Spinning writes

Does time exist? Apparently not, except as a measurement. Just as the existence, which is accepted use only, of an inch. If you measure from here to here, its an inch. Its also a nanosecond.

I like this, space measured in time scales, a practice usually used by astronomers dealing with vast distances. It makes more sense to talk about the distance from the earth to the nearest star in terms of light years rather than in meters, but really, we “mean” the same thing. Yet this presents a problem: the question of reference. If you wonder at Hubble deepfield images, then what are you really interpreting through the eyes: a paradox, because the object in the image may not even be around, because the time it takes light to travel across a distance measured in, say, a billion light years, will take that much time to reach us. This is a cool element of perception and the time-lag of sight.

Even that red bird at 100m is always ahead of me by just a flash of time, perhaps a nanosecond. Pheneomenologically, therefore, everything is “moving” in a context of light travel.

I’m not intending to be overtly weird or philosophical here. What I’m trying to do is set up a conditional tension between spatial awareness, which, of course, is perfectly real, and temporal awareness, also real, and image (physicality), which may or may not be “present.”

The object, the artifact, in other words, is an anchor, an agent that fixes me in a certain context that I’m bred into. Thus the gang member will disagree with the police cheif’s choice to jail him: I grew up in this space-time/light-time. Don’t toss me in prison: get me out of this “place.”

The house I see, a blue house with a yellow garage door, is fixable. But as I mark it, this blue house with the yellow garage door, we are both moving, even though we’re standing perfectly still. This is a continuous and necessary illusion. Spatially, I’m moving through space against a more distance object, and the earth is spinning, as are the atamic structures which form us: and the string never stop vibrating. Yet my impression of space is “fixed.” I’m not moving. Moreover, in terms of presentness, I never “got” to the position of observation: verbally (a way of alphabetizing memory), I “came to.” That was in “past time,” a lost piece of “progression” or existence, through time (and space). I can only 1) remember my insignificant travel 2) and prove that I “came to” by looking for footsteps in the mud. Thus space, time, and memory become profound at every passing instance.

Conclusion: existence is a constant (not inconstant) act of cognition and memory. Existence is a big and dynamic map I constantly create and draw.

See also Wanderlust for further examination.

We know that the past doesn’t really exist, at least in our ability to experience it as we do “presentness.” Look for it. It’s in the artifacts. The things we make and that “remind.” Can one, by looking at the desert, infer a sense of time? But when we meet an old junker in the woods, something that looks like a Ford, is time set on its course then, created in this situation by an interrupted landscape?

Neha on her old blogger blog had an interesting quote from Saint Augustine and his thoughts on time. The quote comes from The Confessions, Book 11. Augustine writes:

17. There was no time, therefore, when thou [God] hadst not made anything, because thou hadst made time itself. And there are no times that are coeternal with thee, because thou dost abide forever; but if times should abide, they would not be times.

For what is time? Who can easily and briefly explain it? Who can even comprehend it in thought or put the answer into words? Yet is it not true that in conversation we refer to nothing more familiarly or knowingly than time? And surely we understand it when we speak of it; we understand it also when we hear another speak of it.

What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know. Yet I say with confidence that I know that if nothing passed away, there would be no past time; and if nothing were still coming, there would be no future time; and if there were nothing at all, there would be no present time.

But, then, how is it that there are the two times, past and future, when even the past is now no longer and the future is now not yet? But if the present were always present, and did not pass into past time, it obviously would not be time but eternity. If, then, time present–if it be time–comes into existence only because it passes into time past, how can we say that even this is, since the cause of its being is that it will cease to be? Thus, can we not truly say that time is only as it tends toward nonbeing?

Subtly, it seems to me that Augustine links time to space. I don’t mean this in Einstein’s sense of mathematical spime, but in the negotiation of the abstract with spatial surround. Time, whose nature isn’t described as having its own body, its own physicality in other words, is “moving,” “passing,” all qualities of physical bodies. If time passes, it has to pass “somewhere” or through some thing: could be the ether, could be jello. Either that or time “is” simply some aspect of physicality itself, some necessary quality of space, or the material world. For Augustine, time has existence, it’s created, it has different aspects (past time, future time) but that doesn’t explain what it “is” as a phenomenon.

The past is either a physical object (a photograph, a fossil, a building) or it’s created in the form of story, recalled and told. I can tell a story about my grandparents (I’d have to make a lot of it up) but most likely that story will involve journey and struggle. I’ll want to tell where “my people” came from. How we got “here.” The tale is about moving through time. Myth space.

Carlos Fuentes in his novel The Campaign writes that God doesn’t need the Church but the Church needs God.

The universe is a big place. It’s so big and mysterious that the human mind perceives just a tad of it, a mere slice. String Theory claims that our senses only experience a few of its surface dimensions, four of them. Our eyes are trained to see colors and sizes so everything becomes color and size. I see what seems large but proportionally what is it? I’ve always liked those small to large video takes, where we see from space and swoop down to the eye of a frog. Proportion. But it’s not just about proportion. Medieval mystics, such as Hadewijch, who wrote about and gave advise on how to live, had their own way of getting close to the mysteries of the world and explaining them.

