Category Archives: time

On the edge (of the universe)

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Have you ever had one of those weird existential moments when you felt like you could step outside of yourself and see reality from the other side as if none of it were real? You feel like an actor in a play, and you have just forgotten your lines, the cues make no sense, your pants are missing, and you have no idea how this thing is supposed to turn out. Your soul is disquieted by an eerie sense of déjà vu, but the familiarity you suffer is completely alien as if you had not done this before. You don’t know why, but it feels as if someone has substituted a different script at the last moment, and you haven’t had a chance to read it yet. You recognize the rest of the actors, but they are just as disoriented as you are. The props feel fake, the stage is empty, you’ve forgotten your blocking, and even your body doesn’t feel like your body. You are starting to think that we drift from metaphor to metaphor, completely unaware of how we are constructing reality as we go to suit ourselves. The world may be a stage, but life should not embody its metaphor, but resemble it. You are on edge because you lack an explanation of the very space you occupy, time moves forward but only because you say it does, and lineal thinking is a convention, not a provable reality. Everything feels hinky, unreal, fake, false, a simulacrum ad infinitum. Is it real because we accept reality as a fact? Or is there some sort of independent reality in which we participate–a reality which produces space and time, independently of our modes of perception. It’s as if you can see the fake flats on stage. The flats are painted so well that they look like bookcases, televisions, furniture, and all the rest of the trappings of daily life with which we decorate our living simulacrum. We all agree to play by the same rules, but do any of us know why? On the edge of night when it’s not really either day or night, we traverse a liminal space, a metaphor for the threshold between our waking self that can identify the simulacrum as a simulacrum and our dreaming self that suspends its disbelief and fully assumes its role in the play without asking questions or being upset by the illogical nature of our invented reality. If the universe is expanding, and we can see that it expands, I think we should all be asking into what it might be expanding, or is space a fluid structure that can expand infinitely? We have no reason to believe that there are answers to any of these questions or whether any of these questions or statements make the least bit of sense at all. So we putter along, play along, singing a song, without a care in the world, but then again, would it matter if we care or cared in the least about time, space, or infinity? When I’m on edge about these things I catch glimpses of eternity, I feel infinity spreading out before me, and I see the shadow of other dimensions, unbounded by space or time, as if ghosts or giants had been there before me, asking the same questions, and unable to answer or understand, created myths to answer questions about the origins of the universe, its age, or where it is. Mystics seem to have an edge in the sense that reality is just a minor objection which does not seem to trouble them. Philosophers are troubled by these details, but they go between questioning and participating, flip-flopping about what they want to resolve and what would be better left unresolved. Maybe we should not look at the man behind the curtain, perhaps some illusions are better left just that, as illusions. Eventually, the edgy feeling goes away, my soul stops asking questions as if it were a five-year-old, and I can accept my place in an expanding universe without getting too nervous.

