Because time is relative, as Einstein showed, how can we really know what a day is?
How can we really know what an hour is, a minute, a second?
We can turn to clocks and calendars and star charts for objective answers, but they can't tell us what a year is in relation to our lives.
Not when every moment is different.
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3 comments:
Dear Petronius,
I used to climb to where the Latin texts were shelved, on the top floor of a very tall building appropriately called Acres of Books. Shuttered in that stifling room, with dust baking in the light of a lone sealed window during a particularly humid summer day, I rummaged among the books to find what had been forbidden and not taught in school. In this way I discovered a school edition of your “Cena Timalcionis,” a chapter from that much maligned “Satyricon” which the Catholic Church during the middle ages had condemned and tried to destroy. Only fragments survived, including this portion, thanks to horny monks who must have hidden it for their own private pleasures. Swaying far above that conservative German city, with its beer gardens, its pretzel and sausage factories, I tallied up my money and bought that brown, scholarly edition of your work.
At home, I slowly translated the tale about two gay boys who found a free meal at a rich aristocrat’s banquet. Surrounded by male and female slaves, thick-headed body builders, arrogant soldiers, wealthy women heavily adorned with gold and jewels, platters of exotic food, buckets of wine, pots of urine and shit, all embalmed by incense and perfumes from Arabia, suddenly the room was silenced as the lord and master rose from his reclined position to recite a very badly written poem.
“So that’s what poetry readings are like!” I yelped. And ever since then I have ventured from one reading to another, hoping to find Trimalchio’s banquet of grotesque gluttony and decadent women, only to encounter respectfully attentive listeners and bewildered students tuning up the sound system. Here in Arkansas, Slams have all but vanished. The venue that housed them in town had a kitchen fire and the building was condemned, then shuttered up. And in Cincinnati, Ohio, Acres of Books was razed to the ground, replaced by a parking lot.
Regretfully,
Dr. Mike
[Disposable Prose Poem September 13, 2009]
Dr. M:
The irony, if there is one, is that change is eternal, and eternity is the absence of time.
How does that work?
Thanks for this and your recent additions. I'm really loving on your poems, man.
H. K.
Tis paradox is quite true: "The irony, if there is one, is that change is eternal, and eternity is the absence of time" Thank for reminding me, H. K.
Dr, Mike
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