Multiverse & I (a bank holiday amble through time and space)

Ever thought,

If only,

I could have that time again?

to re-run events,

History?

Ever considered,

What might have been, had, I done or not?

Life is not a dress-rehearsal

or so we are told by Kundera,

One chance to make best use the time available

And then,

Snap,

It is over.

Time is our most precious commodity,

more valuable

Than Mammon

Than all the dollars stacked-up in the offshore accounts

of the rich and famous,

Intangible

Momentary

and precious.

My committing my time to you is an act of faith,

Or, if your will, love.

I have had a lifelong frustration with people who keep me waiting.

You know who you are

Although you are likely

Not reading this

As you missed the bus or overslept and are behind.

From my father, I inherited, a habit for early arrival,

Which if frustrated can lead to angst,

Watch-watching and upset tummy,

‘Always better to be a few minutes early,’

I can hear him saying

As we sit waiting,

Half an hour before the start.

My dad and I

had a thing for watches,

different timepieces.

After he died, I found loads of watches in his bedside drawer.

Not Rolexes or Patek Philippes,

Just,

What you might call shmattes,

Digital or analogue, it didn’t matter.

(Another Kersh had a watch-thing – L Kersh of London, see the headline photo for his Horological Collage)

Before the arrival of the Apple Watch, I was the same,

Constantly on the lookout for a watch that would,

say something to me or about me.

Wrist-bling.

When I was 14 my brother bought me a digital watch that contained mercury in a glass vial, as the watch moved it closed a circuit that enabled me to calculate speed and distance. It broke; the mercury slithered away. That might have been the beginning.

I have a love of time-travel books and films.

I remember watching Back to the Future,

on TV at my brother’s house in Cornwall.

1989.

And, subsequently, a long list of travels in time books and films.

Netflix has a section.

And, what is the fascination with time?

Why not focus on the present?

The present is evanescent,

The past, well, you have something to work with.

Quantum Mechanics, if I understand

Tells us that all past and present are one,

The future is an infinite range of possibilities.

Yesterday, I finished Dean Koontzs’ book, From the Corner of his Eye

A long novel about obsession and the multiple possibilities of life

Through a Quantum lens.

Three of the characters have an ability to review, experience or enter the Quantum Space (think Ant Man), like Stephen King’s shining although more focused on the verisimilitude of time and space.

Last week,

I joined a meeting with Claudius van Wyk, the South African, phiosopher, holist and writer. He and a group of five or six came together to talk about holism – that is the Jan Smuts’ concept of the inter-connectedness of the world allayed with the Gravesian idea of Spiral Dynamics (apologies for too much technical-speak).

It was a far-ranging conversation which started with Shakespeare’s, ‘For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,’ crossed over the multiverse (with allusions to Everything Everywhere All at Once) and ended with George Bernard Shaw’s ‘The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.’

I was tempted to throw-in Mokusatsu but didn’t.

I don’t want to go into the possible intersections of my life, suffice it to say, that none of that matters, for had things been different, I would risk my present being other (even though it is other in all the universes I inhabit), this one, the blog-guy, this flawed individual with a swimming obsession, whose dogs can’t keep out of the mud, whose tortoise ate half an apple last yesterday. Me, here, now.

A few weeks ago, Good Friday, I went swimming.

It was early (weekday swims are seven to eight).

Driving home, just after eight, in the village next to mine, a deer ran beside my car. Short, half-grown antlers, it looked at me then bounded intto the fields.

Around me, in South Yorkshire, despite all the cars, farms and pollution, deer roam.

On the water walk there used to be a few; I haven’t seen them in a year.

Roe deer are not small.

Of reasonable size, they create paths through the fields and yet, they are rarely seen.

I think of Richard Parker, the tiger in the Life of Pi.

He too is out there somewhere,

Able to remain motionless as people pass,

Hidden in the foreground,

Breathing slowed and muscles silent.

What else is out there that we can’t see or know?