A Small Part of Recent Time — Adam Kosan

Putting on a ruse of improvisation and avoiding the real matter of life by protective, delaying chatter, sitting down to run a finger, a single finger not yet holding a pen, through the air over an empty page, pointing and hesitating, held back by the sudden laboriousness of the task and the inscrutable excess of life, tedium, bad moods clouding up at the fringes of what you imagine that page will become, once you have defaced it with effort. A kind of listlessness begins inside a person and quickly becomes physical, pressing down through limbs and keeping the torso slow, making the body hostile to anything beyond minimal motion, and then spreads outward and hovers—again, clouds, an aura of oppressive clouds—there at the body’s edges, a nimbus of sensation that encloses you totally. You cannot outwalk or outthink it. So, having no relief in space, you turn inward to see if you can break up this aura where it begins, in you, and soon you are attempting to do this by an unpredictable nearly directionless clambering across time.

The pale blue of morning moved on the sky, a kind of agitated, limited flowing, like fluid across a trembling—yes, the old ideas come back—eye, an eye just waking up. And we below it looked everywhere around us, not sure if looking through this massive insensate eye and seeing the world within some share of its perspective, or if looking toward the eye from without, and so also looked at—observed—by it. In the depths of our permanent ignorance, you can play games like this endlessly, thinking yourself in and out of things. And then it’s time to get up: shaking the magnetic pull of that old never-closing crocodilish transparent eye, clawing out of the long pit of dreams like thousands of others at that moment putting their own little eyes out on day. For the coming block of industrious time, the two unappeased eyes in your head will be under a film of obligation, routine, professional performance, and night’s febrile energy will be restrained behind such dutifulness and its repertoire of polite and hackneyed expression. But the well-attired, apparently well-ordered figures in professional motion conceal an enmity that can’t be resolved or dispelled no matter the ingenuity of their compromises. It asserts itself as regularly as the sunrise, having its own peculiar repellent life: this enmity communicates that day is a taunting form—so much time at hand, and look, none of it can be put to use as needed or desired. Going around hectically with our minds all full of potential, some achievement, some progress, is near at hand, and then look…what a scrawny figure of reality is there, waiting, chewing on itself in distraction—and you’re supposed to do what with that? How much better it’d be to go back to sleep, to the favored night world. But day is the necessary overside of things. An existence all night would overwhelm to the point of insanity or ecstatic-delirious idiocy. There’s a ceaseless demand of being to avoid becoming all one thing. And maybe this isn’t limited to the term of life, but extends into afterlife, or eternal life, or whatever you want to call postcorporeal prolongation of ourselves beyond earthly time. Think of all those descriptions of Heaven and G-d as uncontained total light: all-enveloping, all-absorbing (language that would suit ads for antimicrobial kitchen counter sealants)—after horrors in a brief span of human history, this reward of unremitting awesome light, for which the transcended seem always to be grateful and which they call “sweet,” an adjective used for ages, inaptly, to suggest supreme experiences of pleasure, beauty, solace. What vapidity. In generations and generations of writers no one could come up with a better word for the most desirable good than a glorified taste, a mere pleasantness, “sweet”? Or for a more powerfully approximate vision of G-d than light? I myself don’t have a better form to suggest for the essence of G-d and the quality of Heaven, but that doesn’t mean we should resort to duncingly inadequate terms and hope that with enough repetition, enough narrative invocation, we are closer to understanding or representing G-d or afterlife. It’s not that we need something more elaborate, but that we shouldn’t insult ourselves with prodigal laziness, expecting readers and congregants to be awed by the mindless recitation of a vaguely evocative word, light, like a hammer gently tapping our minds, light-light-light-light. Say it enough and paradise will feel almost apprehensible! 

