DIMENSION FOUR
I don't like to think of time in the conventional manner. I once read a definition of time as, “a measure of change”. I always liked that. It also happens to make sense; like, if there's nothing at all, no matter, no movement, no growth or decay, there's no sense in talking about time. But, then, to me at least, it also makes sense to not just have a standard measure, like the second (defined by the International Committee for Weights and Measures as “9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of caesium 133 atoms at rest, and approaching the theoretical temperature of absolute zero – with zero external radiation effects”), but also to account for the rate or volume of change as well. Right? Otherwise, it's a very flat and colo(u)rless thing that doesn't really account for the most important features of time: context and experience. What I mean is that, as you've seen and felt, an increment of time may be universal (a second is a second everywhere) but it can have different value or substance in different situations – just like currency. What you can do with a dollar, what it's worth and what it will get you, is different in rural Utah than in downtown San Francisco; and it's different again anywhere in America than anywhere in Cambodia or Cameroon; and then there's the difference in the value of a dollar over time, between 1879, 1942, and 2005, say. Time has the same quality. Doesn't it? To think about the inflation rate of time you might compare the modern experience with that of the past. One of my favourite examples is the fact that there's more new information in any Sunday New York Times than a person would have encountered in their entire life in the 1600s. (Or something close to that. I can't find the quote.) I find this both believable and extraordinary. But even just compare something like office work in the 1970s with office work today. People today can get far more accomplished – even just by having email and not needing to type, photocopy, print, courier, mail, or telephone. Or think about your personal communications and how most of us have a dozen conversations going at all times: you may be in a meeting, having an analog face-to-face conversation someone; engaged in four or maybe ten e-mail dialogues and two or three analog mail correspondence; three Facebook messages and a pile of Twitter exchanges; and may have a whole slew of text messages on your phone. And these can all be happening simultaneously, and at all different speeds, over different periods of time (often operating in what amounts to their own temporal dimension), and regardless of location or distance. Or, for another example, I heard a senior graphic designer explain that it used to take him and a team of people (using layout boards, t-squares, proportion wheels, Exacto blades, tweezers, rubber cement, drafting tape, film, photo processing, and toxic solvents) weeks to push out the same magazine cover he alone whips up in an afternoon on his computer. Or, for something different, you could think of the speed of travel. How it once took a lifetime to cross the globe by horse or by foot, then mere months by sailing ship, and now just about anywhere can be accessed in less than a day via airplane – with recent proposals of sub-orbital rocket travel taking passengers from New York to Tokyo in an hour. In these ways and many more it seems a second, minute, or hour is worth a lot more today, permits more, than even just a couple of decades ago. And, of course, this rate of change is accelerating. You've noticed this, and people have been talking about “time-space compression” (or more pompously “time-space distantiation”) since way back in the mid-19th century – when the telegraph and locomotive first disrupted our sense of time. This is interesting for sure but still feels like only part of the equation. Aside from its felt value, time has a different kind of experiential dimension. People think of time spatially and as having direction and movement as well. For instance, if you ask a Canadian to place in chronological order a series of photos of a man ageing she will organize the images from youngest to oldest going left to right. This seems to have something to do with language, as people who speak languages written in the opposite direction, right to left, do the reverse: organizing these images chronologically from right to left. But these are not the only ways people think of time. A famous study of aboriginal Australians showed that, given the same task of ordering photos, they will always put the oldest image on the west and the youngest farthest east in the series. And they will do so wherever they are and however they are oriented. Amazing, right?! Another study, one of mountain-dwellers in Papua New Guinea, showed that not only do these people live in a world of slopes but their whole worldview is composed of uphill and downhill associations and orientations. That being so, if a building is sitting totally flat or even if it's sloping downward, away from the entrance of the building, a person is said to be moving “uphill” if they're entering a space and walking away from its entrance. And, interestingly, these folks think of time in a similar manner, with the past understood to be downhill of the present and the future forever situated uphill. Yes, time for them flows not right to left or from west to east but downhill! I love that. Knowing this then, I like to combine these ideas into a semi-universal frame in which time flows from west to east and ever-higher with increasing mass/gravity. But then how to represent that on a calendar or clock? Well, I think an excellent image and metaphor for time is, then, a tree. It starts as a seed that falls from its parent, helicoptering to the ground between the tree it came from and the steam next to it. It has found fertile ground and plenty of water but sits in a very shady spot. To the west is a wall of trees – its older sapling siblings, parents, and grandparents – and beyond them a towering mountain range. This means it gets light only in the morning and even then it must lean and stretch to catch any sun at all, given its parent's expanding canopy. But grow it does: one little shoot splits into two, which then branch into five, then seventeen, then eighty-one and on. The leaves in this metaphor make up the present – the flexible interface between the solid, weighty, and mappable past and the dimensionless attractor that is the future/sun... (Or some such nonsense.) BONUS: One of my favourite anecdotes about time comes from Utah Phillips. He said something like: "The past didn't go anywhere. I can go outside and pick up a rock older than the oldest song you know, and bring it back here and drop in on your foot. Now the past didn't go anywhere, did it? It's right here and right now.”
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