It was poignant to re-read a blog piece I posted on May 7, 2016 entitled "Tomorrowland." It described my childhood in the fifties, a veil of unwarranted optimism draped over the reality of hunger and racism at home and colonialism in the global south. In this purdah, featuring floor wax commercials and shiny Chevrolets, we invested in the future. We ate it, snap, crackle and popping, three times a day. Our lives were predicated on progress, the belief that things would continue to get better, faster, more efficient and that we postwar kiddos would inherit a synthetic paradise that met the challenges of mid-century with a phalanx of plastic action figures. We shrugged at infectious disease and spoke in hushed, reverential tones about the miracle of antibiotics with long, musical names. Erythromycin.
Of course, that world was long gone by the spring of 2016. We had survived the harsh future-become-present of Vietnam, of Watergate, of the Reagan years, intoning the litany of the High Priest Ram Dass. We told ourselves and one another to Be Here Now. But recall that was before a pathological electorate, racing headlong down the yellow brick road, handed over the reins to a man with less courage than the Cowardly Lion, fewer brains than the Scarecrow and no heart at all. The present is an open wound. It's painful to be here now and, as for the future, some days we can't bring it into focus long enough to believe in it. Absent the present and the future, we sometimes wallow in the mud puddle of the past, but you can't live on re-runs, tempting though that may be. You have to consider the possibility of another paradigm, a new way of looking at time.
For me, it's useful to remind myself that linear time is a convention that can be sent packing and replaced by a different model. Why not? I keep two in my back pocket like spare masks. The first is the ancient idea of circularity. the eternal return. In that mindset, I'm in touch with the planetary orbits, the cycle of the seasons, the phases of the moon. Think of the profound implications of straightening the circle into a line, creating out of the sundial and even my five-and-dime analog alarm clock, the wall calendar from the auto parts store. Everything changes. Where did we get the idea that nature is calling us to march forward in military formation until we get to next year and then keep going? Why do we think time keeps pointing ahead until for some reason it doesn't? Ridiculous on the face of it like a Mickey Mouse watch, circularity gone bonkers.
My second and even more beloved paradigm imagines the past, present and future existing simultaneously. That's the understanding behind the Hebrew name of God which is the interbeing of was, is and will be. It accounts for Proust, for hallucinogenic experiences, for dreams. How else to understand the splintered grammar of dreams except to see that before and after have no inherent meaning? How much more nuanced time becomes when it interpenetrates the ground of being like water, sinking as rain and rising as vapor. I say that this paradigm imagines time — homeless and wearing its various changes of costume one on top of the other — because I can't really know if this is true. Still, I sense that there is a level of consciousness where the dance of the days and years warrants a much more complex choreography than I am normally in touch with when I say "Today is Monday, August 10, 2020 and things are not looking good."
I like the idea of options, creative ways of looking at time. Entrapment in linear time increases my anxiety and not only because mortality is the beckoning future. Linear time is the lab where regret and worry are cooked. Looking backward in this paradigm, I'm plagued by grievances that cannot be addressed, amends that cannot be made. So much hurt imposed on good people now gone, leaving its after-image in my memory. Looking forward, I'm trampled by lurid images of our leader finally getting that parade of tanks down Pennsylvania Avenue that he has been jonesing for. I cannot afford the linear paradigm. It's bad for my health. Give me a labyrinth. Give me dreams and poetry. See, I have time on my hands and tears in my eyes.
For more on new paradigms of perception, check out this interview with cultural ecologist, David Abram.
https://emergencemagazine.org/story/the-ecology-of-perception/
Please share your thoughts regarding this post and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com