Today it snowed. I had time to take a walk around the university and came to visit the Harris Gardens. Last time I visited here was to see the cherry blossoms in the arboretum way back in May. It reminds me that I visited here on that fateful day in 2006, gloomy because I had no heart for the blossoms and desperately missing the heady days of “my muse”. But she was already gone by then it being pm of the day then,
Walking up the track to the arboretum I was very much enjoying the snow and by good fortune my camera ran out so I was forced to experience the walk as a “one off” … as I always used to promise myself with everything to do with “my muse” (how I’ve let myself down on that!!! reliving it again and again and again). Arriving at the skeletal trees, their dark sleeping branches reaching out from the white sheet of powdery snow all around, I was gripped by the sense that this was a “one off” just today and in particular the sense that “my muse” - no longer being here - was not experiencing this day of snowfall… it was mine. At last I am letting go. I am no longer grasping greedily for that “ecstasy” that she made me so jealous of – those moments of complete and joyful absorption into the world, the emersion in ones surroundings, that marked my time with her, and which I dreamed she was a frequent navigator. This was the root of the attraction that she was an ocean in which I could sensibly drown and be enriched with. That she was Indian, that she was born of the culture, above all others, which speaks of this, was the binding to the dream which promised my heart its goal.
Well today I heart stood firmly on its own feet without her. And, I have learned something too. I used to make a mistake that I called “the fetishisation of the moment”. Sartre and other Existentialists make the mistake of making too big a deal out of the moment. It is just a moment! As an eternal thing it is never replaced and as a momentary thing it is eternally replaced – there is plenty to go around, why do we value something so universal and common? Existentialists speak of the moment as though it were gold. In a way it is, but gold that makes the ground and the sky. If we cling to the moment, search for it too earnestly, and particularly if we become jealous of the moment (as I have been) we cast the moment in stone – raise its statue on a pedestal but forget what the statue is of.
Better than gold, the moment is like pure water. It is essential for life, it cleans, it is pure and clear and leaves no residue. Yet it is bountiful and we can catch it whenever it rains so we often forget about it, or even curse it when we get wet. We curse the moment equally when it takes what we like away, but we miss the cleansing process that this is. We cling (as I have done) both to the things of the past not allowing then to wash away, and worse we cling even to the notion of moment seeking desperately for that liquid to run through the soul and nourish us. A mistake to give “my muse” the keys to this spring!
New Year is a time for cleansing and letting the past be washed away so that it can be remade anew. Timely that I should return to these musings that I first remember having properly while watching the sun set for that last time of 1997 from King Arthurs Seat in Edinburgh. I was seeking to get the essence, capture that moment in its entirely, focus the mind and rid myself of the past so that I could be one with that setting sun. I wasn’t but I was satisfied at the effort. Interesting that I switched my attentions from one setting sun to another – a setting moon who waned long before her time. Didn’t I realise something about moments?
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