Time, folks
Billy Pilgrim came unstuck in time. And Louise Banks, knowing how her life would unfold, still stepped straight into it.
Let’s start with Billy. In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut lightly sketches the facets of this Pilgrim: a successful optometrist; a bumbling father thought hopeless by his daughter; an unlikely survivor of war; an accidental clown; a zoo exhibit; a number one fan; a somewhat mercenary husband. Billy is largely apathetic - he observes what is happening sometimes quizzically, mostly with bewilderment. He’s a pilgrim in the sense that he is walking a path set out before him: since his alien abduction, Bill Pilgrim knows that all moments have existed, do exist and will go on existing throughout all time and so he walks his life as he’s seen it before, walking even into his death (which he knows is not final at all, since time is not linear). So it goes.
Louise Banks is also a multi-faceted character. There is, firstly, her construction - originally depicted in a short story, then written into a screen play, inhabited by Amy Adams, and directed by Denis Villeneuve in the film Arrival. Like Billy, the Louise we see on film, through the course of the story, comes into a new relationship with time. As a linguist, she proceeds methodically from ignorance to an impressive command of an alien language, but the key to this progression seems to be her flexibility: as information is gathered and patterns are observed, new strategies and inquisitions are made. As we watch the film, we are doing something similar - trying to make something cohesive from parts of a whole, refining our understanding as we go. It took me a while to understand that the film didn’t start at the beginning of the story. Denis had me eating out of his hands.
One of the most scintillating aspects of Arrival is the idea that language shapes the way we think. I’m only part way through Metaphors we live by, but am so far inclined to agree with Lakoff and Johnson’s claims that language and meaning shapes behaviour. How do we come to know language, have our thoughts infused with its latent rules and premises? Banks, bamboozled by alien speech, turns to writing. The aliens ‘write a sentence’ from beginning and end simultaneously - the results are elaborate and beautiful circles, more or less embellished. Vonnegut, too, proffers the secret of a civilisation held by writing in the following passage, in which an alien attempts to explain their books to Billy Pilgrim, who has asked to read one:
There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore. But you’re right: each clump of symbols is a brief urgent message - describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvellous moments seen all at one time.
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In recent months, I have been coached - this started when I took a break from work in order to figure out what to do with myself. It intensified recently with access to group coaching. Once a week, I hear about a series of ‘wins’ and these tend to refer back to goals and ambitions. Everyone is looking ahead, working on their purpose, amplifying their drive, eliminating the things that stand in the way of them achieving their goals. It is admirable, but lately I’ve noticed myself resisting this language. I have become suspicious of the mantra ‘improve 1% every day’. Watching and reading what I have this week, I think of the way time is handled in these situations: we must make the days count, we must be cognisant of our goals, act each day to get closer to them. It’s like each day is a step on a defined path and whilst deviations are anticipated, the message is to get back on track as fast as possible.
Rebecca Solnit, in Wanderlust, talks of paths that are laid out by others:
A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape, and to follow a route is to accept an interpretation, or to stalk your predecessors on it as scholars and trackers and pilgrims do. To walk the same way is to reiterate something deep; to move through the same space the same way is a means of becoming the same person, thinking the same thoughts.
I think of some of the coachees I interact with as pilgrims, because there is a sense of emulation in their endeavours - wanting to be as fit or strong or resilient or rich or entrepreneurial as whomever. For some, this desire is perhaps not as explicit, but few of us are inured to the barrage of external stimulus that - like or not - shapes some of our values and many of our desires. The people that intrigue me in this group are those that have clearly thought long about what they are aiming for and why - they are, in a sense, following their own path, they are off map. Being off map seems to demand a looser grip on time: in uncharted territory, we cannot know the spatial or temporal distance between two spots.
It is notable that both Slaughterhouse Five and Arrival both emphasise the alien nature of an alternative to linear time, questioning whether it is indeed human to concede that time progresses in a line, one moment after another - it slips through our fingers, we search for that we’ve lost. But we don’t need a time-travelling alien race to find ideas that time may not linear - they can be found in an altogether more familiar setting. Kathleen Alcott (whose prose, if it concedes anything at all, attests that to breathe is to bruise) exquisitely pins that experience of finding a whole life in a momentary action:
Had she upset him, she wondered, as they coasted down the canyon, but then he placed two fingers on her earlobe and kept them there the whole drive back, a slight pressure that made her delirious, all of who they might be to each other imagined by that gesture.
John Berger, too, knows of the depths a moment can possess (and in the context of this all-encompassing view of time, it seems apt to refer to him in the present tense):
It was the period of 33” records, which one had to turn over by hand. And those moments of turning the record over, and slowly lowering the arm with its diamond needle, were moments of a hallucinating plenitude, grateful and expectant, only comparable with the other moments, also wordless, when one of us was on top of the other making love.
One of the things I particularly love about standing in front of a canvas in an art gallery is the sense of being able to indulge in a crystallisation of time - to taste, all in one mouthful, the entirety of the creative process. I often stand in awe, marvelling at the mystery of what took place for this painting to hang before me. Its form rarely reveals the secrets of its making. I wonder less often about the construction of a story or a novel, but it seems to me that it’s easy to fall into the trap of mapping the process of making onto the progression of a story - that it is linear, that the writer began at the beginning. I don’t know any writers that begin at the beginning, and mostly, I hear tales that relate to finding the beginning long after the start of the commitment to the project.
