In Time or On Time?

Last night I went to an early evening lecture at the University - Art & Science were up for discussion in  the Archway Four lecture theatre. . . Afterwards, friend Jenny and I went on to Eureka Cafe for Laksa, cider and scrumptious conversation. We inevitably got talking about books; Jenny asked me if there are any books on my shelves that I read - or re-read - regularly. Well, yes! Im sure we all have a handful that fall under this umbrella? Amongst mine are The Four Wise Men by Michel Tournier (pretty much an annual read since December 1984) and, too, evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis's What Is Life? (with chapter titles like 'The Autopoietic Planet', 'Cosmic Wiggles', 'Living Carpets and Growing Stones', 'Kissing Molds and Destroying Angels', 'Hitchhiking Fungi' and 'Underbelly of The Biosphere', you will understand my saying I take this book to bed with me often; I have (blush-blush) even been known to tuck it under my pillow pre-sleep?! Lynn Margulis co-authored this volume of reflective essays with her son, Dorion Sagan - son of Carl). Another book I read regularly is Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman. . .   

"Suppose time is a circle bending back on itself. The world repeats itself , precisely, endlessly. For the most part, people do not know that they will live their lives over...'' (pg 8)

"There is a place where time stands still. Raindrops hang motionless in air. Pendulums of clocks float mid-swing. Dogs raise their muzzles in silent howls..."  (pg 70)

"A mushy brown peach is lifted from the garbage and placed on the table to pinken. It pinkens, it turns hard, it is carried in a shopping sack to the grocer's, put on a shelf, removed and crated, returned to the tree with pink blossoms. In this world, time flows backwards... " (pg 102) 

These are various lines that open the succinct, time-defining (time-questioning) chapters in Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman.

One of the insistent global themes at the moment is 'living in the present.' The ideal is that by living in the present, one can still assimilate and integrate the past (without getting stuck there) and trust that - with a healthy dollop of proactivity on our parts - the future will unfold as it must. Lightman addresses time from a number of different angles. In each chapter, time is introduced as a unique concept with a peculiarly different set of characteristics. In one chapter, time is a sense. In another, a memory. He wanders and muses, opening the subject up rather than drawing any conclusions. 

I consider time a gift, not a commodity and yet, we think (in our so-called civilized communities) that we can trade it, save it, promote it, bottle it, consume it... Not so! I read somewhere that 'time' is one of the most frequently used words in the English language. It is also one of the most elusive and un-pin-down-able of subjects. This is one of my favourite excerpts from Lightman's book -

"In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time. The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along.

Many are convinced that mechanical time does not exist. When they pass the giant clock on the Kramgasse they do not see it; nor do they hear its chimes while sending packages on Postgasse or strolling between flowers on the Rosengarten. They wear watches on their wrists, but only as ornaments or as courtesies to those who would give timepieces as gifts. They do not keep clocks in their houses. Instead they listen to their heartbeats. They feel the rhythm of their moods and desires. Such people eat when they are hungry, go to their jobs at the millinery or chemist's whenever they wake from their sleep, make love all hours of the day. Such people laugh at the thought of mechanical time. They know that time struggles forward with a weight on its back when they are rushing an injured child to the hospital or bearing the gaze of a neighbour wronged. And they know too that time darts across the field of vision when they are eating well with friends or receiving praise or lying in the arms of a secret lover. 

Then there are those who think their bodies don't exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o'clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock. They make love between eight and ten at night. They work forty hours a week, read the Sunday paper on Sunday, play chess on Tuesday nights. When their stomach growls, they look at their watch to see if it is time to eat. When they begin to lose themselves in a concert, they look at the clock above the stage to see when it will be time to go home. They know that the body is not a thing of wild magic, but a collection of chemicals, tissues, and nerve impulses. Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain. Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings. Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum. In short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock. As such, the body must be addressed in the language of physics. And if the body speaks, it is speaking only of so many levers and forces. The body is a thing to be ordered, not obeyed.

"Taking the night air along the river Aare, one sees evidence for two worlds in one. A boatman gauges his position on the dark but counting seconds drifted in the water's current. 'One, three metres. Two, six metres. Three, nine metres.' His voice cuts through the black in clean and certain syllables. Beneath a lamppost on the Nydegg Bridge, two brothers who have not seen each other for a year stand and drink and laugh. The bell of St. Vincent's cathedral sings ten times. In seconds, lights in the apartments lining Schifflaube wink out, in a perfect mechanized response, like the deductions of Euclid's geometry. Lying on the riverbank, two lovers look up lazily, awakened from a timeless sleep by the distant church bells, surprised to find that the night has come.

Where the two times meet, desperation. Where the two times go their separate ways, contentment. For, miraculously, a barrister, a nurse, a baker can make a world in either time, but not in both times. Each time is true, but the truths are not the same."

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Time and Truth. Endlessly fascinating subjects. . .

I can't help wondering whether there mightn't be two primary prompts - interchangeable and essential - when it comes to our relationship with time: (1) time awareness that acknowledges responsibility to self and one's own rhythms and truth, and (2) time responsiveness that takes into account one's place within the community - i.e. in relationship with others?

