1 - Overview
When you see everything move,
it is inarticulate beyond all words; the future.
They say you cannot put your foot into the same river twice,
but I say that anywhere you touch the river, you create illusion,
for the river cannot be stopped, named or divided.
At the limit, it is nothing less
than the movement of every particle, entwined.
And at any level of generalization,
it is less than the truth.
The river is both the future and the past, now.
One seeming to yield and one seeming to become
and both of them non-existent.
And this moment, with every particle's movement frozen mid-vector,
still implies the future as a function of the past.
Only now, in this moment, do cause and effect touch,
only now, in this moment, does existence exist,
and only now, in this moment,
does the idea of creation have substance.
These words, 'Past, Present and Future', they divide us
from the burning river's fire, from Shiva's blinding light.
2 - The Monkey's Despair
Be still, small mind, we want to seek the future
through the river's fire and the impossible divisions.
We want to touch the pulse and read the tea leaves
and see where the river is taking us.
Monkey-like, we look into this perfect mirror
and see nothing
until we reach out and touch the surface
and the ripples begin to flow.
Somewhere, in these distortions, as in a crystal ball,
the images begin to come
of cities, armies and civilizations,
rising and falling.
And all of history
pours out,
overwhelming us in a moment,
until we are rendered dumb by detail.
If the words and the concepts
and the constructions we have
but touch the truth of it,
they are all made void.
All of our transient symbols
are washed away by an existence
that is simply
impermeable.
Just as patterns in the sand
are simply destroyed by the sea.
3 - At the Coal Face
Riveted by our senses in a world where you cannot just sit,
we are all motes in a whorl made of womb born grit.
One becomes two and two becomes pain,
action and reaction
and our egos are born
and we take a name.
We arrive in confusion
and the play begins again.
Oh where in this causality
shall we apply the spade?
Blind from the womb,
each as dumb as the last,
we're up against the coal face
having learned little
from our past.
(this is a work in progress begun may 23rd, 2015 in Montreal, Canada)
gallagher
— Copyright 1965-2015 by Dennis Gallagher —