Charles Taylor

Treatise on Time, or Laughter

Now and now and now and now and all I hear about

is now and I don’t have anything against now I’m in

the now right now and right now though it’s mighty

slippery the way it moves so fast into the past I guess

I can keep saying now and now and now and I’ll be

close to what the hippie guru said in his famous text

Be Here Now, and I’m into the heightened sense of

the moment right now yes now my right leg is cold

and the air filter in my bedroom is humming and it’s

a soft gray light that comes in the window because

it’s an overcast day looking like rain right now but

then things could change to sunny before you know

it we’ve got to give a place for the future even if the 

future does not live in the now and now and now that 

barely exists itself slipping away so fast so then it’s

into the future that we cast our hopes and dreams,

some mailbox must exist in that unknown where our

hopes and dreams are stored and then let’s give a

shout out to the past which is gone and doesn’t exist

either but we store some kind of shifting knowledge

of the past in our heads and some of these memories

give us great pleasure or sorrow and help define

just who we are I know my first memory it’s on

an airplane flying from Minneapolis to Chicago

in 1946 and I am three and my sister is one and

my mother says to buckle my seat belt and already

I’m rebellious I pretend to buckle the belt and then

the stewardess comes and gives my sister and I

a cookie and asks if I’d like to go up front to look

in the cockpit of the plane, my baby sister is in

my mother’s arms she’s too small so I go up to

look and the pilot and co-pilot take turns turning

and looking back at me and smiling and I saw

all the dials and through the windows lord all

that white of sky and by bringing the memory

back it is alive again in the now and now sliding

by why would I want to live all the time in the

now so fragile and quickly behind? Look I‘ve an

agile mind like an airplane and can fly into the

past, coast along in the changing present or fly

forward in a visionary dream into a future way

using my imagination where sometimes the sights 

are good over Barcelona and sometimes not so 

good so over Timbuktu and while I honor the now 

and now as she goes by like a jet stream I’m a damn 

good pilot, know not to stall out in any one these 

nonexistent human time constructs, for it seems to 

me that the now and the past and the future are 

equally nonexistent  and existent, illusionary and 

real, and I can deal with that and you can deal with 

that so let’s put away all this floozy and fuss and 

move on to brief enjoying life, dream will you of 

laughing in the future and hold that a moment

and then give a laugh now and now and recall 

all your sunlit or drunken fits of laughing past

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