But beware, anime meus, of the marcel wave of fashionable art; avoid the Proustian bed and the assassin pun (itself a suicide—as those who know their Verlaine will note).
We are now ready to tackle Space. We reject without qualms the artificial concept of space-tainted, space-parasited time, the space-time of relativist literature. Anyone, if he likes, may maintain that Space is the outside of Time, or the body of Time, or that Space is suffused with Time and vice versa, or that in some peculiar way Space is merely the waste product of Time, even its corpse, or that in the long, infinitely long, run Time is Space; that sort of gossip may be pleasing, especially when we are young; but no one shall make me believe that the movement of matter (say, a pointer) across a carved-out area of Space (say, a dial) is by nature identical with the “passing” of time. Movement of matter merely spans an extension of some other palpable matter, against which it is measured, but tells us nothing about the actual structure of impalpable Time. Similarly, a graduated tape, even of infinite length, is not Space itself, nor can the most exact odometer represent the road which I see as a black mirror of rain under turning wheels, hear as a sticky rustle, smell as a damp July night in the Alps, and feel as a smooth basis. We, poor Spatians, are better adapted, in our three-dimensional Lacrimaval, to Extension rather than to Duration: our body is capable of greater stretching than volitional recall can boast of. I cannot memorize (though I sought only yesterday to resolve it into mnemonic elements) the number of my new car but I feel the asphalt under my front tires as if they were parts of my body. Yet Space itself (like Time) is nothing I can comprehend: a place where motion occurs. A plasm in which matter—concentrations of Space plasm—is organized and enclosed. We can measure the globules of matter and the distances between them, but Space plasm itself is incomputable.
We measure Time (a second hand trots, or a minute hand jerks, from one painted mark to another) in terms of Space (without knowing the nature of either), but the spanning of Space does not always require Time—or at least does not require more time than the “now” point of the specious present contains in its hollow. The perceptual possession of a unit of space is practically instantaneous when, for example, an expert driver’s eye takes in a highway symbol—the black mouth and neat archivolt within a red triangle (a blend of color and shape recognized in “no time,” when properly seen, as meaning a road tunnel) or something of less immediate importance such as the delightful Venus sign 9, which might be misunderstood as permitting whorelets to thumb rides, but actually tells the worshipper or the sightseer that a church is reflected in the local river. I suggest adding a pilcrow for persons who read while driving.
Space is related to our senses of sight, touch, and muscular effort; Time is vaguely connected with hearing (still, a deaf man would perceive the “passage” of time incomparably better than a blind limbless man would the idea of “passage”). “Space is a swarming in the eyes, and Time a singing in the ears,” says John Shade, a modern poet, as quoted by an invented philosopher (“Martin Gardiner”) in The Ambidextrous Universe, page 165. Space flutters to the ground, but Time remains between thinker and thumb, when Monsieur Bergson uses his scissors. Space introduces its eggs into the nests of Time: a “before” here, an “after” there—and a speckled clutch of Minkowski’s “world-points.” A stretch of Space is organically easier to measure mentally than a “stretch” of Time. The notion of Space must have been formed before that of Time (Guyau in Whitrow). The indistinguishable inane (Locke) of infinite space is mentally distinguishable (and indeed could not be imagined otherwise) from the ovoid “void” of Time. Space thrives on surds, Time is irreducible to blackboard roots and birdies. The same section of Space may seem more extensive to a fly than to S. Alexander, but a moment to him is not “hours to a fly,” because if that were true flies would know better than wait to get swapped. I cannot imagine Space without Time, but I can very well imagine Time without Space. “Space-Time”—that hideous hybrid whose very hyphen looks phoney. One can be a hater of Space, and a lover of Time.
There are people who can fold a road map. Not this writer.
