I am Time
word sketch + thinking about narrative voice
Sometimes, I am your jack-in-the-box: you try to push me back but I just keep popping out, spilling uncontrollably, over and over again. My springs never tire. The more you waffle and lack conviction, the more I escape your hold. Laughing back at you.
Other times, you blow me into the wind like a dandelion — tiny seeds feigning freedom, unaware and unconcerned where I will land. My frustration at losing control withers in the tiny particles of sea water in the sky. Together, we find peace and travel the Earth’s circumference before coming back to you, reminding you of what you have and have not accomplished. On these occasions, you often accept me; you mark moments as memories that merge with the horizon. Shapes dance at the edge of the world as your heart beats with odd syncopation expressing joy.
But today, I weigh down on you, suffocate you with my slowness.
You never thought you’d wish away time. You with all your worry about death and old age, not just yours but of those around you — fear taking away seconds and minutes of living. I’ve watched you cling onto my last energies of consciousness as you fall asleep. As I continue in that regular rhythm, the sometimes-silent metronome, you think you can bend me or mould me like the toffee you extended the life of as a kid, stretching it to oblivion before dropping the threads on your anticipating tongue. Contests for who could keep it the longest.
You used to try to push me away and now you - defeated - welcome me in, like the devil taking hold of you, whisking you away. But I won’t. I don’t work that way and I’m not a part of that binary of evil and good the world has artificially created. I just am.
My omniscience sees you wherever you may try to hide. your perception makes you strange to others as you look at them with jealousy or disdain, merely projecting your dissatisfaction with my slowness. You know there is hope if you can just get around this corner —
But I see you stop.
Not abrupt or forced, instead a gentle motion of rest. That perpetual forward motion pivots to focus on a strange sound and suddenly you are out of your misery. It is nothing - well, something - just a bird. You don’t know what kind, you were never a twitcher of even the extremely amateur variety. Its intermittent song is innocent and light, standing out from those city-sounds-in-suburbia (cars that hum and distant sirens and mumbling mixed with cries of laughter or anguish, the same kind as the city but dulled down and more personal in their individuality, not quite drowned by multitudes) like complementary colors, orange popping on turquoise. And then: what is that surreal shade of blue-green? You wonder. There is life, culture, aesthetic beauties everywhere…there are things to see.
I can feel you release me from your wrath. Rather than wrestle with my unavoidable existence, you forget about me and the ellipsis opens. A bulbous energy born from my continuous forward motion, a trick of the mind, a metaphysical triumph.
Meta
Does Time feel slow or fast to you today? Does it shift for you, both in meaning and in intensity or perceptive experience?
After finishing the manuscript of my first novel, I thought about changing the narrative voice to be that of Time. However, I thought it would change the story too much (in addition to being a lot of work). A pairing could work, like the twinned novels from Cormac McCarthy, the last before death. Stella Maris and The Passenger tell the same story from the perspective of sister and brother. With quantum mechanics at the center of these tales, Time would be a welcome guest narrator, especially, I imagine, from the McCarthic imagination.
I just finished a book that I mentioned last week, one of the Scandinavian novels I picked up at Daunt with my son. [And time in a bookstore is quite different when your child has chosen their purchase and is begging you to do the next thing as you browse. Maybe that’s not a bad thing: spontaneous decisions lead to surprises.]
On the Calculation of Volume is Solvej Balle’s self-published International Booker finalist has five volumes and is currently being translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Havaland. Our protagonist wakes up repeatedly on the eighteenth of November, so the ponderings that span the pages are often connected to Time, such as in this passage (Volume I, pp. 126-7):
The sky has its pattern. It repeats itself. You can feel at home with it. You can sit on a step in the darkness and observe it or you can stand on the grass and be a very tiny monster in an immense space. I can feel the sky lifting the monster cape from my shoulders. I become smaller and the little pieces of the world that I have to work with dwindle to almost nothing. The heavens are vast and untouchable, the universe opens up and you become an insignificant little monster taking tiny bites out of a gigantic world.
Here we are reminded of the concept of spacetime, something I think many novelists explore even without the details of the mathematical model.
I’m also slowly making my way through Mircea Cărtărescu’s Nostalgia (slowly for savoring, and not always sequentially). As the title suggests, time is again a subject frequently visited in this collection of short stories and novellas. Saturday night, I filled the hole of disappointment when Celine Dion was unable to perform at Eurovision with a read of part of “The Architect” and discovered this passage (Julian Semilian translation from Romanian, pp. 314-5):
It was already three o’clock in the morning when, exhausted and hungry, the architect Popescu wobbled in through the door of the apartment. Standing in the kitchen, he guzzled down, without bothering to discriminate, whatever he found in the refrigerator. His mind was filled with sounds. Hour after hour, he had pressed at random the black and white keys, one key at a time or several keys simultaneously, feeling like an adolescent waking up unexpectedly in the bed of his first woman. He would have liked to remain there eternally, to try out all the possibilities, pressing each of the keys, at first one at a time, then two, then three…A few of the sounds sequences made him happy, as though he had previously known them and awaited them for a long time; the others, however, the most in fact, wounded and insulted not only his hearing, but perhaps his entire being. He sprawled out on the living room sofa and fell into a comforting sleep, for the first time in months.
Time is looped with mortality, with memory, with growing up (and real life bildungsroman), with aging and wisdom, with regret, with dreams…Time is never something on its own. Our projections of mood — worries and fears, hope and desire, nostalgia and reminiscence, or clear-minded presence of Zen — these shape the way we perceive it. Time is not wasted; it just is.
Related posts:
"Time is not wasted; it just is." It is, but it sure feels like a waste a lot of times. Perception... eh?
I enjoyed reading this, Kathleen. My debut novel, "Devin's Dreams" was all about time. In fact, the cover of the book features a vintage clock spiraling into the unknown. By the way, the plot revolves around the idea that there are infinite space-times with porous membranes that -sometimes-- allow beings to "travel" between them.