Fore and Aft
Time. Time keeping. Time to die. Time lapse. Time management. Time out. Time zone. Sign of the Times. Time-space. Time Warner.
I started to title this Before and After, but when I looked for images to reflect my meaning, the term generated side-by-side pics of makeovers, plastic surgery, dieting outcomes, and hair replacements. Then—more in line with my hydrophilia—I looked up Fore and Aft, wherupon I retrieved page after page of boating diagrams. I put up one of each, just for shits and giggles, even though I’m going to ramble on for a bit about chronology, ontology, aging, and politics. (When I put those together in the Duck Duck Go image search, I got this:)
Go figure.
Okay, we’ve goofed around long enough.
On aging, it’s true what a lot of people said that I didn’t believe (or didn’t want to believe) when I was young. The mere fact of having grown old changes you, and not just in the physically obvious ways. You don’t grow into being a cool old person who remains young at heart—even if you’re one of those pathetic parodies who tries to live into this pitiable and self-deluding vanity.
In fact, the very horizon of your existence—and here is the gift—has all the clutter of silly ambitions and useless fantasies removed. I’m not coming into some magic money in the next ten years that will allow us to live on some tropical beach. In ten years, if I haven’t already kicked the oxygen habit, I’ll have beaten the US life expectancy tables by six years, and if I’m doubly lucky I won’t be wearing a diaper. Which means, at long last, having all these clamorous head trips cleared off, I can more consciously do what I’ve been doing—and what we all do all the time against out disordered wills— and that is living in the present while actually attending to it . . . in that more aeriform vocabulary, “living in the Now.”
Of course, everything that is is always happening now, and here’s where we dive off the high board into chronology. My whole life and your whole life is always happening now—birth happens now, copulation happens now, death happens now—even when we’re projecting fore and aft—things that were, and things that will be or might be or won’t be—our projection and recollection, our anxieties and regrets.
In that last image above, someone name Horvath (no idea, and less curiosity) has apparently held forth on two different kinds of clock—chronological and biological. We’ve heard that expression from women who’ve delayed childbearing, “My biological clock is ticking.” Time—in the old hourglass metaphor—is running out.
Back in olden days, before we converted our juicy hot bodies into clocks, we spoke of two kinds of time (not two kinds of clocks), those being chronos and kairos. Clocks “measure” chronos, that is, the steady unfolding of change in the form of what is (we can just call it Being); whereas kairos is more about timing—it was the right time for planting peas or for God to break into the world.
When you think hard enough about chronos and clocks, it’s quite perplexing. Clocks have no awareness of the passage of time or of right timing, and clocks are the mechanical incrementation of time, whether coordinated with fluctuant periods of daylight and darkness, or atomic oscillation frequencies. Clocks are actually measuring themselves in order to regulate us. Our time and our timing, for most people throughout human history and prehistory, were recognized (not measured) by stars and seasons, birds and bees.
Yes, time “passes.” My brother who is dead really was alive once, and most certainly I am still alive, and shall, at some point ahead (there’s that spatial fore and aft thing again), I’ll be joining him and many others. Chronos isn’t a cruel master—that would require intent—but it’s surely intransigent. It’s a rock that doesn’t cry back at you when you stub your toe on it.
In a more poetic, and therefore truthful, register, we might recall what Faulkner said in Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.”
When we read above about the italicized is, or Being, apart from being (ha) something of a moving target, we meander into the philosophical field of ontology, where a different kind of fore and aft apply. There’s been a long low-intensity philosophical war over what comes “first,” essence or existence. This is obviously not a debate over chronology. The term existentialism refers to a school of thought that makes a very big deal about existence “preceding” essence. Here’s an entryway to that particular rabbit hole.
I’ve made the claim—echoing several of my mentors—that you, as an actual person, in the form of being which makes you a person, are ontologically prior to the various ways you might be reduced and abstracted by biological, anthropological, sociological, or ideological descriptions. Yes, the atoms that constutute your physical being were there before you (and will continue to exist after you). That admittedly confusing because fore and aft, as opposed to just the fore, might suggest you never really existed at all—that you are a “mere” instantiation of atoms and energy and motion and whatnot. There are people who say stupid shit like this and even demand that you take it seriously (which we should, but only because they sometimes do horrible things). It’s in the “mere” that we find the hidden value judgement that superintends this ostensibly objective claim.
You can’t get away from value judgements, no matter how you try. Best to own them and subject them constanly to thoughtful vigilance . . . and revision.
All I’m saying is that you, in the full flower of your personhood, are more, a lot more, and prior to, in my discernment of Being, a collection of atoms. So maybe essence precedes existence, idk. Atoms seem to be stubborn things, always doing forms, like they’re obeying a command.
If you’re tens of thousands of Palestinians, who are just atoms that eventually dissolve into other things anyway, what difference does it make, really, if some other collections of atoms bomb, torture, shoot, and starve you to death? That ethical action thing is just an hallucination casued by the atoms in your head—a complex conditioned reflex.
In our own Now now, there’s a lot of this reductionism afoot, and not just in the form of nihilism . . . which, we need to say, is on the march; but also—as we just pointed out—in violent social engineering projects. Stalin compared a few million shot, starved, and worked to death to breaking the eggs for an omelet. Hitler was a doctor instead of a chef, and called it purification. But even the people who would ritually denounce the deadly twentieth century totalitarianisms (and perhaps the many crimes of capitalism and the civilizing missions of the West) are often building their philosophical houses on sand.
