Panta Rhei
Looking into my past, I picture to myself a long series of Bens frozen in various attitudes of repose, recreation, work or sleep. The farther back I cast my eye the more their resemblance to me diminishes before finally dwindling away altogether. Here is a tableau vivant of a hazy afternoon in Auckland, 1996. A Ben is perched on the end of an unmade bed, gazing at a rectangle of sunlight on the carpeted floor. I probe and palpate his teenage face and body with my thirty year old gaze. I happen to know that his outfit has been put together from things he picked up at thrift shops; I happen to know that the placket of his trousers is held together with safety pins because the zipper is broken. These pathetic details disturb me—not because I pity him but simply because they mark a difference between us. If the situation were reversed (if he wore new clothes and I threadbare castoffs from the Salvation Army) the feeling would be almost the same. The face is younger than mine; still boyish, less careworn. His lugubrious expression seems somewhat implausible. I cannot help regarding it as an adolescent affectation which need not be taken too seriously. I withdraw my gaze from him with a strange pang.
Here, in 2004, another Ben is sitting before a computer at three o'clock in the morning in the strobing light of a dying fluorescent tube, enthusiastically writing in a diary which, a few years later, I will enthusiastically destroy, and occasionally pausing to bite his fingernails. This revolting habit I no longer share with him; a fact which should, but does not, please me. He is surrounded by objects whose ineluctable fate is to be lost or thrown out and which I will not inherit, with the exception of a few books I have read but he has not and never will. I do not wish to own any of these objects now, and yet their loss, and even, paradoxically, the fact that they no longer hold any importance for me, weighs upon a remote corner of my consciousness. The objects constitute the once familiar world of the young man who sits in their midst, a world that has, like the young man, dissolved irrecoverably. And it is this force of irrecoverable dissolution that the young man and the objects on his table signify, and not the young man or the objects themselves, that troubles me and fills me with a kind of Heraclitean sorrow. Let me try to express myself slightly differently. With every step I take, I feel that I am leaving an imprint of my former self upon space like an entrainment of figures in a sequential photograph. Every second I slough off one of these husks and become someone else; every second I die a tiny death. The difference between each self and its immediate predecessor is imperceptible; but the accumulative, attritional force of these infinitesimal changes will one day annihilate me, just as they slowly annihilated a boy in brown polyester trousers, just as they annihilated the onychophage who succeeded him. Looking back upon this long line of discrete Bens, and forward to its phantom extension beyond the present to the unknown and unfamiliar man who will one day gaze upon this frozen scene, I am filled with a queasy awareness of the plasticity of my identity. For a moment, I see myself through the liquescent lens of a cinematic time-lapse. An animated polyhedron that rapidly and continuously changes the number and angle of its faces is an object of no identifiable shape. A man, viewed in the aggregate, is something similarly ungraspable and vertiginously elusive: an iridescent whorl of oil in a puddle, the outlines of foam raised by an oar, the patch of condensated breath on a cold window pane that quickly and irregularly contracts to a point and is gone. |