What is a moment? How long does a moment last? You’ll find, there isn’t one firm answer regarding something so basic to human experience - the experience of “now”.
A moment is a length of time, the duration of which we are able to both grasp what is occurring (process - in our clumsy computer/technologic language for describing this) and personalize/connect that information with our existing experiences, and mindscape.
Historically, a moment was first defined as about 90 seconds. But scientists have been working hard on this problem and have recently come up with a figure of 3 seconds (and a brain refresh every 15 seconds). 3 seconds is about the amount of time for you to listen to one line of music, or one line of poetry - or have a thought. And then it disappears or most of these moments do. They are constantly living and dying within us.
I think back to Miroslav Holub’s superb essay “Dimensions Of The Present Moment”. For the life of me, I can’t find a copy on the web. I met the immunologist years ago - we were both giving a poetry reading at The Globe - at the time, a famous English language bookstore in Prague. Holub’s work is unique - he brings to his writing and poems a scientific slant. Yet at the same time, they have a poet’s sensibility and “seeing the world anew” touch. In his essay, he argues that the moment has gradually decreased in time throughout history - much in line with the recent findings.
This suggests time can be bent, it isn’t universal and experienced in the same way (though it mostly is, if no effort or training is taken). Buddhists have known this for ages and basically, Yoga is but our attempt to lengthen the duration of a moment, to hold experience in stasis, as one would a breath.
At this moment, I’m thinking of this RadioLab video - it’s haunting. Perhaps because it makes us truly see how the moments that don’t disappear and die, are there in us to be relived as memories, a film collage.
As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty - is too a beautiful example of moments and memory brought forth as art. Mekas tells the story of his life through thousands of moments, all stuffed and wrapped in a film, a film of beauty, and because we experience the moments as fleeting because we can’t grasp and keep them all - a sadness too. See my piece about the word Oleka - the fleetingness of life. How there is no center where things hold. We are trapped in an endless series of moments that pass through us towards the great bin in the sky where all is forgotten.
I have never been able really to figure out where my life begins and where it ends.
Jonas Mekas
I think in the poem So Now? Bukowski is experiencing the same thing I am currently. A kind of melancholy, a resignation, empty waiting, a giving up because time the destroyer is winning and has taken so much away, killed so many memories. It’s a common affliction with the elderly, your “golden” years. The passage of time seems like one big empty pit hole, nothing is left. That incredible lightness of being that can weigh very heavily on a person.
Yet, if you listen to Mekas, he’s come out the other side into total happiness. His film (if you can call it that - it is something much different and greater) he states is about beauty, a celebration of the small bit of beauty we can and must capture, the moments we are able to steal.
I echo his words …
I don't know what life is. I know nothing about what life is. I have never understood life, the real life. Where do I really live? I do not know. I do not know where I come from, where do I go. Where am I, where am I? I do not know. I do not know where I am, and where I am going to and where I'm coming from. I know nothing about life. But I have seen some beauty, I have seen some brief... Brief glimpses of beauty and happiness... I have seen, I know. I have seen some happiness and beauty.
I do not know where I am. I do not know where I am! But I know I have experienced some moments of beauty, brief moments of beauty and happiness, as I am moving ahead, as I am moving ahead, my friends! I have, I know, I know I have experienced some brief, brief moments of beauty! My friends! My friends!
If I could write a happier, B-side version of So Now, it would be something like this …
And Now
days have come and gone,
I sit still.
the TV flickers, the dog stretches
mothers rock their babies asleep
on a porch somewhere in
my yesteryear.
I am alive
as ever in my old age,
wide-eyed and waiting
to live even more
than the immensity, I’m given.
I wish I could wake this world up
yet I can’t find the high notes
and the trees outside
laugh at me
moving around in their stationary way
content in the late afternoon sun.
I’ve nothing to say
to death that steals
from my mind’s
open pocket,
a death I face with all
the strength of the people
alive in my memories.
Oh, I once was too busy
to have memories
but I’m younger than that now!
So Now ...