"An Era Can be Considered Over When its Basic Illusions Have Been Exhausted.” Arthur Miller

 

Looking through old photographs, I stopped and spent a few moments on one I had taken in a humble pension. There was nothing special about this photo except the alarm clock. In fact, I did not even see a clock – I just was transported into the most human of all worries, that of being seduced by illusion.

And the illusion here was that of time, flowing independently from Platonism to Quantum Physics. And I let my mind take a free ride on that flow.

.. The Belgian singer Jacques Brel wrote and sang some of the most beautiful French poems of the 20th century. I make a point to listen to Brel often in my car, even when, after 40 years of listening, I know every word of every song he has recorded. When I looked at the above photo, I thought about the song titled “ Les Vieux ” (The Elderly or Old Folks) because Brel frames their passage through life within the tik-tok of the old clock that counts their remaining time.

Time for Brel, therefore, was not an illusion, but a quantifiable concept. It is measured and it exists as fatalism asserts in philosophy.

The lines from the song's lyrics are:

Et fuir devant vous une dernière fois la pendule d'argent
Qui ronronne au salon, qui dit oui qui dit non, qui leur dit: je t'attends
Qui ronronne au salon, qui dit oui qui dit non et puis qui nous attend

That translates as:

And avoiding in front of you, one last time, the silver clock
Humming in the living room, saying yes, saying no, telling them: I'm waiting for you
Humming in the living room, saying yes, saying no and then waiting for us.

 

Until Einstein and later Quantum Mechanics, time was defined as a flow through three spaces –past, present and future. Then the concept of space-time was proposed adding a fourth dimension to time and a new definition – that of “ block time ”.

The Old Folks Brel sings about navigate through the three dimensions of time – they remember the past, they go to the funeral of friends in the present, and listen to the clock announcing their fate, the future.

 

In the 20th century the concept of space-time can be seen in the arts, often under the delicate veil of its traditional dimensions. One of my favorite poems in that transition from three to four dimensions is by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda entitled “ Ode to Broken Things ”. The lines about time read:

And that clock
whose sound
was
the voice of our lives,
the secret
thread of our weeks,
which released
one by one, so many hours
for honey and silence
for so many births and jobs,
that clock also
fell
and its delicate blue guts
vibrated
among the broken glass
its wide heart
unraveled.

 

Neruda has written “odes” to many common aspects of daily life – odes to tomatoes, artichokes, socks…But all have a common purpose – they are a celebration of his/our residence on earth even if time will break all aspects of life into pieces, eventually. The poem “ Ode to Broken Things ” puts many of these celebrations together, recognizes that they will be broken by time, but ends with a wish that is hopeful and transcendental – Neruda hopes that all these broken things could somehow be unbroken again. Every time I read this poem I think about the Second Law of Thermodynamics that proposes that natural processes, perhaps including life itself, go in a single direction and are not reversible (one cannot put back into the perfume bottle the molecules that escaped when the bottle was opened).

But Neruda hopes that one day, these broken things will find a reversible path.

 

And this brings me to a contemporary Scottish poet, Eileen Carney Hulme. I first read her poems by her when she published her first book by her in 2005. I immediately found a panromantic style in choosing words, forming sentences and admitting to the power of small things. I say panromantic because her words from her could be written in any language other than English yet these words would mean the same things in different cultures. There is no need to translate – her her romanticism speaks in simply human language.

So, now that unassuming photo I took in an unassuming pension got me traveling through time, place and celebrating ordinary things, here are lines from Hulme about how much we have to celebrate through the passage of time. The poem is titled “ Belonging ”:

 

small spaces of silence
in between borrowed breaths
arms tighten
at the whisper of a name

all the words of the heart
the unanswered questions
are at this moment
blue rolling waves

 

Blue rolling waves, like time, sound and velocity give the poem a look into the fourth dimension, the block time. But Hulme talks about small places of silence, about words of the heart to let us forget the waves, to let us remember the whisper of a name (past) or hope to whisper it one day (future).

At the end, as modern philosophers propose, time is encapsulated within or inside a space. If the space is tight, then time will fill all that space because it cannot escape it. But perhaps if corners of that space, small places, are filled with silence, the “unanswered questions” would find their voice and maybe their answers.

 

Romantic, skeptic or fatalist, we build upon our experience to follow a path in search of our questions. I used to think that answers were the death of any questions we explore, while unanswered questions predispose us to new questions. As a scientist, a poet and a romantic, I celebrated questions more than answers. Because answers do not provide a map for our search but are failed trees blocking our path.

A line from Syrian poet and diplomat Nizar Kabbani remains returns to my mind when I think about maps and our irreversible path forth during our residence on earth as Neruda would have said.   That line reads:

Your love taught me

How love changes the map of time

 

Can time be mapped? We pass through time faster than time passes through us. within us. Our North is love, magnetic and repulsive. We hold our map when in search of what we already know – it is only in those small spaces Hulme describes, that our belonging finds its comfort. Its last breath. Its identity.

 

… The alarm clock in the photo shows just past eight. I do not remember why I took that photo. Perhaps it was a small place of silence where I listened to the tik-tok of the old clock. But I am sure I celebrated that ordinary moment.

I always do.

 

April 10, 2022

©   Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2022