I had a pretty extraordinary week last week — my daughter completed her degree; my son completed his A levels and left school; I held the earliest known coin — made of Electrum in the 6th C BCE — in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford; that same youngest boy-child reached adulthood, and can now vote in the next General Election; and then I flew to Rome to meet an old Australian artist friend for a kaleidoscopic 48 hrs.
Electrum, as the Deputy Keeper of the Coin at the Ashmolean informed me, is a natural alloy of gold and silver, which was being dug up and turned into coins in Lydia (modern-day Turkey) at around the same time the Upanishads were being composed in North-Western India. It’s in the Katha Upanishad that we find some of the first references to yoga as we understand it now, as a kind of well-aligned chariot ride.
Reader, bear with me, there is a point to my Comparative Historical Lecture.
Here I am, behind the camera, four days after my Electrum sighting, gazing in astonishment at the Forum in Rome, and starting to realise that the Foro Romano was being drained, paved and turned into the public meeting place it became, in around the 6th C BCE — the same sort of era as, well, coinage and the Upanishads…
Travelling to Oxford and Rome last week was also about time travelling in my own life, back to Oxford where I started my doctorate in the 1990s, and back to Roma, where I first interrailed alone in the late 1980s, later strolled the streets with the future father of my children; then later still went to the wedding of a dear friend.
No wonder I’ve been feeling a little dizzy and joint-achey of late… The time in Britain, coming up to a vital election, is feeling acutely out of joint, but last week my personal articulation of time and history joined up into a moment of fluency that simply took my breath away.
I don’t mean to write a lecture or prattle on about myself per se — it’s more that my mind has been slightly blown, clean, like an egg. And to blow an egg, you have to pierce it, bottom and top, with a needle.
My own little life has reached a personal historical tipping point: the next generation after me, born from my body, has reached its adulthood (some would point out that I’m old enough for two generations to have elapsed, but I’m going to let that one slide).
And I’ve started to understand, for myself, that the Indic world we all too easily dismiss as 'magical thinking' isn’t somehow 'lost in time', but was growing at the same time as Ancient Rome, and ancient coinage. Those worlds spoke to each other across the Parthian Persian empire. Between the ages of two and six, I lived in Tehran, because my father worked for Shell Oil. I have never been able to return, because of the Iranian Revolution. It is Persia we in the West have folded up and lost sight of, and replaced with a strange blank sticker of Iran as pariah state. But Persia is still there. I was there.
Suddenly the penny has dropped (literally) that seeing time and space as a 'crumpled handkerchief' (a wonderful Michel Serres metaphor I also heard this weekend) is a much richer, more buoyant way of living.
I can feel that my own time has been, for most of my life, a much-crumpled handkerchief, and that now it’s beginning to be possible to unfold it, to see how its creases work.
We are always, of course, in the present — we can’t be anywhere else — and if we are not careful, we can load ourselves down with accumulated weight from the past, that does need shedding, or at least archiving.
But that past is always with us, around us, not necessarily haunting us, but simply available, in all kinds of ways, through artefacts, texts and textiles, living memory, through lightly reliving past stories; and we can at any time walk through accidental doorways into moments of being we never thought could resurface.
I have dreaded this moment of my last child getting ready to become an adult, and it’s been a really hard process, both for him, and watching him accomplish it.
Now I feel that I’ve gone through the eye of the needle — and seen for myself that that unfolding of being will never really end.
All we can do is keep one foot moving in front of the other, as Time passes through us, occasionally piercing us with rapture.
i weirdly wrote about quite a similar thing in my latest piece! also yay moments of being!!!