Soul of the World

by Christopher Dewdney

  The atemporal world of the unconscious alters the time-bound expectations of our waking lives, submerging us in a paradoxical world of simultaneous narratives, of backwards stories and jumps through seasons and years. I think of dreams as the working edge of an encounter between the version of ourselves that we have built up from long-term memories and the timelessness of the unconscious. In retrospect my diorama dream seems to be a message from my unconscious about just that nexus. At our centre we are eternal beings that slough off the years, impervious to time’s arrow. Neuroscience appears to support the atemporal nature of our brains. Magnetic resonance images of volunteers asked to think of the future, and then of the past, revealed that both future and past were processed in the same parts of the brain. In dreams memories become alive—they are no longer images of the past, we live them. Our sleeping minds are illuminated by the timeless radiance of the unconscious.

  THE ART OF TIME

  “Time and I against any two,” Cardinal Mazarin once declared during the reign of Louis XIV. He was quoting an old Spanish proverb, but he was referring to the treacherous realm of French court intrigue in the seventeenth century. Indeed, given enough time, anything can be done: pyramids can be built, empires established and books written. Though we don’t have all the time in the world. “Vita brevis est, ars longa”—“Life is short, the art long,” as Hippocrates wrote in the fourth century B.C.

  Time-based arts, those that depend on time itself as an essential part of their realization, have always been the most popular. Film, dance, music and theatre could not exist independently of time the way that sculpture, architecture and painting do. I suspect that the reason we prefer time-based art forms is that they are so much more like us: they live and move. The non-time-based arts have a less immediate, more eternal attraction. Writing, I think, occupies a position midway between the moving and stationary arts, because even though letters are immobile, we animate them with imagination.

  The written arts have a considerable advantage over improvised ones, such as jazz or improvised theatre, and somewhat of an advantage over painting or sculpture, in that the writer can take the time to get it right. With time on her side, a novelist can labour for years on a single book, considering every angle of plot, tone and structure. There are no muddy areas of overpainting, no seams in chiselled marble that reveal where a limb once broke off. What the writer sacrifices for this perfection, however, are the sensual pleasures of paint, of fragrant pigments and swirls of form, the gesture and movement. The writer’s medium is punishingly minimal; emotion, time and love are reduced to a series of tiny, insect-like silhouettes on paper. And there’s none of the freedom of dance, the exultation of music, the physical mastery of a beautiful instrument. There’s no clay or stone or towering pediments or sound and fury, and, except for the finished book, there’s nothing you can point to and say, “Look.” It is a solitary profession. The writer works alone and the reader reads alone. Both share the isolation of page or screen, the silence of inner codes.

  While writers have the luxury of taking their time, the amount of time that goes into perfecting any work of art is invisible to the audience, who apprehend the years of toil in one whole, or continuous, experience, as if the work appeared ex nihilo. The time spent on composition is hidden, like the underwater section of an iceberg. But I think that audiences sense the time anyway, and it charges the work with a special energy. The compressed potential of all those hours of labour is released during the performance of the music, during the reading of the novel, and upon viewing a statue or great building. The experience becomes a secular way of touching the divine, the more than human.

  This afternoon, while I was listening to Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations, I realized that during the past century the performance of music has begun to take on some of the characteristics of writing. Before the advent of electronic recordings, music performances were liable to spontaneous irregularities—a cellist might cough, or a violin string might snap—marring an otherwise perfect performance. But now a musician can insist on take after take, as Glenn Gould did so famously when he was recording the Variations. In the film Glenn Gould Hereafter, a documentary by Bruno Monsaingeon, Gould talks about the manipulation of time.

  You know, this is a very cloistered environment, this world of the recording studio. It is, quite literally, an environment where time turns in upon itself, where, as in a cloister, one is able to withstand the frantic pursuit of the transient, the moment-to-moment, day-by-day succession of events…the first take may well be preceded by the sixteenth, and both may be linked by inserts recorded years apart. It is an environment where the magnetic compulsion of time is suspended, though warped, or at least it is a vacuum in a sense, a place where one can properly feel that the most horrendously constricting force of nature—the inexorable linearity of time—has, to a remarkable extent, been circumvented.

  There was something in the music of the Goldberg Variations, as performed so precisely by Glenn Gould, that evoked the sunlight coming through the window. I could sense both the time that Bach put into the composing and the hours that Gould invested in practising, listening and re-recording. Yet the music floated out of my speakers as fresh and crystalline as if it were being downloaded from heaven. The inaudible substrata of time within time had polished the notes like diamonds.

