Patience by Ray Ogar

>>> COPYRIGHT 2004

Patience is my way to explain the inability to execute a plan of action. Not to dominate, not to destroy, but merely to be released like a beast into the wild of my own imagination. Patience almost connotes obsession with me. Waiting, a guarding, my own pregnant mind—its fertility of ideas softens the covenant my subconscious has made with the god of istantanaity, the digital, the now, now, now. What would Carry Fisher say? “Instant gratification is not fast enough!” I try to squint my eyes at her and her cynicism. This woman who has been rebroadcast over and over because of her role as the holographic princess in a movie made in 1979. In those frames, she existed in a multiplicity of instants, insubstantial and pre-digital, a now-form. This old ideal of herself is currently redirected to millions as a resonating mythological prototype—a she-warrior. She, the passive-aggressive, re-enacts patiently waiting to be rescued.

Patience, from the root word patia, derived from a word meaning to bear pain. To wait, to see, to be healed. To bear conscience to some process of angst. And I suppose I will have to take on several moments of displeasure. If patience is a process, then its opposite, the non-process, the now, the non-patient moment gorger is like a fattened tick or a frog waiting to rupture with 1000s of eggs. Culminating in its own exist-ential moment and time. Like a quantum bottle cork popping to everywhere, at once. Spray white, spew. Relocating tangent strings of fertility and slightly askew replicas of itself. Afterwards the frog is patient. Guarding its hole. Waiting for food to repeat its cycle. And regain some instant that allows it to know reality as a tactile sensation. Patience for us is waiting for a window of time to rub over us so we can run our fingers over the braille of the real. This is an idea actualized, a sexual gratification, or a simple touch of the hand, perhaps some unexpected gesture of kindness. As a pinnacle, patience is always a spark, explosive happenstance that can delight us or tear us into a moment of dead. It cannot be captured and always, patience begets more patience.

We don’t live like vcrs or dvd players. Our minds do, perhaps in some wishful thinking recollection. They have a replay button, which is our memory—of course it is slave to entropy. Patient. Wait. Instant. Occurance. Delight. Joy. Replay. And something new is erased and degraded by the process of recollection. The mind always recalls not in the original manner but into a new slickened, recalibrated, and refreshed format of contemporaneous relevance. Barring cognitive dissonance, memory self-reinforces our own desires, eradicating that patient wait into a cognitive similitude. All things are remembered as if they happened “that way”, we edit out the waiting, the impatience. Memory recalls perfectly what it knows—recast, it is always the patient, scabbing over, waiting to be healed, a victim of the mind’s determined entropy to know now.

Patience is waiting for the picture to fully develop so we can take advantage of its content.