Many so-called progressives share the self-same philosophical premise that it’s okay to make all manner of human sacrifices in order to secure some imaginary technocratic future. They just imagine something different than technocratic Judenfrei Europe or the technocratic Soviet worker’s paradise. They haven’t come to power yet, so we haven’t seen them in real pragmatic action, except as cultural mavens. Liberals are likewise willing to make human sacrifices for The Future. We see it now. They’re co-signing genocide as this is written and risking nuclear war in Europe. They’re allowing doctors to drug, mutilate, and sterilize children. They’re euthanizing human beings. They’re indoctrinating children in compulsory schools with values alien to their parents They’ve allowed the uber-rich to transform society into a precarious mix of debt-peonage and digital feudalism.
In the last two days, I’ve seen two videos with children. One, with primary school children being encourage to slap the twerking asses of irresponsible adult women, dressed as Toy Story characters . . . on a public street; another, with a male pervert, in drag, reading to primary school children, in school, and between readings teaching them how to “tit-shimmy.” On Easter Day, I saw the President of the United States declare a “day of trans visibility” (as if the trans thing weren’t one of the most visible things around).
Progressives accuse everyday people and parents, who might find these things objectionable, of moral panic. Then they denounce Donald Trump. (My own thoughts on Trump can be found here, here, here, and here.)
Don’t get me wrong. Trump is immanently denouncable. He’s a liar, a thief, a cheap huckster, a bully, a rapist, and a malignant narcissist. My point is, he is going to be the President again, because of harebrained stunts like announcing the “trans day of visibility” on Easter—the high holy day of almost a third of humanity and almost 80 percent of Americans.
I’m neither justifying the Trump reaction here nor disparaging Trump supporters; I’m just stating the facts. Trump is ahead of Biden in nationwide polls by two points, but the US has a slavery-vestigial electoral system wherein the popular vote doesn’t count. Trump is way out in front of Biden in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina. Trump is slightly ahead in Wisconsin, and dead-even in Pennsylvania. Gasoline, in my state of Michigan, was $3.61 a gallon yesterday, and food prices have gone up more than 15 percent since 2022. Biden has carved off Muslim support in key states (like Michigan), and the genocide in Gaza has become so in-your-face that 55 percent of Americans now disapprove of Biden’s support for it. Sixty percent of Independents disapprove, and 75 percent of Democrats (Biden’s base) disapprove. A majority, likewise, does not support open-ended continuation of US aid to nuclear-trigger Ukraine (though, admittedly, this fracture is more visible among Republicans than Democrats).
Seen from an historical distance, we’re witnessing a breakdown. Details of the material/financial aspect of this breakdown here. Crises in political economy are always accompanied by cultural, epistemological, and spiritual crises. Chicken and eggs, don’t try. They happen at once, and seamlessly.
The point I’m circling, and upon which I’ll now land, is that people get scared. Different people react in different ways to being scared. Fight. Flight. Freeze. We see all these at once. There’s a fourth response—stop, take a breath, assess, do the best you can with what you’ve got, and don’t take it out on others—but that’s the one that requires sobriety, maturity, and discipline—something in short supply in our society, because we’ve been intergenerationally deskilled, disabled, drugged, infantilized and rendered dependent upon the very institutions that are now failing us.
Which brings us back to time, and to “fore and aft.”
One of the conundra of time is embodied by physics as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The poetic account of this “law” is that time’s arrow flies in only one direction. The past happened, but it can’t be retrieved. Any fisherman can attest to the power of an instant, the moment after he drops his rod and reel into sixty feet of water. Anyone who’s suffered the death of a loved one knows the intransigence of time’s arrow.
But politics is a field of manipulation and magical thinking. The belief in our ability to “build” The Future find easy accompaniment with the belief that this Future can be made in the image of an irretrievable past. This is the delusion of my co-religionist Integralists, who think they can rejoin throne and altar is some return to the High Middle Ages, and it’s the fever dream promoted by the carnival barker, Trump: Make America Great Again. And so we have the politics of disintegration, with equally frightened camps fighting for possession of the same fictional hill, one dreaming of a transhumanist Utopia and the other of one modeled on childish “histories.”
One looking fore, and one looking aft, but both on the same leaking ship.
Politics, it seems, can never “live in the now.” Perhaps the restorative, then, is to turn our backs on it, as often as possible, to take a Sabbath, to live in the now of this precious and transient gift. Let the Trumps and Bidens fight it out among themselves—a duel, perhaps, with hand grenades—while the rest of us turn to one another again, just for a moment, as sisters and brothers.
Oh well, it seems I’m out of time.
Peace.
I think I'm in freeze mode at the moment. I read this and appreciate it. Thinking and searching for words for a response, but they are not coming. The pollen is thick and seems to be impacting my energy and sanity. I will be doing well to go check my oil and then see what my next self-imposed assignment is. Yesterday a long-time neighbor of mine who has been living in Costa Rica for years came over to help me with something. He is deeply disturbed and has been shunned by many because he is a patchwork of every conspiracy theory you could ever imagine and can't stop talking. While some percentage of what he says is no doubt true, he is mad as a hatter, and is something of a stunning work of art in his expression of it. It all makes a horrific kind of sense. I could only be with him for a short time, and I daresay it has something to do with how I'm feeling now. I love the Faulkner quote, by the way. So true.
I'm not sure how this relates to what you said, but there you have it, Stan. Peace.
Chris Bray makes a point that has really stuck with me, that as a nation we are sick from the top down and healthy from the bottom up. The right here right now of my human embodied existence has become my main focus. A friend was super excited about attending an RFK jr event and I responded that while I’m a fan to a large extent, and feel his candidacy is good for election conversations, I put no eggs in that basket and think the dem establishment will do anything they can possibly think of to make sure Biden gets another four years. The “off the rails” state of those who make large scale decisions for us is beyond my control and my primary job is to care for my nervous system, my family, my local community. Local local local. Now now now. Potlucks and prayer circles baby. Humility, service, forgiveness and joy. Amen.