Seems to me, it makes sense we pay equal attention to both these calls, since the neglect of either surely serves neither the group nor the individual well? As for the elusive 'still point' . . .  the 'still point' is, I think, where we find equilibrium - of self, as well as in relation to the call to link in more effectively with others. Few things take the path of a simple straight line, though, do they? (Or do they?) 


My tussles with these themes are very much in evidence on this here blog! And yes, there are A Lot of words here today - I hope not too many. ; ) Ta ra.

Not Rebelling To Agitate Trouble But As A Lover of Something Poses Questions ii

Oil on paper - CB

from Questions of Balance series 2009

We and many other animals

". . . We and many other animals sleep and wake in cycles that repeat every twenty-four hours. Some ocean protists, dinomastigotes, luminesce when dusk comes, ceasing two hours later. So hooked are they into the cosmic rhythm of Earth that even back in the laboratory, away from the sea, they know the sun has set. Many similar examples abound because living matter is not an island but part of the cosmic matter around it, dancing to the beat of the universe.

Life is a material phenomenon so finely tuned and nuanced to its cosmic domicile that the relatively minor shift of angle and temperature change as the tilted Earth moves in its course around the sun is enough to alter life’s mood, to bring on or silence the song of bird, bullfrog, cricket and circada. But the steady background beat of Earth turning and orbiting in its cosmic environment provides more than a metronome for daily and seasonal lives. Larger rhythms, more difficult to discern, can also be heard. . . "

from What is Life?

Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan

Pg. 240 & 241

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Speaking of rhythms, I'm stepping outside my usual ones tomorrow and flying up to Wellington to celebrate my daughter's 25th birthday. . . Joy! I'll stay up there for a week and hope there may be an opportunity to meet one or two of our fellow bloggers (Mary? Tim?) while I'm pottering about in their city.

Alisaundre was all curiosity, knowing and dark, smoky blue eyes when she was born. It's incredible to me that she's turning twenty-five; so much life lived and so much yet to unfold... I was her age when she was born! On Tuesday I'll post a photograph and a poem I wrote for her when she was seven years old and "heaven had a lime-green sky."

XO

Surface stories I

I've just been listening to the news and am sitting now with a tight throat and a knot in my solar plexus.

Our world's airwaves are clogged with stories of war, incest, murder, Facebook deviants, paedophilia - and, of course, the devastating oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. This man-made disaster has all the toxicity and virulence of a very black plague; its full reach and impact, quite beyond our imagination.

This morning it was confirmed that the oil has entered the current we have all so hoped it would not, and is drifting North towards Florida Keys - oh god, no. What have we done? What of the manatees? And the turtles? And the corals and fish and anemones and plankton and brine shrimp and foraminifera... What of the birds? And the fragile communities of plants and animals living on the intertidal zone and all along those shores? I feel deeply, ongoingly shaken by our appalling capacity for willful devastation. Such glorious creatures we can be; so tender, fierce for love, compassionate, attentive, courageous and nurturing. But oh, how blithely we underestimate our shadow, our inbuilt propensity for blindness, self-delusion, mindless, large-scale destruction. What irreparable havoc we are capable of unleashing.

W. B. Yeats's poem is stampeding around inside my chest ---

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned. . .

In What is Life? - a book I tend to carry around with me - Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan write -  

". . . We and many other animals sleep and wake in cycles that repeat every twenty-four hours. Some ocean protists, dinomastigotes, luminesce when dusk comes, ceasing two hours later. So hooked are they into the cosmic rhythm of the Earth that even back in the laboratory, away from the sea, they know the sun has set. Many similar examples abound because living matter is not an island but part of the cosmic matter around it, dancing to the beat of the universe.

Life is a material phenomenon so finely tuned and nuanced to its cosmic domicile that the relatively minor shift of angle and temperature change as the tilted Earth moves in its course around the sun is enough to alter life's mood, to bring on or silence the song of bird, bullfrog, cricket and cicada. But the steady background beat of Earth turning and orbiting in its cosmic environment provides more than a metronome for daily and seasonal lives. Larger rhythms, more difficult to discern, can also be heard. . . " (pg 240)

". . . Knowledge about the varieties of life on Earth - life which, from pond scum to tigress, is connected to us through time and space - serves to inspire. That excess is natural but dangerous we learn from the photosynthetic process of plants. That movement and sensation are thrilling we experience as animals. That water means life and its lack spells tragedy we garner from fungi. That genes are pooled we learn from bacteria. Modern versions of our ancient ancestors, the protoctists, display versions of the urge to couple, and of our capacity to make choices. Humans are not special and independent but part of a continuum of life encircling and embracing the globe. 

Homo sapiens tends to dissipate heat and accelerate organization. Like all other life forms, our kind cannot continue to expand limitlessly. Nor can we continue to destroy the other beings on which we ultimately depend. We must begin to really listen to the rest of life. As just one melody in the living opera we are repetitious and persistent. We may think ourselves creative and original but in those talents we are not alone. Admit it or not, we are only a single theme of the orchestrated life-form. . . " (pg 246)

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As a way of reminding myself to look more closely and listen more attentively, I'm thinking of posting a weekly series of 'mystery images' that shine a light on the surface landscapes of ordinary, every day things. I invite you to join me in this quasi-meditation on our natural world...

Here's the first one -

What do you see?