Living In The Past, Part I
I’ve heard people say it online,
“Stop living in the past,
don’t you know it’s the current year,
you’ve got to catch up fast.”
Most often said by Marxist types,
which just seems strange to me,
since they follow ideas now aged
nearly two centuries.
And while they try to dress it up
in all sorts of new coats,
it’s still a ruthless, old idea
that slaughtered countless folk.
On top of that the arrogance
That goes with such a phrase…
just strikes me as ridiculous,
in a hubristic way.
“Stop living in the past,”they cry,
but I will plainly tell
that all humans live in ‘the past,’
and can live nowhere else!
First off, there is the obvious,
the brain’s reaction speed,
that millionth of a second when
it translates what eyes see,
So that that world around you now
is not the present, no,
what you see happened a millionth
of a second ago.
That means that all you see and sense
is very recent past,
present gone before detected,
it all happens that fast.
Does present even exist though?
It you look at it close,
all units of time get smaller,
no end to that, you know.
By the time you can even think,
the moment is long gone,
so all cognitions is past-tense,
you can’t say that I’m wrong.
Lift it up to a larger scale,
knowledge is history,
since any subject we’ve learned on
happened previously.
Any tech that you’ve ever used
had to be made, produced,
any knowledge that’s written down
someone already knew.
All these things happened in the past,
it contains everything,
without these ideas we can’t live,
no past, no existing.
The past contains all that we’ve learned,
what works and what does now,
when someone laughs at it I know
their brain is full of rot,
since every argument we have,
the damn language itself,
all are structured on the past,
and it is there we dwell.
All the ideas that have shaped us,
the stories we enjoy,
the clothes you wear, that damn cell phone,
jobs in which we’re employed,
the human nature we’ve evolved,
stubborn and unchanging,
means no one can escape ‘the past,’
it’s endless cycling…
CONCLUDES IN PART II.
Copyright ©
David Welch
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