"I wonder if I've been changed in the night? Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!" Alice --"Alice in Wonderland"
28. Strange word. Actually the word would be twenty-eight. 28 is a number and numbers are things which I still don't quite comprehend. They are out "there" before I was and will be "there" long after I'm gone--a fact which is both marvelously beautiful, yet the fact that I can't understand "there" or what it is seems to make me both scared and sad; as if I'm missing out on something of great importance.
I went camping this weekend. Something I haven't done in years. It was wonderful, tromping in the woods. The dirt and grim. Everything alive around you. Moutains, cliffs that hang in the air. Knocks and crannies out of the jagged rock. How all of this happend--and how long it took to happen. Facinating, and I wish I could be there to watch the whole thing. Tonjna would say I have been. Since the very begining, little bacteria that struggles topsy-turvie into this mamamel that has forsight and the ability to see--and hence plan--into the future.
If nature could predict I doubt it would have been able to forsee what as mess such an entity would make of the world. Where forthought seems to be something that could create progress it has reapped destructiveness--or maybe thats a lineage from a more violent brain? That we haven't fully passed that mechanism in the brain.
Progress--silly word--I'm taking a class on the individual and soceity where we are dealing with the philosophical response to the Enlightenment thinkers. Ah the Enlightenment. Such grandiose belief in progress, improvement, reason. And then we get wacked with the reality that there is no progress--maybe a construct, that comes from our biology--but nothing that is coming from history. I still believe in Progress, but its now something I do, we do, rather than something innate in the world. Progress can slip away as quickly as it has come about. What the fuck good are antibiotics or cancer treatments to someone sitting in Iraq, Palestine, Sudan? Sigh.
"But then, shall I never get any older than I am now? That'll be a comfort, one way never to be an old woman -- but then -- always to have lessons to learn!" Alice --"Alice in Wonderland"
To think that I am, rather than not am. To think something rather than nothing. I remember when I went to visit my Dad in the Philippines. I looked at his bookshelf and found Sartre's Being and Nothingness. I was so excitied to pick it up and actually read it! And the thought that my Dad had felt the same way... that we somehow wondered what the world was like--I mean really like--made me feel not so alone.
So I sat and struggled. Page after page. I can tell you I didn't understand it and yet wanted so badly to.
THis is my life... that i'm living one minute at a time.
If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see? Alice --"Alice in Wonderland"
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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com
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