One of my most favourite descriptions of the past , is by one of my most favourite writers : Haruki Murakami.
He said that the past is like a shattered plate, a plate that has shattered .
You can never put it back right.
And so I like, in my fanciful way , to expand on his theory . The present is our attempt to piece together those fragments . To gather and collect. Sometimes we pick up large pieces ( imagine , if you will, a willow pattern plate ) , where there may be the glimpse of a lovers face . A hand , a bow with leaves dangling soft , the wind in pictures , hints of things . We pick them up and are taken back , to then. Other times . And small sharp shards cut our fingers and make us bleed . But we take them , pieces all , big and small . Sometimes clumsily , sometimes , when life treats us well , almost seamlessly , and we fit them together. As best we can.
Maybe the future is that reformed plate .
Jagged edges and broken pieces , glued together with the now , fixed but different.
and our shattered plates sometimes intermingle, so that our future plates are never perfect, but are always a mish-mash of our own patterned-pasts and the crockery of others
oooh yes ! I like that idea , fragments from all over, someone elses past mingling with our own.
Brilliant imagery. Between you, Mr Murakami and yourself give Marcel Proust a good run for his money. And you are rather more succinct than he is.
The shattering the plate still seems so sad to me. we can create beautiful art with the fragments, but my deepest yearning is to see the plate unshattered and whole again. Not permanently, or we are liable to be reminded of how oppressive it was in some respects. But just one more time. Perhaps at the moment of death, a moment when time freezes.
So the now would be a slightly different version of the past? It makes me feel stuck on the treadmill of time and I don’t like that thought at all.
Hello Ariel !
hmm, no, I don’t think the now would be a slightly different version of the past. What I was trying to convey was that the past is fractured, memories are fickle , but we are somehow shaped by it. Perhaps we make sense of our ‘now’ by referring to events in our past ? As for the treadmill of time, well, I don’t like to think we are stuck on it either, but in a sense, I think we are. I guess it’s how we choose to look at it that counts.
best book I’ve read all year Kafka On The Shore…
and “fixed but different” is a great tag line, for many of us it seems….
Broken plates taught me thermodynamics.
The same matter, just greater entropy. The relative probabilities mean that while the plate COULD leap back onto the table… it won’t.
And that’s why time passes, one way, and irreversible.
quite!
he has a way with words, mr. murakami. or perhaps even more than a way in japanese…sometimes i wish i could understand how wonderful his words would be coloured in their original hue.
Amuirin sent me here, and I am very glad she did.
There really isn’t any now without reference to the past … experience has to be contextual, or it isn’t experience, it’s existence.
Hello David, thank you for reading this.
I clicked on your name and found a fascinating read, well written, insightful, beautifully structured.The ‘grain assault’ made me laugh and wonder in equal measure.It seems you are a sensitive and genuine soul, I shall read with interest about your therapy, I’m not sure I would like to talk to someone ( and pay them ) about myself either but I’m sure it can help certain people,I suppose it’s whether you are one of them. Gosh ! Well that’s what I think,for what it’s worth, which is probably not much Thanks again for reading the things I have written.