Few days we had the TV on, no sound, and images of the war in Ukraine appeared. I explained to my son that there was a war going on, that the bad guys attacked and people were suffering. He answered me: “Like Goya?” “Yes, like Goya”
Because life repeats itself both in the outside world and in each one of us, and at the same time everything is new, the good and the bad. In a movie I watched over the weekend ( C’mon C’mon) they asked a boy what heaven was to him, and he replied that it was “a hill with a thick tree with leaves and strong branches spreading. Grass, sun, bright light and constant breeze that never tires or ends”. Heaven feels a timeless thing.
Perhaps we need to get out of ourselves and thus get out of time. Abandon this second by second and just be. The being, which imposes itself as an imperative, does so in the instant, out of time. Lyotard mystifies time when he brings it down to the instant, and despite Byung-Chul’s complaints, he may be right. “Time flew by” we usually say, when we get out of it, when we have no use for it we forget about it.
For Kant, time and space are the “sine qua non” conditions of knowledge. And space and time is just what we must do without to know. Why do we want to divest ourselves of time? To be immortal? No, to be immortal is to have infinite time. To be immortal is to keep looking at the clock. Immortality does not free us from time but rather makes it insufferably long.
Popular wisdom has always known that we will cease to be, that time reaches all hands and wrinkles them with daily caresses. We kiss ladies’ hands because they tell the story that their gaze blurs on the horizon. We cling to time with kisses.
There is no more soul than to be alone, that is our condition, and that has no time. The rest is noise, background music…nothing.
This mixture of soul and uremia, this shadow of ashes grazed by time with its monotonous passage of clouds and suns, rhytidectomized cheeks and endless eagerness has to come out of this infinitesimal time to know, to understand. To get to know you have to go further (John 15: 5-7). The Sutras, the canonical scriptures of Buddhism, say “the past is imperceptible, the present is imperceptible, the future is imperceptible”. Like heaven wisdom is a timeless dimension.
“Seek in reading and you will find in meditation; knock in prayer and it will be opened to you in contemplation“ said Saint John of the Cross. God, infinity, cannot be reached by reason. “Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things; but only one thing is necessary” (Luke 10:41-42).
Wisdom is something that goes beyond time. Wisdom is something without parts, without divisions, one.
Let us go into the unknown
and stay there unknowing, rising beyond all science.
References
Breathing under water by Richard Rohr 2011
The Scent of time by Byung-Chul Han 2009
The inhuman by Francois Lyotard 1988
The Bible
The joy of living by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche 2007
Lectio Divina by St. John of the Cross , so long ago that even church forgot about it