The issue is that an existence of neverending light would be torture. Skip the sophistry about how we cannot reconcile ascended consciousness with earthly consciousness, that whatever it is to think and feel and perceive and experience down here will be unfathomably transmuted there, once we have slipped these deadweights of skin. All that may be true, but still, no form of consciousness could persist in a state of ceaseless light. Consciousness depends not only on change in general but on the relief of darkness specifically, on being able to move without impediment into and out of the stillness of darkness, free from the continuity that would make light a kind of transposed shrieking. Even for the changed higher consciousness of afterlife, even if consummated at last in G-d, an all-light condition would be inimical. Eternity is supposed to be beyond time and encompassing or enfolding it—the ultimate no-time simultaneity, far beyond our reasoning and conjecture—but without some kind of intervallic darkness Heaven would be little more than an adjunct to Hell. Such chanting, praise, joy in One, the pretense of no longer being a self, being now completely blissed, translated in unending light: stubborn individuality coughs up within eternal union, insisting on memory, sensation, something like what we call thought, though changed, though I hope a higher version, and in this obstinate irreducibility, there will also be discontent, distance, scrutiny, and what’s that—still there, even in Heaven?—desire…all the unassuaged unseverable elements of consciousness persisting in some form. And as Heaven must be where the wordless promise and undrownable hope we’ve felt during earthly life is fulfilled, it cannot be a place of torture—Heaven must be where the soul can rest, where there’s still something like dreaming, where even amid G-d there remains some access of unknowing, which will, because we have no words to guess at what occurs there and then, “restore” and “sustain” any spirit exhausted by this conscription into eternal joy. Milton seems to grant this when one of his fallen angels says,

How oft amidst
Thick clouds and dark doth Heav’n’s all-ruling Sire
Choose to reside, his glory unobscured,
And with the majesty of darkness round
Covers his throne; from whence deep thunders roar
Must’ring their rage, and Heav’n resembles Hell?

These lines implicitly recognize the necessity of some change, of some movement of darkness in Heaven, denying that ultimate rapture is a condition of monotonous hallelujahing radiance. It’s a necessity, of course, because anything occurring in Heaven must be of necessity, being an outcome of and yoked to the Unevadable.

For the hell that can be made of unremitting light, just look at poor Winnie in Happy Days. Stuck in place, exposed to air cooked by sun, she quotes Milton’s “Hail holy light” at the start of the second act, full of grim irony, having an incredible kind of (and maybe foolhardy) fortitude. Her husband is nearby, crawling wide-leggedly lethargically across her imprisoning mound, like a wounded reptile, his existence parched. (Happy Days can often seem like one of the world’s earliest plays about the future of a climate-changed world.) Or elsewhere in Beckett, in “The Lost Ones,” another story of mysterious captivity and feckless searching, we read of an enclosed space that never goes dark, dominated by a light of “faint stridulence”—the inhabitants must endure a perpetual visual buzzing that consciousness will never assimilate. Human imagination has always been more capable of conjuring Hell than Heaven. Who says Paradiso is their favorite part of Dante’s poem? Blind Milton actually brings some originality to the “God is light” affirmation:

Since God is light,
And never but in unapproachèd light
Dwelt from eternity, dwelt then in thee, 
Bright effluence of bright essence increate.    

“[N]ever but in unapproachèd light / Dwelt from eternity”: no being in Heaven, even there in the finality of all things, can approach G-d—that ultimate light still moves off, and veils itself, and goes in and out of darkness, as we read in those lines quoted above about the “majesty of darkness round.” The unapproached light of eternity is never to be attained completely, never something for any mere being to be completely in—souls and angels in Heaven receive the magnanimous gift of consummate proximity, and that’s all. The “holy light” that Milton addresses to begin the third book of his poem is an emanation from this ultimate, withdrawing light. But it’s still mysterious in and of itself, an inspiring spell of creation:

Before the sun,
Before the heavens thou wert, and at the voice
Of God, as with a mantle didst invest
The rising world of waters dark and deep,
Won from the void and formless infinite.

Blake’s observation that Milton “was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it” is evergreen—it’s true that the vision of Hell in Paradise Lost is more poetically lasting than the vision of Heaven. But at the same time, when Blake claims that Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of angels and God, he undersells the poem’s prophetic view of Heaven, which is founded on various separations that keep and even widen the distance among G-d, angels, and souls, and Heaven, heavenly phenomena in our world, and humanity.

