Any voyage against time is going to be at least a bit against the current. It tends to be unidirectional, and the rare instances of analepsis are marked due to their rarity. We plumb memory for a living, nostalgia is our stock-in-trade. Those who speak brightly about the future and what it holds are simply espousing a nostalgia for when anyone could posit that that was objectively true. Any rosy future is imagined and must be fought into being. But that’s all pretty obvious.
Feli is no idealist, not really. He wants what’s best, sure, but dealing in counterfactuals is bad praxis, and gets us no closer to our goals. On a not unrelated note, he is generally pragmatic about his abilities, and seems unlikely to take up a fight that there is not a strong chance he’ll win, or else one in which he’ll at least accomplish something of value in not prevailing. So it is with this in mind that we refer to his opposition to time as a voyage rather than a fight, because that would be a losing fight, and a voyage, while ultimately concerned with its destination, has perhaps a wider range of possible outcomes. The stream of time in some ways is simplified in this operation: wake up at whatever hour is necessary to meet the vehicle or eat (the order there shifts back and forth, bobbing along in the current), try not to actively obstruct the next series of marker buoys, which include arrival at the venue, the dreaded whirlpool of sound check, set time, load out, entering the vehicle, awaiting the current to wrap back around to the beginning. The whole concept of “flat circle” begins to make more and more sense. The thing that will get you, in any scenario, is thinking you are the arbiter of what matters. I desperately wanted to write “is thinking that any of this matters,” but I did not, and I stand by it.
But you see, on his voyage, Feli is adaptable. He does not seek to be the arbiter of what matters, unless he is asked, and then he will, well, arbit. He understands ballast, and that the ship is only as strong as any individual set of planks along its hull, but there are intervals in which weight is useful and others when it has to go. The temptation, of course, is to jettison everything, stop by stop, down to a man, and that man would be Feli, piloting the van into a drum clinic when previously was booked a cabaret tent revival. Furey might be there as well, especially if it happens to be a weekend, but that’s it.
There are storms at sea in Feli’s voyage against time, and one can cling to the mast of anger or climb up to the crow’s nest of bemusement, seeing no land further ahead, only different, separate seas. The voyage continues at home, at work, until death, and maybe afterwards as well. But remember, this voyage is against time, it attempts to cut a new path across the currents, it ignores the trade winds and carves its own eddies, it is innovative and amazed, and luxuriates in its amazement, drinking it in.
But the last thing about the voyage is that it is not Sisyphean, because its captain understands failure and is willing to reset the terms of success. He cares as much as is solicited from him or allowed of him. And we are all rearranging the deck chairs while he is at the helm.
