Time
By John Weiners
Why is it eternity lasts a moment
a moment eternity?
Are you quiet enough to hear horned owls
at dawn?
I hear voices rustle in the leaves
after they are gone.
New mice burst into life. Small raccoons
bear tiny chains around their wrists.
After hunting around for it in used bookstores for years and years, I finally gave in and just bought myself Rebecca Solnit’s River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. It is basically one of my favorite writers exploring the impact of one of my favorite artists, and I should have just given up on “discovering it” ages ago. (I like to stalk books, looking for them in used book stores, Little Free Libraries, boxes left on the street, and friends’ book purges. When I find one from my list, it really is like the thrill of discovering a missing treasure). Anyway, I’m excited to read this book this summer, and so I’m thinking about time and how we perceive it. So today’s Notions & Notes is about how we cognize time.
Eadweard Muybridge was a late 19th-century photographer who was hired to prove all four of a horse’s hooves were off the ground at a single point in a trotting gait. So, he invented a camera with a shutter speed capable of capturing stop motion. When people doubted his photographs, he invented a zoopraxiscope, basically the forerunner to modern cinema. In the middle of his work, he stood trial for murdering his wife’s lover (he was acquitted because you could do that in the 1890s). He’s fascinating.
Regardless of their technological breakthroughs, I always like looking at his photographs, the small changes between each, the effect of the whole.
Of Murbridge, Solnit writes:
“[Muybridge] had captured aspects of motion whose speed had made them as invisible as the moons of Jupiter before the telescope, and he had found a way to set them back in motion. It was as though he had grasped time itself, made it stand still, and then made it run again, over and over. Time was at his command as it had never been at anyone’s before. A new world had opened up for science, for art, for entertainment, for consciousness, and an old world had retreated farther.”
Solnit explores how technologies such as Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope change or perception of time:
“‘Annihilating time and space’ is what most new technologies aspire to do: technology regards the very terms of our bodily existence as burdensome. Annihilating time and space most directly means accelerating communications and transportation. The domestication of the horse and the invention of the wheel sped up the rate and volume of transit; the invention of writing made it possible for stories to reach farther across time and space than their tellers and stay more stable than memory; and new communications, reproduction, and transportation technologies only continue the process. What distinguishes a technological world is that the terms of nature are obscured; one need not live quite in the present or the local.”
One of my biggest creative and aesthetic influences as a writer is artsy sci-fi. I love the genre’s rambling epic narratives, its heroes and villains, its big questions, its imagination to challenge paradigms, question the impossible as possible. One of my favorite movies of all time is Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, in which replicants explore what it means to be human in a world controlled by a mega-corporation (basically our future if we let Amazon keep growing unchecked). What I love about spending some time in any distant future, whether that’s Blade Runner or Saga or even Back to the Future II, is the imagined aesthetic is so stylized it reminds me we live and breathe in a visual culture we often take for granted. Aesthetics do define eras—you can look at an advertisement from the 1950s and know a lot about social and cultural values, the ways of thinking about the world. Future worlds must build an aesthetic to reflect the imagined zeitgeist. Blade Runner is a masterpiece in this regard. I mean, look at that fucking cinematography:
Syd Mead’s concept art for the film is incredible too:
Emma Willard’s maps of time also use visual language to conceptualize the essentially abstract and invisible construct of time. I stumbled on her time maps while poking around Public Domain Review because public domain wandering is an excellent pastime.
What interests me is how she gives time dimensionality and perspective, making a river or a temple widen as it approaches the viewer with the more recent events in time.
From the linked article: “Historical time is not uniform but dimensional. On the one hand, this reflected her sense that time itself had accelerated through the advent of steam and rail. Traditional timelines, she found, were only partially capable of representing change in an era of rapid technological progress. Time was not absolute, but relative. On the other hand, Willard’s approach reflected her own deep nationalism, for it asked students to recognize the emergence of the United States as the culmination of human history and progress.”
Willard’s perspective is limited or blinded by her whiteness and Christianity, and a good reminder to question what gets included and what is excluded from maps and history (or the story we tell of time and place). Her nationalism and belief in Manifest Destiny are problematic, but I can still appreciate the artistry of her maps and her thinking about how we inhabit time. I can also appreciate her dedication to girls’ and womens’ education. She believed girls should study the same subjects as their male counterparts and with the same level of rigor, and she founded an influential school to train women teachers.
