As the Libet Delay Gets too Late in the Day
Presentation for the Launch of "Time and Propinquity" - July 27, 2024
If I am known for much of anything—which, fortunately, I am not—it is my account of the ‘time traveler’ John Titor, Who Authored the John Titor Legend. Perhaps the lone takeaway after all those years is from the Latin on John’s insignia:
TEMPUS EDAX RERUM↬↬↬↬↬↬↬:↫↫↫↫↫TIME DEVOURS ALL THINGSWhich calls to mind just how much time I’ve wasted [A] talking about time, the the order of its operations, the minutia of its metings, and my thoughts thereupon.
In I Ain’t Go No Home in This World Anymore and the recently released How to Market Your Grief Blog dilettantes narrate of lost time and the lost camraderie of misspent youths, myopically looking for something that’s present everywhere even as it begins to dissapear. As Augustine’s well-worn, “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know” indicates, time is inherently personal, if only for the reason that something has to be. After all, due to the horrors of macro-cellular [B] regeneration, we are never physically; or, based on the Lacanian notion that “repressed content returns from the future” [1] psychologically the same selves. We are mere boats against the Boltzmann [C]urrents of subjectivity and subjunctivity, borne back synesthesiacally into the past, present, and future conterminous. Except, as the toilet trades are reporting, “not really not anymore.” [D]
In The Introductions, which is entering its fifth year of composition and shaping up to be the great albatross of my life, I attempt to catelegiacally [if neither categorically, nor, lo, logically] address Paul Virilio’s question that Joshua Hansen epigraphs his essay Academia and Apocalypse with: “Tomorrow, what will happen when the CYBERWORLD has once and for all subverted the space and time, the continuum of our fate?
Time alone is supposed to erase history. Time, it then seems, cannot abide interpermeation. Time takes its Time and Free Will is only another Madeleine Stowed away in its read-only memory of the anthropocene. Time ate the law of conditional probability. Time took the deeds, doubts, and dreams of mathematics. Time took, roughly, covarariants, contravariants, transfinite numbers, discontinuous deformations, all that rusty old stuff. Time took indeterminant equations. Time ate The Claims of Theory and The Hermeneutic Motion. Time ate solid analytic geometry. Time ate Bernoulli, Roger Cotes, and Robert Recorde. Time ate the dark ages and The Discourse Upon the Method. Time ate reciprocal causality. Time ate all the cosmological proof. Time ate apparent motion. Time ate Claude Shannon’s Information Theory. Time ate the retinal image. Time ate Bayesian inference. Time ate unfettered from the salient features of sensory processing. Time ate All Sorts of Sorts. Time ate the Median and the Mode. Time ate the Presence of the Past and ex extensio the short-lived Plancking trend.
- From The Introductions
At the conclusion of Dylan’s Newport Folk Festival set in 1964 Pete Yarrow tried to placate the fan’s demand for an encore by droning on about how there was insufficient time, ironically using up a great deal of time that could have been spent satisfying the fans. Dylan, giddy-looking with a faux-hangdog expression, emerged from backstage to play the increasingly popular role of the epiphanic edible consumer, “It’s all about time….man.” I fear how easily one could reduce most of my ideas to “mystic word games” little more player-friendly than a Wordle comprising a series of idiotic ‘mind blown’ hand gestures from some snickering ironist poisoning the while of the overlit lobby of eschatology. Hence the AGGRESSIVE AESTHETICIZATION of my sophistic blurred claims.
Enough hand-wringing already! Here are my claims. *Now with slightly fewer games.*
◯ Media, as in a 35 mm print of The Way We Were, as in all the records and the books of Nick Drak[ε]’s lifetime, is our last lone metaphysical co-ordinate system orienting us back to being in media res after The Death of God and The Slow Concealation of the Future.
∞ Time travel may have already begun. This may address the increasingly nagging Question Concerning
TechnHauntology, hauntelegiacal business models, and the reneging [F]eeling that “things will not be put back, not be made right again.” [2]⚯ If consciousness—that spandrel and scoundrel—can be di[G]itized, a greater threat than time’s cessation or ceaseless recapitulation is that of eternal prolongation, particularly if such a prolongation involves the blurring of the self with the porn, TikTok, and CAN-D Crush addicted other in some ceaseless algorithmic re-[H]ashing of drives that exist only to be—compulsively, repetitively, fruitlessly—pursued.
