How can I acknowledge that person to be me? The thoughts, the notions aren't alien, but I wonder I had them at all, or even where some came from? By what means? Of what was I inspired? And why do more moments now seem to be dry? Did they then appear so too? Do I only recognise their fruitfulness after? Does everything then – all that happens in the present - require distance and reflection?
I think it does.
And I worry we do that less now.
We do not give events the distance, the reflection, the deliberation they deserve. We want answers, or justice, straight away; we move on, or attempt to, too quickly. Or try to capture something so momentous, so affecting – in words, in pictures – before adequate time has passed and the dust has settled a little. We compare to a previous time or event, with no due consideration given to the age itself, or any victims or descendants of, instead of assessing the occurrence in its own time and place. We, like others before us, want to record and forget. Let others after us remember. It somehow being more important that they learn what we do not, but will they from what we leave, if such accounts were too hasty in their making, and perhaps never later returned to to redress and clarify?
We may have some bright minds, but we are, I think, becoming far less wise, as to facts and details, and even the assimilation and dissemination of our thoughts and feelings.
Accompanied by a portrait of Francis Bacon (by Pourbus the Younger, 1617; source: Wikipedia) since it was in the course of reading his History of the Reign of King Henry VII that this short piece was written, February 2021.
