{"id":145512,"date":"2019-10-21T12:01:11","date_gmt":"2019-10-21T11:01:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=145512"},"modified":"2019-10-17T11:03:43","modified_gmt":"2019-10-17T10:03:43","slug":"when-time-stands-still","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/10\/when-time-stands-still\/","title":{"rendered":"When Time Stands Still"},"content":{"rendered":"

17 Oct 2019 – <\/em>The intimate human experience of time standing still is universal, although rare.\u00a0 When we undergo it, we are stunned.\u00a0 Silence seems to enclose us. It is the correlative to the more common experience of time passing at different speeds, sometimes slowly, sometimes fast, despite clocks.\u00a0 These universal experiences do not accord with the teleology that underlies the modern world with its scientific principle that leads to entropic death triumphant. They are therefore, as John Berger, the English writer and art critic, writes, \u201cdismissed as subjective, because time, according to the nineteenth-century view, is objective, incontestable and indifferent; to its indifference there are no limits.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a result of living within this scientific and technical presupposition that the background ticking of the clock is the only truth and time is a one-way street, we are now living inside a hopeless mind-frame of a scientific theocracy that says all will end in entropy.\u00a0 This is nihilism; for at the end of this clock time is nothingness, the infinite void.\u00a0 This is the unstated \u201cfuture,\u201d but a future that is also now, a noxious injection that surreptitiously poisons people at the well of their lives where cracks in the consensual reality open and other truths fly in, or as Emily Dickinson said, \u201c\u2019Hope\u2019 is the thing with feathers\/That perches in the soul\/And sings the tune without the words\/And never stops – at all\u201d<\/p>\n

The one-dimensional finality of the view of time as death triumphant is the nihilistic future Nietzsche said was coming, and it is here.\u00a0 And being here, it tries to reduce any experience that transports us beyond time to personal lunacy and worthy only of dismissal. It reduces human subjectivity and transcendent joy and despondent suffering to the ravings of a madman. Facts are facts says this unstated premise, and if you don\u2019t get that, you are a joker and will be rendered invisible.<\/p>\n

In the new movie \u201cJoker,\u201d the suffering Arthur Fleck, the eponymous Joker, is abandoned by a cruel American society whose capitalist order cares not a whit for its regular people, and in a penultimate scene when Arthur is appearing on a late night television show where the snide and condescending host mocks him and his attempt at comedy, Joker says to the host:<\/p>\n

Comedy is subjective, Murray. Isn\u2019t that what they say? All of you, the system that knows so much, you decide what\u2019s right or wrong. The same way that you decide what\u2019s funny or not.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In that quote lies our current fate, the dark night that has descended on our world since Nietzsche issued his warning. The system that knows and controls so much decides human truth and what is good and evil, always of course, deciding in its own favor, even to suggest that all is woe and all hope is gone while heading to the bank with its ill-begotten lucre.<\/p>\n

No wonder all the media, mainstream and alternative, are today filled with headlines and titles screaming about our impending extinction, doomsday, and the apocalypse. The end days are near.\u00a0 Just as our fictitious \u201ctelling of time\u201d with advanced technology has sped up since the simplest clock and speed has devoured space, so too have all the admonitions to prepare for the end of the world, as if you could.\u00a0 Just pack your suitcase and you\u2019re off.\u00a0 These warning are often accompanied by assertions that humans, having contaminated the planet, don\u2019t deserve to survive; that humans are vermin; and that, anyway, it\u2019s too little too late, we don\u2019t have time.\u00a0 Extinction will be arriving shortly, even if we protest its arrival.\u00a0 It\u2019s hopeless, so don\u2019t have children, or, if you have them already, teach them that \u201clife is a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing.\u201d\u00a0 A one-way trip to dusty death where the trains run on time and the last stop is Nowhere.<\/p>\n