[I] hope the prolixity of my prose stealings isn’t solipsistic as it often seems, because after all is said and Dunne, what could be a stranger Experiment with Time than writing a book while knowing throughout the entire effort’s duration that:
Time ate Augustine’s Childhood. Time ate The Thousand and One Nights, one tale tolled at a rhyme. In unserious cases, such as this one, time can even manage to masticate all the syncopated strobes of multi-channel Finnegans Wakeification. Time ate Candide. Time ate all of Beowulf and Andre Gide—called a “gay saint” by Honor Levy, the all-night believer and dime’s square poetry-adjacent deceiver shrieking in the name of angelicization. Time ate Arthur Rimbaud. Time ate Baudelaire. Time ate Rabelais and Proust just like it ate Petronius. Time ate Boccaccio. Time seasoned Keats’s “songs of Spring” and ate straight through To Autumn. Time ate The Inferno, The Purgatorio. Time ate Quixote’s Homecoming and Death. Time, to its credit, ate a pharmaceutical scion’s Noonday Demon. Time even ate all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books. Time ate our hope for what the green light at the end of daisy’s dock might yet project. “By a commodius vicus of recirculation” back to the transcendental conception of reality and the faculty of judgment in general time ate the “swerve of shore” and the “bend of bay.” Time—knowing with Joan Stambaugh that “causality is also teleology, it results in all things being firmly knotted together” [3]—broke our telos copes when it ate the problem of illusions and the potential for ambiguity.
- From The Introductions
⇋If⇋ “what’s at stake in 21st century hauntology is not the disappearance of a particular object,” ⇋if⇋ “What has vanished is a tendency, a virtual trajectory” [4] ⇋if⇋ there is no band, and ⇋if⇋ nobody can sing the blues like Blind Willy McTell, ♺then♺ just as Libet’s delay arrives too late in the day, THIS MUST BE THE PLACE where “The image of no thing returns.” [5] And what then does that leave us but … overlays.
Overlays. Overt ray tracing of the uninvertible essence of flower colours, The Color Out of Time, and The Poetics of Pace; a forceful view of hard truths, of the blood stained earth, the earthly plan in the warm glow of early morning, midday’s clear blue sky, late afternoon’s richness, TWILIGHT’s broken idols and dream boulevards, the ones we loved, the subtle cadences of The Father of Night, the reneweller of the sky, in the beginning, and now that we’re here at the end again.
- From The Introductions
FOOTNOTES
[1] Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology
[2] Cormac McCarthy, The Road
[3] Joan Stambaugh, Nietzsche’s Thought of Eternal Return
[4] Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life
[5] Martin Heidegger, Language in the Poem
ENDNOTES
[A]
“...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”
―
From William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury”
[B]
As though Time occupied the intercellular space for a spell, then ate it.
[C]
“It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision. As far back as I can remember, said Austerlitz, I have always felt as if I had no place in reality, as if I were not there at all. [...]”
-
From W.G. Sebald’s “Austerlitz”
[D]
I was reading the graffiti on the wall of the waiting room of a local railway station. It was the usual stuff, including one record, in chalk, of teenage romance, written in the form of the ubiquitous mantra: “Janet Heathcote + Alan Flask. It is true.” Then the sky fell in on me, and with it, Red Shift. Someone had come back later and had written immediately below the mantra, in silver lipstick, without punctuation or a capital letter, the cramped, single line: “not really now not any more.”
