Equation of Time

? r (S] Q^ & IQ EQUATION OF TIME by Kiffin Rockwell When the magic carpet stops, and starts to fall, when doves before sunrise coo like distant owls, things clear up, time becomes tangible concentrates, is heard and felt. Time's not touched. It's repetition of pulse, breath after breath, and the memory of breath before, heart beat more or less, irreversible periodicity: No sense for time, unless feeling of balance in ear's deaf coil registers a sequence, runs, like a finger over a scar, to recall in the instant now, fear and harmony. 20 Stranger, these words are not for you. This is a note for a man named Alexander, a scholar without pretense, a witty man readier to smile than to spring the jest, a modest, moderate enthusiast; facing the ultimate. A friend. (Before invasion) Edged beside a flow of blinded lorries whose drivers, lightened of shell, rolled north and would not lift a man could they have seen him, all night I walked from Oxford toward Banbury; across an English field in a May dawn came downhill to St. Mary's Farm, my billet; slept, unmissed, unbothered, until noon. (Between victory) June, cold in storm, was heated with alarm. Cramped boredom, a queasy strait, a scramble up sand. Then, when a second weather had blown and gone, over a Norman field I heard a skylark. Before my time in France another soldier not far away, facing my enemy's father, heard and wrote such a songster in a poem, soaring and dipping above his ravaged meadow. And I too, in my time. Such luck is seldom. * * * And what I wrote of facing, is now not so. Unless he be frozen in the least lovely frame. (Liklier far he'd go where mind was aimed.) For soul, whatever it is, is closer to real than fear, pain, or joys that loom and go. Time fixed is eternity, the cadence held. Man is the fact. Some few worth their while. 21 ...