  BACKWARDS TIME

  My banana tree is taking off like Jacks beanstalk. Almost every week it sprouts a big new leaf, always larger than the last. I measured the newest one: thirty-one inches long and thirteen inches wide. The next leaf—starting to unfurl now in a luscious, pale green funnel—will be even bigger. My neighbors are impressed. But I worry that with August almost over, the nights will soon be getting cooler, and longer, and the banana tree will suffer.

  My potted fan palm also did well this summer. To keep track of how fast it’s growing, I scratch the month and year each leaf emerges in small letters at the top the leaf’s stem, and this year it produced a giant fan every month, a real vegetative factory. The August leaf, still expanding, is thirty-one inches wide by twenty-five inches long, not including the stem. But, like the banana tree, the palm is at risk. It’s not scheduled to be picked up and shipped off to the greenhouse for overwintering until the middle of October, and even though the transition into autumn is an incremental process, something that plants can adapt to easily within their special time frame, September seems to be creeping up on me faster than I expected. The seasons bleed into each other.

  The rhythms of our days, the cycle of the seasons, turn time into an ourobors—the hooped snake that eats its own tail. Each day, every season slides incrementally into the next, greased by routine and familiarity. In W. B. Yeats’ mystic book A Vision, much of which was dictated to him by his wife while she was supposedly in contact with spirits, time is likened to two widening, interpenetrating spirals or cones (not unlike an hourglass, though Yeats himself doesn’t make the comparison). Time, for him, spiralled outwards into history, away from the present. Yet the fact that another cone, facing the opposite direction, was mirroring the first, meant that the past could return. What goes around comes around. The cones, or “gyres,” as Yeats called them, were to his mind also representative of beauty and truth, the particular and the universal, value and fact, and quality and quantity. In his famous poem “The Second Coming,” he interprets the gyres: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falconer cannot hear the falcon;/ Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

  It’s fascinating that Yeats came up with his vision of a cone to describe cosmic time only a few years after Einstein used light cones as a description of space-time. Circles within circles, spirals within cones and interpenetrating cones seemed to be in the air at the beginning of the twentieth century. But other minds had earlier pondered the cyclical nature of time. In 1882 Friedrich Nietzsche had published a book of lyric philosophy called The Gay Science, in which he spelled out hi
s doctrine of the eternal return by means of an allegory called the Greatest Weight.

  What if, some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”

  Here is Yeats’ cyclic time with a vengeance.

  Nietzsche then goes on to explain how this idea, the weight of eternal repetition, could be used as a spiritual discipline to free the soul:

  Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

  Nietzsche’s vision of the eternal return came to him while he was walking through the woods beside Lake Silvaplana, not far from Surlei, in the Alps, during August 1881. The eighth month proved a charm for Friedrich. More of an idea or a Zen koan than an attempt to explain reality the way Yeats did in A Vision, the eternal return nevertheless gives us hope of a future, however unchanging, whereas in Yeats’ version, things incrementally fall apart. The circle is broken. Though sometimes we don’t notice.

  Incremental phenomena are notoriously invisible. The house paint that fades over the years, the men who gradually lose their hair. What happens with the men is that one morning they notice a small, bare area and comb a few loose hairs over it. As the baldness spreads, they end up combing long strands from the sides of their heads right over their crowns. They didn’t start out like that; they didn’t wake up one morning and resolve to hide their bald domes with specially grown long strands of hair. It was an incremental process. Gaining weight is the same thing. People reach three hundred pounds gradually, deceiving themselves in the mirror like anti-anorexics.

  If only we could reverse time, if only we could become young again, slimmer, with a full head of lustrous hair. But time’s arrow cruelly points one way. With a few exceptions. In cyclotrons—“atom smashers,” as they are otherwise known—physicists have discovered that the paths of certain quantum particles can only be explained if they have travelled backwards in time for a very brief period. And at the other scale of matter—the universe itself—there may be another temporal surprise in store.

  One of the immutable cornerstones of physics is a principle called “reversibility,” which states that every basic physical action in the universe could be reversed in time with no contradiction of the laws of nature—planets could circle the sun in reverse, atoms could spin in reverse, everything could go backwards and nothing would change. For this reason scientists think that time’s arrow has no quantifiable direction—time is directionless. But hold on, you say. If people walked backwards and rain fell up into the sky, you would certainly notice a difference. Do physicists exist in the same world as us? Time’s Arrow, a novel by Martin Amis, takes on this principle, depicting an impossible, disorienting world of people taking food out of their mouths and putting it on plates, feeding their money into bank machines. What Amis is wryly saying is that it is only common sense that time flows from the past into the future. But common sense often fails scientific rigour. After all, it seemed common sense that a heavy object would fall faster than a small one, or that the sun and planets would orbit the earth. But, surrounded as they are by daily, hourly evidence of time’s arrow, scientists have found no irrefutable evidence to support time’s flow in a single direction. Except, perhaps, for one renegade.

