I know what I was thinking at this spot (telephone pole, park at right, road and road median and dog park at left) yesterday (vainglorious farewell column of terminally ill newspaper columnist); could remember what I was thinking that morning and the day before (αἰσχῡ́νη was a type-one noun) at this spot, but not the day before or the day before. Can think of things that happened around there, not sequentially. “People remember but they distort,” had reportedly said Baudelaire, which is one of those things a famous poet has said that one can imagine a non-famous person also having said. (Baudelaire said this on the occasion of someone calling Victor Hugo “Victor Rugo.”)
The day before the day before was the one when I’d seen some mockingbirds going after each other with unusual intensity and nimbleness among the trees of the road’s median. They had flown from the park to my right over the road, tussled among the trees of the median, flown over the other side of the road to the trees of the dog park, then I lost sight of them.
And the day before the day before the day before was when I was thinking of the difference between “core samples” and “slide samples” of Time. The example of the Slide Sample of Time was Ulysses or Wallace’s short story Good Old Neon: it was all that was going on at a single moment in Time when you really unpacked it, as if time had stopped. Perhaps you could call it Poetry. (Perhaps a haiku was such another instance. The subject matter of haiku was said to be Nature, but couldn’t that be extended to mean a Moment? Might not that have been what they had sought in Nature, the momentary?) A Core Sample of Time was just History — a place or subject through time. You would think that a Core Sample of Time was essentially just Slide Samples of Time stacked on top of each other, but in fact, it wasn’t so, for history was composed not of Moments but of Events, and Events were where Moments evanesced to nothing. (A Moment was Time dilated and an Event was Time evanesced.) Were you to see a bunch of Slide Samples of Time stacked on one another you would think that nothing had ever occurred in History, was the thought around here earlier that week. There would perhaps be only the present and only poetry.
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