chapter 5 …cont

I stopped the process of going mad after a while, but it took me a few days — days that went into weeks. But I stopped it deadly in its tracks after a while. What’s missing is a sense of revelatory truth — but if we view the truth as relative, for instance different for those who make time stand still in a different way from how one makes it stand still — then we’re onto something.

For instance, time never stood still for me in a conservative manner. I never entertained the notion that today was like the day before that went all the way back to the inception of Western society. That was never my impression. Thus the relativism. I’ve also been under the suspicion that time was golden and magical really. I thought I could bend it and it would take me where I wanted to go. In many ways it has, although it’s slippery like a dragon’s back and you can fall off it. What then you ask.

But this notion that we do not fundamentally change, because we are the way we were back then, whenever, that to me seems like a lie. At least the stories aren’t convincing. People who cannot get close up but say you’re just as you were when you were fifteen. Well that was the age I had a horse still, although not so much, as she was getting on in years. So then I got another and that is the one that I went galloping on.

But some people say its all the same like it’s all happening right now, and nothing really altered. You have your character structure, only this time disembodied from the horse, and you’re still falling off it. Can’t sit on straight.

Coz they see things, some people, really really see, like things that finished long ago, but they still see them. But anyway I never broke an arm of leg, although there was this one time when my horse was getting old.

On the day, it had been raining quite heavily, a beautiful thunder strorm and warm water gushing, but it made the red mud slippery, and I had to take care. And so I went along the grass in a kind of canter, when I suddenly felt a jolt like as if the horse suddenly stood still. One knee suddenly buckled and the horse’s nose pecked to the ground and I knew I was falling and the horse was falling too, on top of me. This was a time when time slowed down and things were looking bad. So I relaxed my body, thinking all my ribs were going to be crushed and Honey fell on top of me. And winded me. She was quite heavy. Then she rolled and stood up and all this time I was fine. I did get rolled in mud a bit and then the horse was spooked and ran away, nose bleeding, up someone else’s drive and I went looking for her.

But that was beautiful because I’d made it, even though I knew by then my horse was getting old, but she was still doing the best she could for me.

So time slowed but it didn’t stop and that allowed me to take in a breath and not be crushed, but to relax my body for the fall that was about to come.

And that was then and this is now. Because back then the time stood still, but now it keeps on going.