time is a jet plane, it moves too fast

Ghosts inhabit my space, float around in my apartment, appear in the still of the night when I'm trying to sleep. Little angels of the silence appear above my bed and whisper. They don't torture me anymore though. It's a comfort, to know I'll never be lonely, with all these friendly ghosts haunting me. But it's dangerous to be seduced by ghosts, lest I find myself stuck in a virtual world, a universe where nothing is concrete.

There's the whole core of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle- the idea that if there are two variables, you can only know one of them for certain. In that way, the universe is never concrete for any of us. Not perfectly. I know my present, I know it with serene certainty. It's crystal clear. As such, the past is a complete blur, and an obscuring halo crowns the future. If I am absolutely confident of how someone else feels, I have no idea how I feel myself.

Still we go on, like Sisyphus pushing that stone up the hill. We're destined to fail, but the chance, the possibility that we might figure it all out keeps us from abandoning the futile quest. And occasionally, a flash washes through my brain, and some particular aspect comes into sharp aspect. I feel that if I don't capture it right at that moment, acknowledge it, articulate it, it will disappear into the chasm of uncertainty once again. Surely enough, it does.

When that lightning arrives, flooding its momentary light, it's often from the thunder of a Bob Dylan stanza. It's backward. The music is supposed to articulate a feeling; instead, it brings forth a feeling that demands to be articulated in its new, personal interpretation. And those are the types of apparations that are much harder to handle.

Happy Birthday, Robert Zimmerman.