Late this last Saturday afternoon -– picking up more or less where the most recent entry ended -– I rendezvoused with my friend Bill at Government Center Plaza in Boston, a strange, sprawling urban landscape of brick and poured concrete. Not exactly a friendly expanse of real estate, not one that encourages folks to settle down, enjoy the sun, maybe toss around a frisbee. It's a major point of transit, however, situated between Quincy Market, Courthouse Square and the intersection of Cambridge, Tremont and Court Streets, containing the Government Station T stop and City Hall, a strange, massive, poured-concrete, er, thingie.
We hooked up just before four o'clock on a breezy, sunlit afternoon, the air feeling cool, the light looking the way it does as August gives way to September and the New England autumn. Bill suggested a jaunt down Newbury Street way, leading us to head along Tremont Street to the Common where we cut through to the Public Gardens and the near end of our destination. I can't explain exactly why, but this visit had the feel of a valedictory tour kind of thing, a sensation that peaked during my hours in Bill's company, when I found myself inundated with 20 years worth of memories seemingly everywhere we went. There are those in the current world of physics who posit that each passing moment spins off an endless array of alternate or probable realities and, beyond that, that linear time is a construct that doesn't actually exist, is solely a function of these physical mechanisms of ours which are wired to experience existence in linear fashion. All there is, if one accepts this line of thinking, is the present moment, and everything that we perceive and consider to be past or future is actually unfolding simultaneously, in infinite variation.
So I'm ambling through Boston, being bombarded with memories of past moments. Of people who passed through my life (friends, lovers, acquaintances both brief and longer-term), of past situations and happenings, both routine and extraordinary, and I swear it began to seem like I could feel the vivid closeness of other moments in time around me, vivid and vital enough that I could believe they were truly taking place, that if I could just adjust my frequency in the matrix of existence I'd be able to slip into them, watch them unreel around me.
Blah blah blah.
I hadn't been on Newbury Street in some time, two or three years minimum -- felt mighty interesting to be walking along its sidewalks with all this memory hooha going on. On the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, no less, crowds of people out shopping, walking, enjoying the afternoon, sitting at wildly overpriced sidewalk cafes watching the passing throngs watch them as they milled past.