Intercalation

Feyerabend lets appendices interrupt the order of his paragraphs in Against Method, at least as I remember. As though the end of the book divided itself in the book; as though it was by intercalation that the end would come, not at once. And I think of the author who points out that the apocalypse has already happened, or the other who remembers a commentator say ‘The Messiah is perhaps I’ and then comments in turn, ‘Anyone might be the Messiah – must be he, is not he.’

Anyone, everyone, and the end of times is here – the Now of the Messiah is every instant, any instant. The end is here; it’s already happened, and who noticed? The Now slipped incognito away with all the others. It’s already happened, and you’re too late. Recall that strange Ray Bradbury story about the astronauts who arrive on a planet to find the crucifixion had just happened – and then to another planet, where it had happened there, even more recently. Until all their voyaging is an attempt to reach the Now of its occurrence.

Perhaps there is an experience with which we cannot quite coincide, and that we cannot be said to undergo. Where does it happen, then? – and to whom? It’s just upstream of us, slightly higher up. Close, but also away, where experience happens to itself and what we live downstream is only a portion of its greater happening.