Hmm. Some thoughts from before and then this mail on 'atemporality'. Together they resulted in a blog post. Slightly-vague. But what the heck :). Here goes.
Mementos The day's headline read in dark, black, thick font 'A giant leap for womankind'. A part of me wanted to cut it out from the newspaper and keep it inside an old diary. Yes, I do have one. A diary fully in black with brass fittings in its corners which bore witness to a habit of writing even before the words came out fully fleshed. Adolescent scribbles with ball-point pens. I open it once in a few years and smile at the memories preserved there. It is a marker, rather than a record. And in a way, all writing has a way of marking. I never cut out that newspaper story. Another part of me asserted itself, saying that there will always be the link available at the beck of a button calling out to search. What would it be like to see that yellowed piece of paper thirty years from now? That shriveled and dried piece of paper. Its ragged edges apologetically designed by a scissor manoeuvred with fingers more accustomed to typing on plastic. The same fingers holding it then would be shriveled and dried. The veins etched under a translucent skin, the colour of creamy coffee brewed right under the sun. Those veins gnarled and sunken, with time pressing, oppressing. The beat flowing slows down. Bit by bit. Then stalls. The relationship we share with time is not measured by the hours marked by the clock we invented to satisfy our urge to control. The clock does offer a semblance of control, of order. Instead of being stilled by a thought or struck by beauty, we shake ourselves and glance at our wrists. And thoughts and beauty slowly loosen their grip, till we lose them. Only the clock matters and becomes the before and after. They call it atemporal. The arrow of time loses its way inside the Internet. Ordered events become meaningless because the events are too many and the scale of the order is too tiny. I don't control. I can't control. So, I drift. I drift to what catches my fancy and drift some more. Adrift I search for solace. The paths are so many and each time I follow on, I know there are many more waiting, alluring. So, I just keep following. Something tells me, it is the search that holds the key. Something else doesn't care. Just throw the keys and drift for now, I say. And I drift and come to the link with a different font saying "A giant leap for womankind". I imagine my long fingers thirty years from now, slightly shivering, held aloft by hollow bones, typing the link out. The screen glows. Or what perhaps is no more a screen. But it is not yellowed. I don't need to whisper to the dust, cajoling it to let go after having built its painstaking home on benign neglect. I just need to gaze and the screen stares back.Or what perhaps is no more a screen. Mementos contain stories. I am accumulating markers that serve to remind, without telling stories. The same blank wall, as clean as the day it was painted. Why do I itch to scratch it? Just a bit?
