Iain Atkinson

Suppose this sentence were the very beginning of thought. I have just returned from Tesco, and I have maybe another 15 minutes of my boy napping before I have to get on with my day. I hear him stirring at the sound of my fingers typing, I try to subdue my fingers’ movement by anchoring my attention into the present moment.

I want to write about this very present moment. I want to write out of and as this moment. This historical moment sees a deepening of human attention to “the” present moment. There is everywhere a worship of “now”. I feel in the air around me the historical moment, and I try to attend within that to the essential moment. Now is not only 2023, now is not only my arrival home from Tesco, now is felt as a stripping back of identification to reveal a fecund territory of creation creating which I innately and happily call Eden. So in this historical moment there is a revelation of the eternal present, Eden. 

This historical moment is at the waning of modernity. Note that “modern” comes from the Latin meaning “now”. A whole historical epoch has felt itself to be the thinking of “now”. Indeed, it has been. How can we remove that accolade from its self-conception? 

Now there is emerging a historical moment of post-modernity, which would literally be “after now”. So let’s think this emergence as “after-now”. Let’s think this now as after-now. After now there will continue to emerge a thinking after modernity. This moment is creative of that moment. I am thinking after now. I am thinking a future that is a result of this present moment. 

Here we are at the very beginning. The eternally present moment is the very beginning. We are this moment, the beginning. Tune in with me to these words. Yes I know the feeling of their being nonsense. Yes I know the ‘what is he on about?’ sensation. To “tune in” is to kind of ignore those thoughts. It’s to feel that the writer has as little “knowledge” of what is being said and meant as you the reader do. The sense of what is said and meant is here on the page for neither of us to know. These words flow by like water in a river. You can walk upstream to the spring, but you can wonder in baffled amazement at the feeling that you will never know exactly whence these particles of water came, or where they will go.

You can’t step in the same river twice. And you can step in the same river twice. Consider these words as the river. Now consider yourself as this river. So you consider yourself as that same river that any other reader would be, and as indeed the writer is too. Feel your mind to be locked into these words, not flitting off into the thought “I don’t know what this means”. Of course you don’t know what it means. Neither do I. Who cares if you don’t know what it means.

When I show people my writing and receive the response “I am not sure if I understood it all”, I am baffled. If you are not sure you understood, are you not rather sure that you didn’t understand? And if you didn’t understand some part, can you not conclude that you did not understand the whole? A good response would be: “what lovely writing, I understood none of it!”. 

“I understand” would mean “I already translated your attempt at novel thought back into the same old thoughts I already have”. It would mean “your thinking did nothing to me, didn’t move me deeply”. 

So let’s begin. Here we are trying to think. University degrees tried and failed, a thousand books digested and shat out. A million tweets and photos and boring conversations later – let’s think.

What is this thought? It is the thought that we are, and the thought that we should find and state what we are. I should cajole you into the thought, and you should shake me back and challenge me to state better what I mean. We should all think. We should find and express what we are.

I feel such a joy in the sense of the embodied and dynamic connection between us. I breathe and feel my inner body, I feel the weight of my chest, I feel my hands type. I intend words to appear here on google docs, and bam here they are. They are saved and transported – I glance up at google saying “saving” – and then after God knows what happens you read them, whoever you are, and they affect you God knows how. How could I have any intention regarding how they affect you? I might feel that it’s because I imagine you to be me, to be “fundamentally similar to me”, although I “don’t know what that means”. I’d rather say I feel that you are me. So I write to me. Hello me, here’s what I have to say.

Am I who write the me to whom I write? Do I write to I, or to myself? Are me, myself, and I related, and how? That’s a question for me to answer, not you, stupid! Let me tell you whether I am myself or not.

I had a dream once that I was sat with me and myself. I (not in the dream, in “reality”) had fallen asleep while attempting mental quiet. Now I, (in the dream) was quiet, while “me” was chatting away frantically. I grew tired of listening to me, and glanced at myself, who looked back at me – at I – knowingly, rolled his eyes, and gestured at me – at me, the one talking – as if to say “this guy!”. It’s the only time I recall ever having woken up laughing.

Only I can tell you whether I am me or myself or indeed I. But you are also me, so why can’t you answer whether you are I. You may say “no, I am not you”. 

OK my 15 minutes are over.