Maggie O'Farrell's brushes with death and the Continuous Present in 'I AM, I AM, I AM'

 

My wife was reading the Maggie O’Farrell book ‘I AM, I AM, I AM’.  Is she a devotee of Nisargadatta Maharaj I asked:

My Guru ordered me to attend to the sense ‘I am’ and to give attention to nothing else. I just obeyed. I did not follow any particular course of breathing, or meditation, or study of scriptures. Whatever happened, I would turn away my attention from it and remain with the sense 'I am'. It may look too simple, even crude. My only reason for doing it was that my Guru told me so. Yet it worked!

Or indeed a follower of Meher Baba whose motto was ‘Be Here Now’.

O’Farrell is in love with the continuous present in which her, all her, books are written.  In my view she wants a cleansing course of the pluperfect to flush it out of her system.  She ought to get in touch with her inner preterite and open up to multiple tenses. Her success as a writer is not affected by the cliche ‘I am now attending with a feverish vividness and ‘grokking on the fullness’. (Kesey also does  time in, in ‘One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’) .  You can’t argue with a Sunday Times best seller which the afore mentioned ‘I am x 3' was.  In that of course the intensity of brushes with death, only 17, focuses the mind wonderfully and the tense conveys that.  These events are like what Wordsworth called ‘spots of time’ that remain undiminished by time.  In O’Farrell’s case they are shrines to mortality where attention is the homage paid to the dark god Thanatos.  She carries to this day the burden of her childhood encephalitis which has left her damaged in her space perception and fine motor skills.  These deficits play a part in those near things that grip you in a suspended unbelief which is irrational as the ‘I am here to tell you’ proof of life of the book testifies.  Will she make it?  Her publicity photos should show her clutching a copy of The Times of the day so we can be sure.

Its a fine book.  The chapter on her daughter who has multiple serious allergies is moving.  As a parent you do not want to outlive your children.  Can I go first please?