BOY AND MAN (THE ROLLING NUMBERS)

BOY AND MAN ( THE ROLLING NUMBERS)
　
I had visualised a procession of numbers and they were all allotted a brown, blue or dull opal colour.
They rolled up and back down in my mind’s eye if I wished to reckon upon their interrelated proportions or to consider how rapid or how slow they progressed. They kept their vague and watery conservative colours and had distinct and individual personalities. Quite simply these numbers represented human age, my own as it was and as it would be. This conceptualisation was composed and meditated upon regularly from the onset of my having grasped numerical guile. I knew a kaleidoscope of associations for each year old that was and I succumb to particular prejudices where the concluding of decades was concerned . The post war world indoctrinated me as well as consciously tutored me to understand exactly what was meant by being at what time of life and apprised me of the widely accepted and well established prohibitions and prescriptions that one ought recognise as obligatory guidance in youth as well as maturity. I frequently drew comfort upon considering that save falling an ill fait, a far larger proportion of my time was to come than was spent. I made constant references to characters whether barflies or barristers in their being so many times my age and still in their prime so as to celebrate my own abundant future. Or I would take to shaping justifications to see no hurry for accomplishments by squinting in summer fields at the rolling numbers and relishing that the coalman was so many times the day or that I would only be finishing school when this eternity of life so far expired had laboured on to have merely doubled. I am now ten times the age I was when I began to watch and review and speculate upon and analyse the rolling numbers. I can still see them today but they are weary spectres and have many omissions in their entirety of form as they stagger back and fourth at my whim. A life of eschewing counting them, has thinned and dulled my memory and image of their forma potency into an incomplete parade of lame icons. But though the appearance of each one has declined as a result of a tiring brain’s recall , a far greater weakening and diluting force has been more primarily active in rendering them into their current form. Today they represent at the very least half spent and more likely a life mostly spent. So the ambiguous measures of months, days and decades which I enjoyed as a child are now without mystery , defined, and I know those measures. I am driven harder to look further and find comparisons to make my mortality seem an enviable one. In truth I did not believe as a boy that this day would come. I am unchanged in every way that could possibly be of currency or worth from boy to man. I view the world exactly as I did right or wrong. I have the same thoughts, imaginings, theories and contemplations and I feel a replica of feelings likewise. All that has altered in me is that which the clocks of circumstance have demanded and the governing bodies have ordered. If I relate or gesture in a different way, it is owed to the steering of etiquette, customs and the pulls of each transient societal notion of that which is and is not savoury. If my aspirations have evolved or mutated into a different kidney I have done it to placate the sea of those who know best. I am the boy even as the man. Many try to define past, present and future. This is not one such attempt, this is not the science of past, present and future so much as the feeling of each of ,and all of the three immersed within me. There is never present ever. There is only past and future. The past is not real (remember just feeling) and even if it were real it struggles so ineffectively to be relevant. The future is of the ultimate importance and is tantamount to my precious and hallowed life. The rolling numbers are but one of many of the visualised reckonings of infancy in my case. I do not say that they tune me with reality now or then, but they are cognitions which when reflected upon sober me to my unadulterated , unadorned and unconfused self. The nouns that named the fundamental household objects in my early childhood have allotted colours just the same and even many adjectives too. I approach my forty-first year now and muse for hypnotic calm and peace in my free time along those numeric zany ghosts having to believe that the ones who represent the years yet to come are plentiful. If they are not I generally console myself by settling upon specific numbers whose colours mark life already lived and who each compensate for having lost this forma ambiguity by reminding me of the halcyon autumns and the unprecedented avenues of endeavour that have been my story.
　
　
TIM SANSOM 15 TH JANUARY 2005