Moving Trains / Crossing Timelines

You can never cross the same river twice because it's not the same river and you are not the same person. So it follows that you can never meet the same person twice. Of course there is familiarity, character traits, ideology, heritage, roots, accumulated knowledge, ephemeral impressions, and looks, but whenever people meet they are like moving trains. Even faces change. So does the gaze. Sometimes the trains move so fast that meeting someone the next time could  feel like meeting another person. Intersections and collisions can happen in different timelines. 

The senior journalist

At work today, a colleague asked for my designation to put under a caption and another colleague loudly replied: senior journalist. I could not help but laugh at the sound of it. I have been designated as “senior” for the past decade or so, but today it came across as a reminder that I am in the autumn of my life.

Well, since last year some gentle Indian souls have started offering me their seat on the bus, I guess out of respect for my not-so-venerable age of 51.

I am not the type to worry about age. In many aspects of life I feel younger than I was twenty years ago. In many other aspects nothing much has changed since I was 16. Teenage Kicks by The Undertones remains a sort of anthem.

Of course, back in my younger days I imagined myself ageing gracefully, surrounded by loved ones and respected for my wisdom.  

Now, on most days, I sleep and wake up alone, spend a lot of time talking to and being with myself and, of course, still have loved ones with whom I like to share time.

Perhaps I am still wise, but perhaps a bit cranky too. In a number of situations I get confused about how I am supposed to act, which creates a certain awkwardness even in pretty normal exchanges.  

Funny that this reminder of my biological ageing process came after a sort of awakening from two or three years of emotional numbness.  Fuck! I could have made better use of that time.

I do not want to process, plan and zone everything. I am in between places, in a present carrying a lot of past and a little less future. I want to let my multitudes run amok a bit, simply for the sake of celebrating my presence here.

Let’s see how that goes — and how many pineapple cans I buy before they expire.

Schrödinger's wallet

One of the persistent thoughts I had as a child was that reality did not exist but was merely conjured up either by my brain — which I found distasteful and egocentric — or that I might just be part of someone else’s dream, which was even more problematic because the person dreaming might suddenly wake up and my life would simply vanish.

I eventually grew out of this and evolved into a materialist, albeit one who still believes in magical realism. Extraordinary things happen in the here and now, not elsewhere. But by my late teens I had developed another fantasy: that I could somehow slip from one timeline or universe into another. Once I even felt I experienced this. I was about to kiss a girl I was certain wanted to be kissed and the next thing I remember was her telling me not to stare at her. Heaven had been so close that it simply slipped away. Hardly the best example to prove the theory. I later experienced a similar sensation when I actually did kiss someone some months later.

In truth, the thought itself is pointless and can even become dangerous, because it can legitimise wrong choices by imagining they might have been the right ones in another realm. Still, sometimes the feeling of existing between worlds is intoxicatingly real, especially when it feels like being sucked into the void.  I still find the theme fascinating and am currently re-reading Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart.  I love this quote from that book: “We're both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We're connected to reality by the same line. All I have to do is quietly draw it towards me.”

A few hours after writing this,  a curve ball was thrown at me by the universe.  Just before sleeping, I realised I might have left my wallet — with all my cards inside — at the office, but I could not be 100 per cent sure. This triggered my anxiety.  I had a panic attack because I had to wait until morning to know. It felt like a Schrödinger’s cat scenario: the wallet was both lost and safely on my desk until reality revealed itself.

What made it worse was that I had a radio show to face before I could even go to the office to check. I tried distracting myself, but my fallback  was another loop. Eventually, I stopped trying to solve the uncertainty and reminded myself instead of the good things already present in my life. I slept soundly.

I woke up at six without any hint of doubt that the wallet was 'alive', had a joyful breakfast with my son, enjoyed the radio programme, and later discovered the wallet sitting safely on my desk.

Maybe that is the answer to these loops. Reality is anchored less by certainty than by the small rituals and people that pull us back into the world. And the magical part is that uncertainty and failures are just part of living — not departures from it.  As Bob Dylan wrote "there is no success like failure and failure is no success at all."

The circus is in town

General elections in Malta have morphed into a circus of competing gift-giving — a kind of potlatch financed through accelerated economic growth that, in turn, opens the way to ever more get-rich-quick schemes. It is dizzying, yet strangely plausible.  

Foreign workers, on whose labour this temple was built, are weaponised in a battle where both sides accept their necessity while competing over how much to exclude them from sharing in the wealth they helped create.

There is no ideological battle for the soul of the nation.  There is just an auction to be paid from the proceeds of economic growth generated by profit driven capitalists.

Sure, I have a love-hate relationship with the modern, post-2013 Malta. I prefer living here now than I did 20 years ago. It is a more cosmopolitan place, even if it remains limited and unsophisticated in many ways. But I resent the incestuous relationship between the state and big business, the erosion of public spaces, and the Disneyfication of others. There is now a clear convergence around what increasingly resembles a country that has struck oil without ever having found it.   From my angle, the opposition will only aggravate matters through its socially regressive fiscal policies.

All this said, I do not see much hope.  The only fun aspect is the anthropology of it all.  Someone should really write about how masses are mobilised and energised in a situation where they are clearly being used to prop a benign regime composed of two rival branches.  Still must admit that I have a soft spot for conviviality, albeit one colonised by dominant elites.

 Given my line of work, I cannot really escape it. But in times like these, one comes to appreciate more joyful subjects and encounters. For the first time, I am considering political disengagement a sensible option — albeit one that would regrettably reinforce the status quo.   Still most civil battles are not won in elections but in the streets.