Heidegger says:
As something fateful, Being itself is inherently eschatological.
I can’t yet wrap my head around Martin Heidegger. But what I can imagine, just whimsically from an eschatological notion of Being is a prominence, and pervasiveness, of harbingers. Any historical instant is a rich harbinger of all to come. The foreboding I can project into this or that image in my head is a true foreboding, intricately tied to unfolding salvation and destruction.
For this story’s incident, a literal sign I saw a year ago in Costa Rica comes to mind. It was small and wooden, and said in bright colors, “La Vida es Una Ola!” Life is a wave. It was my first exposure to international surfer culture and its tranquility, and I felt the statement to be deceptively brilliant.
The sign was posted by a pristine beach with perfect surf and regular dolphins. Residents of the beach surfed, ate mangoes, had love affairs, and watched the sunset until they grew old and their skin turned to leather. The waves were fleeting but always kept coming. Life dissipates, coalesces, swells, crashes, ad infinitum barring the forces of erosion. It’s an inspirational mantra; potentially nauseating.
I remembered that original beach when I woke up on the Paia beach the morning after sex and adventure. The air was cold and the clouds were pink with sunrise. It was my first night spent on a tropical beach. Silly palm trees flapped in the fresh breeze and a humpback whale breached near the horizon. My New Age Hippie crystal lay buried off to my left, forgotten somewhere in the sand. Ronnie wandered up and down the beach, working up heat. A sequence of bubbles was popping in my head which would lead, a few weeks later, to outright abandonment of the bohemian ethic, new clothes, a car purchase, and job applications. That sunrise, however, I merely pondered how many times in life I would wake up feeling strange and far from home, and how many decades could be spent roaming aimlessly through paradises.
(go to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)
Wednesday March 19th 2008, 4:54 am
Leave a comment
I know. But on the other hand, it’s simple: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, then a giant gap, then Part 4.
Comment by Luki 03.22.08 @ 1:16 amLeave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
The timing of all this is getting confusing…
Comment by weronika 03.21.08 @ 7:57 pm