Time's Outside

Further Thoughts on Time


“the ultimate unrepresentability of time… makes even phenomenology continually turn to metaphors and to the language of myth in order to talk about the upsurge of the present or the flowing of the unitary flux of time” (Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 3, 243).

We exist in time. No one can disagree with that statement. It implies that there is an “outside” to time which it is possible to exist in—though not necessarily for us to exist it, occupy, see, or comprehend, but possible for us to imagine, in some way. Not what it is “like” particularly, because except for the possible and merely suggestive analogies or metaphors it isn’t “like” anything we know or experience. We exist in time. It may be that the “in time” part of the sentence is redundant, meaningless, dangerously misleading. It may be that time’s “outside” is a fiction made possible because our metaphor to our relationship to time is the metaphor of “in.” “Outside of time,” may be pure nonsense. If we die we may no longer be “in” time, but that does not mean we are “outside of time,” but rather that we don’t exist at all. An inside does not imply an outside when an inside is simply a metaphor for a relationship that has no nonmetaphoric way of being expressed.

On the other hand, we who live in time have no way of knowing that there is no such “place” as “outside” time. Do we have any evidence beyond analogy, metaphor and the tricks language plays on imagination to suggest there is such a “place”? I think we do. We do not have proof. And all our evidence can be talked about (I won’t quite say “explained”) by other references. But even Nietzsche, the great atheist, admitted that music suggested to him the unearthly and made emotional play son him that broached a sensation of the spiritual. Music did this to him even when the spiritual was no longer allowed in his positivistic frame of mind. We’ve all had the same experience with music, with art of all kind, with natural beauty—we say “breathtaking in a linguistic serendipity or causality that deepens the experience when we realize that breath is the ancient origin of soul. The longing we feel that nothing that is can satisfy, that does not have any obvious function in the world, that does not in any way contribute to our survival, that evolutionary pressures cannot adequately explain, this suggests that the world that we are in, the world of time, has an outside, a place for which our feelings are hints.

We have no logical need to tie the outside of time to the longing. They are two impossibilities that co-exist and are or are not in fact related. But if we do not want to accept the reality of the spiritual—which we are tempted to call the “other world” or “time’s outside,” then along with Nietzsche, we have to deny to this universal experience the urgency the experience calls for, and that action is as arbitrary as affirming it.

IN

It starts with a word.
In.

Nothing

tentative.

Dive

in

Drive

in

Fall

in

All

in

There’s all the room

in the world

in the

in.

Pile

In.

Another moment in the Time/Ricoeur series

“The present is both what we are living and what realizes the expectations of a remembered past” (Vol. III, p. 35). Christmas day is all I hoped it would be. To say this, I must experience the present as the fulfillment of a past-future. The fullness of today is the manifestation of a layering of time, a pastness, a presentness and a futureness. Wordsworth: In this moment there is food for the future. He experiences the present not as present but as storehouse. At the same time, the present is layered as the return of the past that does not quite happen: the past is best remembered here, on the banks of the Wye. But what is remembered best is what is not experienced now.

From Proust

Often one hears nothing when one listens for the first time to a piece of music that is at all complicated. And yet when later on, this sonata had been played to me two or three times I found that I knew it perfectly well. And so it is not wrong to speak of hearing a thing for the first time. If one had indeed, as one supposes received no impression from the first hearing, the second, the third would be equally "first hearings."

Language, Tragedy, Power

The implications of the limitations of language. Because language emerges from and conditions back onto not life, reality, but a tense and complex model of/for reality, nothing said can ever be simply true. Truth can emerge in and through and via language but never purified from untruth. Everything from the structure to the concepts works against the emergence of truth in language. You can pull up the root of the plant but you can never remove all the dirt. (You would first have to define “dirt” and at that point all is lost.)

The insight of Tragedy. While “Fate” is not the proper word for our conditioned life, the insight of tragedy remains: that our lives are conditioned and determined in ways we can never fully understand or recognize. The border between “free” and “unfree” is forever blurry, always a space, an area, itself imprecisely defined with blurry edges, never a line.

The co-opting tendency of power, which is more than a tendency in fact, since a tendency is something that could be resisted or stopped, and the co-opting by power of all discourse is a prerequisite of power. But lest we go too far in our critique, order is also an effect of power. No power, no order. (Return of the social contract.) No order, no life. And so we see that the undesirable effects of power are unavoidable if we want the desirable effects of power. And if we spend our whole lives fighting power’s undesirable effects (a noble pursuit), we leave ourselves no time for the noblest pursuit of what order makes possible: thought, speculation, the pursuit of truth, knowledge, God, poetry, art.

Soup's On

As seen on CCTV.

The Tide Rises

Notes Toward a Narrative Future II

The question then is whether a narrative can be true--or in what sense or to what degree or in what way a narrative can be true. Narratives work. Most human work is done through the complicity of narrative.. But what makes a narrative useful does not make it true (the essential fact upon which is built Nietzsche's second Untimely Meditation).

True is different from accurate, though they share in the same problematic of a lack of wholeness. But if a narrative can be accurate as far as it goes without being true. In fact a true narrative might not even have to be accurate, that is if the true is the object of fiction and the accurate the object of history. One might posit degrees of truth, but that is really degrees of accuracy. True, unqualified, admits of no ommission or excess.

Notes toward a Narrative Future I

Humans sense the world via story. It would be accurate to say that in addition to our physical senses we possess a narrative sense. As our sight and hearing and smell, touch and taste make sense of physical stimuli, our narrative sense connects these and all other impressions into story. Stories, like houses, are both "made" or constructed and "found" or discovered. The house can be built a number of ways. But these ways are not infinite. They are bounded by the nature of the material out of which the house is made and the physical constraints of the environment, from gravity to hurricanes. The house is a negotiation of the imagination, history, material, and materiality. The story too is so constrained. Neither true nor false, and yet both.