I hope someday I grow into being an old woman artist, and you’ll have to read the recently published “Old Women” by Jillian Steinhauer to see why.
Because I’ve been thinking so much about time as a construct, these lines stood:
Tropes and euphemisms abound for describing the old-woman artist. One of them has to do with time, specifically the idea that she went un- or underrecognized for so long because she was somehow out of sync with her moment. “Like so many women artists in postwar America,” art critic Laura Cumming writes in The Guardian, Herrera “seems to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Agnes Denes was, according to critic Anne Midgette of TheWashington Post, “miles ahead of her time.” Even the artist Betye Saar, when asked by TheNew York Times why she thought she was getting major attention at age ninety-three, simply answered, “Because it’s about time!”
In this context, time means something close to a zeitgeist, and given that this is America, the mainstream, moneyed zeitgeist is almost always white, male, straight, able-bodied. By definition, women, especially women of color, never fit into their times, because the times are not made for them.
Listen to Iron & Wine’s cover of “Time After Time.” It’s beautiful.
Einstein’s Dreams by MIT professor Alan Lightman is a collection of vignettes arranged as dreams Einstein has while figuring out the theory of relativity, each a presenting different way for time to move. This book was one of the first that Rob and I found we mutually loved, and my first gift for him was a framed piece of art with this vignette:
In this world, it is instantly obvious that something is odd. No houses can be seen in the valleys or plains. Everyone lives in the mountains.
At some point in the past, scientists discovered that time flows more slowly the farther from the center of the earth. The effect is minuscule, but it can be measured with extremely sensitive instruments. Once the phenomenon was known, a few people, anxious to stay young, moved to the mountains. Now all houses are built on Dom, the Matterhorn, Monte Rosa, and other high ground. It is impossible to sell living quarters elsewhere.
Many are not content simply to locate their homes on a mountain. To get the maximum effect, they have constructed their houses on stilts. The mountaintops all over the world are nested with such houses, which from a distance look like a flock of fat birds squatting on long skinny legs. People most eager to live longest have built their houses on the highest stilts. Indeed, some houses rise half a mile high on their spindly wooden legs. Height has become status. When a person from his kitchen window must look up to see a neighbor, he believes that neighbor will not become stiff in the joints as soon as he, will not lose his hair until later, will not wrinkle until later, will not lose the urge for romance as early. Likewise, a person looking down on another house tends to dismiss its occupants as spent, weak, and shortsighted. Some boast that they have lived their whole lives high up, that they were born in the highest house on the highest mountain peak and have never descended. They celebrate their youth in their mirrors and walk naked on their balconies.
Now and then some urgent business forces people to come down from their houses, and they do so with haste, hurrying down their tall ladders to the ground, running to another ladder or to the valley below, completing their transactions, and then returning as quickly as possible to their houses, or to other high places. They know that with each downward step, time passes just a little bit faster and they age a little more quickly. People at ground level never sit. They run while carrying their briefcases or groceries.
A small number of residents in each city have stopped caring whether they age a few seconds faster than their neighbors. These adventurous souls come down to the lower world for days at a time, lounge under trees that grow in the valleys, swim leisurely in the lakes that lie at warmer altitudes, roll on ground level. They hardly look at their watches and cannot tell you if it is Monday or Tuesday. When the others rush by them and scoff, they just smile.
In time, people have forgotten the reason why higher is better. Nonetheless, they continue to live on the mountains, to avoid sunken regions as much as they can, to teach their children to shun other children from low elevations. They tolerate the cold of the mountains by habit and enjoy discomfort as part of their breeding. They have even convinced themselves that thin air is good for bodies and, following that logic, have gone on spare diets, refusing all but the most gossamer food. At length, the populace has become thin like the air, bony, old before their time.
During the Worst Winter, I had no job, was disillusioned by the system of education I’d believed in and dedicated myself to, and listened to the Pixies too much. It was the winter Christian Marclay’’s “The Clock” was on exhibit at the MFA. On days when I coudln’t think of anything to do with myself, I’d go and just sit in the dark room with strangers and watch time pass. Art truly got me through to the next day, and the next, until things were ok. In this work, Marclay spliced together scenes with clocks to make a 24-hour film that aligns with real time in the time zone it’s displayed in. YouTube has a few bootleg excerpts, but it doesn’t fully capture how mesmerizing it was.