You stop and lift your head, now it’s well above the page: stretching limbs and cracking joints, releasing the hunched-over, old-eyed tension that seizes your body during this frantic inches-from-the-page scribbling. And then, looking at the morning’s work, what do you see? A graphic mess. Shambled, slanting, inconsistently-sized, chaotic penmanship, artifact of an acute struggle with time, never more acute than just before the professional hours, when you try to get down as much as possible within a short span of stolen minutes, writing nearly at the speed of breath—and then up periodically from the table to walk the apartment, shuffling the new pages, then putting them back under your pen, crossing out, adding in margins and between lines nearly illegible words made from tiny jagged letters, a thicket of unintelligibility to anyone other than you. And is that why you never slow down enough to make your pages more legible? Because you don’t expect anyone to read them, or, if they do, it won’t be the handwritten drafts but revised and printed versions? The latter is inevitable—such ridiculous juvenile penmanship—but part of you is also in a strange awe to be responsible for these graphic relics of works and days. Together they could be joined into a quilt-like monument of runic madness. The flagrantly physical nature of first drafts still surprises you as if you hadn’t produced thousands of such pages before. Each one is a haphazard of crossouts, restorations, false starts, and multiple word variants—the external marks of a mind in frenzy, though your mind hadn’t actually been agitated when writing. The mind was calm about its subject and the work to do, but time, the very limited time in which to do the work, brought down an unanswerable pressure. And so what happens isn’t slow meditative discovery and hand-slightly-slower-than-mind composition—instead these pages receive writing at the speed of thought, the writing even seeming to jump ahead of the speed of thought, then slowing for a short reading-back of sentences, then the brief changing of them, then adding new sentences, all while you interrupt yourself repeatedly to prepare for the professional workday, never able to sit at length with the page and time. In the evening, on the other side of those seemingly endless professional hours, looking again at the morning pages, what an embarrassment to be confronted with that record of compulsion and untrimmed ambition!

And where is all this hurrying to? In the middle of a pandemic, trying to make things in our new circumstances as they once were, a conspiracy of earnest pretending spreads. We live, now more than ever before, more than even in the years immediately before 2020, amid a proliferation of images—yes, there’s a little substance, acting on the senses, but mostly we are surrounded by vanishing gauzy manifestations of desperate wishfulness, narcissistic indifference, or unfounded belief in one’s invincible self. In robustly elaborated and widely projected delusion, look at us cheerfully, willfully, living, convinced that we are in a period of rejuvenation. We confine ourselves to a child’s security of closing eyes and wishing away near reality with amazing imagination.

And where else is all this hurrying? A gray misting Saturday morning in the middle of December, as gray and misting as it is on the sea, with a movement of thin cold water through the air. It’s not actually cold out, not for a historical December morning anyway, though that doesn’t matter much anymore—the old expectations are breaking up. This may be winter but it’s not winter air and it’s not winter water. Instead: the once-atypical, now increasingly common, warmth of another season intruding, the ill warmth of a warming world. A bath water world, dying in perpetual humidity: a sweating disease has afflicted earth and all life on it. Or elsewhere, when not that, it’s so dry that earth will soon burn itself to nothing.

Where else? A 66° day in late February. Spring forcing its way up the calendar, a disturbance in the bald head of winter—annunciation of a tumor. You can trick yourself well enough for a while, achieving a myopic day-to-day equilibrium, but open up that field of vision just a little toward the future and what happens? Your sense of order slides, the land around you seems to wake into new nervous life, and total upheaval becomes law, the basis for infinitely new conditions in a world transforming far beyond anything in recent memory.

And where else, where is this, where are we all, going? Forget about Gogol’s melancholy-sublime version of the question, saying, Rus, Rus, where are you going, to the runaway carriage—instead, we have this decadent old world wobbling down its pleasure dome, some of it starving, some desolately plump, a particolored clown in quest of paternity falling around the night sky auditorium of its solar system, braying, reciting credulous nonsense, speaking sleaze and desperation. And on this transmogrified helpless globe we discover a new answer to that ancient philosophical challenge, What is man? Not a featherless biped, the plucked chicken, not so much the language animal, the laughing animal, the just a little below the gods crowned with glory and grandeur creature of awe, the wonder that is infinite in faculty and noble in reason—forget all the marveling at this astonishing work, ourselves, it’s far simpler: “man” is a monkey with nuclear weapons. Suddenly, like a new moon rising, monkey simpering overtakes the planet. In the game of insinuation that the leaders of nations play, all kinds of formulas are recited and subtleties employed, but no matter what they’re saying on the surface in human language, all those threats and warnings and justifications and guarantees are no more than the always-agitated, sometimes-exhilarated sounds of monkeys. And these monkeys in possession of weapons that mimic G-d’s power of destruction believe themselves superior not only to all other beasts of the field but to one another, simply because some among us have done abominable things like achieve this capacity for planetary murder-suicide. What’s actually remarkable are the sophisticated variations on monkey sounds that we’ve evolved, so intricate and cunning, so adaptable, that most of the time our imperious nonsense thoroughly obscures the true monkey form at the core of all that mouthing. It nearly slanders monkeys to say this.