At this point, I suspect, I should say something about my attitude to “Relativity.” It is not sympathetic. What many cos-mogonists tend to accept as an objective truth is really the flaw inherent in mathematics which parades as truth. The body of the astonished person moving in Space is shortened in the direction of motion and shrinks catastrophically as the velocity nears the speed beyond which, by the fiat of a fishy formula, no speed can be. That is his bad luck, not mine—but I sweep away the business of his clock’s slowing down. Time, which requires the utmost purity of consciousness to be properly apprehended, is the most rational element of life, and my reason feels insulted by those flights of Technology Fiction. One especially grotesque inference, drawn (I think by Engelwein) from Relativity Theory—and destroying it, if drawn correctly—is that the galactonaut and his domestic animals, after touring the speed spas of Space, would return younger than if they had stayed at home all the time. Imagine them filing out of their airark—rather like those “Lions,” juvenilified by romp suits, exuding from one of those huge chartered buses that stop, horribly blinking, in front of a man’s impatient sedan just where the highway wizens to squeeze through the narrows of a mountain village.
Perceived events can be regarded as simultaneous when they belong to the same span of attention; in the same way (insidious simile, unremovable obstacle!) as one can visually possess a unit of space—say, a vermilion ring with a frontal view of a toy car within its white kernel, forbidding the lane into which, however, I turned with a furious coup de volant. I know relativists, ham pered by their “light signals” and “traveling clocks,” try to demolish the idea of simultaneity on a cosmic scale, but let us imagine a gigantic hand with its thumb on one star and its minimus on another—will it not be touching both at the same time—or are tactile coincidences even more misleading than visual ones? I think I had better back out of this passage.
Such a drought affected Hippo in the most productive months of Augustine’s bishopric that clepsydras had to be replaced by sandglasses. He defined the Past as what is no longer and the future as what is not yet (actually the future is a fantasm belonging to another category of thought essentially different from that of the Past which, at least, was here a moment ago—where did I put it? Pocket? But the search itself is already “past”).
The Past is changeless, intangible, and “never-to-be-revisited”—terms that do not fit this or that section of Space which I see, for instance, as a white villa and its whiter (newer) garage with seven cypresses of unequal height, tall Sunday and short Monday, watching over the private road that loops past scrub oak and briar down to the public one connecting Sorcière with the highway to Mont Roux (still one hundred miles apart).
I shall now proceed to consider the Past as an accumulation of sensa, not as the dissolution of Time implied by immemorial metaphors picturing transition. The “passage of time” is merely a figment of the mind with no objective counterpart, but with easy spatial analogies. It is seen only in rear view, shapes and shades, arollas and larches silently tumbling away: the perpetual disaster of receding time, éboulements, landslides, mountain roads where rocks are always falling and men always working.
We build models of the past and then use them spatiologically to reify and measure Time. Let us take a familiar example. Zembre, a quaint old town on the Minder River, near Sorcière, in the Valais, was being lost by degrees among new buildings. By the beginning of this century it had acquired a definitely modern look, and the preservation people decided to act. Today, after years of subtle reconstruction, a replica of the old Zembre, with its castle, its church, and its mill extrapolated onto the other side of the Minder, stands opposite the modernized town and separated from it by the length of a bridge. Now, if we replace the spatial view (as seen from a helicopter) by the chronal one (as seen by a retrospector), and the material model of old Zembre by the mental m
odel of it in the Past (say, around 1822), the modern town and the model of the old turn out to be something else than two points in the same place at different times (in spatial perspective they are at the same time in different places). The space in which the modern town coagulates is immediately real, while that of its retrospective image (as seen apart from material restoration) shimmers in an imaginary space and we cannot use any bridge to walk from the one to the other. In other words (as one puts it when both writer and reader flounder at last in hopeless confusion of thought), by making a model of the old town in one’s mind (and on the Minder) all we do is to spatialize it (or actually drag it out of its own element onto the shore of Space). Thus the term “one century” does not correspond in any sense to the hundred feet of steel bridge between modern and model towns, and that is what we wished to prove and have now proven.
