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| What I see when I bed rot |
I was fascinated in 1962 when our philosophy professor, Ramón Xirau told us about the origin of the expression “water under the bridge’. Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus had stated that anything you saw on a river before it passed under the bridge was gone. The past was just that past.
Through these years in my constant reading of Borges, he writes that everything that happens, happens again. Not only that he insists that all our first times are always first times again.
From my bed I stare at Rosemary’s framed portrait. She stares back at me. I wrote about the portrait here.
I took that photograph early 1969 and they were my first nude photographs. There is this sad look on her face. In my memory that sad stare is always there. That first awareness of that sad look (what was she thinking? Did she know something about her future to come?) when I look at the photograph, it seems to me that I am seeing her for the first time. The portrait is new. I took it seconds ago even though so many years have transpired.
That brings me back to Heraclitus. Suppose I see a floating shoe before the bridge. It then disappears under the bridge. What if I run ahead and wait for it to appear on the other side?
St. Augustine wrote that when you listen to music you hear that note in the past, then you hear a note in the present. But then you predict the next note in the future before it happens. Of course Augustine did not know about about Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal music.
I am comfortable with the Borges notion that every time I look at Rosemary’s portrait on my wall I am taking her photograph for the first time
Again.
