but i had to think long and hard about the Time, since "today" is an impossible word for me, even though i hear and say it daily, you can't escape it. when people start telling me what they have planned for today -not to mention tomorrow- i get confused. my relationship with "today" is so bad that many people often mistake extreme attentiveness for an absentminded gaze. this "today" sends me flying into the utmost anxiety and the greatest haste, so that i can only write about it, or at least report whatever's going on. actually, anything written about "today" should be destroyed immediately, just like all real letters are crumpled or torn up, unfinished and unmailed, all because they were written, but cannot arrive, "today."
...i'm just afraid "today" is too much for me, too gripping, too boundless, and that this pathological agitation will be part of my "today" until its final hour.
ingeborg bachmann,
malina
she wrote in 1971, before email, texting or blogging were invented. now things can be deleted and still remain in spacetime forever, unremembered. the thing i feel about today is it's always today, memory is today, rich with feeling, and the past is fiction or history and the future is blank speculation. it's always and only today. we get up and walk and make the same images as yesterday and tomorrow, which don't exist today.
one time when i was on amorgos island in greece i wrote a postcard i was carrying in my hand on a mountain goat path when the wind took it from my hand and it flew up and away.
i don't recall who it was written to or what it said, but i recall the image of the postcard flying out of my empty hand as today.
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