Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.
—Charles Baudelaire
Most blogs concern themselves with the instant. They are running commentaries on the events or fashions of the nano-moment. Of course, that is the blog’s very nature, a pulse by pulse status of our perpetual now. No longer do we need to wait for the weekly or even daily snapshots provided by magazines or newspapers; in the blog we have access to a streaming ticker seamlessly tracing the internal weather of our collective psyche. Like Heraclitus’ ever-changing river, blogdom is a relentlessly variable torrent of the topical where history is only the last post.
The downside to all this is that, as mere points in an unremitting and infinite gush of instants, everything is trivialized. There is nothing not instantly replaced by another thing which is itself instantly replaced by another, then another, ad infinitum. The blitzkrieg of the continuum erodes all firm ground, leaving only the conviction of a merciless obsolescence. The blogosphere, like its mothership the internet, offers a glut of flickering but empty bites; the more we eat, the more we starve.
Against this cataract of momentaries—or maybe rooted within it as Eliot’s still point of the turning world—are the monolithic, shadowy shapes of the persistent. These are the dim but inescapable grounds of being itself, the fathomless fields within which all being is possible.
O how to say it? What words to frame the unsayable? The eternal? The landscape banished by our urgent junta? The fundamental equations? Light? Love? Continental shelf? What to do but write? What to do but attempt with every ephemeral line to breach the event horizon, to pierce the skin of transience, to bore into the meat and drink the blood? Except for the point, the still point / There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
Delicious loss, savory ache
for this passing present,
this draining away of now,
this exquisite dying of to be
even as it now comes to be: to be
now less than before, after now
swelling with the liquor of
now now not: sweet
emptiness, now’s lingering
flavor as it sieves through
the soul’s fingers cupped
against the loss it gains now
and now and now . . . I stop,
the sun’s brim flaring on the
earth’s, close my eyes to yield
the be now was, then, move on.
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