I rail against any idea that the book is a linear art (incidentally, this is much easier to accept for an album, but how many people listen to albums these days?) - in fact, I notice that my taste often inclines, in novels especially, toward those that cut and hack at a linear progression of time in the story space. I enjoy being fucked with, enjoy having to work to piece it together. It feels like a more real experience of reading to me, especially because the very best books aren’t done with me after I’ve turned that final page. They go on, living and breathing in me, becoming something that transcends the progression of pages. Rebecca Solnit, again, offering a bridge between the structure of a story and the experience of time passing:
The workings of the mind and spirit are hard to imagine, as is the nature of time - so we tend to metaphorize all these intangibles as physical objects located in space… And if time has become space, then the unfolding of time that constitutes a life becomes a journey too, however much or little one travels spatially. Walking and travelling have become central metaphors in thought and speech, so central we hardly notice them.
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I want to ground these thoughts in relation to habits that I think we’re overlooking more and more. Things that I’ve certainly been uncomfortable with for much of my life and am now developing a deep attachment to, an acute desire for. Slowness. Stillness. Simply being.
The Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse Five don’t understand Bill Pilgrim’s question about how it is possible to live in peace. They attest that, when bad things happen, they simply look the other way. At first, I was horrified by the thought - it seemed both irresponsible and impractical. But I wonder if there is something in here about the nature of attention, that thing that we do actually get to choose to bestow, in spite of the world conspiring to wrest it from us.
These aliens, in trying to explain to their own kind what the human experience of time is like, create an elaborate metaphor of a person on a track, looking down a very long tube, unable to turn their head, proceeding along the track at a steady pace. How do we act as if our heads are not bound, our vision not restricted?
In the film About Time, Bill Nighy’s character introduces his son to a gift in the patriarchal line: time travel. In the midst of the son’s reeling about this power, the father explains how he has used his gift through most of his life: he lives each day as it comes, as usual, responding to all the things that happen. Then he goes back and lives the same day again, and this time, he enjoys it. He is not stressed out about what might happen, he can pay attention to small courtesies and details because he is not consumed by what he is trying to do that day. He is in each moment, not just passing through. Whilst we could say, easy for him with his time travelling powers, the truth is that we can all time travel simply by remembering and reflecting. What we’ve lived we have not lost.
These characters, these ideas, these observations - they come to us like Dark Knights, the heroes we didn’t know we needed. At least, in these stories, we’re offered an antidote to the sensation that we’re marching toward death, or that our life is only meaningful in accrual. Perhaps one way to be more Tralfamadorian is to train our attention on the good of what has passed, to sift the past for what we want to carry forward on this road of our own making. This insists, of course, on letting go of the things that don’t serve - it is a selective process that requires awareness and reflection; that requires time. Reviewing what has past and bifurcating based on what we currently need is less of a writing-off than a writing-in: let’s hold on to those things that bring us closer to ourselves. In order to do that, I think we could all benefit from a better idea of what it means to be ourselves.
What if imagining that every possible moment that may be is happening right now is the simplest way to connect with the moment, this moment that is no other? What if considering all these simultaneous possibilities untethers our minds from thinking of scarcity - our time is precious, it must be well spent; to thinking of abundance - time can grow with me, rather than use me up. What if neutralising the sting of ‘endings’ allows us to see that there is not only one way to be, one person to love, one place to live? Would we be happier? Would we be freer?
I take no issue with goals per se, but I do observe fixations on the end and not the means. It seems in this treadmill of achievement, we have unlearned how to be, how to simply sit with ourselves and notice what is good, what is us. That is a practice to cultivate, because if we don’t relearn how to be, whatever our goal is, when we achieve it I just don’t imagine how we can be satisfied. Satisfaction, I am convinced, takes practice. And perhaps it also requires the removal of any external locus of value. You are enough, and you were, and you will be. Because there is nothing else. In this moment, you have no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects - and you are beautiful.
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This essay has grown beyond the proportions I originally saw. I walked out on the moors yesterday to try and find the edges of it. At the end of the walk, as I was changing my shoes, a man stopped to chat with me. Our paths had crossed among the heather. He told me he walked a lot and I asked if he’d noticed more people out enjoying nature since the pandemic hit. He smiled wryly and said he knew where to go, recounting his walk the previous weekend - seven hours, not seeing a soul. We both sighed heavily at the thought. Bliss.
I don’t often meet people like me, whose love for solitude runs unabashedly deep. It’s hard to voice that contentment, because the sheer fact of conversation seems anathema to solitude to many. But it is possible both to adore solitude and to intensely enjoy meandering conversations with strangers. In fact, for me, the one enhances the other. The man commented that I took many photographs. In the course of our sharing the time and space of Haworth Moor, I had stopped to take four photographs. All of the landscapes, I thought, were singing of discordant hues and I could barely believe my ears. He offered that he never takes photographs, but that at any moment, there at home in his armchair, he could recall a landscape he’d walked through in vivid detail. Sometimes they come unbidden. A real life Tralfamadorian.
To ride this out, let’s read the inestimable Sarah Hall, who captured something in the philosophy of her reclusive artist Giorgio that now resides in my heart:
Of all the conditions we experience, solitude is perhaps the most misunderstood. To choose it is regarded as irresponsible or a failure. To most it should be avoided, like an illness. Inside solitude, people see the many compartments of unhappiness like the combs of a pomegranate. To be emptied from the world, to be cast away and forgotten - is this what we fear most? So we shake hands and pass money and hear talk of society and talk of our families and ourselves. We must move in and out of doors, press buttons for lifts, catch each other’s colds, laugh and weep, and contribute to the din and the restlessness. We must dance and sing, and visit the courts. We must make our daily contracts.
But if it is embraced solitude is the most joyful of commitments. In the grace of these quiet rooms I know far better the taste of each day.
May you attend to your tastebuds with all the flavours of your life - those gone, those yet to be and especially those that are right here, right now.
Love,
Bx