Such political commentary, while often based on obvious problems caused by systemic structures of capitalist exploitation and technological hubris, implicitly rejects millennia of human experience and the testimony of the world\u2019s great art and spiritual experience.\u00a0 It rests upon a metaphysical assumption disguised as science that brackets out any word to the contrary. \u00a0It is the triumph of technical reason over the revelation of hope that is rooted in love, sexuality, and the human body, not abstractions.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur totalitarianism begins with our teleology,\u201d writes Berger in his brilliant essay, \u201cThat Which Is Held.\u201d<\/p>\n

He adds:<\/p>\n

What is ahistorical is the need to hope.\u00a0 And the act of hoping is inseparable from the energy of love, from that which \u2018holds,\u2019 from that which is art\u2019s constant example.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Such as the painting of a plaid suitcase by a little-known artist that hangs in my mental museum.\u00a0 My father once went on vacation, and when he arrived at his destination and opened this suitcase, he found that it is was empty.\u00a0 He had forgotten to pack and was overcome with joy at the realization.\u00a0 He wanted for nothing.\u00a0 This was his masterpiece, created when he wasn\u2019t looking.<\/p>\n

Just yesterday, I was being thought by these thoughts as I took an early morning walk by the neighboring lake.\u00a0 A group of geese, like battleships on the sea, greeted me with their honking, and as I dawdled along, they dove to show me their white asses, as if they were college boys out on a drunken lark, mooning anyone who passed.\u00a0 It seemed as if I were being mocked for allowing these thoughts to drift into my mind, guests that I did not summon but came uninvited.\u00a0 Many days I feel as though I am visited by words and images that transport me into reveries of time lost and time found and time beyond time.\u00a0 Rilke captures a bit of this with these words:<\/p>\n

O longing for places that were not<\/em>
\nCherished enough in that fleeting hour<\/em>
\nHow I long to make good from far<\/em>
\nThe forgotten gesture, the additional act.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Who, among us, has not heard such words whispering into our silences?<\/p>\n

Then I stopped by a swampy area at the end of the lake and took a look through the gently swaying bushes. A blue heron stood stock still on the far side, as if it were a statue or a silhouetted profile on an ancient Greek vase.\u00a0 I froze and watched intently, lost in the sight of the bird\u2019s eerie stillness. \u00a0For an instant I was that blue heron.\u00a0 Its immobility and my stop-time staring seemed to fuse us in the way one is transported into a cataleptic state when watching dust motes in a flash of sunlight or unexpectedly seeing the full moon hanging on the world\u2019s edge when stepping outdoors with night coming on. \u00a0It seems at these moments that a crack opens in the conventional reality machine that runs the world and one shivers with an erotic happiness that transcends description. Berger calls these \u201cenclaves of the beyond.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I finally shook myself loose from being the heron, I walked on by myself but with many voices whispering in my ears.\u00a0 Kris Kristofferson, whom I had recently seen in a documentary on country music, was singing \u201cMe and Bobby McGee,\u201d which took me back to a night years ago when a woman I knew played the song over and over for me as she drank wine in her low-cut dress, coming on to me, even as my then wife sat with us.<\/p>\n

There is an infinite sadness in this memory, the loneliness of her yearning, not just for sex but for love, for a relationship, for tenderness, for \u201cthat which is held,\u201d and while I remember the night vividly, I sadly can\u2019t remember her name and she slips into the penumbra of the dreamy past.\u00a0 But vividly alive, present.\u00a0 She walks with me as I head down the road, where the sign reads: Rough Road Ahead.\u00a0 The words live:<\/p>\n

Then somewhere near Salinas, Lord, I let her slip away\/She was lookin’ for the love I hope she’ll find.\u201d\u00a0 <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Just a moment of time out of mind.\u00a0 A moment the time-keepers can\u2019t imagine.<\/p>\n

We know it.\u00a0 We live it. We use and are used by our memories and forgetteries in equal measure, thinking we control the flow of life, which we don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

