasp of information than any computer: that the human body, its organs, its voice, its power of locomotion, and its imagination – is a more-than-sufficient means for the exploration of any place, time, or energy level in the universe.[1] I feel like this statement is what the truest souls on this universe have set out to prove, in a myriad of evil and angelic actions, to find how our minds can capture certain essences of life in the time and space that only we can comprehend through meaning and lack thereof. It’s beautiful and sad, and outrageously full of laughter and fun, all at once, and that it what it means to live.

And since we speak of war, I will end with the best monologue I’ve heard about war, and of course it’s from a movie, which will be the closest I will ever get to that specific face of horror.

“The bloodlust, they say, are the men that I have read about. They say that the human animal is the only one that has bloodlust; killing without purpose, killing for pleasure. You can see light through this. You can take the ones that are made for garbage detail, you can take the ones who can think but can’t act... I swallowed a bug. It’s irresistible when a bee discovers honey. He is irresistibly driven. My friend laughs; he is my critic, my only critic, perhaps outside of myself. It takes bravery, the deepest bullets are nothing to be feared, phosphorous and napalm are nothing to be feared… but to look inward, to see that twisted mind that lies beneath the surface of all humans and to say, Yes. I accept you. I even love you because you are a part of me; you are an extension of me.” [2]


This is now. We must not leave our humanity, we must be true to ourselves, even if it hurts, we must make our hearts stronger with whatever it is that we know and we find through our own destiny. I will not push others, I will push myself, and in turn that will cycle onward towards what I know that I do not know. I am here, not there, and I trust that alone.

If each one of us is brave enough to see this twisted mind I have hope for a new beginning, a new age of exploration, rested not on fear but on the holy spirit of all of our souls, judgment free and simultaneous with history and the mythology of the future.


Love,
Felicia
[1] Terrence McKenna, True Hallucinations, Being an Account of the Author’s Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil’s Paradise (Harper Collins, 1993) 85.

[2] Apocalypse Now, dir. Francis Ford Coppola, writ. John Milius, perf. Marlon Brando, DVD, Zoetrope Studies, 1979.