Richard Pierce

Richard Pierce – author, poet, painter

Writing

Time

Back here, in real life, half-term over, and in the last week of February. One sixth of this year gone already, and Christmas still not fully digested, nor finances recovered. And the weather more like summer than what it’s supposed to be like – February, the coldest month of the year.

Things change. Time changes. Times change.

And yet I’m feeling strangely in stasis.

I am on alert to take one of the girls to her gymnastics class on what are always frenetic Monday afternoons, as I rush from one delivery of service or child to the next and then off to one of my highlights of the week, my ballroom dancing class where I can at last spend 45 minutes with my arms round my wife. I love the dancing, but not the chaos of these days.

On Friday I gave up on my latest novel, at least in the form it is at the moment, 23,000 words in. It just wasn’t working, and I need to try a different tack. That’s stasis, too. It doesn’t feel as cathartic as it should.

Life is fragmented, like this piece. Time is split into such small segments that each one becomes more difficult to control, that prolonged concentration and advancement (of anything) is almost impossible. And the more fractions of time there are, the quicker it appears to pass.

Of course, something could be happening with the system of time we’re all in, without anyone, least of all scientists, noticing. Time could be running more quickly, just like the sand in a tea-timer seems to flow more quickly when it comes to the end. Perhaps that’s what’s happening – that we’re at the end of time, at the end of this time, and what’s remaining is falling down through the plugholes of the universe faster and faster, proportionally intact, and we’re too out of tune with this universe to be able to notice or measure.

Or I could be making it up, or, even better, just imagining it all.

And other moments move slowly, insufferably slowly and soporifically, and I don’t know where to put my hands, my feet, my emotions, myself.

Ah, the human condition. A wonderful thing. Is it? It is. We are.

The days are longer, but no frisson of elation.

Back to Prufrock, I think, to lift my spirits and see something greater than the whole.

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6 Comments

  1. Elaina Davidson

    25th February 2014 at 09:49

    Well put. We all feel this way sometimes … and then time feels different again and we move on.

  2. richard pierce

    25th February 2014 at 10:09

    Thanks, Elaina. Always good to know that someone's reading my words. R

  3. Dan Holloway

    25th February 2014 at 12:55

    Prufrock is almost always the answer

  4. Stephanie Cage

    25th February 2014 at 18:43

    And if TS Eliot isn't the answer, a good waltz is. Or maybe you're more of a foxtrot man?

  5. richard pierce

    1st March 2014 at 00:15

    Indeed. My cornerstone. R

  6. richard pierce

    1st March 2014 at 00:17

    Definitely the waltz for sensuality (over the tango even). Although my favourite of all is the Quickstep because it's very physically exacting. R

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