I have not read Proust (although Swann’s Way is a paperweight for me just now, trying to flatten some poems whose edges can’t help but curl up), and so don’t yet know how to sound the depths of memory. But if there ever was a time to create variety in life through living inside of Things Past, it’s now, from deep inside of Stay At Home. 

Furthermore, today is Good Friday, a day on which certain people celebrate a very specific crucifixion. 

I have perhaps never related more to the man called Jesus than now, as I imagine his physical body lying in that garden tomb, waiting for a higher power to tell him that he can go ahead and GTFO. 

If I pull my eyes off of this computer screen and look out this very window I see the already-resurrected flowers of a pear tree, who, at least three hundred times more patient than Jesus, are forced to wait nearly a year between resurrections. They don’t get to live thirty three years at a go either.

But I’ve already digressed sharply from Remembering Things Past. So let me start again, resurrect the train of thought, and do some remembering.

But First, Parmenides, Again

Parmenides, according to things I’ve read and written before, was a philosopher who pre-dated Socrates, and had some wild ideas about time and change. In many ways, he is the counterpoint to the more famous Heraclitus, who claimed that everything in the world was in a constant state of flux. That quip that we all know about “You can’t step into the same river twice” is attributed to him. 

Paremenides, on the other hand, claimed that there is no such thing as flux or change at all. While Heraclitus thought of the river as the water, maybe Parmenides thought of the river as the course through the earth in which the water moved. 

But not quite that either, since for Parmenides, the very movement of the water, whether you call that bit river or not, was an illusion. In fact, not only is there no such thing as Change, with different things being born and going through a process of becoming and then passing away, but no kind of Movement at all really exists. Not even the Movement of your physical body through space (which does not exist). Parmenides realized that Change and Movement are just two of the biggest liars in a larger world of illusion. 

This sounds bizarre and contrary to experience, but I must admit that I continue to find that he was right. 

Real Things that Exist

I have already proved that Parmenides was right about there being no such thing as Change while discussing me and Alex’s mind-stretching experience of through-hiking in the Centennial Mountains in July of 2017. Furthermore, in that same short post, I proved that Time does not exist in any sense. The only Real Things are Places and miles traveled are Real. 

And so, having proved that Change and Time are just stubborn illusions, I will now prove beyond a reasonable doubt (recall, if you don’t mind, the billboard just north of Salt Lake City that reads “BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT, GOD EXISTS”) that Movement, too, is illusory. 

And so I bury those grave-triplets of Time, Change, and Movement. From inside the dark belly of Stay At Home, I bid them all three good riddance.

In their place, I will add another Real Thing that Exists to the list that includes Place, and does not include Time or Change. Or maybe this new Thing belongs as a sub-heading under Place, since Place might in fact be the only Real Thing that Exists at the end of the day (which ‘end’ and ‘day’ are just illusions anyway). 

This new subsection of Place is a Linking of Places, just as Place is a linking of Times (which do not Exist), as William T. Vollmann, Bob Dylan, and Alex Cox conclusively proved. 

Ritual is a Thing that is Real

This second Real Thing, an operation of Linking multiple Places, can be called, for lack of a better term, Ritual. You can think of this Linking as some type of Wormhole, although I promise this is not necessary. 

The evidence for the Linking power of Ritual, on December 2, 2019, at least, was the shape of a cross. A full-sized, crucifyin’ cross, that I saw being dragged by a young man, pale and pudgy, along US Highway 412 in the Oklahoma panhandle, the cross westbound as I traveled east. 

If I was a smarter, and therefore more pious man, I would have flipped across four lanes of traffic and a dug-out median to maybe follow the young man and the cross, or maybe to tell him that he was about four months too early for crucifyin’ season. 

Behind the young man carrying the cross, this Simon of Cyrene of the Panhandle, just as one would expect, was the figure of the Christ, as pale and pudgy as his cross-bearer. This modern-day Christ was as deep into a cell phone as anyone I’ve ever seen. Looking at this young man dissolving into his screen, I could have been carefully driving on any college campus I’ve ever visited, dodging in my car the youth inside their telephones as they cross the road with the most beautiful faith in the world.

Because of these young men and the impending crucifiction(s), I was driving east not only toward Fort Supply, Oklahoma, but also approaching Jerusalem. 

I hereby prove that there is an indisputable link between the Holy City and Fort Supply. And since they are Linked Places, they are One Place. This is the power of Ritual.

The broader conclusion is inevitable that this world is made up not of many Places, but of a Single Place outside of Time (which does not Exist). This unitary Place is accessible to anyone with the ritual wherewithal to realize this truth, just as these faithful young men were, being also well on their way to starting a world religion. 

I did not flip around to follow these young men. I kept driving, taking no evidence of this world-centering event but my memory. 

And now, from this newer world-centering Ritual of Stay At Home, when I think of these two young men at the armpit of the Oklahoma panhandle, I remember them out of the sliding window of the 1999 Jeep Wrangler that I traded in 11 months before I drove across this continent and saw these young saviors. 

But Parmenides knew the truth about this apparent aberration of Memory, too. The fact that my jeep Exists in my memory means that my jeep was in fact in that Place with me, illusorily looking like a Chevrolet Colorado to everyone from the outside. 

One Becomes Two Becomes Three Becomes One

And so I continued east through Oklahoma. Just as I was leaving the panhandle, in front of a small gas station in Fort Supply, the Jerusalem of this continent, two large Joshua trees were proudly growing. These beautiful western trees proved that I was not in two Places, Jerusalem and Fort Supply, but three, adding the Mojave Desert to that list. Therefore these are not three Places but one. So the world tightens.

I am confident that through a more detailed remembering (Proust help us!), the rest of the Places in the world, however many they appear to be now, will eventually be collapsed into One Single Place, which has no need for a name, because we’re all already there.