On the new year

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I used to get depressed on New Year’s Eve because I always thought that one year looked and felt pretty much like every other year. Just because we were going from December to January was neither a cause to celebrate nor a cause to morn. It’s just a calendar? Am I right? So all the New Year’s Eve celebrations always seemed incredibly phony and artificial. Most people don’t need a reason to party, so why create some hugely artificial evening when everything gets overly dramatic and maudlin, weepy, even? I hate (love) nostalgia, so thinking that the previous year was so wonderful (terrible) is just as idiotic as thinking the next year will be fabulous (horrible). Although the spectacle in Times Square is something to behold (from a distance), I wouldn’t go there if you paid me. I’m not sure if we are overly sentimental, too cold hearted, myopic, visionary, or blind, but the world does not change a whole lot from one day to the next just because we hand up a new calendar. I am sure, however, that some people drank too much last night, others did things they really regret this morning, a few ladies kissed a few frogs and got no prince in return, and a few guys failed miserably at being princes. We have all these high expectations about changing (“on resolutions” tomorrow), losing weight, finding a new or better job, drinking less, being kinder, breaking up, getting back together, but in the end we do none of those things because we are unrealistic about our own strengths and weaknesses. Just as a leopard cannot change its spot or the scorpion its true nature, people are tired, petty, self-centered, unkind, egotistical, cranky, ornery, stupid, foolish, unrealistic, and irksome. These things are constants that do not change just because we changed the calendar. The new year is no more or less than what it is: a new year. As a child I always associated the New Year with ice box, frigid temperatures and vacation, but by the time I got to New Year’s Day, I knew that school was the next day, usually. January 2 meant business as usual and vacation was over. Perhaps what we need to do, and perhaps what we always need to do, is stop for a moment today and contemplate our lives. We rush around 365 days a year like headless blind chickens, missing every moment of every day because we just don’t stop, look, and listen. We always have another thing to go to, another person to make happy, another job to do. This is not a well-lived life. Perhaps New Year’s Day should be a day when we stop and wonder what we are doing. I don’t suggest we necessarily change anything, but perhaps just be more thoughtful of others, more polite while driving, kinder all the time, slower to react, contemplative about everything that we might improve both our lives and the lives of others without making any huge changes at all. Should I suggest that self-awareness for everyone would be a good thing? Maybe a little less ego, a little less ire, a little less pride, would help us all, and since I’m the worse sinner of all, I’m talking to myself here. No, I can’t change, but perhaps bit by bit, situation by situation, I can do better. So perhaps changing calendars isn’t a wholly superfluous change, Maybe, perhaps, you never know, something good and positive might come of it after all.

On the new year

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I used to get depressed on New Year’s Eve because I always thought that one year looked and felt pretty much like every other year. Just because we were going from December to January was neither a cause to celebrate nor a cause to morn. It’s just a calendar? Am I right? So all the New Year’s Eve celebrations always seemed incredibly phony and artificial. Most people don’t need a reason to party, so why create some hugely artificial evening when everything gets overly dramatic and maudlin, weepy, even? I hate (love) nostalgia, so thinking that the previous year was so wonderful (terrible) is just as idiotic as thinking the next year will be fabulous (horrible). Although the spectacle in Times Square is something to behold (from a distance), I wouldn’t go there if you paid me. I’m not sure if we are overly sentimental, too cold hearted, myopic, visionary, or blind, but the world does not change a whole lot from one day to the next just because we hand up a new calendar. I am sure, however, that some people drank too much last night, others did things they really regret this morning, a few ladies kissed a few frogs and got no prince in return, and a few guys failed miserably at being princes. We have all these high expectations about changing (“on resolutions” tomorrow), losing weight, finding a new or better job, drinking less, being kinder, breaking up, getting back together, but in the end we do none of those things because we are unrealistic about our own strengths and weaknesses. Just as a leopard cannot change its spot or the scorpion its true nature, people are tired, petty, self-centered, unkind, egotistical, cranky, ornery, stupid, foolish, unrealistic, and irksome. These things are constants that do not change just because we changed the calendar. The new year is no more or less than what it is: a new year. As a child I always associated the New Year with ice box, frigid temperatures and vacation, but by the time I got to New Year’s Day, I knew that school was the next day, usually. January 2 meant business as usual and vacation was over. Perhaps what we need to do, and perhaps what we always need to do, is stop for a moment today and contemplate our lives. We rush around 365 days a year like headless blind chickens, missing every moment of every day because we just don’t stop, look, and listen. We always have another thing to go to, another person to make happy, another job to do. This is not a well-lived life. Perhaps New Year’s Day should be a day when we stop and wonder what we are doing. I don’t suggest we necessarily change anything, but perhaps just be more thoughtful of others, more polite while driving, kinder all the time, slower to react, contemplative about everything that we might improve both our lives and the lives of others without making any huge changes at all. Should I suggest that self-awareness for everyone would be a good thing? Maybe a little less ego, a little less ire, a little less pride, would help us all, and since I’m the worse sinner of all, I’m talking to myself here. No, I can’t change, but perhaps bit by bit, situation by situation, I can do better. So perhaps changing calendars isn’t a wholly superfluous change, Maybe, perhaps, you never know, something good and positive might come of it after all.

