Weird dark garage thoughts this morning (if you’re fairly new here, you may not know what this means) about time and space and how they are dependent and yet independent of each other.
It occurs to me that the only things that hold some measure of permanence, relative to humanity, are those things which are inanimate; dead, never having lived. The earth–but not the things that grow upon it; the sea–even in its cycle of rising to the sky and raining down; a rock. All else must depend upon reproduction to endure in some form, animal/fish/fowl birth, seeds in plantlife, etc.
So in my dark little space, even extending it out to approximately a ten x ten foot square, I exist in that space only a few times within my lifetime (more, if it’s a place I traverse daily). Others may have existed in this same space: the prior owners of my home, the ones before that, visitors, etc; and prior to the existence of the house, animals surely, an occasional walker in the woods, explorers?, Indians of the Tunxis tribe?
And after me, who or what? It shall exist as this maybe changed, but never moving, always exactly at this very spot forever.
Or does time remain in place as well? Layers perhaps? Simultaneously ticking with living things moving and dying and being reborn all within a given square of space?
But I shall be long gone. Or maybe not; maybe consciousness, separated from its brain cells and its burdens of living tissue, endures within that space as well. Maybe that is the only part of "I" that has some meaning in the pattern.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology