Thoughts about a Place

*

You looked for your destiny -- or your salvation -- at the bottom of time, you pawed through time like a famished little dachshund, but you never thought to ransack place, or even tried to learn how. So you chose time over place, why? Why time not place? Would a place properly understood be your more vivid form of salvation?

*

One was careful to say place not space. Because space might perhaps be empty, defined that way -- but a place was always occupied.

*

Jane Austen fainted when they told her that her family would move. Wise lady! When one moves not everything moves and then how can you be in two places at once? Which part of you is where, and at the end where are *you*? Or put it this way: place isn't transferable. It is what it is. There is no substitute for a given place and no place substitutes for another. So if you have it you have what is not comparable or expendable, nothing you can just give away without thinking. Because you are wedged in it so far that the wedging is you. And there you stand, completely happy. Enclosed.

*

And a place cannot be ransacked either. Its meaning is not hidden at the bottom of it or hidden behind what is there or in any way extractable. Because what is there? What would that "there" be? That was what you wanted, after all. You thought you were searching for a meaning but the meaning and the search were in a place and the place was what you wanted, not the lesser things it contained. It was "already", it was, it was not hidden unless in plain sight, which only hid itself from people who didn't look at it -- oh, if they only knew! "Plain sight" was paradise!

*

What would it mean for one actually to be where one was? Would salvation have a piece of this, in its not grasping so much at an elsewhere? I mean to say, I think the transcendence is real and the imminence is real but they are just about the same. In the sense that both are intense or both are weak. When you feel them you then don't have to do so much walking, or else the walking is itself right *there*, itself placed and not really moving. Because what if time could be seen as no longer breaking down one place to reach another, but instead simply the deepening of your being in a place? Time would be the act of understanding a place. It wouldn't exactly go anywhere. Or the going somewhere would be very calm.

*

Understanding would be mindfulness with nothing reductive about it.

*

You could walk away from those aesthetic cliches -- death in a vacuum, meaningless death, meaningless life -- all those wearisome monologues that try to presuppose existence without a place. As though even absolute freedom didn't have its placement, its being placed, a place that itself is perhaps not free, or a place that is neither free nor unfree but something else. This whole bliss is "already" set down and the only part of it that is "not yet" is your relation to it. Maybe you are not "virtual" but just confused. Maybe unhappiness is not really where you are.

*

Otherwise you would be just like today's affluent ones (inwardly so very poor) who endlessly move from place to place and from address to address, starting over each time and somehow remaining quite the same -- with that "same" never quite defined or confronted or even effectively evaded.

*

If you harp on God's absence so much, is that because God's presence would be too much to bear? And because it might provide a sort of jewel shaped hollow for your own presence or absence?

*