The Past, then, is a constant accumulation of images. It can be easily contemplated and listened to, tested and tasted at random, so that it ceases to mean the orderly alternation of linked events that it does in the large theoretical sense. It is now a generous chaos out of which the genius of total recall, summoned on this summer morning in 1922, can pick anything he pleases: diamonds scattered all over the parquet in 1888; a russet black-hatted beauty at a Parisian bar in 1901; a humid red rose among artificial ones in 1883; the pensive half-smile of a young English governess, in 1880, neatly reclosing her charge’s prepuce after the bedtime treat; a little girl, in 1884, licking the breakfast honey off the badly bitten nails of her spread fingers; the same, at thirty-three, confessing, rather late in the day, that she did not like flowers in vases; the awful pain striking him in the side while two children with a basket of mushrooms looked on in the merrily burning pine forest; and the startled quonk of a Belgian car, which he had overtaken and passed yesterday on a blind bend of the alpine highway. Such images tell us nothing about the texture of time into which they are woven—except, perhaps, in one matter which happens to be hard to settle. Does the coloration of a recollected object (or anything else about its visual effect) differ from date to date? Could I tell by its tint if it comes earlier or later, lower or higher, in the stratigraphy of my past? Is there any mental uranium whose dream-delta decay might be used to measure the age of a recollection? The main difficulty, I hasten to explain, consists in the experimenter not being able to use the same object at different times (say, the Dutch stove with its little blue sailing boats in the nursery of Ardis Manor in 1884 and 1888) because of the two or more impressions borrowing from one another and forming a compound image in the mind; but if different objects are to be chosen (say, the faces of two memorable coachmen: Ben Wright, 1884, and Trofim Fartukov, 1888), it is impossible, insofar as my own research goes, to avoid the intrusion not only of different characteristics but of different emotional circumstances, that do not allow the two objects to be considered essentially equal before, so to speak, their being exposed to the action of Time. I am not sure that such objects cannot be discovered. In my professional work, in the laboratories of psychology, I have devised myself many a subtle test (one of which, the method of determining female virginity without physical examination, today bears my name). Therefore we can assume that the experiment can be performed—and how tantalizing, then, the discovery of certain exact levels of decreasing saturation or deepening brilliance—so exact that the “something” which I vaguely perceive in the image of a remembered but unidentifiable person, and which assigns it “somehow” to my early boyhood rather than to my adolescence, can be labeled if not with a name, at least with a definite date, e.g., January 1, 1908 (eureka, the “e.g.” worked—he was my father’s former house tutor, who brought me Alice in the Camera Obscura for my eighth birthday).
Our perception of the Past is not marked by the link of succession to as strong a degree as is the perception of the Present and of the instants immediately preceding its point of reality. I usually shave every morning and am accustomed to change the blade in my safety razor after every second shave; now and then I happen to skip a day, have to scrape off the next a tremendous growth of loud bristle, whose obstinate presence my fingers check again and again between strokes, and in such cases I use a blade only once. Now, when I visualize a recent series of shaves, I ignore the element of succession: all I want to know is whether the blade left in my silver plough has done its work once or twice; if it was once, the order of the two bristle-growing days in my mind has no importance—in fact, I tend to hear and feel the second, grittier, morning first, and then to throw in the shaveless day, in consequence of which my beard grows in reverse, so to speak.
