Impermanence: a gift of time

Once I thought begifting pieces of my skin. After my body is dead, and my skin with the images I’ve placed upon it, in ink and otherwise, will no longer live and will disintegrate, returned to the maelstrom of life. Like marks in the sand blown by wind and swallowed by water, my body will be taken to be incorporated back to the elements, re-absorbed into the world. Who would want a piece of my skin?

My pieces of skin with the markings placed on it by the life of my hand. I thought about which of the four tattoo pieces would go to whom. I have four tattoos and I have four children. My children, they all have a part of me in them. My four, they’ve marked my body and my soul. They are the blooms come to life in my existential field, forever rooted and even in absence feeding of my soil, my soul. My begifting is my reaping. No, not that. It is not about giving or taking with my four. It is about the inevitability of having been taken into this communion, a part of me and a part of each of them hinged together in a unique pattern. Without reservation, it is love that binds not, but a love that is a vital contact.

But back to my skin. Since my marks cannot be begifted, they must be lived. Their permanence is illusory. If anything, they remind me of my impermanence. They will perish with me, and more and more this perishing seems very conceivable. So I must live my skin, breathe life thought my body, breathe my pieces of skin. Life’s moments, the duration’s progeny, are fragile, as time is passing. Their sustainability illusory, like my permanence.

We gladly submit to an illusion of permanence of things we collect in a disposable society, where objects and relationships have become both possessions and abandonment. We seek permanence in other things – religion of objects and spiritual structures that promise permanence but cannot deliver without corrupting the basic of human rights. I chose private pleasures, obscurity over permanence, passion over prudence. Why not jettison the austere, circumspect diligence of writing familiar plotlines settled with dust and surrender to the somatic fringes of the moment. Presencing, against permanence. Being present means dispensing with linear continuity of logic and proof of truth that follow from the past into the future on illusion of history. There is a deep vitality that resonates in these fully engaged moments.

The kinetic postures and gestures of engagement with a vital impetus originate in the flowing connection with the duration of the moment in space and time. It begins as a kind of swelling, slow, but urgent pulse of mounting energy. Somewhere at the core of the body, this kine-somatic energy traverses spherically throughout a torso as a steady pulse that leads to a threshold where one surrenders to the moment just ahead, not yet, give into the expectant swelling over the unknown, one that is beginning to take, to receive this energy, this movement, whether it be a first step to a walk, a run, a dance, picking up a pen to write, or reaching out a hand to touch an other. It leads to the movement of hand, the pulse of the body enlivened by the urge, the ex-stasis of becoming, a flow, the time passing. The space carries the density of flesh in a porousness of the moment, the interchange between the body, the flesh, the comportment, posturality and intentionality to move, to simply move, to let itself be carried, taken, to be received by the movement itself. This primary intentionality is pre-reflective and is oriented to move, encourages the body to engage, it yields in a moment of lived encounter to deeper perceptual engagement. Time takes on another texture. It softens, slows, gives up the linearity of measurable flow, carries, caresses the body in swelled sphericality of the shapes of the movement. The duration itself a part of body and its movement. Both time and the body surrender the calculated intentionality to the impetus in being-ness, this-ness itself. It is an immediate resonance, point of absorption and a reciprocal ingress, an experience, quite often unpredictable, depending on what the body asks or arrives at in the moment.

The first somatic response to an experience is a physiological sensation of a body kinesthetically engaged, and made aware. Not an emotion yet. Sensations of the body are the first, primary markers of experience. Most people, dimmed to awareness of them, or misunderstanding, jump to more strongly felt, more culturally legitimized emotional reactions. The connections between people and their animal nature have dissolved, or perhaps I should say, have been eroded by centuries of separating the mind from the body, and priviledging mind’s status, the intellect, the reason, the logic, over the knowing flesh.

But we don’t exist in an experience alone, there is an integrative plurality to a lived temporal somaticity. And what happens when, as we move into space, as we take it up, we encounter another body, with its own intentions and trajectories, its own, particular rhythm, sense of space? What arethe responses to another body in space, what resonances occur as two bodies, each occupying and taking up space, reach proximity, how far into each other’s space can we get, without disturbing these resonances, without breaking up the rhythm of vital contact, or dissolving the space between in hesitant approach, incomplete syncopations, is there a response that is inviting, is there holding back? How do we know?

Theatre of Noh is a Japanese form of dramatic unfolding that seeks the moment of flow. The actors repeat over and over the act of performance, the make up, the scenes, and if not satisfied, not catching the moment of flow, they return to the beginning, re-playing, sometimes all night, all day, until the moment of perfection occurs, in between the actors, the space, the audience,  descends in inevitable collision of body, movement, space and time. In a theatre performance, all agree on this moment of perfection…a precious collision…

And this is where the courage to surrender to the unfamiliar is needed the most. These cracks, these deep crevices in the existential field need to be used for both, to dissipate self and to feed it. To give of self as well as drink of the world. Live openly, reciprocally is more difficult in groups where each entity has a different unit of flow, an opaqueness holds the meaning from fruition. Like a frost that holds the bloom from opening.

In one breathing instant, a moment of kairos, which in Greek philosophy discloses the appointed time, an opportune moment which is dialectical to chronos, the sequential measured time, the quantitative amount captured in measurement, the time opens the opportunity for existential decisions, the moment when psychological and emotional make up of those receiving the flow is receptive to it. Kairos, the god of the fleeting moment, the moment fleeting, not offered to be captured chronologically, but exactly its passing, in between, when something special happens. The Sophists developed this idea of bridging something old and new, a collision, a crisis that fosters the ability to adapt to changing, continuous circumstances. Time standing on tippytoes. A voluptuous touching of moments as they flow into one another, in deep marvelously rich indefatigable untiring stirring, incandescent yearning, suffusing every fiber of the body, arbitrary visitations of the porous world, constellations of our limbs aligned, Pleiades of pleasure.

In time, a prolonging, extending of a moment, time itself goes on…and we make contact, a vital, alive accent of reality with awareness, immersion in it. Against permanence, a  surrender makes a moment preciously hung, however fleeting. The transience deeply felt becomes part of the fabric, the integral part of our flesh. Mind densely in concert with the body, a consort of the carnal, the reigning point of contact in the immediate experience, the sensual, sensory knowledge of abstraction surrendering to carnal knowing. We can conceptualize and imagine, but it is not enough if given the opportunity of being motivated enough to enter the momentum we don’t trust enough to surrender, if we do not act, then we lose the opening for truly lived philosophical choice.

My skin, impermanent, curling at the edges, is already begifted by time’s caress. And my four, tucked underneath in a precarious touch. A gift I cherish.