There is nothing in midnight but a fleck of ink on the otherwise empty face of the clock, or an electrical pulse which dis-integrates into a soft dash of light in an otherwise seamless river of life. We make the marks against which we measure our lives and call them time: they do not exist without our pen striking the hours and the days and the years.
Gravity explains the sands of our lives by dividing moments into falling grains of silica, whose gently wrinkled whorl descends a crystal flue, gravity which draws it through in only one direction, toward the center and to rest, toward the sea. As smooth as grains can be, still they click in quantum resonance like a smaller tick of the clock, a smaller and less useful error of the time we make, one which can never be pointed out, so never be discussed.
The clock I want extends a digital display. I want to see the passage of every instant, not grasp at seconds as though life were not a wheel but merely the spokes. See the red numbers at your bedside: eleven fifty-seven… eleven fifty-eight… fifty-nine… one second, two, three…
If my clock were to truly show me time, the digits that run their course at the rate of my heart, one pulse per second, would begin to flow faster and faster, closer together. My life is the art of calculus, it is an approximation to the infinite, not the simplicity of integers. The digits spin faster until they run together, then faster still, until the face of my timepiece is a blur, then a beam, and finally an unceasing beacon of light.
Like my breath, a polished circle which admits no breaks and is never anywhere by here.
Vladimir Nabokov's tremendous, indelible book… its title Speak, Memory is an evocation, a prayer and a petition all in one. In memoir you recall events which have passed, and perhaps relate them to the lives of others with a number, with a date and a time. But the act of writing is not one of drawing the sands back up the wasp's-waist of the hourglass. When we recall a moment, we re-create it using strands of feeling and thought provided by the present, and in so doing must admit our art, and artistry.
The greatest artist renders what is into what might have been, just as the journalist weaves an impossibly tiny number of facts into a conclusion. The greatest paintings knead the stuff of living into a form that is easily ingested, becoming part of the present of those who view them.
None of it respects the fleck of black which hopes to stake the river's water in place. Everything is. So when I tell you a story, I am telling you of me, right now, and some slight information which might help you navigate your course, right now… but probably not.
~
The spreading branches of the figueira reached over each of the two small houses, as though wings of a great bird sheltering its young. We felt its presence and believed its promise. That night, just after we purchased the small farm, and before we even had keys to the property, we set out two beach chairs under its leaves and leaned back as though to rest.
The southern sky was hidden and revealed. Stars winked into and out of existence behind the leaves and branches as the softest breeze moved them back and forth in green waves. It was a puzzle to which we had no key, nor did we want one. Side by side, beneath the enormous fig tree, in the presence of that tree of life, having chosen without knowing it a shelter for our son's exploration of the earth, shelter for our daughter's earliest days… land filled with fruits and harvests, soft joys and harsh struggles.
A memory is forged in the heart and mind of the moment. Its one ingredient is the knowledge which time pours into and through us like the blinding light of my real clock, the emotion we call melancholy elicited, or reverie, a feeling which attaches itself to things of the world. I see a farm in southern Brazil, in a small town 12 kilometers outside of Porto Alegre, in Belém Velho, Old Bethlehem, whose name rings like the sound of a bell, "bell-ENG, bell-ENG", and whose sounds and smells and neighbors are now part of me, slight shadows that fall upon my words and my ability to share this my life with that your life.
I ask my memory to speak so that, in the patterns of the sand as it falls, I might better see my face.