I’ve been struggling to write this post for a while. I have been tangled up in these powerful emotions and I’m by no means free, but there’s subjects I want to talk about other than the one that preoccupies most of my nights and days lately.
The thought that has been rattling around in my head is that I have the strange sense that I’ve detected that life has the qualities of a loop. Or not a perfect reiteration of events, but maybe more like a spiral, with both the qualities of a loop and an arrow. Like a screw. Yeah, life will screw you, won’t it? Like James Brown said, “Money won’t change you, but time will take you on.” Uh, huh.
This notion has grabbed a hold of me, and won’t let me go. Its related to this other idea that the concept of free will versus determinism is a false dichotomy, and that reality exhibits characteristics of both.
But today I want to focus on this concept of cycles. They say that history repeats itself, and that there’s nothing new under the sun. For me, that seems to be true at a more personal level. Like I said, you are who you are, and it is what it is. And maybe people change, but only slowly, and not really that much.
So our experience of life is filtered by our perceptions and responses, and so on. But what I’m talking about is coming at a different level. Like seeing something out of the corner of your eye that doesn’t look right somehow. Like when you’re not looking, the tables and chairs get up and dance around. And you turn your head quick, and boom. They’re back where they were, I think. Or like these ideas I’ve had, I’ve written about elsewhere, that seem so real, I called them “future memories.” How when Anita was sick the first time, I used to tell her how we would grow old together and we’d go certain places, and do certain things, sometimes rather ordinary things, but I could describe those scenes so vividly, it was like I was actually seeing them, or recalling them, in a way like maybe recalling a dream you had. And over our nearly thirty years together, by God, one by one, those things actually came to pass, pretty much as I had “seen” them or dreamt them. And not one went undone, that I can recall, although some did surprise me.
And now I’m sitting in my back yard by the pool, at a table in the shade, drinking a beer, idly plucking my guitar. And I’m reminded of my little apartment on Emily Road, during another really hot summer back there in 1980. We were all young and from somewhere else, and working in the big boom town, and my neighbors and I formed a little group, guys and girls, all single and mostly in our twenties, and we’d hang out down by the pool in the shade after work, drink beer and swap stories, and sometimes play guitars and sing. And to me, that whole scene could have been yesterday, or this morning. Memory is funny that way, the associations literally are adjacent in my memory banks, and not at all separated by nearly half a lifetime.
There’s other examples, with friends and acquaintances how when you get to this phase of life, everything reminds you of something else, and everyone reminds you of someone you used to know, and damned if your relationship with this new person doesn’t follow the same arc as with that other person you knew thirty, forty, fifty years previously. And how could it not, for all the differences, and changes time brings on, you are the still the same person you were then, and this new person is just another incarnation, avatar, manifestation of the same archetype as that other one you’re reminded of.
And then my thoughts, and my own words form a loop, and like Pam said one time, some people have like this little tape that plays over and over again, and all you have to do is punch their button, pull their string, and blattibloop, out it comes.
So not only does everything remind you of something else, everyone reminds you of someone else, and you wind up saying the same things over and over, and every morning you forget that you’ve been having the same dreams over and over again your whole life long, and it’s just like that tape that’s playing in your head, like a big blue loop, that doesn’t ever change. and it looks like we’re moving, but we’re really standing still.