Desiring Machine

I was born after the 60’s. I didn’t live through the Kennedy Assassination, the 1968 Democratic Convention or many of the tumultuous events of the era, or any era previous to that. I did not experience trench warfare in the teen years of the 20th century. I was not present at Marie Antoinette’s beheading. I was not in the crowd when they offered the hemlock to Socrates. I did not witness Beethoven’s 9th symphony the very first time it was performed before a live non studio audience. I didn’t witness the dying gasps of the dinosaurs as they gazed doe-eyed as the meteor came crash landing into their Mesozoic paradise. I was nowhere to experience these events first hand. But I have an imagination and the ability to experience great distance. This is perhaps an under appreciated aspect of our time-bound destiny and finite nature. We have no possible means for direct access. Direct access is for all intents and purposes meaningless. Direct experience is waking up in the morning eating a bowl of cereal and nonchalantly looking out at the sunshine day just past your window. Absolutely immanent and ahistorical immediacy. The here and now. The only experience that we ever really “have” in any truly metaphysical and ontological sense. But we exceed these bounds with thought, we occupy other spaces and other times in our own imagination. It is a very peculiar imaginative experience as well because nobody else has any empirical access to the places and times we visit. The thought, the time travel is truly idiosyncratic and solipsistic. A tableau of past and future, here and there vivified in our minds as the consequence of synaptic firings of neurons in our brain. No admittance to this cosmic ride only a ticket and seating for one, destination anywhere. How much of the disagreement and human conflict can be attributed to this lack of access? A rebellious and clamorous other shrieking at the liminal gates of our psychic life crying “take me with you, it is hell out here”.