-
From Alan Garner’s 2011 Introduction to “Red Shift”
[D1]
This line, ‘not really now not any more’, acts as a mantra within Garner’s novel, its repetition within the text and its usage as the novel’s concluding line simply emphasizing the temporal repetitions, continuities and distortions with which Red Shift is concerned. Garner considered the line as an alternative title to the book, a shorthand for his own experience of the complexities of ‘inner’ time; for in its forceful suggestion of an alternative temporality, this phrase, much like Hamlet’s declaration that ‘the time is out of joint’, points far beyond the confines of Garner’s text in anticipating our own similarly uncertain engagement with the present. Indeed, so perfectly does this phrase appear to summarize Garner’s temporal outlook (and increasingly our own), that in his discussion of Red Shift, Mark Fisher questions whether its discovery in a piece of anonymous graffiti may be attributed to more than mere chance:
-
From Merlin (Thomasinα) Coverley’s “Hauntology: Ghosts of Future Past”
[D2]
There is something so eerie, so cryptic, so suggestive about that phrase, especially when written as an anonymous graffito. What did the nameless author of this vagabond poetry mean by it, and what did it mean to them? What event – was it a personal crisis, a cultural event, a mystical revelation of some kind? – prompted them to write it? And did anyone else but garner ever witness the phrase graffitied onto the railway station wall? Or was it only garner who saw it? Not that I am suggesting he imagined it – but the phrase so perfectly captures the temporal vortices in Garner’s work that it seems as if it could have been a special message meant only for him. Perhaps it was, whatever the “intentions” of the graffiti writer happened to be. [...] To say that there was something fated about Garner’s encounter with this graffiti is to redouble the phrase’s intrinsic, indelible eeriness. For what does the phrase point to if not a fatal temporality? No now, not any more, not really. Does this mean that the present has eroded, disappeared – no now any more? Are we in the time of the always-already, where the future has been written; in which case it is not the future, not really? [...] What red shift discloses is not, evidently, a linear temporality, in which different historical episodes simply succeed one another. Nor does it present the episodes in a relation of sheer juxtaposition – in which no causal connection at all is asserted amongst the different episodes, and they are offered to us merely as sharing some similarities. Nor do we have the idea [...] Of a causality operating “backwards” and “forwards” through time, so that past, present and future have influence upon one another. This latter possibility is the closest to what red shift seems to be doing, but the novel’s scrambling of time is so complete that we are not left with any secure sense of “past”, “present” and “future” at all: not really now any more. Is there, then, no now because the past has consumed the present, reduced it to a series of compulsive repetitions, and what seemed to be new, what seemed to be now, is only the playing out of some out-of-time pattern? This formulation, perhaps, is closest to the cold fatality that seems to (un)ravel in red shift: yet if different historical moments are in some sense synchronous, would this not mean, not that there was no now, but that it is all now?”
-
From Mark Fisher’s “The Weird and the Eerie”
[D3] Which is all while and good except that,
“[Austerlitz hopes] that time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back and go behind it, and there I shall find everything as it once was, or more precisely I shall find that all moments of time have coexisted simultaneously, in which case none of what history tells us would be true, past events have not occurred but are waiting to do so at the moment when we think of them, although that, of course, opens up the bleak prospect of ever-lasting misery and never-ending anguish.”
-
From W.G. Sebald’s “Austerlitz”
[D1-α]
“THOMASINA: ....the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue. Oh, Septimus! -- can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides -- thousands of poems -- Aristotle's own library!....How can we sleep for grief?
SEPTIMUS: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew? […] When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.”
- From Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia”
[ε] is for
[F]
While a lot of attention is paid to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, I might direct your attention to its Atlas Detector, designed to read very subtle changes and deviations from expected physics. If a “message” were to emerge into this home of old seekings we call a worldline from a mini black hole created at CERN , then ATLAS would be their medium.
[G]
Perhaps phenomenal consciousness has no function of its own because it is either a by-product of other traits or a (functionless) accident. If so, then phenomenal consciousness has an evolutionary explanation even though it fulfills no biological function.
-
From “Is Consciousness a Spandrel? by Robinson, Maley, and Piccinini”
[H]
Entering society means accepting that one cannot do just as one pleases. The loss of unrestricted existence that occurs when one enters society forms the subject of the drive. But the initial loss has a deceptive appearance that distorts the subject’s experience of the drive. It appears to the subject as if it has lost something substantial—that the unrestricted existence it has sacrificed holds the ultimate enjoyment—and thus the subject searches for the object that might return it to this mythic time. In fact, the loss is itself primordial and constitutive for the subject, which is why every attempt to return fails. No subjectivity exists prior to this structuring loss. […] From the perspective of the drive, the goal or object that it seeks is nothing but a tool for facilitating repetition, which is where enjoyment actually lies. We require the deception of the pleasurable goal in order to submit to the enjoyment of the repetition of loss.
-
Todd McGowan, Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema
[I]
Perhaps that’s why people find it so offensive when authors make changes years after a book’s publication: at a certain point, idiotic as my past words and ideas sound to my current self, my past self did the work, and does not deserve to have his wrong-headed bloviations, sentimental pratfalls, and romantic flagellations stricken from the record. How would you know that what you say, today, won’t soon seem equally banal, ostentatious, or flat-out embarrasing? I’m pre-emptively embarrassed for myself right now! More optimistically, how to know if what we change today won’t regain its truth tomorrow? More importantly, how would you know, and what would it matter anyway?