'Not All People Exist In The Same Now...' (For Brother Brian) Poem by Dónall Dempsey

***

His world was a world of electricity and circuits and whatnot....mine was of books and study. Work being scarce in Ireland he came to London to be with me....work was just as scarce in London and so he went back...not realising he was about to step into the job that was to last over 20 years.

He could soak up my world of Eliot and Hamlet and Block but his world was beyond my ken. He would pick up little nuggets of knowledge such as the Block quote and then laugh and apply it to all and every situation.

Little did I think that I would be applying it to his death as a means to understand how my brother can be dead and alive to me at the same time. He and I both living in different NOWS.

Grief is a process and I am lost in a maze of pain desperately trying to find a way out.

***
'Not all people exist in the same Now.'

Ernest Bloch in his 1935 Heritage of our Times(Erbschaft dieser Zeit) .

'Not all people exist in the same Now. They do so only externally, by virtue of the fact that they may all be seen today. But that does not mean that they are living at the same time with others. Rather, they carry earlier things with them, things which are intricately involved. One has one's times according to where one stands corporeally... times older than the present continue to effect older strata; here it is easy to return or dream one's way back to older times...in general, different years resound in the one that has just been recorded and prevails. Moreover, they do not emerge in a hidden way as previously but rather, they contradict the Now in a very peculiar way, awry, from the rear. ..many earlier forces, from quite a different Below, are beginning to slip between.'