On time and being

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Time measured versus time perceived has always been an interesting problem. Time flies while you are having fun, but time slows to a crawl when you have to wait. You can look at a clock with a sweep-second hand and watch time go by, but that doesn’t tell you anything. Being objective about time is about as rational as being objective about thirst: objectivity has nothing to do with either. When a dentist is working on reshaping a broken tooth and the drill is whining, bits of tooth are flying everywhere, and you have eight things in your mouth at once, time stands still. When you wake up at six in the morning, you wonder where the entire night went. You turn fifty, and you have no idea what just happened to the last thirty years. A watched teapot will never boil, and that bagel in the toaster will only pop up after you sit down. Stopped at a red light, your entire life drags out before you, but time flies when you see a green light, which you will not reach before it turns red again. When you are in a hurry or late, time races like a scared jack rabbit. The fact that time is so malleable and dependent on our perception of it would suggest that time as a fixed rate of progression is an illusion dreamed up by watch and clock makers in the eighteenth century. Before that, time was a much harder thing to measure. The Illustration and its proponents thought that humanism, science and the corresponding empiricism could be used to lock up time, put it in a box, and regularize it. Much to our chagrin and illusory time ideology, time has never been a part of such a plan. It took Einstein and his “Theory of Special Relativity” in order to disavow such an idea that time is fixed, regular, predictable, but instead that time is totally dependent on one’s context, point-of-view, frame of reference. Though we will never have enough “time,” time is really all we have. What makes time so scarce is over-commitment, 80 hour-a-week jobs, and time poverty. What we do with our time is often a mystery, but we fight our calendars, arrive late everywhere, cut our rest short, skip time with our families, sell ourselves short. Being seems to come at a premium completely dependent on our inability to manage and distribute or time sensibly. Before we know it, we’re on the run, trying to make our next thing, or time is up, and we have to leave, get in the car, hop a train, take an airplane. The speed at which we live is geometrically proportional to the speed at which we travel, getting back to Einstein again. Perspective, frame of reference, context, dictate that the connection between being and time is contingent on how we perceive the passage of time. As we live, we create the illusion that time moves forward, especially given the structure of our verb systems, past, present, and future, language being our only mode for expressing what we experience. These are measly attempts at creating order within a structure that lies outside of senses, our perception of the universe, but because we must move within something, we call “time” that fourth dimension which surrounds our movements and gives meaning to our being. Beingness is necessarily a question of what we call time, but we only have the faintest notion of what “time” might really be. Our senses fall well short of understanding the impossibility of time, but our philosophy is equally deficient to even ask the correct questions concerning this enigmatic phenomenon. So we settle for a simple explanation of seconds, minutes, hours, and days because our little brains have no chance of understanding what is actually going on. We create simulacra to account for something that we not only don’t understand, but that we have absolutely no chance of understanding.

On time poverty

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I think we all wish we had more time to do the things we would like to do. As a nation, we run to work, run to school, run to piano lessons, to football practice, to band practice, to the grocery store, to church, to whatever the next thing is. Today I didn’t eat lunch until 5 pm, which was totally my fault for bad planning, but I felt like I was running to and fro in the earth without a moment to breath, think, or take stock of the day–not to be sure. Time slips away and the day is gone, and I often feel like I’ve accomplished little or nothing, all the while thinking about what I have to do tomorrow, which is already stacking up as a busy day, and I’m not even there yet. We have successfully filled our days with so many meetings, events, happenings, practices, and duties that we must blindly scurry from place to place like so many moles looking for our next meal. Should lunch or dinner be something that we wolf down just to gain a little protein and few calories so we don’t pass out at the next football game? We text messages instead of talk to people, we send emails instead of communicating, we skype because we can’t be in two places at once. We double-ook and over-commit ourselves, and before we know it, we are late to everything, stop lights are our enemies, traffic and parking are more of challenge than pleasure. As we rush about trying to make everyone happy, we neglect our own poor abandoned soul in favor of trying to please everyone, so basically no one is happy. They don’t call it the rat race for nothing. There has to be a point in everyone’s life when you reach a breaking point: your clothes are sweaty and wrinkled, you did just miss a meeting, you don’t know where you are supposed to be, your head hurts, your stomach grumbles, you don’t really know what your life has become other than a chaotic jumble of people, places, and things. You no longer know what a rose smells like unless it comes in an air-freshener, you don’t remember the last time you sat with someone and just talked about nothing. You are stressed and cranky and facing an all-nighter because someone wants another paper or a report or an accounting or something. Should you have another cup of coffee really quickly? Or maybe a shower will help you wake up? Everything turns into a band-aid, a patch job so you can get the next task done. You lose perspective. If only you had more time to get things done. Is it time to start saying “no” and begin to recuperate your life? Is there more to life than over-committing to a dozen causes, to working sixty hours a week, to creating a schedule that is so hostile that your life is no longer your own? Perhaps.