When I read about Michael Sheridan’s letter in Colorado Springs concerning Catholic politicians and their votes, I have to snicker (recalling Fuentes) at its cynicism, but it’s a snicker that bugs me, because such an action at this time and in this place seems to me small-minded, foolish, mean, and dismissive of a great tradition of human thinkers and dismissive, ultimately, of human proportion. The universe demands big thoughts, big eyes, big leaps, big telescopes, and small gestures that matter because they’re a piece of that thing which in its whole, even in some of its parts, is too grand and wonderous to understand. Consider the size of a nebula or the power of a black hole or the intricacies of a string. Compared to these hate and ignorance are about as insignificant as it gets.

Prayer in its many forms is a small thing, but it’s still a way of speaking to the Nebula and to those places where the lamps are born.

Wanderlust examines the path here:

An older generation that once succumbed to a frustrated life of duty, repsonsibility, and expectations went on to create children who, a few decades down the road, mirrored their parents. A lawyer’s son is doomed to be a lawyer. I’ve seen the minds of countless children brainwashed by their parents. The windows in their rooms have been boarded and nailed shut, their phone lines disconnected, their T.V. privileges snatched away from them at the beginning of the school year, and the playground declared out of bounds. The Spartan remake begins as early as grade 6 to ward off evil distractions from their life’s goal. The parents goal. It took my brother twelve years to convince my father that he didn’t want to study to be an accountant for the rest of his life.

How can a person break away from a never ending cycle if s/he was born into it? How can a generation or a society be expected to bring about significant progress or change, it the majority of the population is made up of frustrated individuals who, at the end of the day, choose to take the “safe” road home? How is the pull of gold so strong that it causes people to unwittingly and unknowingly hand themselves over as slaves in exchange for a handful of coins? I have tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to wrap my mind around this concept. There has to be more to life than social acceptance and money.

I wonder if it’s profitable to ask the question: why must there be “more than” social acceptance and money. Social acceptance can be rewarding, can it not, and very deep, since part of the social involves relationships, friendships, and enemies? Can we claim that this is a problem with confusing, or often confusing, work with life or working with living. Don’t we often learn that what we’re born into is often just fine unless, of course, that space has been destructive of others and destruictive of ideas?

Many people have talked about the nature of mental images. Concerning mental images, for example, I have one of the Franklin mountains around which the city of El Paso is laid out. Theyre not big mountains, such as those in Alaska. The highest peak rises only about 1,000m. They are, however, a dominant feature of the horizon line to the north of my fathers house, etching a midline gray stone and yellow green break across the sightline.

The front steps of the house face west approximately. When you leave the house and begin down the five concrete steps you note the sun and the forehead of the mountain to the left of it, at about northwest. Its fair to say that its the first thing you see in the morning. Its an imposing image, an image you watch and watch long, even though the features of the mountain, stone ridging, bandings of sandstone, and just the suggestion of yucca, Spanish Dagger, and desert grass and desert wild flowers, become familiar. The surface changes with the position of the sun. Dark blue and purple in the morning at dawn; then phases of common daylight which dulls the surface, then orange, pink, purple at dusk. Given the cloud cover or the amount of pollution and dust in the air in the evening, all the hues find their way across the creases and folds of mountain. Storms often move in from the southwest, their moisture drawn up from the Gulf of Mexico, thus in evening, the sun will burn sherbet orange on the mountain slopes in its lower course, while the deep gray and blue and black of desert storms wall off the western world.

Above it all you can see the bloated white crowns of the clouds, rising and splitting in the high atmosphere. For the kids, such a sight was familiar and suspenseful and scary, watching a thunderstorm as a total vertical and horizontal phenomenon, for the adults, nostalgic.

Other images of the mind, or in the mind, are more spread out, diffused, or hard to fix, instances of time that we remember, recall, such as sitting on the porch in the cool and sunny air of a spring morning in Connecticut. The image of the mountain is an object. It has physical density. Its image, which no science has been able to explain mechanically, translating the surfacing of certain kinds of memory from electrical signals and stimuli (this is similar to asking what is the nature of consciousness), matches the real object pretty well as light in the mind. The mountain has a ready quality of recognition even as two distinct phenomena. The mountain has objective quantity but the mental image of the mountain, which isnt the mountain, is difficult to describe with conventional descriptive language as an occurrence. The physical mountain takes up space, but what sort of space does the mental image of the mountain take up in my mind? I know that the image takes up time, thus, to accord Einstein his due, it must have some spatial quality. Is the memory or image of the mountain quantifiable in spatial termshaving mass, position, energy, some physics beyond the mechanism of brain–or is it more like an effect of physical fields which the brain translates, such as gravitation or electromagnetism?

Regardless, the power of the image remains, the power of the shadow of what made it lurking just a few seconds away in thought, always.

I learned something interesting about my good friend Maureen Durkin today. Apparently, Maureen goes around telling people she’s Clarissa. This is very interesting and I can see this. Maureen walks into a room and declares, “I am Clarissa.” I love it.

This is a spatial issue. We can, I believe, inhabit two spaces simultaneously. To myself, in my own thought space, which is all the world at a precise moment, and the circular, bubble-like space of others, who do not know me or may not know me. In other words, I am always known and unknown, and, of course, these “positions” are “real” depending on orientation. The question now is, Who is Clarissa?