Time

Up here in what used to be called the temperate zones night falls slowly in summer, the transition from daylight to night is a long and slowly drawn out moment. Then its night. He lives most happily in that moment, the rest of the day and night is always to busy. Too engaged, so he is here and there. but its often as if he isn’t anywhere. Mostly then he’s travelling and looking at the strange traffic flows of cars and lorries on american highways, watching for travelers crossing the landscape, in the streets and squares of cities and towns. with the light failing, perhaps even rain falling absorbing the light, market stalls, voices selling some useless things which are so tempting to buy, the game like precision of the anonymous flow of the streams of people. Game in this sense is the model for all exact knowledge, not a martial game any longer, but something more fable like. It’s difficult to know what the fable like world is made of and what it means, the games fade away. Its like a dream that you know your inside but the truth does not lie within it, the truth being a convention one or two steps beyond the real. The structure is an arc of four points a, b, c, d, an asymmetric unidirectional arc, fleeting points on the arc, already passed even as you are still on the trajectory of the arc, like time in his life. He has lost the chance to repeat the events of the past, that time is no longer his. He is at c or d and cannot even remember the women and men who who knew at a or even b, once that time was ours he thinks, time passing swiftly behind his eyes. He is missing her, sitting in the dark waiting for his tortilla and corona to arrive watching the street pass by, large SUVs cruise pass with large tattooed arms hanging out the windows, music blaring, time passes so fast that he cannot make out the places and landscapes where they once stood together. The events and moments shared, conversations from long ago filtered by his failed memory, does she remember ? They could have talked about the parks in london, a house they rented in the south-west, the squat they met in, the cliffs they walked across the woman armed with madness, breton fish stew in a bistro by the shore looking out over the grey seas to the north, the children of the religious with the faces of their parents running like puppets on the edge of the sea, the last rays of sunlight from the west. All this runs through his mind, behind his eyes, imperfectly, and though he can almost remember it, understand it, its so much faster than realtime that it hardly holds the colours, was her hair really some shade of blond ? What did her boyfriend, her partner look like, where has his face gone? All he can remember is his naked sex. Ah well the strange colour of a July night, with the moon hiding in the trees and the cheap vodka being handed out in the blackness of the woods. The scent of the. perfume, the asymmetrical breasts, did he really prefer the right breast to the left ? He doesn’t remember, all his life was there, disturbed and immeasurable, streams flowing by and then he is back again, leaving the taxi and walking up the gravel drive to the house after a sleepless night on a transatlantic flight… In the time of this finitude, which is the space and time between our now and the moment when we first met in a party on the road, he has waved hello many times, occasionally singing the lyrics from Sun Ra tunes as he heads back from someplace or other. He puts his bag on the passenger seat next to his, the way we used to when we went off to the cinema together and you went off to buy chocolate and banal cappuccino.