Where? Once, while waiting in a hospital hallway as an epidural was placed, I walked back and forth holding a book of Joubert translations from 1899. I hadn’t looked at it since we’d come to the hospital, but now, badly needing distraction, I opened to the first page and at the bottom read: 

All fine and delicate thought in which the soul truly takes part recalls us to God and to piety. The soul cannot stir, awaken, open its eyes without feeling God. God is felt by the soul as air is felt by the body.

G-d the unoutmovable, a ubiquitous condition of our being, just always there, whether sought or not. In that aggressively bright hallway, amid the constant medical noise of beeping, paging, whispers, hurried conferences, wheels and keyboards being worked over, these words carried in them a self-contained gravity that seemed to come from very far away. They belonged to another time, another state of mind, another existence altogether. And yet, their virtue as poetic thought, their humility and grace and intuitive vision, were reassuring to me in my distraction. They made for a strange suggestion of supernal harmony. “God is felt by the soul as air is felt by the body.” The inescapable serene element of our innermost being, serene for its simple thereness—or is it hereness?—across a person’s anxious fluctuations: like a faint perpetual fire rising up through you to range the surface of your skin, inextinguishable, sometimes burning up to an unbearable state, most often unnoticed or just easily forgotten, but in the end always there as a kind of unease essential to each solitary life. Alertness to the world depends on some level of awareness, no matter how dim, of this presence. The rituals of our debasement take us in an alienated trance away from it toward a state of noxious mud, slithering back and forth on corrupted life. We enter a state of prolonged forgetting that can last lifetimes—generations. Still pacing in the hallway, but momentarily with Joubert, reminded yet again how he is always a poet in his sentences, even in English, I was calmed by this passage not only as I read it, but because I was already thinking of future contemplation of these same words. I thought to myself, I’ll return to this. The words we read and admire in moments stolen from our distraction and dread always seem to promise a future time when, free of whatever difficulty is overwhelming us in the present, we won’t be rushing away from the words back into preoccupation and obligation. But increasingly these stolen moments are all we have. There’s no future of mellower, ample time when we’ll spend hours at the end of the day following such a passage through ramifying paths of thought and association. We have only the momentary recognition, the brief alleviation of the present’s slog, and then, not even having fully left it, or not having left it for more than a few seconds, we are back in our restlessness, back being overwhelmed by an onslaught of surfaces. Joubert’s reticent oceanic composure, that peculiar crystalline and casual immensity about the rhythms of his thought, gestured toward an attainable equanimity—but just as quickly as his words had this effect, I was back with the medical beeping and brightness of that hallway. Something necessary to life, an instruction in awareness, was in those words, which now seemed far off again, receding faster than I could think.

G-d to the soul like air to the body: always there, usually ignored, and if not ignored, hardly more than an influence of comfort or discomfort, a mere state of feeling modified by things so basic as what we wear or where we’re sitting or how we’re standing or walking—a condition of immediate environment and mood requiring minor adjustments, not anything like sustained concentration. At least, that’s how it is most of the time. But then suddenly your throat is full of that same indifferent air and you are disturbed by an unplaceable, inarticulable—but definite—exposure. You had been solid, clearly drawn in space, mortal, yes, but to some extent inviolable too, and then suddenly you can no longer breathe automatically, something causes you to trip up all over yourself, the words won’t come and you know viscerally that we aren’t as autonomous as we instinctually believe, you understand that a silent, invisible weight of existence is inextricably on our tongues, in our minds, through our vision and hearing and words, in the very taste of things, in our desire—it slowly wears us away over years and decades, or it erupts all at once, and it’s never outdone by our endless attempts at subterfuge, it’s never adequately named while driving us toward an unseeable end and then carrying us on after death as infinitely attenuating echoes of what we once were.

***

Adam Kosan is the author of North America: Two Travelogues (Greying Ghost, 2024)."