TIMES UNKNOWN: PAST, FUTURE, PRESENT
Life is like a gift box all tied up with a pretty satin bow and a small card designating you as the recipient. But what’s inside? If you peeked before the giver wrapped it, you know (maybe, you assume); but if you didn’t peek, the gift inside will be a surprise. Our lives are mostly like the “unpeeked” box. Sometimes we know, or think we do. Other times, things remain unknown, or do they?
Auld Lange Syne. As we approach the end of 2022 and make ready to cross the last day of December, we take the opportunity to examine the nature of known and the unknown and the relationships among the old year – new year – years yet to arrive – the three times that most philosophies agree exist.
But not Buddhism.
The Buddha refused to say whether time had a beginning or an end – so much for New Year’s Eve celebrations. The reason he gave was that such questions did not tend toward edification. In other words, there’s no percentage in trying to answer such queries.
Why then do humans worry so much about the “three times,” past, present, and future? Because we are uncomfortable with the unknown most of the time. We want to know. We believe we have memories. We believe what we remember, if only hazily. (Eyewitness accounts are infamous for the unreliability of memory.) Certainly, we believe that in the present moment, we are more or less cognizant. But what do we really know in the present seeing that we have past experiences, biases, doubts, and fears that create pre-existing conditions influencing our current beliefs. And the future? The most unreliable dance partner of the three, though most of us have some intentions and effort in that direction.
Donald S. Lopez, Jr. recently attempted to pin down the three times, saying, “It is here that we see another version of the three times, where every moment of mind and matter passes through three phases: production, abiding, and disintegration. Birth, life, and death. Buddhist thinkers have pondered these phases with great profundity, seeing birth, life, and death occurring each moment, rather than each lifetime, and noting that because the past is no longer present and the future is yet to come, all that exists is the present moment. [my emphasis]
“Yet if the existence of the present depends on the past, and the existence of the future depends on the present, then the three must have some connection to one another in time. [again, the known and the unknown meet.] Indeed, the present and past would have to exist at the same time. As Nagarjuna states, ‘If the present and the future exist in dependence on the past, the present and future would exist in the past.” In other words, when you look to the future, it can’t be found. (Donald S. Lopez, Jr., 2022)
The concept of the “three times” has everything to do with the known and the unknown. Today, both poems confront time and whether we can know what happens in each of the “three times,” even the present.
Yours truly wrote the first poem, “Last time unknown,” that attempts to wrestle the three times in the context of the known and the unknown. Watch for twists and turns.
Derek Walcott echoes “Last time unknown” when his poem, “Love After Love, that states, “time will come” “you will greet yourself arriving,” “each will smile at the other’s welcome” “You will love again the stranger who was your self.” “peel your own image from the mirror”
Walcott finishes with, “Feast on your life.” Rather good advice, inclusive of the three times, and not just on holidays, but everyday whether each day brings the known, the unknown, or . . .
photo by Vanilla Pearl
Last time unknown
By Catherine Stenzel
Last time unknown
Every time
Each time
Until the last time
Arrives
Still we do not recognize
Graced with ignorance, enter
Stand on the edge
Swiftly embrace
no time
Persisting
through
known
and not
lovers heave and sweat
Sheltered
from knowing
the last
I love you
Body remembers
a beloved wife
riding a train
to the no return
of uncertainty
Lamp goes out
child dismantles
hours until nimble light
reliably dismisses
the night
or not
divide flanked by
expire and swallow
an extravagance of yellow
butterflies
“In six months, I’ll be ninety,”
he says not knowing
in three, heart-time expires
“In an hour, we’ll play,”
she says not knowing
a bus silences pleading
“In a minute, I’ll be there,”
he says, not yet knowing
his fall into going
living chased by relentless death
not waiting for
the unknown final breath
Time’s still deep pool entangles revelations
unknown coils unravel to one slack rope
Hidden within the convolutions
an evening Thrush of hope
unknowns pull us along
the passages of disclosure
coils unwinding surfacing
the known until exposure
Unknowns slouch beneath us
worn and wild beasts
searching for the known
what's already come and gone
fruit dangling, ripe or rot
bewildered by what may arise or not
persist hovering between known and not
offer salutations to beliefs
fashioning certainty out of tea leaves
poured from a cooling pot
drip by drop filling falling
moments
that are fast
becoming
one time
on time
dependably the last
© 2022 CatherineStenzel
Derek Walcott (1930 -2017 )
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door,
in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread.
Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Background
Born on the island of Saint Lucia, a former British colony in the West Indies, poet and playwright Derek Walcott was trained as a painter but turned to writing as a young man. He published his first poem in the local newspaper at the age of 14. Five years later, he borrowed $200 to print his first collection, 25 Poems, which he distributed on street corners. Walcott’s major breakthrough came with the collection In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960 (1962), a book which celebrates the Caribbean and its history as well as investigates the scars of colonialism.
Many readers and critics point to Omeros (1990), an epic poem reimagining the Trojan War as a Caribbean fishermen’s fight, as Walcott’s major achievement. The book is “an effort to touch every aspect of Caribbean experience,” concerned “with art itself—its meaning and importance and the nature of an artistic vocation
In addition to his Nobel Prize, Walcott’s honors included a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, and, in 1988, the Queen’s Medal for Poetry. He was an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He died in 2017.
Exploration 1: Have you always assumed that what you think is what you know? Or do you entertain the idea that the unknown is also in your life? What is the difference between the known and the unknown? Untangle this one, if you dare!
Exploration 2: What about your date of birth, expressed in numbers. Is there any significance to describing your day of arrival in the world in this way? Consider that a person actually arrives at conception. Why isn’t that minute/hour/day recorded?
Exploration 3: Is it not so that some dates cannot be known exactly? Hours and minutes even less so. Is this important?
ReplyDelete1. I think, therefore I know. Thinking is a grass fire at that lights up the night. The known is cozy as a cottage. The unknown is an airline terminal.
2. My birth date adds up to 32, which adds up to five. For five dollars we could sip coffee all day at the Wannaska Café. If the second part of the question is valid, then abortion is to be avoided.
3. Dates give structure to history: Chester Arthur was sworn in as president on September 20,1881 upon the death of President Garfield. It was considered important at the time.