In the Moments of Our Blinking

And we have returned to “normal” now. People still not wanting to sit next to each other on the train. Like before. My ears are full of cotton, and my head, congested. A normal cold. Like before. There is a part of me that thinks my body needs this. That it will somehow be both a workout for my immune system and a kind of catharsis.

Harmless discomfort. Shake it up, shake it off. Go for a run.

I jut my jaw forward to clear my ears. The sky is clear and dark. But those three stars have moved since yesterday morning. Now over the neighbor’s house instead of the street. How is that possible? Is that how this astronomy stuff works?

I love those films where the details change and the character finally notices. Or the viewer does. It seems to me this post-modern trope gets at what all the Modernists were aiming for: the awareness that there is a real world outside of our awareness. In the moments of our blinking.

Astonished. It is a nice word, and it nicely describes the emotion at the moment of anagnorisis: Now the tragic figure gets it. Simultaneously surprised by his own ignorance, as well as the existence of a real world. Or another world, where what where peripheral events were chained together along a different path that led – still – to this very moment. This is what it means to face one’s fate, isn’t it? To understand that we are sliding over the surface, slipping consciously along a sliver of existence. Krill, unaware of the ocean.

We don’t need a god to justify our fate.

Maybe a Galton Board.