Temporary Permanence

  

Labyrinth under leaves outside of Buddhist temple, Terrebonne Avenue;
this Buddhist temple used to be a part of Rosedale United Church

There is no real permanence to life, there is only change and impermanence. The opposite of change and impermanence isn't permanence, it is not a duality; we fool ourselves thinking things are dualities when they really have nothing to do with each other; is good the opposite of bad or are they totally different states of being? Writers have a claim on permanence, a temporary claim, and this lies in writing things down, this gives a kind of permanence to what we think or say. Of course, it is also a kind of folly, but who really cares? We prefer illusion over truth; all writing is illusion and impermanent and one day even Shakespeare's plays will disappear. Writing is folly if we think it will give us any permanence; life is not constituted to be permanent. So we vote for a temporary permanence, and we love irony.  

On impermanence

 

The thing is to accept (and even like) the very thing about life that upsets one the most because we are moving irreconcilably to death. And that is the impermanence of life. We can't freeze life to when we were most happy. We continue on and on and then we reflect on the past, on when we were happy but, perhaps, didn't know it. We weren't self-conscious in our happiness. It doesn't work that way; we think back, we're nostalgic creatures, and we fix on a time when we were most happy, or we think we were. We fight our emotions and ideas of self-reproachment, we beat them down! Why are we even having them? Because self-reproachment is an act of depression and we live with more or less mild depression all of the time. And we remember the past and wish we could live on an island of unself-consciousness and unreflected happiness. Is it a hallucination? Does it make any sense? We are sad, we grieve for what we had. We hate impermanence. And we are too old to suffer more impermanence, more change. What to do? What to do? 

                                                                                        16 April 2023