Forward THE CLOCK AND THE METAPHOR Connecticut Review Fall 2000 John Briggs     Ticking in the corridors of this issue of Connecticut Review is the theme of time. The puzzle of time. What is time? The perception of time with which we wrestle developed during the Renaissance. The Medieval church had taught that usury-the lending of money against time-was a sin because time is God's. Though God's time was linear, in the sense of history moving forward to the time of the last judgment, but only vaguely so. The cyclical time of harvests, religious rituals, and chores done between sunup and sundown dominated the consciousness of most people. The historicity of events was not crucial. Painters dressed the crowds at the crucifixion as Florentines or Flemards, suggesting an event continuously present. The 14th-century appearance of mechanical clocks and the rise of banking profoundly changed the Western perception of time. The new banking industry required a definite future. Time became quantified, abstracted as number, part of an equation of compounded interest, the length of time for the repayment of principle or the return on an investment. Time turned into money, and money was numbers. The rise of science solidified the quantification of time. Isaac Newton viewed time as absolute, moving uniformly and evenly from past to future, regardless of how time might "seem" to an observer. Time could be measured by clocks. The scientific description of phenomena included their coordinates along the line of time. Now, centuries later, at the turn of the millennium, we are riddled by time. It dominates our consciousness like a disease. In her essay here, "Time, Water," Anne Spollen captures the feeling: "One recent Saturday afternoon, I stood in line at the post office. A digital clock had just been installed for the purpose of counting down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds until the millennium ends. The frenetically changing seconds panicked me" (95). Most of us feel the panic induced by clocks that can now count in nanoseconds: Frustration amounting to madness seizes us when our old home computer takes five seconds to complete an operation we know takes only a half a second on the computer at work. (Yet five years ago we were delighted when the operation took just 10 seconds.) We talk on the cell phone, watch the television and do the taxes all at the same time in order to save time or accomplish as much as possible in the time allotted. One symptom of our time disease, however, is that despite all the time saving devices we never seem to have enough time to do what we need. The more we try to control our time, the more time slithers away from us. Elusive though it is, we feel crushed by time, by our lack of time, by the pressure of time crowding in all around us, and, it seems, crowding us out. As Joseph Powell puts it here, "It can be argued that the quantification of time has forever sealed us off from the joys of spontaneous living" (157). So what is time? As members of a scientistic culture, we might naturally turn to science for the real answer. The scientific understanding of time has changed dramatically since the days of Newton. Science no longer has one answer to give us. Albert Einstein realized that the time of an event's occurence is relative to movement. Two observers traveling at different speeds would record an event as taking place at different times. Time is welded to space. Nevertheless, Einstein detected an absolute nature to time in the form of the constant speed of light, 186,000 miles per second, no matter who observes it. Meanwhile, quantum physics investigates the atomic substructure of matter using equations that are "time reversible." In this micro world, time can go backwards and forwards, like a film of billiard balls colliding which can be run in either direction and seem logical. This timeless feature of the quantum world led Einstein to famously console the widow of his friend, physicist Michele Besso by saying, "Michele has left this strange world just before me. This is of no importance. For us convinced physicists the distinction between past, present and future is an illusion, although a persistent one." The paradoxes of the quantum have led other physicists to argue that there is no time, and still others to believe that multiple time lines (multiple simultaneous worlds) are constantly branching off at each quantum event, as in Jorge Luis Borges' famous story, "The Garden of the Forking Paths." At the macro level of reality, however, physics confirms that time is not only relative, it has an arrow; it's irreversible (there is no going back), a fact confirmed by 19th century thermodynamics. The above seemingly contradictory definitions of time have not been resolved in modern physical theory. In fact, modern chaos theory has suggested a further wrinkle: time is fractal. Like a coastline, expanded here, contracted there, twisted and turned, time depends on the processes unfolding. Our bodies are a linked-together (self-organized) collection of clocks. Our cells have timekeepers switching on and off biochemical processes; organs secrete hormones on schedules created internally and externally, causing organs to couple in various rhythms. A science which sees time as a measure of process linked to its environment brings our concept of time closer to psychological experience. In one circumstance (an imminent car crash), processes seem to slow time down to a standstill. In another (reading an absorbing book), minutes pass as if they were seconds. Fractal time resembles the way some Polynesian islanders divide their day, not into equal segments, but into time units that accord with the activities going on. During sunrise and sunset when fishing boats are readied and put to sea, the many activities cause several Polynesian "hours" to occur in what would, for a Western clock be only a fraction of an hour long. But in the middle of the day, when people sleep and not much work is done, the "hour" lasts more than 100 of our minutes. As this example from the Pacific islanders illustrates, to an indeterminate extent, time is cultural. In their tales, indigenous storytellers around the world describe mythopoetic events that are grasped as both historical and timeless. In contrast, our idea of time has been shaped by banking, science-and now Microsoft and Intel. The Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti argued that time is really thought because the movement of thought relies on memory, the brain's ability to compare past images to the present perception. The movement of thought is fragmentary, Krishnamurti pointed out, full of gaps. These gaps, we presume (perhaps mistakenly), are bridged by the continuity of the thinker. Krishnamurti also noted that time for us is linked with death, with ending: the ending of the ticks of thoughts. Krishnamurti's observations suggest that time (and thought) may be like Zeno's paradox or Cantor's discovery that infinities of numbers lie between integers. Between the minutes lie seconds, between them nanoseconds, and so on down. We can slice our understanding or perception of the events down finer and finer. But we can never entirely get to the bottom, never entirely close the gaps. Instead, with each new slice we add a thought. We cut a new division. These proliferating thoughts, these micro-times, crowd us out-yet there are always more gaps. Zeno's arrow never leaves its bow. Perhaps we need to see that in the void between one minute or one second and the next is always an infinite, bottomless hole. A timelessness. A timeline filled with holes. How quickly time morphs into metaphor. It's a river; a grape, an arrow, the infinity in a grain of sand like the eternity within an hour. It's the Proustian memory of a pastry dipped in tea, or the Faulknarian one of a little girl climbing up a tree with muddy drawers. January 1, 2000, the millennium, was clearly an artificial and arbitrary demarcation of time (not to mention, being one year too early). But for those watching it on television as the new day moved around the earth, our celebrations of time revealed that there was a unity in our considerable diversity. Time as a metaphor. Time reveals the human mind's contradictory proclivity for both measuring things and living in the unknown. Real or a metaphor? Perhaps both. Time is as real as a heartbeat and elusive and mysterious as a face from the past we can't remember. Here Simone Poirier-Bures describes it: "time is a trickster, a shapeshifter" (179). Shaped within the strata of our awareness, time manifests what is both certain and uncertain, unchanged and forever changing. We are time, of course, and we can't grasp it any more readily than we can grasp the silvery mercury bead of our own being in the world. Nevertheless, it is a puzzle we will pursue-at least as long as our time here will allow us. Five essay writers in this issue ask you to join them in explicitly pursuing and contemplating the puzzle of time. For several of the poets and fiction writers the contemplation willl appear more tacit. Poetry, in a sense, is always about time because it is the movement to capture in a frozen form the ways in which everything melts. Time haunts poetry. In fiction, time is the ligament that holds the story together. In both poetry and fiction, time asserts itself in images of change, loss, memory, and in the flash of the epiphany that both escapes time and reifies it. The editors hope you will enjoy the time spent in this contemplation.