Proust was only half right. Its just bad form to quote oneself.

Am feeling the pressure of concocting a learned response.

Instead, thinking of Proust when he said about the quotes of others: “they are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.”

So, here’s Michael Schumaker (not the driver) from a recent email exchange:

“I think one alternative way to consider ‘experience’ in the context of presence is to consider everyone present at a given event and their awareness, or not, of presence. For me, ‘becoming’ begins when I remember that nothing but my presence in the never ending present moment is new.”

Here’s something I wrote a while back:

“The presence of remembering is elastic. It ‘swells and grows with the flow of becoming’ (Olkowski, 1999 p.110) and is answerable to the present. Remembering reverberates at all levels and in all actions, and yet its presence shifts between the past and the present, between memory and perception, between being and becoming.”

I agree with your skepticism re “the idea of a singularity”. But I like the resolve or desire for newness … as long as does not cost one’s awareness of listening.

Oh – and your writing reminded me of Andrew Morrish’s tendency to remark about audiences being one’s friend. Not sure how.