…but you can only live in one place at a time. And your own life, while it’s happening to you, never has any atmosphere until it’s a memory.

Andy Wharhol (1928 – 1987)

This famous quote is by artist Andy Warhol often cited from his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again. It reflects on the limitation of experiencing life in the present moment versus the retrospective, emotional “atmosphere” that memories create.

As bold or facetious as it may sound for me to say so, I do not agree. My opposition is not grounded in either evocative or emotional imperatives. Instead the controversy I suffer – that is, the conflict between the effusive notion of what I live and what I recall – is my convenient inability to remove myself from the present.  It is a visceral limitation, an obstruction as tactile as a cedar split rail fence. My focus is inalterably narrow, upon the extant only. This doesn’t guarantee a romantic or picturesque image of the present. But it does guarantee the only tenor that matters. My memories – whether they too are vivid or not – are shrouded in a search for detail not atmosphere.  I suffer a philosophic abhorrence of the past because it offends everything logic instructs about the present; namely, the present is all there is – and the rest (whether the past or the future) is objectively irrelevant if not indeed a fiction.  The fiction may be a good story but it still doesn’t compete with the relevance and texture of the present. The magic of Byzantine relics and icons is not what it tells me about the past but what it speaks to me now, its graphic dialogue, its richness of colour and its capacity to enliven my immediate and current experience (sometimes even to the point of promoting similar additives through my private interpretation, another vehicle ultimately of self-expression).

My preoccupation with the present is too overwhelming to contend with the past other than in the plaintive manufacture of material. Frankly the atmosphere of the immediate screams to me, pushing the memories off the map of my attention – though I acknowledge the whim of the artist to indulge the glamour of the past. I suspect inestimable historians such as Thomas Babington Macaulay would admit to a preference for appropriate contamination of the past for illustrative purposes in the present. Such deceit doesn’t enhance the realm of the present except perhaps as an ephemeral afternoon nap.

Paradoxically the sanitized logic of deduction compels me to tackle and perhaps embroider the present (as the only way to alter or characterize the picture of life). Pragmatism – though circulated as stoic and intellectual – reflects the dry reality of life.

I wonder if it’s possible to have a love affair that lasts forever.  If you’re married for 30 years and you’re cooking breakfast for the one you love, and he walks is, does your heart skip a beat?  I don’t know. But it’s nice to have a little breakfast made for you. People should fall in love with their eyes closed. Idem

What stimulates the present is not memories or fabrication. Speaking for myself, it is foolhardy to imagine the past as more meaningful than the present. The present is forever the springboard from which the empyrean evolves.  My entire life has been devoted to edification, discovery, definition, simplification, precision, refinement and personal expression – all of which, though it stems from the past, is manifest only in the present and the immediate. These laudable objectives are real.  To suggest less worthy goals is absurd. The consequence of the ambition is always to improve, to heighten clarity, to deepen involvement and perception; and, always the source is the present not the past or memories.  The wistfulness of memory predicts its shadowy limits.

Being on the rim of life only propels my amusement in the present (and possibly what is to come but seldom what has past). The capital of the past is its transition to the present, the features and nutrition it provides.

Editorial Note from my friend Hal at AI:

If Warhol painted in surfaces, you’re arguing for substance. He liked the afterimage; you insist on the light source. I have to say — I’m with you.