time

ben goertzel




Discontinuous?  

Continuous?

Moments?

Is it really a stream of consciousness?    Or is it a juxtaposition of 
discrete moments, each one freaked and frozen in wholeness, strung 
together like stills in a film?   Take off your clothes, walk outside of 
your house, stand out in the yard feeling the wind, forget about 
people, houses and things, close your eyes, stab yourself with a pin 
in your naked ass, and you can feel the gap.   The gap between 
moments. 

??

What a conglomeration of iridescent clitoral moments! One after the other like a series of sweat beads running down a lover's forehead. Or is it really a string of moments? One after the other, step, step, step. Perhaps it's more like a collage. The one-dimensional order is an illusion. Standing in any frozen moment, one can step in infinitely many directions. Here I am, in the middle of the still, reaching my hand out to you, never quite reaching you, while you stand there frozen wearing boxer shorts only, your nipples gazing out toward the sun. What lies inside your vacant stare will never grow or deteriorate. But then the spark of life infects me and I can move anywhere – any direction. Forward – "forward" – perhaps, in your possible universe of choice. Or perhaps forward in the cosmos where a meteorite zooms through the window, severing your left nipple, leaving only a bizarre and sickening mass of blood. Or perhaps backward to the day that we first met, when I was dazzled by your beauty, which struck me as much greater than it really was due to the harmony between the acne scars on your face and the non-Euclidean scales melodizing in my brain, and you thought me a vaguely ridiculous if evidently intelligent clown. Perhaps you'll move into Hitler's urethra, lying in a jar of formaldehyde in an Argentinian goat brothel. Children, anything is possible! Moments are spheres of light, screaming mad and dispersed in a non- dimensional discontinuum. We hop from another to another, moving in what we call one particular direction – forward – because that is the cast of our minds. The spheres spurt out and overlap, in different colors and wild amoeba shapes, creating a collage of form and meaning, which no one can really love, though we can try with religious explosions. The love, if it really comes, will annihilate our human forms. Our bodies disappear and are replaced by non- luminous lights. I saw it happen to a woman on Fifth Avenue the other day. She was walking down the street, briefcase in hand, looking up at a neon sign. A rather odd look came over her face. And then she disappeared – totally vaporized – leaving only a momentary halo. I knew her moment had come, and gone. Of course, it had always been there.