On time poverty

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I think we all wish we had more time to do the things we would like to do. As a nation, we run to work, run to school, run to piano lessons, to football practice, to band practice, to the grocery store, to church, to whatever the next thing is. Today I didn’t eat lunch until 5 pm, which was totally my fault for bad planning, but I felt like I was running to and fro in the earth without a moment to breath, think, or take stock of the day–not to be sure. Time slips away and the day is gone, and I often feel like I’ve accomplished little or nothing, all the while thinking about what I have to do tomorrow, which is already stacking up as a busy day, and I’m not even there yet. We have successfully filled our days with so many meetings, events, happenings, practices, and duties that we must blindly scurry from place to place like so many moles looking for our next meal. Should lunch or dinner be something that we wolf down just to gain a little protein and few calories so we don’t pass out at the next football game? We text messages instead of talk to people, we send emails instead of communicating, we skype because we can’t be in two places at once. We double-ook and over-commit ourselves, and before we know it, we are late to everything, stop lights are our enemies, traffic and parking are more of challenge than pleasure. As we rush about trying to make everyone happy, we neglect our own poor abandoned soul in favor of trying to please everyone, so basically no one is happy. They don’t call it the rat race for nothing. There has to be a point in everyone’s life when you reach a breaking point: your clothes are sweaty and wrinkled, you did just miss a meeting, you don’t know where you are supposed to be, your head hurts, your stomach grumbles, you don’t really know what your life has become other than a chaotic jumble of people, places, and things. You no longer know what a rose smells like unless it comes in an air-freshener, you don’t remember the last time you sat with someone and just talked about nothing. You are stressed and cranky and facing an all-nighter because someone wants another paper or a report or an accounting or something. Should you have another cup of coffee really quickly? Or maybe a shower will help you wake up? Everything turns into a band-aid, a patch job so you can get the next task done. You lose perspective. If only you had more time to get things done. Is it time to start saying “no” and begin to recuperate your life? Is there more to life than over-committing to a dozen causes, to working sixty hours a week, to creating a schedule that is so hostile that your life is no longer your own? Perhaps.

