Beyond Belief by John Koethe

Author:John Koethe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

AMNESIA FOR THE FUTURE

I don’t remember what it was supposed to be like,

Except that it was going to be open. There weren’t any details,

Beyond the ones so clichéd they carried you along through

Everyday daydreams—a new car or turntable, travel, accolades—

But that was part of the fun, the fun of something new.

And now it’s the same thing every day, the same imagination,

The same imagery. I can’t even talk about what’s happening now,

Although I’d like to, because nothing’s going to happen next.

I’d like to sum things up, and yet there’s no totality without a future

To contain it, and no future without those individual lives that make it up.

They used to be like diaries or minor novels, histories of themselves

That wrote their stories as they went along, then told them to themselves:

Alone, yet always on the way to somewhere else, an unfamiliar place

Where others made up stories of their own that were essentially the same.

There’s no place left to go now, no vantage point a life in progress

Might aspire to, to try to rest and understand itself, and then try to explain.

There’s only life at home, where every future is the same one you

Wake up to, and experience and its explanation are the same.

My world is a receding world. I suppose it’s coming back

Eventually, but whether there’ll be time enough to bridge the gulf

Between a life and everything it promises is anybody’s guess.

What Wordsworth called “the wonder of disappointment”

Is a kind of consolation that the future offers while those promises

Abide unkept, as though the fact of their existence were enough.

I don’t want to make too much of it, but as the days succeed each other

Without comment and their monotone becomes a style of going on,

I keep feeling that in lieu of a conclusion none of this is ever going to end,

With the same perplexities and explanations repeating themselves

Over and over again, on an exponentially diminishing scale.

I wouldn’t even mind it if I understood it or could see the point:

A permanent condition of existence to supplant the old one

Based on progress, or a way of living in the details of each day?

I even like the way the morning starts with reading, which continues

Through the afternoon, and evening ends with my appointment with a record.

But those are merely ways of going along with something I don’t get,

Whose underlying rationale, assuming it even has one, remains opaque.

I wonder if the life I used to have was really all that different.

I like to think it focused on the future, putting off the satisfactions

Of the moment for the sake of something better, but who am I kidding?

I’ve always lived from day to day, and if in retrospect a narrative

Emerged it sprang from wishful thinking and forgetting.

It’s tempting to believe that anything that happens in the world

Or in a newspaper could change your life, for that’s the story from inside.

The truth is that we’re resolute and small, and all this sensitivity

To circumstance is simply self-importance. What difference does it make

If I’m disgruntled with myself? We all have moments when

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