this morning before work I watched a video that I’d seen logged or listed by a few insane randos I follow on Letterboxd. it’s a video produced by something called “Sound Photosynthesis,” editing together stock/historical footage with a couple recordings of Terence McKenna explaining his “Timewave Zero” theory. according to him, using a software model based on the I Ching (how exactly I don’t know; I’d have to read the book he wrote about it I guess), we can map temporal cycles as a fractal oscillation between various periods of “complexification” and “simplification.” his model, conveniently, predicts that the limit of this oscillation is reached at the birth of the universe and in the year 2012—remember the 2012 phenomenon? how lots of people in the weirdosphere/psychedelia/conspiratainment circles latched on to the fact that the Mayan calendar “ends” in the year 2012?
leaving aside the possibility that in some way the “world” might have “ended” in 2012, the year I graduated college, McKenna posits that time is a kind of spiral fractal approaching a “transcendent object at the end of history.” spiral because as we approach this telos, the chronic tightening compounds the complexity of being, and fractal because patterns repeat at various scales, leading to resonances of similarity across time. McKenna uses the example of Ulysses to demonstrate: how Bloom’s wanderings through Dublin on a random day are somehow cosmic echoes of the wanderings of Odysseus around the Mediterranean over the course of a decade plus.
this is the closest theoretical explanation of some intensely overwhelming experiences (yes, brought on by drugs) where I felt—not conceptualized, not imagined, not speculated—but felt that “I” (the bundle of perceptions and sensations comprising the flimsy construct of my consciousness) am the very tip of all of Time, and within me is the totality of all that had to happen—traumas personal, generational, historical, biological, geological, and cosmic—for this present moment to be as it is now.
periodically, an impulse will have me ruminating on emo music, the genre most suited to adolescent angst. I was lucky enough to be an angsty adolescent when emo gained mainstream popularity back in the mid-aughts. they’ve since made a whole industry out of capitalizing on people my age pining for the days when it was socially appropriate to feel your heartbreak at the volume of a sold-out stadium concert, but you won’t find me ever attending “emo nite” or buying tickets to When We Were Young, the corporate festival where ancient (ie 20 years past their prime) post-hardcore, pop punk and emo bands are wheeled out to perform for crowds of tattooed millennials whose knees will hurt for days after pogoing to “What’s My Age Again?”
nonetheless, the opening chords of “A Decade Under the Influence,” or the album art on Diary by Sunny Day Real Estate, or the 16-minute coda of “Goodbye Sky Harbor” from Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity—these stir up in me a feeling, of being young and in love, of being ignorant of all that I know now, of having possibilities not yet foreclosed upon, of being wide-eyed and eager to embrace life in all its messiness and pain and euphoria. friday night lights are lit over the football stadium, holes are forming at the elbows of a favorite zip up hoodie, and someone told someone else that another person is making out with someone they shouldn’t be behind the auditorium.
if I’m being honest with myself, this is the feeling I’m always trying to recapture. it seems that that former eagerness has been beaten back cowering into a corner. even just reminiscing on the discovery this music online, back when the internet felt like a place of boundless exploration, fills me with nostalgic yearning. how can I face the future squarely, with eager anticipation, as I once did in the past?
I’m not old, and there’s plenty of life, painful messy euphoric life, yet to be embraced. but I’m not quite young either, and not getting any younger, as the old ones say.
more to the point: what’s my age again?