  In the 1960s an astrophysicist named Thomas Gold proposed that time’s arrow was pointed in one direction by the law of thermodynamics; the flow of heat away from stars and into space. As the process cannot be reversed, as light and heat cannot flow backwards into the sun, it transcends the principle of reversibility. He reasoned further that not only is time’s arrow directed by this process, but that time also relies on the expansion of the universe to keep soaking up the heat released by stars. Here’s where things get interesting. If, at some point in the future, the universe should stop expanding (and many cosmologists believe it will), if the expansion of the universe eventually succumbs to the inevitable force of gravity, then radiation will start to converge instead of dissipating. At which point, Gold suggested, time will begin to run backwards and everything that has ever happened will happen again, only in reverse. Martin Amis may have been more prescient than he thought. Glenn Gould, Augustus, Correggio, W. B. Yeats and Nietzsche may, one day, walk this earth again.

  THE PAST

  Chapter Nine

  DEEP TIME

  Deeper and deeper into Time’s endless tunnel, does the winged soul, like a night-hawk, wend her wild way; and finds eternities before and behind; and her last limit is her everlasting beginning.

  —Herman Melville

  The past is always giving us something new. The citizens of eighteenth-century England never suspected that a lost world was buried in the rock beneath their feet, but the nineteenth century brought the discovery of dinosaur bones—skeletons of fantastic creatures that had lain unseen in the limestone for millions of years. The fossils revealed an extraordinary world, very unlike Victorian England, inhabited by giant lizards. A little later in the nineteenth century, archeologists unearthed Egyptian tombs filled with the lavish spoils of an exotic civilization. The most celebrated discovery of this kind was Howard Carter’s unearthing of the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1923. All at once the ancient king’s crypt was a time portal into the world. Pictures of the ornate sarcophagus were relayed across the planet, and global interest spawned a whole economy devoted to the reproduction of Egyptian figurines, jewellery, hairstyles, clothing and architecture. And history continues to yield new cultures as well as extraordinary animals completely new to science: the velociraptor that went on to star in Jurassic Park, the giant pterosaurs of the Cretaceous, with twenty-five-foot wingspans. Over the last two centuries, archeology and paleontology have brought us Herculaneum, mammoths, Troy, sabre-toothed tigers and Babylon.

  In a sense I’ve lived my whole life enmeshed in deep time. As a child I used to spend rainy Saturday afternoons leafing through picture books about prehistoric eras. I was enthralled by the lush illustrations of the world of dinosaurs and the tropical Eden they inhabited. In that sense I was like many other young boys who develop a fascination with dinosaurs, though perhaps I took it a little further. My friends and I used to play at being dinosaurs in backyards. I relished the role of Tyrannosaurus rex, king of the dinosaurs, most fearsome of the Cretaceous predators. I think I was pretty good at it. I’d curl up my arms on my chest and stick out two hooked fingers to simulate the strangely diminutive front legs of the Tyrannosaurus. Then, assuming a slight crouching position, I’d mimic snapping huge jaws filled with razor-sharp teeth as I roared and chased my friends, whom I’d assigned to be harmless herbivores.

  My father, an avid geologist and physiographer, fuelled my interest not only in the Cretaceous period, but in all prehistoric eras. From as far back as I can remember, he was constantly describing the origins of the landforms around our home. His extemporized lectures were especially entertaining when we went on intercity car trips, which became journeys through time as well as space. Under his spell, landscapes melted away as cataclysms erupted out of the hills and valleys. That
mound over there was a moraine, a ridge of boulders and gravel deposited by a glacier thirty thousand years ago. That limestone mesa eroded into its shape gradually, over thousands of years. Niagara Falls was once close to the southern shore of Lake Ontario. Over the millennia it worked its way up the Niagara River to its present location, halfway between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. The limestone cliffs beside the access ramp were deposited millions of years ago at the bottom of a shallow tropical ocean. Through his eyes the landscape became a time machine.

  He told me that the limestone boulders in the rock garden at the back of our lawn were made of ocean deposits laid down millions of years before dinosaurs existed. That meant that the fossil shells that studded the rocks were from a time even more primeval and strange than that in which the dinosaurs existed. It was a time called the Devonian period, when there were no land animals at all, and only a very few primitive plants grew at the edges of the oceans.

  Looking at those fossil shells I could almost see their colours. I would go into a kind of trance, the rock would disappear and I’d envision the shadows of trilobites and armoured fish flickering across the sandy bottom of a warm tropical lagoon on a sunny afternoon untold years ago. (My reveries of primeval reefs eventually grew into a love of snorkelling in modern reefs. After all, coral reefs haven’t changed that much over four hundred million years, although, of course, the design of the fish has been updated.)