On bifurcating paths

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How do we end up where we are? The other day a visiting student asked why I became a college professor, and I was at a loss for words. The bifurcating paths of my own life seem chaotic, capricious, and strange. How does one pick a major? Deciding a path of studies is simple for many, but how did a boy from the prairie of southern Minnesota decide to study a language to which he has no ties, neither genetic nor tradition? I had no family in Spain. None of my family had ever been a Spanish teacher or a professor of literature. My people are farmers who tilled the ground, raised chickens and pigs, milked cowes, bailed hay, and picked corn. Nobody had ever conjugated a verb in Spanish, no one had ever read the Cid or Don Quixote, no one had ever worked in a university, written a scholarly paper, or published a book. So an economics professor who didn’t know me put me in a Spanish class when I was a freshmen, but only because I had already studied Spanish for five years in junior high and high school. I had done that because my mother and the Spanish teacher were best friends who had met in the League of Women Voters. So what happens if the Spanish teacher’s husband doesn’t get a job in the local college that brings him (and his Spanish teaching wife) to my home town? What would have happened if I hadn’t had a politically active mother who was interested in social justice for women? Where do the bifurcating paths begin? Does it matter that my father had a terrible job in another town that motivated him to search for better work in the town where I grew up? The paths have been splitting over and over again for decades and continue to split even as I write this. So I majored in Spanish at an American-Lutheran-Swedish school whose specialty was really pre-med majors and Lutheran pastors. After I graduated I couldn’t get a decent job, but I was motivated to go back to school by a random comment by a favorite History professor–“What about Middlebury?” he said. After I graduated from Middlebury I decided I wanted to live in Europe for awhile, so I did that. Six years earlier, in 1980, walking past a bulletin board at St. Louis University in Madrid I saw an advertisement for the graduate program in Spanish at the University of Minnesota. I applied in 1985, they loved me, I loved them, and I graduated with my PhD in medieval Spanish literature in 1993. The combination of happenstance, historical caprice (Franco was dead), luck, coincidence, serendipitous causalities, and unnatural timing have carried me through the vortex of the space-time continuum to this place called Waco. If the dominoes had not fallen in a very specific way, I might be someone completely different, but even knowing that, I wouldn’t change anything, and I say that as if I had any control over any of that chain of choices and happenings. I am the most unlikely person doing a most unlikely job given my history, family and circumstances. How does this happen?

On bifurcating paths

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How do we end up where we are? The other day a visiting student asked why I became a college professor, and I was at a loss for words. The bifurcating paths of my own life seem chaotic, capricious, and strange. How does one pick a major? Deciding a path of studies is simple for many, but how did a boy from the prairie of southern Minnesota decide to study a language to which he no ties, neither genetic nor tradition? I had no family in Spain. None of my family had ever been a Spanish teacher or a professor of literature. My people are farmers who tilled the ground, raised chickens and pigs, milked cowes, bailed hay, and picked corn. Nobody had ever conjugated a verb in Spanish, no one had ever read the Cid or Don Quixote, no one had ever worked in a university, written a scholarly paper, or published a book. So an economics professor who didn’t know me put me in a Spanish class when I was a freshmen, but only because I had already studied Spanish for five years in junior high and high school. I had done that because my mother and the Spanish teacher were best friends who had met in the League of Women Voters. So what happens if the Spanish teacher’s husband doesn’t get a job in the local college that brings him (and his Spanish teaching wife) to my home town? What would have happened if I hadn’t had a politically active mother who was interested in social justice for women? Where do the bifurcating paths begin? Does it matter that my father had a terrible job in another town that motivated him to search for better work in the town where I grew up? The paths have been splitting over and over again for decades and continue to split even as I write this. So I majored in Spanish at an American-Lutheran-Swedish school whose specialty was really pre-med majors and Lutheran pastors. After I graduated I couldn’t get a decent job, but I was motivated to go back to school by a random comment by a favorite History professor–“What about Middlebury?” he said. After I graduated from Middlebury I decided I wanted to live in Europe for awhile, so I did that. Six years earlier, in 1980, walking past a bulletin board at St. Louis University in Madrid I saw an advertisement for the graduate program in Spanish at the University of Minnesota. I applied in 1985, they loved me, I loved them, and I graduated with my PhD in medieval Spanish literature in 1993. The combination of happenstance, historical caprice (Franco was dead), luck, coincidence, serendipitous causalities, and unnatural timing have carried me through the vortex of the space-time continuum to this place called Waco. If the dominoes had not fallen in a very specific way, I might be someone completely different, but even knowing that, I wouldn’t change anything, and I say that as if I had any control over any of that chain of choices and happenings. I am the most unlikely person doing a most unlikely job given my history, family and circumstances. How does this happen?

