Consistency is for the birds. Those little (or big, in the case of city-swans) are always picking little insects out of their feathers or chasing each other around on the water. On an ongoing basis, with no visible ennui or open questions about the right thing to do. Broken wings and death a constant series of facts of feathered life. But wavering or falling out of the sky, nonexistent events. Are they impressive? Or just not particularly reflective? They don’t seem to mind humans, other than being sucked into their jet engines. But then it’s just one of the constant facts, manifested a bit faster than what a fox can achieve. But a fox probably couldn’t touch a swan, those necks look built for breaking fox necks. But I’m sure I could find a video of a victory in either direction, with a tiny amount of searching.
I ask about consistency, indirectly, because I once again drank a lot of coffee this morning. And I’m more than prepare to share what time of day it is (generally) and what month it is (specifically). Mid-morning. July, of the latter part. To give you an idea of the order of events. For what is life but a chronology, a thing that happened before or after another thing, all things with respect to each other thing as a before or an after. If I drank coffee, slept, walked, got on a plane, had a discussion, saw a friend, and ate five sandwiches, you might ask when each thing happened. And I would be prepared to tell you. Often I’d like to not be prepared, but I’m sensitive to chronology, in spite of myself. So when I was on a plane and then on a plane again, I wonder from where to where, because that makes a why, particularly when a few more befores and a few more afters are identified.
Try this out. Think of something you don’t understand, like why you did something you’re not sure you’ll do a year from now. Consider all the events before and after, develop a timeline of how it happened. It will all become clear. Right before going South for November, I made plans, crafted an itinerary, and wrote a hundred poems. Right after, I went East. You know the type of thing, the type of thing that comes together like a trip, but could be any type of thing. It gets less vague on a timeline. Thing 1, Thing 2, Thing 3. The numbers create legibility and make it possible to relate. Otherwise you end up eating coffee grounds and taking a shot of steamed water and lukewarm milk. To take a small example.
Chronologies demand consistency, even though they don’t require them. I may make a demand and accept much less, and this is how timelines are. That’s the reason to use them with caution. Otherwise one becomes just another employee of the time-industrial complex, responding to the demands of the immediately before and the immediately after only. Sometimes I prefer this way of being and at those times I drink five cups of coffee and let whatever is ahead fly. Can you tell that I’ve had six cups of coffee this morning? Or was it four? I don’t know how to count them when there is milk involved.
Do you have any friends that have the confidence to say anything and make it out to be the gospel truth and pull people in like a Messiah? I’m always grateful when I see that those people are almost always ironically detached, so that the truth is a performance of a pre-arranged and always congruent script, a rite. It makes my truly confused state feel “authentic” in that I don’t know what will happen next. Though it’s deeply tempting to know what will happen next. People seem to like it. My body seems to like it. I drink a little less coffee. But is it as exciting? Possibly, but exciting requires a little more definition to know for sure.
Excitement: 1) Possible surprise detected. 2) Motions made to elicit surprise or non-surprise. 3) Feeling of anticipation prior to the opening of Schrödinger’s Surprise Box. 4) Box opened, with excitement eliminated no matter what the outcome.
So excitement is yet another chronology, non-existent without sequences of events (and expectations for those sequences). Maybe excitement is more accessible if the ability to predict the outcomes of events stays quite low, because the unknown radioactive outcome is the key to anticipation. So a little deliberate anti-futurism seems to be required, even though the futurist is not necessarily any better at predicting the future than anyone else (beside the powerful, because power is predicting the future and then experience that future enacted over and over). In this way, I appreciate having power limitations. If I could marshal enough electricity to use fans instead of having walls or a ceiling, everything would be transparent. Picture it: tiny fans keeping the rain and bugs and hail and intruders out, making windows irrelevant. But then how would I choose a place to live, when the square area of windows is the primary determinant today? It would have to be based on the location of highest voyeuristic possibility. Or do I mean exhibitionist? But I don’t have (or want) that kind of power. I like the surprises that walls provide.
Roman Ryan 