of shadows, and only a kind of blend of the two exists in its own right.”
(This feels so much less lonely, less disturbing, than Telesio’s view of Time that exists unaccompanied, always and ever by itself.)
Yet Santayana said, “The essence of nowness runs like a fire along the fuse of time.”
(Now seems less and less a solid entity to me, and time more a series of shifting, intersecting planes. Tenses fall away, the nowness. Claire picks up her pen, opens her notebook, raises her hand, starts to write. Where is she? And when? From what place do I watch her? From what time? I can almost touch the crispness of her sleeve, or the wet ink, each page a fractured, beating thing.)
According to Stannard, “In four-dimensional space-time nothing changes, there is no flow of time, everything simply is… It is only in consciousness that we come across the particular time known as ‘now.’”
And for Grünbaum, “Events simply occur … they do not ‘advance’ into a preexisting frame called ‘time.’”
(Could it be true what I’ve read—that there’s no physical experiment that can distinguish among a state of rest, a state of constant velocity, and a state of gravitational free fall?)
A “Block Universe” is the idea that time is somehow laid out in its entirety all at once—a landscape made of time where all past and future events exist together.
(I’ve felt this but have had no words with which to say it.)
Lloyd wrote, “For the Quinean, what differences we see between past, present and future pertain to our limited mode of access to reality.”
(Would that mean the buildings of imperial Rome still stand—it’s just that we, caught in the net of the present, can’t see them? And that the buildings of future cities already exist, though we can’t see them either?)
And Weyl, in 1922: “The objective world simply is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness crawling upward along the lifeline of my body does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image.”
(I’m sitting on the bench with Eudemus. It’s morning or afternoon or night. I watch his blue-veined hand curl around his staff. And I’m on the table where you made me. And in the forest alone, scavenging for food. I’m almost touching Claire’s hand. I hear her slippered footsteps on the stairs. Her face is young then older then young again. Over and over Socrates is born, lives, dies. Zhuangzi dreams himself a butterfly. Or a butterfly dreams itself Zhuangzi. The sky’s dark or not, the water calm or not, the snow fallen or not. My footsteps on ice, my tracks in the grass.
I can’t know what the physicists know. How there are more than four dimensions, such things as defy our habitual ways of thinking. Borges wrote of time: “It is the tiger which destroys me but I am the tiger.” Where is he now? And you? And Claire’s hand on the page, all this ice I feel inside me, and the night, the day, the measurements we use: millisecond, second, minute, hour … season, eon, era … as if such things could be measured, as if there weren’t this fire in the skull, and in that fire a hand, perplexed and burning, reaching through it—)
ICE DIARY
I’m now far north. Archangel. Salt winds from the White Sea mix with naphtha and lignite from the shipyards. Sea ice cracks and groans, breaks on itself, breaks farther. So much whiteness violently dividing. Then stillness: ice locks in around the ships, seals them like footprints left in wax, or pharoahs, mummy-wrapped, trapped and burning inward. For months each hull’s a secret violently kept, volatile and cryptic. Shore lights flicker like something slowly starving.
If I still had a voice, if I could speak. But who would I speak to even then? These notes as if written in invisible ink. And the taste of blood in my mouth, or is it the memory of… And those bushes where I hid …
This morning I found a single stick ornamented with Chinese glass beads. Also a Kufan coin, a blurred list of provisions, a pair of oilskin breeches, a cap. A harsh quietness in them like the silence of those ice-locked hulls. Something helpless in them too, as if as they lay there in the ice they felt unremembered and remembering, unconnected yet somehow still connected—but to what? (Though of course I knew they could feel nothing.) Where did they come from—what lost ships?
But so many years since