Free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time

If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.

 

John McPhee, Annals of the Former World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000) p. 91

A small bright sparkle at the end of time

With your arms spread wide again to represent all time on earth, look at one hand with its line of life. The Cambrian begins in the wrist, and the Permian Extinction is at the outer end of the palm. All of the Cenozoic is in a fingerprint, and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history. Geologists live with the geologic scale. Individually, they may or may not be alarmed by the rate of exploitation of the things they discover, but, like the environmentalists, they use these repetitive analogies to place the human record in perspective – to see the Age of Reflection, the last few thousand years, as a small bright sparkle at the end of time.

 

John McPhee, Annals of the Former World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000) p. 89

No vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end

"The world which we inhabit is composed of the materials not of the earth which was the immediate predecessor of the present but of the earth which ... had preceded the land that was above the surface of the sea while our present land was yet beneath the water of the ocean," he wrote. "Here are three distinct successive periods of existence, and each of these is, in our measurement of time, a thing of indefinite duration.... The result, therefore, of this physical inquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end."

 

James Hutton, cited in John McPhee, Annals of the Former World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000) p. 79

Time isn't deep, it is always already all around us

Time isn't deep, it is always already all around us. The past ghosts us, lies all about us less as layers, more as drift.

 

Robert Macfarlane, Underland (Hamish Hamilton, 2019) p. 273

We live on a restless Earth

When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. A conviviality of being leaps to mind and eye. The world becomes eerily various and vibrant again. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless Earth.

 

Robert Macfarlane, Underland (Hamish Hamilton, 2019) pp. 15-16 

Deep time opens into the future as well as the past

Deep time is the dizzying expanses of Earth history that stretch away from the present moment. Deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: epochs and aeons, instead of minutes and years. Deep time is kept by stone, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Deep time opens into the future as well as the past.

 

Robert Macfarlane, Underland (Hamish Hamilton, 2019) p. 15 

Building and action interpenetrate

As porous as this stone is the architecture. Building and action interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades, and stairways. In everything they preserve the scope to become a theatre of new, unforseen constellations. The stamp of the definitive is avoided. No situation appears intended forever, no figure asserts its "thus and not otherwise". 

 

Walter Benjamin, 'Naples' in One-Way Street and Other Writings (NLB, 1979) p. 169

Museums and libraries are heterotopias

Museums and libraries have become heterotopias in which time never stops building up and topping its own summit, whereas in the seventeenth century, even at the end of the century, museums and libraries were the expression of an individual choice. By contrast, the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. The museum and the library are heterotopias that are proper to western culture of the nineteenth century.

Michel Foucault, 'Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias' in Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité (at https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=6&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwimo4-YlaHkAhVQblAKHWf9DZoQFjAFegQIBRAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fweb.mit.edu%2Fallanmc%2Fwww%2Ffoucault1.pdf&usg=AOvVaw333VKyhg9HhLuy9An6eJNQ ) p.7

The book of events

Every beginning
is only a sequel after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.

Wislawa Szymborska, 'Love at First Sight' in View with a Grain of Sand (faber & faber, 1995) p. 198

We call it a grain of sand

We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine, without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt.

Our glance, our touch means nothing to it.
It doesn’t feel itself seen and touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is not different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn’t view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake’s floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelessly.
The water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.

A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they’re three seconds only for us.

Time has passed like courier with urgent news.
But that’s just our simile.
The character is inverted, his hasts is make believe,
his news inhuman.

Wislawa Szymborska, 'View with a Grain of Sand' in View with a Grain of Sand (faber & faber, 1995) pp. 135-136

You are already living on more than one timescale

You are already living on more than one timescale. Ecological awareness is disorienting precisely because of these multiple scales. We sense that there are monsters even if we can't see them directly.

There's a monster in the dark mirror, and you are a cone in one of its eyes. When you are sufficiently creeped out by the human species, you see something even bigger than the Anthropocene looming in the background, hiding in plain sight in the prose of Thomas Hardy, the piles of fruit in the supermarket, the gigantic parking lots, the suicide rate.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) pp. 41-42

Space has collapsed and placed has emerged in its truly monstrous uncanny dimension

We have been telling ourselves that homogenous empty "space" has conquered localized, particular "place". We are either the kind of person who thinks that the category of place is a quaint antique or we are the kind of person who thinks that the category is worth preserving because it is antique. In a certain way, we are the same kind of person.

Many have pronounced the death of place since the 1970s. In literary studies the announcement has gone hand in hand with the language of textuality versus speech. Our habitual talk pits speech (presence, villages, the organic, slow time, traditions) against textuality (dissolution, speed, modern, and postmodern technocultures). Yet the coordinates are terribly out of date. In a twist no one saw coming (because we weren't looking outside the human), space has by no means conquered place. That postmodern meme was simply a late symptom of the modern myth of transcending one's material conditions.

