Grasping, Grasping; Seizing Nothing

Bloodied and broken, I address you. I want to address you with all of the candor that is only possible to the dying or poor in spirit. If not necessarily the former, I certainly count myself among the latter.

I have been scanning, and sometimes contibuting, to an online divorce forum, and have found that most of the divorce and break-up advice seems to have one principle in common: to seize the "now" as the moment in which to take decisive action. Seductive advice indeed. But practical . . . practicable? Where is the "now?" When does "now" become "then?" When does "then" become "now?"

You see, I'm skeptical of this whole therapeutics of seizing the "now," because I doubt that there is any "now," and, if there is a "now," it is too transient, too ephemeral, to ever really be seized. To me there is only past and future, the one pouring forth and consuming the other the way a flood sweeps away everything in its channel. The future is consumed by the past, moment by moment, passively awaiting the latter's approach. The present is simply that ever-shifting, inscrutable zone of contact, of consumption.

Think about it. Each moment of your life-- this moment right now . . . this moment right now--has poured into it your individual past, which grows and grows, but never changes its essential character. You had a relationship that lasted, say, eleven years. Does this moment change that, even if you were to take some sort of "decisive action," to "sieze the now" as an opportunity to effect some radical change? Even radical change is informed by the inertial effluence, the unstoppable onrush, of your personal history. To summarize Hegel: "Everything is its Other." The facticity of your eleven-year relationship alters not, though you seize "the now" as a means of contending with it. The "now" is the frothy ribbon of the wave meeting the shore, as long as the shore itself. Can you seize that ribbon? And, even if you could, what would you have? Froth. The residue of a wave that's already receded--a wave that, moreover, had behind it the history of all the forces roiling in the deep, wine-dark sea (all props to Homer).

I don't say all this to encourage defeatism. I simply want people to realize the true nature of existence--what is past is prologue, after all. Therefore, knowing that the past is dynamic, that there is no past, only constant passing, I exhort you to luxuriate in your disappointment, in your heartache. It reminds you that you are alive, that you are a creature of History with a unique relationship to your parent. It reminds you that you are human, and that your departed lover is human, because only a human could do this to you.

A writer whose name escapes me once claimed that one could not read Proust until one had reached a stage of her life in which she will have more memories than she will make. I love this claim, because, as the poet Wallace Stevens said, "Death is the mother of Beauty."