Paul Ricoeur will barely be discernible in these notes, and yet he will be part of the negotiation at every step.

Alan's Arc. We assume the rains will flip it upright.

Screen House for Garden Viewing

A work in progress, framed by the trees on the property, like the bridge. It's a great deal of effort; you don't save as much money as you'd think (the hardware and finish wood is where the money goes), but the effect, one hopes, repays the effort. We'll reserve judgment until it's done. Meanwhile, we'll look about for new pronoun types, as we seem to have exhausted all existing...

A Formal Garden

Bridge Redux, Garden Abloomin, Blue Man

The ground is laid for the second draft.

Reading WIttgenstein

The world consists of facts—not things.

What draws me to this statement?

“Fact,” a word, a ball of frozen vapors, shards on the pavement.

Is this “bed” of “rumpled” “sheets” a fact?

Mere things detritus of fact?

Because I love you, I turn in my sheets.

This is a fact.

I writhe in my nonsleep, in my nondreams sweat.

Facts are sure

Not innocent things.

I will never get behind that wall it will never breech and open to me.

Fact:

A sweaty glass of melting ice drips a circle on the table.

Fact:

The stone tossed from the bridge makes a series of circles that are not round.

Everything diminishes from the center.

Just facts.

The blue of midnight, the midnight blue falls so eloquently, so wordlessly lovely against your skin, against the confluence of your hair about your neck…

I do not think that is a fact, although I know it is true.

This is a fact.

Where have you gone Ludwig?

What games are you playing now?

Today

So this is what yesterday we called the future,
We looked forward to this day with so much hope
and trepidation.

What we hoped for didn’t happen.
What we dreaded turned out not too bad.
All in all the future seems pretty ordinary.

Perhaps tomorrow will be better.

The Origin of Poetry or Words and Meaning V

The origin of poetry is the love of language, of the sensual body of its rhythms and sounds, first and foremost, and, secondly, with the things it can do: mean, for example. The origin of poetry is the physical desire to dive into language and explore its hidden, its new, its surprising places. The lover's desire for the beloved who believes he will find in the body what no one has found before, pleasures no body has yielded before.

And the frustration. The other side of the origin of poetry is love's frustration, language's no, the endlessly repeated failure to do what it cannot do, wants to do, will not do. What it seems to do.

Words and Meaning IV

The waitress ends every sentence with "you know what I mean." A useful shorthand. She doesn't have to take the time to say what she means--formulate her meaning in words. She doesn't even have to know what she means; I presume she does not. She launches the opening of meaning like a trained bird which lands like a flock of butterflies or an array of snowflakes, no two the same, on your shoulder.

He launches the possibility of meaning thus in a poem: he launches perhaps meanings which you take meaningfully. Or leave empty.

The Only Naked Man in the Room

The Only Naked Man in the Room

danced among the guests to no music in the room.

I am what I am, he laughed.

No one seemed to notice him.

In tiny clusters around the room everyone just kept talking

stirring plastic sticks in their martinis

adjusting their backs when their laugh

joined the laugh of the rest of the coterie

because someone said something

that must have been funny.

The naked man danced

across the big tables

past guacamole and cheese

around the little rubber tree—

he must have taken time from the music

of the spheres—dancing oblivious circles round

lighted sculputary hunks of magma.

The people did not let themselves frown

though he passed himself around like a tray of daiquiris

until the crowd that could not comfortably pretend any longer

to ignore him, nodded and thank-you’d and shook the hosts’ hands

and goodbyed. Even the gentleman who slammed down his drink

and nearly hushed the room when he cried “Put some clothes on dammit”

slouched through the door and was gone just as soon

as the almost halted talk resumed

leaving the naked man to his twists and turns.

 The room

thinned

until no other soul remained

but one

fully clothed

who smiled at the smiles of the harmless man

Would she care to join him?

I do enjoy your dancing, she said,

to the naked man who stopped

half hidden

behind the little tree.

My Sestina

My teacher said when you write a sestina, the
most important thing is to choose the six
ending words carefully. Not any ol’ words
will do. Don’t succumb to the temptation of
a casual series, such as any six words my
mother might randomly utter at lunch. Sestina



’s are serious stuff. To create a masterful sestina
you need to hunt down some protean words; the
y must be able to signify not just verbally, my
goodness, no, but nounally as well. Six times six
times you’ll have to play these words out. Of
tener than would work for form-challenged, mundane words.



Whether for the level or the type of trouble, Words
worth unlike Spencer never that I know of wrote a sestina.
But Auden did and Bishop, and Pound, and Ashbery, but one of
my favorites is the one done by Lloyd Schwarz, the
world’s shortest, the whole thing made of exactly Six
Words: Yes, no, maybe, sometimes always, never. My



own thought on the matter is to forget the attempt. My
sestina is unlikely to compete with such stuff; my words
are mashed potatoes next to the banquet of those six
minds’ astonishing products. And is the sestina
even viable anymore—quaint and ancient vestige of
an age of representational form? Now, when the



ory itself recedes. The
naïvete of any forms’ my
opic vision: wrung words of
uncommitted play: words
of the pretensive sestina
’s re-reign: six



of one half a dozen of the other. How can any six
words make a difference? Still, I cannot just abandon the
form. For one thing, there’s the teacher, and his ignorant sestina
worship. And then there’s the vestige of something in my
self that tells me if I can just find the right six words
and arrange them in the proper places, something of



compensatory beauty will emerge (or the horror of the six
sixty six, perhaps), yes: numbers and words, something of
force if I can just find them: the six words of my sestina.