ABOUT TIME
As I was walking down the street one day
A man came up to me and asked me what the time was that was
on my watch, yeah
And I said
Does anybody really know what time it is
I don't
Does anybody really care
care
If so I can't imagine why
about time
We've all got time enough to die
Oh no, no
(“Chicago”, formerly “Chicago Transit Authority”)
How much time is left? When will it end? How much do I have left?
These questions have plagued humankind since the beginning of time. At the end of time they may still not have answers.
What is it about the past that that day, that time, is always today, tomorrow always today, yesterday, always yesterday? That we are told the path of time lies in a straight, continuous line? What is it about time? Is this how time works?
Everyone believes in time; but cultures differ on its direction, and whether time actually, forever flows forward. I don’t believe in this version of time since for Emily Dickinson, it seems that time had stopped when she heard a fly buzz. Yes, maybe when she died did Dickinson feel that time stopped. But something tells me that Emily had heard a fly die before she died, the hum never ceasing.., time always stopping for her.
Another poet, this time, a quantum physicists made time stop once when the whole world stop:
The bang is Trinity—the first detonation of a nuclear device, in July, 1945. The name was chosen by Oppenheimer, in tribute to a sonnet by John Donne. (For the complete poem, listen to the agonized aria sung by Oppenheimer in “Doctor Atomic,” John Adams’s 2005 opera.) The explosion, two hours into the film, reaches to the pure core of Nolan’s visual intensity. For once, in the midst of this talkative movie, the chattering dies down. Many observers, including Oppenheimer’s boss, General Leslie R. Groves (Matt Damon), lie flat on the ground. One scientist, confronting the blast, wears sunscreen and shades, as if he were at the beach. All music is finally hushed. The sole sound is human breathing, in and out. The clock counts down; time stops; then comes the flowering of fire. (New York Review of Books)
Dickinson often contemplates the brevity of human existence and its mystery. “Rather than succumbing to despair, however, Dickinson seeks solace in the impermanence of life, finding a sense of beauty and significance in the fleeting moments.
Dickinson’s contemplations on the nature of time and existence led her to a profound understanding that the future is not an abstract concept disconnected from the present but rather a culmination of the “nows” we experience daily.”
From Thomas Oppong, Medium
Time is not so much an experience of life’s movement; but of the movements of the body in life, over one’s life-time. Time doesn’t start existing, being “real,” I don’t think when one is born. Yes, the baby’s breath is now, has just “begun;” but even after growing older there is no awareness of the movement—in time—of the body itself, in other words, no thought, no self-consciousness; in fact, birth, like death, is an absence of consciousness altogether, at least self-consciousness. This doesn’t necessarily mean that there is an end to life itself in the sense that time “stops” when the fly buzzes in your ear. Time never “was” or is always in the past, never dead, Faulkner reminds us. The past outwaits patience, until it dissolves into the present:
“Old Bayard sat for a long time, regarding the stark dissolving apotheosis of his name. Sartoris had deridedTime, but Time was not vindicative, being
longer than Sartorises. And probably unaware of them. But itwas a good gesture, anyway….
Yes it was a good gesture, and old Bayard sat and mused
quietly on the tense he had unwittingly used.
Was.”
The body stops. Growing, thinking, moving, feeling, experiencing sensation in the physicality of the body. When the body stops living, the mind stops thinking, the nose and mouth not breathing. The time that never really was existed only in the reachings of the mind, reminding the body of its, rather ironic, incessant movement, I would guess after even being dead. Odd is the use of the adjective, “dead.” Why does the adjective morph into a state of being, dead? Rather than a verb in the past tense, which seems more logical: She died. He’s dead connotes a present tense: Some-thing still exists, a corpse maybe?
This is what happens when a dream about the future, an experience one has while dreaming becomes reality after the dream. A dream about getting a call from a doctor to come in and be seen takes the shape of a real thing once a call is missed on your cell phone. Is this just an intuition, a mere coincidence, or something else? Like a small prophecy that manifests itself in a different reality of time, one where the presence of the “now” in a dream becomes an actuality in another “now” in the movement of the body in the present and the future that makes the dream come true, an actual call from the doctor’s office. In our cultures, it’s called premonition. In others, a form of time-travel.
So, why is it that we are so afraid of how much time is “left” before time expires and we die.? In the expression “we never know how much time we have left,” left meaning that our time that the time that came before has “come and gone,” expired into the past. The problem is that the past is never dead. It’s not even past. So, again, the question of how much is “left” is itself misplaced.
Whatever time we “had” at the start of our life never “left,” because the past is never dead, that time is still with us, today, in our consciousness and in the thoughts in our memory. Time is not “real” in the sense that past time is not past. It is today still stuck in the past because time doesn’t move, propel forward.
For J.K. (Jiddu Krishnamurti), thought is the past—memory— and time is past projected into the future. And life is one single eternal movement in the {bodily} present.
“So it’s now all done, all finished, he thought quietly, sitting in the dense shadow of the shrubbery, hearing the last stroke of the far clock cease and die away. It was a spot where he had overtaken her, found her on one of the wild night two years ago. But that was in another time, another life. Now it was still, quiet, the fecund earth now coolly suspirant. The dark was filled with the voices, myriad, out of all time that he had known, as though all the past was a flat pattern. And going on tomorrow night, all the tomorrows, to be a part of the flat pattern, going on. He thought of that with quiet astonishment: going on, myriad, familiar, since all that had ever been was the same as all that was to be, since tomorrow-to-be and had-been would be the same. Then it was time.
From Light in August
Time stays still; time doesn’t move. Only the body that mimics its encapsulation actually moves from space to space, evolves in physicality. It’s not that time’s moving. In that stillness, the past doesn’t “repeat.” It remains the same in the days of yester-day , the days of today, the days of tomorrow. I change because my body changes, its movement deteriorating as the body “ages.” But the body does not “age.” It wears as clothes wear on a body. Time does not enfold the body; the whole body enfolds its brain and mind, all together enfolding time. The body dies, and time dies with it in the sense that time exists only in the body as a mirror of the body’s movement in time, and over-time. Its goings on continuing on tomorrow night, all the tomorrows. Continuing in the sense that time remains the same; it’s consistently here in the thoughts of today and the memories of yesterday, memories that could not exist in the absence of the mind-body.
Imagined time is void of any movement, the past never dead, because the past was never….was.
Time leaves the body when the body dies. Time lives only in a live body.
If one “buys” any of the above, allowing an idiosyncratic idea as somewhat comprehensible, then why? Why have time at all? Other than as a means of ordering society as the universe and planets order themselves in a cause unknown. The passage of time, thus, is a metaphor. A useful metaphor in that allowing for its construction throughout the “ages,” we are mindful, aware, of the body-in-the world as observers of our minds that trick us into believing we can improve ourselves, indeed the world, with time. With time on our side, we can achieve perfection, indeed a perfect life lived eternal. This is an allusion. We are already “perfect,” because our state of evolution was perfect from the beginning, a moving river, an eagle’s flight that leaves no mark..
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with god, and the Word was god. Time was a word, a word made perfect for the beginning, only to later deceive as it misled the world into believing that it can improve itself, become a perfect measure of the spinning orbit of the world. Left alone, the imperfections of nature are, themselves, nature made perfect, already bring like gods. The flight of the eagle leaves no path.
