Tempus What's It?

 

“Time passes. Listen. Time passes.
Come closer now.
Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night.”

 

I was talking earlier on, of a reference made in an old episode of the TV series "Lovejoy", to the famous 15th Century Prague Astronomical clock, and the prevailing superstition - and fear - of that period, that clocks actually create time itself. The thing is that up until the era of mechanical timekeeping - and you could go a good bit further back in history to pseudo-mechanical methods, I guess - we simply regulated our daily activities in a purely analogue and instinctual sense: daylight and the season's turn being the only means by which one was aware of 'time'; all tied to itself and our being, and not abstracted to the 'measured' time of the clock. Intuitively, on a human scale, the only correct interpretation of time, if such exists, is the human, existential one: the fact that human intellect sought and discovered means of 'measuring' time is more a concomitant of intellect than reality, of the need to extend our influence, than simply to live.

 

So, by the by, I had an epiphany this evening: having chosen the Dylan Thomas [Under Milk Wood] quote above to head tonight's post, I saw, briefly, time in memory, having read the stanza again, in isolation. Not just static, fragmented snapshots like boxed Polaroids; but, somehow, I 'listened', as Thomas put it - listened - to time. I think that moment, which I really am unable to articulate in words, is as close as I'm going to get to Satori. And no, I'm not using psychedelics. Art, Literature, Music, Physics and individual memory all converge to suggest the non-linearity of that we have sought to trammel: time itself...