Proteus

     The fluidity of time, or at least my attempt to acknowledge it or interpret it, strips away all of the filters we tend to use in order to structure experiences, thoughts, and emotions. Perhaps this structuring is appropriate and necessary at times in order to cope with our conception of reality. Perhaps it allows us to feel separate from the primordial muck through which we sprung forth billions and billions of years ago. The need to eradicate all sense of ambiguity keeps us contained, at least temporarily, until we realize that life is not really land or sea, but that shifting space between land and sea. Another way to contextualize this would be to describe the man who walks up and down Romney Street making very realistic bird noises. I know he is a man and not a bird, but when I only hear his call, which is usually the case, there is a second or two of contemplating the form of the creature making those sounds outside my window. He has successfully, albeit momentarily, escaped the certainty of humanness and made of himself a Proteus in mid-shift.
     So, then, I cannot help but think of my recent experiences as nothing more than reminders of the protean state of the universe, or at least of my universe. Whenever I become confident about the form or shape of a feeling, interaction, or thought, the contours of that feeling, interaction, or thought distort into something else. These constant changes propel me into a whirlwind of contradictions: I am tired but cannot sleep; I am hungry but never want to eat; I hate cigarettes but keep smoking them. The stimuli around me is never quite enough of what I want, will never satisfy those urges within me that cause me to seek what I later realize was merely a transitional image. I am beginning to wonder if it is a mistake to conceive of life as a search for consistency. Shouldn’t it be about the acceptance of inconsistency? In literature and in poetry, what I respond to the most are those writers who devalue universal truths, who dwell within the moment in order to analyze their particular interpretation of its unraveling.
     And it is always within the moment that I find myself: reconciling with it, permitting it to run in and out of my memories of past moments or dreams, or interpreting the future through it. My concept of the moment reminds me of a Caravaggio painting: the foreground contains semblances of dramatically illuminated people, while the background is saturated with complete darkness, but the kind of darkness that is more full of life than the faces peaking through it. It is within that unknown space, I believe, that all creativity resides. And it is also within this space contained in the moment that my love for other people and myself exists. It is that unknownable, ineffable quality of interaction and self-awareness that draws me into this world, both biologically and spiritually. I search for all kinds of love and creativity, but perhaps am discovering that they are always here and have always been here, stretched along the invisible tideline. I have what I think I want, but just not in the way I’ve thought I should have it. Like the man walking along Romney Street, I too warble in an effort to understand my vacillating existence.