My dear friend Currado Malaspina is obsessed with time.
As far back as I can remember he has tossed around the inconclusive implications of temporality like a philosophical hacky sack. What is duration and how does it apply. Is it fixed to the cycles of the moon? Does it register like a metronome, like a heart, like a breath? Or do all these barbed and back-breaking slow years of toil only point us to our pointless degeneration and unavailing demise?
Or is there something urgent about our rented exhalations? Is there a good enough reason for us to persist and to make things, grow things, destroy things and love things?
Currado has been keeping notebooks all these years, compiling observations, speculating and composing existential riddles hoping to find a key. It's a personal parlor game with no apparent consequence other than the avoidance of the very real and messy task of living 'in the world.'
Now, as he enters his seventh decade, understanding time seems more pressing - even desperate.
He recently confided in me that nobody, not even his father and certainly not his mentors, effectively prepared him for old age. It seems like there's an unwritten convention among the elderly to withhold valuable information. It's as if the potential windows of comprehension have been soundproofed. The young observe the ancient but are denied their depth.
And so he's left, bereft, fumbling after some significant form of cosmic consolation.
Aloft in the metaphysical, Currado has fortunately retained the passion and the vigor to continue pursuing the corporeal. Yet these days his knavery is cast with a ponderous, theoretical skepticism that turns romance into field-work. What was once characterized as a fling is now considered an "experiment," but if you ask me it's just a case of the blind leading the blind.
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