If now, with some poor scraps of teased-out knowledge relating to the colored contents of the Past, we shift our view and regard it simply as a coherent reconstruction of elapsed events, some of which are retained by the ordinary mind less clearly, if at all, than the others, we can indulge in an easier game with the light and shade of its avenues. Memory-images include afterimages of sound, regurgitated, as it were, by the ear which recorded them a moment ago while the mind was engaged in avoiding hitting schoolchildren, so that actually we can replay the message of the church clock after we have left Turtsen and its hushed but still-echoing steeple behind. Reviewing those last steps of the immediate Past involves less physical time than was needed for the clock’s mechanism to exhaust its strokes, and it is this mysterious “less” which is a special characteristic of the still-fresh Past into which the Present slipped during that instant inspection of shadow sounds. The “less” indicates that the Past is in no need of clocks and the succession of its events is not clock time, but something more in keeping with the authentic rhythm of Time. We have suggested earlier that the dim intervals between the dark beats have the feel of the texture of Time. The same, more vaguely, applies to the impressions received from perceiving the gaps of unremembered or “neutral” time between vivid events. I happen to remember in terms of color (grayish blue, purple, reddish gray) my three farewell lectures—public lectures—on Mr. Bergson’s Time at a great university a few months ago. I recall less clearly, and indeed am able to suppress in my mind completely, the six-day intervals between blue and purple and between purple and gray. But I visualize with perfect clarity the circumstances attending the actual lectures. I was a little late for the first (dealing with the Past) and observed with a not-unpleasant thrill, as if arriving at my own funeral, the brilliantly lighted windows of Counterstone Hall and the small figure of a Japanese student who, being also late, overtook me at a wild scurry, and disappeared in the doorway long before I reached its semicircular steps. At the second lecture—the one on the Present—during the five seconds of silence and “inward attention” which I requested from the audience in order to provide an illustration for the point I, or rather the speaking jewel in my waistcoat pocket, was about to make regarding the true perception of time, the behemoth snores of a white-bearded sleeper filled the house—which, of course, collapsed. At the third and last lecture, on the Future (“Sham Time”), after working perfectly for a few minutes, my secretly recorded voice underwent an obscure mechanical disaster, and I preferred simulating a heart attack and being carried out into the night forever (insofar as lecturing was concerned) to trying to decipher and sort out the batch of crumpled notes in pale pencil which poor speakers are obsessed with in familiar dreams (attributed by Dr. Froid of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu to the dreamer’s having read in infancy his adulterous parents’ love letters). I give these ludicrous but salient details to show that the events to be selected for the test should be not only gaudy and graduated (three lectures in three weeks), but related to each other by their main feature (a lecturer’s misadventures). The two intervals of five days each are seen by me as twin dimples, each brimming with a kind of smooth, grayish mist, and a faint suggestion of shed confetti (which, maybe, might leap into color if I allowed some casual memory to form in between the diagnostic limits). Because of its situation among dead things, that dim continuum cannot be as sensually groped for, t
asted, harkened to, as Veen’s Hollow between rhythmic beats; but it shares with it one remarkable indicium: the immobility of perceptual Time. Synesthesia, to which I am inordinately prone, proves to be of great help in this type of task—a task now approaching its crucial stage, the flowering of the Present.
Now blows the wind of the Present at the top of the Past—at the top of the passes I have been proud to reach in my life, the Umbrail, the Fluela, the Furka, of my clearest consciousness! The moment changes at the point of perception only because I myself am in a constant state of trivial metamorphosis. To give myself time to time Time I must move my mind in the direction opposite to that in which I am moving, as one does when one is driving past a long row of poplars and wishes to isolate and stop one of them, thus making the green blur reveal and offer, yes, offer, its every leaf. Cretin behind me.
This act of attention is what I called last year the “Deliberate Present” to distinguish it from its more general form termed (by Clay in 1882) the “Specious Present.” The conscious construction of one, and the familiar current of the other give us three or four seconds of what can be felt as nowness. This now ness is the only reality we know; it follows the colored nothingness of the no-longer and precedes the absolute nothingness of the future. Thus, in a quite literal sense, we may say that conscious human life lasts always only one moment, for at any moment of deliberate attention to our own flow of consciousness we cannot know if that moment will be followed by another. As I shall later explain, I do not believe that “anticipation” (“looking forward to a promotion or fearing a social blunder” as one unfortunate thinker puts it) plays any significant part in the formation of the specious present, nor do I believe that the future is transformed into a third panel of Time, even if we do anticipate something or other—a turn of the familiar road or the picturesque rise of two steep hills, one with a castle, the other with a church, for the more lucid the forevision the less prophetic it is apt to be. Had that rascal behind me decided to risk it just now he would have collided head-on with the truck that came from beyond the bend, and I and the view might have been eclipsed in the multiple smash.
Ada, or Ardor Page 50