On warp speed

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At some point in the future science and technology will reach a point where we figure out how to go faster than the speed of light. I know this seems impossible at this point because mass increases to infinity at the horizon of the speed of light, but just because the problem seems impossible almost guarantees that someone will find a solution. We will laugh at our own simplicity, our primitive nature of sticking to our old scientific paradigms even in the face of real proof that upholds a hypothesis and turns it into a theory. I suppose our tendency to stick to an established paradigm is only too human. We want to explain our world, so we deem that which we don’t fully understand as impossible. Traveling faster than the speed of light will probably have something to with creating energy fields which move mass outside the boundaries of standard time and space, whatever that might mean. I don’t believe we really understand three-dimensional space or this thing that we call “time.” We move through space and time in what we perceive to be a lineal fashion, but these are only our primitive and conventional manner of describing a complex and chaotic process which we simplify so we don’t go mad. To imagine that all times and all spaces exist all in the same moment and space doesn’t make sense to our little brains. We fall victim to our own egos and hubris by imagining that we understand “reality” just because we live inside of it. For century we could not get past a geocentric universe even in the face of the truth because not being the center of the universe is more frightening than changing the paradigm. Warp speed won’t be discovered tomorrow, or the next day, or even next year, but we did land a two thousand pound rover on Mars last week, and that seemed impossible not too long ago. The fact that we can imagine warp speed means that sooner or later an engineer and a physicist will figure it out. When that happens, we will move out toward the planets and eventually the stars. When that happens, we will marvel at our simplicity. And the answer will have nothing to do with our preconceived ideas of motion, work, speed, mass and velocity. The new paradigm will cast aside ideas of fuel, propulsion, and everything else we know about concerning the speed of things. Change is not the only constant in the universe, but we may have to revise our idea of constant. From our relative perspective, light travels at a specific speed, but what about other perspectives? We didn’t think that communicators were possible, but now we all have them. We also did not think that Ipods or digital music were possible, but now they are commonplace. Warp speed may take a little longer, but the way technology is progressing, I might see it in my lifetime. We will redefine things like time and event horizon, and velocity will mean something else. Understand the implications of warp speed, hardly, but without having the ability to imagine it, we just grow old and boring.

On warp speed

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At some point in the future science and technology will reach a point where we figure out how to go faster than the speed of light. I know this seems impossible at this point because mass increases to infinity at the horizon of the speed of light, but just because the problem seems impossible almost guarantees that someone will find a solution. We will laugh at our own simplicity, our primitive nature of sticking to our old scientific paradigms even in the face of real proof that upholds a hypothesis and turns it into a theory. I suppose our tendency to stick to an established paradigm is only too human. We want to explain our world, so we deem that which we don’t fully understand as impossible. Traveling faster than the speed of light will probably have something to with creating energy fields which move mass outside the boundaries of standard time and space, whatever that might mean. I don’t believe we really understand three-dimensional space or this thing that we call “time.” We move through space and time in what we perceive to be a lineal fashion, but these are only our primitive and conventional manner of describing a complex and chaotic process which we simplify so we don’t go mad. To imagine that all times and all spaces exist all in the same moment and space doesn’t make sense to our little brains. We fall victim to our own egos and hubris by imagining that we understand “reality” just because we live inside of it. For century we could not get past a geocentric universe even in the face of the truth because not being the center of the universe is more frightening than changing the paradigm. Warp speed won’t be discovered tomorrow, or the next day, or even next year, but we did land a two thousand pound rover on Mars last week, and that seemed impossible not too long ago. The fact that we can imagine warp speed means that sooner or later an engineer and a physicist will figure it out. When that happens, we will move out toward the planets and eventually the stars. When that happens, we will marvel at our simplicity. And the answer will have nothing to do with our preconceived ideas of motion, work, speed, mass and velocity. The new paradigm will cast aside ideas of fuel, propulsion, and everything else we know about concerning the speed of things. Change is not the only constant in the universe, but we may have to revise our idea of constant. From our relative perspective, light travels at a specific speed, but what about other perspectives? We didn’t think that communicators were possible, but now we all have them. We also did not think that Ipods or digital music were possible, but now they are commonplace. Warp speed may take a little longer, but the way technology is progressing, I might see it in my lifetime. We will redefine things like time and event horizon, and velocity will mean something else. Understand the implications of warp speed, hardly, but without having the ability to imagine it, we just grow old and boring.