Exactly the opposite has occurred. From the standpoint of the genuinely post-modern ecological era, what has collapsed is (the fantasy of empty, smooth) space. "Space" has revealed itself as the convenient fiction of white Western imperialist humans, just as relativity theory revealed Euclidean geometry to be a small human-flavored region of a much more liquid Gaussian spacetime. The Euclidean concept that space is a container with straight lines is good enough to be getting on with if you want to voyage around the coast of Africa to reach the Spice Islands. Space in this sense has collapsed, and place has emerged in its truly moonstrous uncanny dimension, which is to say its nonhuman dimension. How? Now that the globalization dust has settled and the global warming data is in, we humans find ourselves on a very specific planet with a specific biosphere. It's not Mars. It is planet Earth. Our sense of planet is not a cosmopolitan rush but rather the uncanny feeling that there are all kinds of places at all kinds of scale: dinner table, house, street, neighborhood, Earth, biosphere, ecosystem, city, bioregion, country, tectonic plate. Moreover and perhaps more significantly: bird's nest, beaver's dam, spider web, whale migration pathway, wolf territory, bacterial microbiome. And these places, as in the concept of spacetime, are inextricably bound up with different kinds of timescale: dinner party, family generation, evolution, climate (human) "world history", DNA, lifetime, vacation, geology; and again the time of wolves, the time of whales, the time of bacteria.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) pp. 9-10

Forests reign in the past

Who knows the temporal dimensions of the forest? History is not enough. We should have to know how the forest experiences its great age; why, in the reign of the imagination, there are no young forests. [...] In the vast world of the non-I, the non-I of fields is not the same as the non-I of forests. The forest is a before-me, before-us, whereas for fields and meadows, my dreams and recollections accompany all the different phases of tilling and harvesting. When the dialectics of the I and the non-I grow more flexible, I feel that fields and meadows are with me, in the with-me, with-us. But forests reign in the past.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p. 188

In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time

At times we think we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of the being's stability – a being who does not want to melt away, and who, even in the past, when he sets out in search of things past, wants time to "suspend" its flight. In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time. That is what space is for.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p.8

Progress is a matter of political struggle, following no pre-plotted trajectory or natural tendency

Various modernities are possible, and new visions of the future are essential for the left. Such images are a necessary supplement to any transformative political project. They give a direction to political struggles and generate a set of criteria to adjudicate which struggles to support, which movements to resist, what to invent, and so on. In the absence of images of progress, there can only be reactivity, defensive battles, local resisitance and a bunker mentality – what we have characterised as folk politics. Visions of the future are therefore indispensable for elaborating a movement against capitalism. Contra the earlier thinkers of modernity, there is no necesssity to progress, nor a single pathway from which to adjudicate the extent of development. Instead, progress must be understood as hyperstitional: as a kind of fiction, but one that aims to transform itself into a truth. Hyperstitions operate by catalysing dispersed sentiment into a historical force that brings the future into existence. They have the temporal form of 'will have been'. Such hyperstitions of progress form orienting narratives with which to navigate forward, rather than being an established or necessary property of the world. Progress is a matter of political struggle, following no pre-plotted trajectory or natural tendency, and with no guarantee of success. If the supplanting of capitalism is impossible from the standpoint of one or even many defensive stances, it is because any form of prospective politics must set out to construct the new. Pathways of progress must be cut and paved, not merely travelled along in some pre-ordained fashion; they are a matter of political achievement rather than divine or earthly providence.

Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (Verso, 2016) pp. 74-75

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary.

Henry David Thoreau, Where I Lived And What I Lived For (Penguin Books, 2005) p. 77

Our life is frittered away by detail

Our life is frittered away by detail.

Henry David Thoreau, Where I Lived And What I Lived For (Penguin Books, 2005) p. 69

Without memory, time would be unarmed against us

"Mr. Trask, do you think the thoughts of people suddenly become important at a given age? Do you have sharper feelings or clearer thoughts now than when you were ten? Do you see as well, hear as well, taste as vitally?"
"Maybe you're right," said Adam.
"It's one of the great fallacies, it seems to me," said Lee, "that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to a man."
"And memory."
"Yes, memory. Without that, time would be unarmed against us."

John Steinbeck, East of Eden (Penguin Books, 2000) p. 458

The world is always new

"The world is always new," said Coro Mean, "however old its roots."

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest (The Orion Publishing Group, 2015) p. 32

Linearly calibrated time is an illusion

Abstract, linearly calibrated time – like its negation, pure stochasticity – is an illusion, reinforced only by our own species-specific dimensional scaling and self-referentiality. "Only the behaviour of the natural system itself (its properties of non-linear recursion under specified conditions of observation) identifies the contextual meaning of time."

Mike Davis, Dead Cities (The New Press, 2002) p. 325