![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
me again
*stumbles over from ficblog and collapses*
Mmm, replying to fic feedback. Joy. No, in all seriousness, it makes me feel all warm and nice when people bother to comment on my writing. And to everyone who mentions things in particular/expands on an idea/etc. - THANK YOU. Being able to say more than 'Thanks!' in return is good for my brain cells.
***
I'm not sure if this will interest everyone, but I have something of a strong interest in sociotemporal theory and I think it's important. It's also beautifully expressed.
To sense time, to speak about time, you have to sense that something has changed. And you have to sense that within or behind this change there is also something that was present before. The perception of time is the inexplicable union in the consciousness of both chnage and constancy.
In peoples' lives, in yours and mine, there are linear time sequences, with and without beginnings and endings. Conditions and epochs that appear with or without warning, only to pass and never come round again.
And there are repetitions, cycles: ups and downs, hope and despair, love and rejection, rearing up and dying away and returning again and again.
And there are blackouts, time-lags. And spurts of time. And sudden delays.
There is an overwhelmingly powerful tendency, when people are gathered together, to create a common time.
And in between all of these, every conceivable combination, hybrid and intermediate state is to be found.
And, just glimpsed, incidences of eternity.
Time is inextricably bound up with language, with the sensory apparatus, and with human fellowship. Time comes into being when the mind encounters the world in a normal life.
Without contradicting anyone I would like to take issue with Newton who thought that time runs through the universe regardless of man, and with Kant who thought that time is inborn in the mind. I believe that time is a possibility inherent in all people at all times, but that teaching is required if it is to unfold, and whatever shape it takes will depend upon the character of the teaching and the environment.
Time is a sphere made up of language, colours, smells, senses and sounds, a sphere in which you and the world coexist, an instrument with which to put the world in order and comprehend it, one of the reasons for your survival.
But if time grows too tight, then it becomes a reason for doing away with yourself.
Time is not an illusion. Nor is it the only reality. It is one possible, widespread form for encounters between the mind and the surrounding world. But not the only possible one. If you are driven by curiosity, or if you are ill and cannot survive any other way, then you can enter the laboratory and touch time. And then it will change.
Linear time is unavoidable, it is one way of hanging on to the past. Like points on a line - the Battle of Poitiers, the Black Death 1347, Columbus discovering America, Luther at Wittenberg, the beheading of Struensee 1772. And what I am writing here, this part of my life, is also remembered in this way.
But it is not the only way. The mind also remembers stretches, fluid passages, connections between what has once happened and what is happening now, regardless of the passage of time. And farthest back, the mind remembers a timeless plain.
If you grow up in a world that only permits and rewards one form of memory, then force is being used against your nature. Then you are imperceptibly nudged out towards the edge of the abyss.
Time is made up of many different states of consciousness, of symbols from human life.
This means that time is also a sphere of language, like a landscape, the place you make for when you try to comprehend, in particular, those elements in the world concerned with its change.
Like all linguistic landscapes time is not just a matter of words or linguistic significance. It is also colours, tones, rhythms, touch, tension, relaxation and scent.
In its simplest form it is the indescribable combination of recogniton and surprise that arises when the mind encounters the movement of the world. It is the acknowledgment of the fact that, in every change, there is something never before seen, something unique and irreversible, and something that always remains the same.
Time refuses to be simplified and reduced. You cannot say that it is found only in the mind or only in the universe, that it runs in only one direction, or in every one imaginable. That it exists only in biological substructure, or is only a social convention. That it is only individual or only collective, only cyclic, only linear, relative, absolute, determined, universal or only local, only indeterminate, illusory, totally true, immeasurable, measurable, inexplicable or approachable. It is all of these things.
- extracts from Peter Høeg's Borderliners, which you should all read right now
Mmm, replying to fic feedback. Joy. No, in all seriousness, it makes me feel all warm and nice when people bother to comment on my writing. And to everyone who mentions things in particular/expands on an idea/etc. - THANK YOU. Being able to say more than 'Thanks!' in return is good for my brain cells.
***
I'm not sure if this will interest everyone, but I have something of a strong interest in sociotemporal theory and I think it's important. It's also beautifully expressed.
To sense time, to speak about time, you have to sense that something has changed. And you have to sense that within or behind this change there is also something that was present before. The perception of time is the inexplicable union in the consciousness of both chnage and constancy.
In peoples' lives, in yours and mine, there are linear time sequences, with and without beginnings and endings. Conditions and epochs that appear with or without warning, only to pass and never come round again.
And there are repetitions, cycles: ups and downs, hope and despair, love and rejection, rearing up and dying away and returning again and again.
And there are blackouts, time-lags. And spurts of time. And sudden delays.
There is an overwhelmingly powerful tendency, when people are gathered together, to create a common time.
And in between all of these, every conceivable combination, hybrid and intermediate state is to be found.
And, just glimpsed, incidences of eternity.
Time is inextricably bound up with language, with the sensory apparatus, and with human fellowship. Time comes into being when the mind encounters the world in a normal life.
Without contradicting anyone I would like to take issue with Newton who thought that time runs through the universe regardless of man, and with Kant who thought that time is inborn in the mind. I believe that time is a possibility inherent in all people at all times, but that teaching is required if it is to unfold, and whatever shape it takes will depend upon the character of the teaching and the environment.
Time is a sphere made up of language, colours, smells, senses and sounds, a sphere in which you and the world coexist, an instrument with which to put the world in order and comprehend it, one of the reasons for your survival.
But if time grows too tight, then it becomes a reason for doing away with yourself.
Time is not an illusion. Nor is it the only reality. It is one possible, widespread form for encounters between the mind and the surrounding world. But not the only possible one. If you are driven by curiosity, or if you are ill and cannot survive any other way, then you can enter the laboratory and touch time. And then it will change.
Linear time is unavoidable, it is one way of hanging on to the past. Like points on a line - the Battle of Poitiers, the Black Death 1347, Columbus discovering America, Luther at Wittenberg, the beheading of Struensee 1772. And what I am writing here, this part of my life, is also remembered in this way.
But it is not the only way. The mind also remembers stretches, fluid passages, connections between what has once happened and what is happening now, regardless of the passage of time. And farthest back, the mind remembers a timeless plain.
If you grow up in a world that only permits and rewards one form of memory, then force is being used against your nature. Then you are imperceptibly nudged out towards the edge of the abyss.
Time is made up of many different states of consciousness, of symbols from human life.
This means that time is also a sphere of language, like a landscape, the place you make for when you try to comprehend, in particular, those elements in the world concerned with its change.
Like all linguistic landscapes time is not just a matter of words or linguistic significance. It is also colours, tones, rhythms, touch, tension, relaxation and scent.
In its simplest form it is the indescribable combination of recogniton and surprise that arises when the mind encounters the movement of the world. It is the acknowledgment of the fact that, in every change, there is something never before seen, something unique and irreversible, and something that always remains the same.
Time refuses to be simplified and reduced. You cannot say that it is found only in the mind or only in the universe, that it runs in only one direction, or in every one imaginable. That it exists only in biological substructure, or is only a social convention. That it is only individual or only collective, only cyclic, only linear, relative, absolute, determined, universal or only local, only indeterminate, illusory, totally true, immeasurable, measurable, inexplicable or approachable. It is all of these things.
- extracts from Peter Høeg's Borderliners, which you should all read right now