Moon over Trafalmadore

I have been thinking on time lately. Time is an odd thing. I have blogged on the perception of time moving faster as we get older despite its very nature of being steady (not taking into account relativistic effects which make it both steady and able to dilate based on your reference frame). What I muse on now though, is a recurrent line of thought following the fact that time (unlike the first three dimensions length, breadth, and depth) is a man-made construct. Time was created to accommodate motion and change in our scientific pursuits. Clearly there was a considerable period in our history where it was sufficient to know when was when by simply following the sun through the day and the stars’ or sun’s progress through the course of a year – no clocks necessary.

The introduction of clocks and Gregorian calendars has led to no small problems and confusions socially if not scientifically. Early world explorers who sailed the seas and crossed the international date line were thrown off by a day they were not able to account for. By the time they returned to port they discovered they had somehow (without changing their practices) come to celebrate the Lord’s day on the wrong day and ended up in trouble with the Church. Even today, we wrangle with daylight savings time and time zones. We try to keep up with those who respect the former and those that don’t. And trying to keep up with latter has caused me to miss more than one phone call back South in my life.

This attempt to understand the nature time revolves around my dreams and my childhood. Lately I have been dreaming quite a bit, and I love to dream. I wish that I could remember them, but all that seems to stay are snippets and a flavor of the whole dream. When I pause to examine a snippet in hopes of divining the whole, all I can do is feel the whole around this piece at the same time I am barred from seeing much of it through shadowed walls. It is frustrating at times to feel the dream hanging around, knowing it is there and being unable to touch it.

This is very much what I feel when I explore my memories particularly of childhood. I will recall an event or image from back in my much shorter days such as “slow-motion karate,” and then try to remember when my older brother and I played at it with our friend next door. I can’t put anything concrete together, even though down in the basement there is a video of one our “fights” as a memory aid.

What I am left with is that image, but am also left with the feeling that all of what makes up that memory image exists all around, is in existence all around. Like I feel it, taste it, express it, see it. However, peer as I might I cannot see it beyond the original image.

In other words, though I feel the whole of my life around me, I cannot see it all. It is as if each instance is going on right now and is always going on right now. It is a schizophrenic thought of time as linear within a static view not unlike the description of the Trafalmadorians’ existence in Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Slaughter House Five. The Tralfamdorians define a person/object/place/thing by the totality of its existence, seeing its whole life - be it lived in seconds, days, or eons at one time. They can even see the end of the Universe.

This is how I feel about my dreams and my past at times, like I should be able to see all of it in its unchangeable glory. I keep trying to construct a physical analogy of such a view and I keep getting hung up on the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other mentality. As an example, consider life existing like movie. It is complete, start to end, but we must view it the way it was edited – sequentially. And even though we can hop into the movie at any point and jump to any other point, once we arrive we are trapped in the localized linearity of it. Similarly, we can picture life as a record album. Begin-to-end in one object, but even though we can set the needle anywhere we want to on the record we can only experience the music sequentially from whatever point we land in.

Perhaps the Trafalmadorian view is correct and does exist. Sometimes But if so, I am trapped by the sequential nature I have been taught and accepted in my life. Its not that I wish to change anything, even to the Trafalmadorian perspective of life is a whole and immutable glory. I just sometimes feel that’s how things are, and I should be able to experience them like that. But doubt keeps me in a sequential reference frame. Doubt blinds me to the possibility that life can be seen in the whole, and not limited to moving from one present to another with the past left and often lost to memory.

I think of this being trapped by faith similar to the act of being able to fly as described by Douglas Adams in his woefully misidentified books The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy. As Adams describes it, personal flight is possible by the following two steps:

1)     Fall

2)     Forget to hit the ground

It is in the process of having the presence of mind to forget about hitting the ground that allows the body mid-fall to begin flying. And the reason most people can’t fly is because they don’t have the faith to follow the second step. It is why I haven’t been able to fly – yet.