we are not separate from what we learn.
you are witnessing the waxing and waning of generations; every memory recorded, every sunrise captured, every bird watched, its in your hands. you are what you perceive but you're perceiving nothing.
sitting in history class today i remembered an image i was fixated upon a few years back. unfortunately, i didn't possess the skills to draw it out nor was i proficient enough at writing that i could describe it the best it could. there are things you feel, things you know, things you imagine that are too complex- too ridden with emotion- to be translated onto anything else other than your consciousness. this was one of them.
the image came back today, full detail, so vivid i could almost see it. my teacher was talking about the decline of the mongol empire. i was looking at people playing volleyball through the window. our class overlooks the school ground, we get to see all the people walking in, all the people walking out, every little movement.
that is, if you weren't too busy being a good student or whatever.
but while i was watching them play with an utter disregard for the rules of volleyball, i thought about all the visionaries that have existed throughout the course of history- be it, good or evil. mandela, genghis khan, kevin feige, henry ford, whichever charming british dude came up with the idea of colonizing half the world; a vision leads to great things, there's been no doubt about that.
i guess the real challenge is actually fleshing the thing out.
my image, i guess it can't be called a vision as it is a singular scene- a really artistic gif, if you will-, has something to do with time blurring enough for the sun to become a single line through the sky. all the colors, all the stars, rotating and revolving so quick it looks like nothing but an ill-placed smudge. it's a common strand i find through all my daydreams, if you can call them that. the concept of time unraveling. it's hard to imagine a world without the time dimension, einstein would have definitely gone out of business but despite my brain being incapable of comprehending it, i wonder what it would be like to live through all of time at once.
civilization after civilization, discovery after discovery, death after death, the rise and fall of empires,
it's just a little blip when you look at the grand scale of things. maybe millions and millions of years from now, after the earth has slowed down enough to add an hour to the day, after we've probably blown all of mankind up over a petty war or after artificial intelligence has taken over, humanity can look back and resist the urge to recreate the chaos we've caused over and over again. they would resist the urge to live through history.
we are not separate from what we learn, that is what my history teacher said to us today. it's not as if our current affairs aren't going to be studied by hordes of students in the distant future. perhaps that's where we're erring, who's to say we won't be forgotten the way exam schedules are?
but then who's to say our place in history won't be remembered and thus studied with a burning urgency, the way exam schedules are remembered a week before the first test?
time has always eluded me. we know nothing yet we progress like we know everything.
i wish history witnessed us the way we witness history.
it's the miasma of humanity.
aching to live.
aching to witness.