There is an experience that lovers, writers, singers, and athletes have. Everyone has it at least once in a lifetime, or so I hope. It is called by some \u201cbeing in the zone,\u201d by others \u201cbeing unconscious,\u201d by others \u201cecstasy\u201d and \u201cinspiration\u201d; in all cases it transcends clocks and the underlying bias of our age. \u00a0It is hope incarnate. It is time out of mind. By discounting it, we embrace hopelessness, nihilism.<\/p>\n

Living in the age of abstractions, we tend to abandon the body, the earth, and the chance that we might redeem this sordid era.\u00a0 By remembering that hope lies in the shadows, in the unexpected places and faces that flash through our times even when we are induced to believe we are only dreaming, we have a chance. But only if we reject the belief that entropy is time\u2019s arrow.\u00a0 Therein lies the real danger that will result in our forgetting of how instantly time can stand still in the ultimate sense, as it did for the Japanese victims of America\u2019s murderous rage on August 6, 1945.\u00a0 Galway Kinnell, in his poem \u201cThe Fundamental Project of Technology\u201d reminds us to remember:<\/p>\n

The children go away. By nature they do. And by memory,
\nin scorched uniforms, holding tiny crushed lunch tins.
\nAll the ecstasy-groans of each night call them back, satori
\ntheir ghostliness back into the ashes, in the momentary shrines,
\nthe thankfulness of arms, from which they will go
\nagain and again, until the day flashes and no one lives
\nto look back and say, a flash, a white flash sparkled.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Where was the lightning before it flashed?\u00a0 To us it wasn\u2019t.\u00a0 Its flashing was it.\u00a0 It was its act. But the nuclear weapons that we once used and are now preparing to use already exist and if they flash again all time will be extinguished and we will be gone with it.<\/p>\n

The road ahead is rough indeed.\u00a0 A despairing teleology will not save us.\u00a0 We need to see it for the trap that it is.<\/p>\n

Rhythm, melody, and movement: from these life is born and sustained.\u00a0 They are also integral to art \u2013 music, writing, painting, sculpture, dance, etc. \u2013 even when they are apparently absent, as with my distorted perception of the seemingly immobile heron. They lie at the heart of spiritual experience, as breath is the inspiration that carries us along.<\/p>\n

As I walk up the hill past the lake and my respiration increases, I see Alberto Giacometti\u2019s sculpture, \u201cTall Walking Figure\u201d in my mind\u2019s eye. Its immobility implies movement, just as the ticking of the turning clock down through the ages has implied the earth\u2019s solid resistance to time\u2019s final victory, as the seasons turn and renew themselves timelessly.\u00a0 Movement and stasis, time and the timeless. Such paradoxical inclusiveness pertains to still-life painting as well.\u00a0 While seemingly immobile, and defined by some as dead life encompassed by the presence of the absence of movement and change, the essence of all living things, such paintings come to life in the encounter with the living.\u00a0 Relationship is all. To grasp the paradoxical nature of art \u2013 and life \u2013 one must approach them as an artist and see the wholeness in broken pieces.\u00a0 \u201cEverything is broken,\u201d Bob Dylan sings, \u201ctake a deep breath, feel like you\u2019re choking.\u201d<\/p>\n

It seems that way.\u00a0 But I am enjoying my walking reveries and so will let John Berger have the final word:<\/p>\n

There is no question of looking away from the modern world and its practices.\u00a0 There is no question of a Pre-Raphaelite flight back to the Middle Ages.\u00a0 It is rather that Dante advances toward us.\u00a0 And in the specific purgatory of the modern world, created and maintained by corporate capitalism, every injustice is grounded in that unilinear view of time, for which the only relation conceivable is that between cause and effect.\u00a0 In contrast to this, in defiance of this, the \u2018single synchronic act\u2019 is that of loving.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>. Website: <\/em>Behind the Curtain<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am finding that far too much of what is being published about our world situation is doing little good. We need different approaches. Here’s one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":89352,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[120,290,985,75],"class_list":["post-145512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-conflict","tag-culture","tag-social-justice","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145512"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145512\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}