Time for Time
Physicists talk about the fabric of space-time, which, for example, could use some ironing in the neighborhood of black holes.
For years I’ve wanted to delve into a couple of books on time, about the physics of time and how we humans handle it. But exploring time requires a great stretch of time, because the work will stretch my brain in new directions. It will yoga my brain.
Now, on an island in British Columbia’s Salish Sea, I have the luxury of devoting myself chiefly to writing, and also to local geography and arts. Beauty is abundant, like in the chestnut blossoms drifting down as I write.
Never in my almost-62 years have I had a dozen unprogrammed days in a row, which might explain why some part of my being keeps feeling adrift. I keep re-anchoring it here in this garden on Spruce Avenue.
It’s started already: Physicists talk about the fabric of space-time, which, for example, could use some ironing in the neighborhood of black holes. And I am responding to being untethered in time by trying to tether in space.
I consider the rarely-asked question, What’s a woman to do with too much time on her hands? Honestly, the answer that keeps circling in my head is, Wash them. (The yoga begins.)
The poet William Matthews also pondered daily time, in a poem called “Time.”
“…Perhaps I should plan how to spend my
time, but wouldn’t that, like a home movie,
prove but a way to waste the same time twice?”
—William Matthews, from Money and Time
Matthews’ question sounds like just a joke: Ah yes, home movies, hahaha. Set aside for the moment the question of what a home movie even is anymore, because the book this quotation is from was published in 1997 when people were still making home videos. And, my family of origin’s home movies show jets taking off and landing on aircraft carriers, plus a few Christmas mornings. But I don’t mind. It was better to have Dad joining in whatever fun wasn’t being filmed than absent behind the camera.
But back to the poem. Making fun of home movies is what you used to do, once you made the movie. Matthews (who died at age 55 not long after that book came out) was married three times and known to have many affairs, so perhaps this is a darker comment on family.
The poem ends: “You’ve got time on your hands; you’ve / been caught red-handed with the blues and by // the worst detective in the world, yourself.” The whole poem has this sardonic, even bitter tone. But notice, he and I both felt a sense that having time on our hands was not OK. Matthews associated it with the blues and guilt, I with needing to get clean. Is this just the Puritan work ethic, or something more intrinsic to being human?
I sought other poetic takes on time (using the Academy of American Poets theme search). Browsing several centuries worth of poetry on the topic, I was struck by the pervasive sense of loss. Time = past = loss = grief. Loss and grief are far too true, but what about the physicists’ ideas of time having something other than uninterruptible, unchangeable forward motion?
Then I came across “Honest Tongue” by Laura Da’, an Eastern Shawnee poet who lives near Seattle. I recommend reading the poem—or listening to her read it—as well as her brief remarks about it that you’ll find on the same page. Da’ writes:
The poem begins at the site of an established Indigenous village, at the site of a military fort, at the site of a park, at the site of a meadow of wildflowers, at all these spaces that inhabit the same patch of land and which confound time and intention.” —Laura Da’
Village, stockade and wildflowers coexist in a place, once you let go of clock time, of the “wristwatch’s ticking goad,” as she calls it. This layering of experiences certainly coexists for the people who first dwelt in the village she writes about, who had and have very different ideas about people’s relationship to a point in space (land), than did the men who arrived with guns and the men in the government that sent them.
The island I’m on, traditionally home to the Snuneymuxw people, has a sandstone formation called the Wave, and I climbed around and down to it and sat for a while on a sort of bench formed in the rock, under the shade of its arcing overhang.
I watched dragonflies and caterpillars. A critter that looked like the love child of a crab and a centipede and was too fast for me to investigate. Crows. Birds I didn’t recognize. Marveled that the snow-capped peaks barely visible due west could be so far away and yet still on Vancouver Island. Listened to the loud, deep engine noise of barges and cargo ships. Seaplanes. Ferry. Bird calls I didn’t recognize.
Realized that, once upon a time, this sandstone was the bottom of a sea. Later, it was carved into this sideways gulley by glaciers, then further eroded by rock water seeping through, according to one source. Even later, especially inland, Indigenous residents carved petroglyphs in it. Then, less than 200 years ago, European settlers found it a fine place to build their homes and barns. For something like 3,500 years, the Snuneymuxw had known that. Still know that. There are fences.
On a clear, unseasonably warm spring day, I agree with all of them. There is a border.
Even here, the urge to “wrap up” this writing keeps erupting, no matter the time of day. But it’s not almost dinner time. There’s not one day left in the weekend and so much I want and need to do. There are no tasks to finish by bedtime, which is not early because no alarm is needed when I do not have to start work on time. Yet it’s so hard to ignore, like an itch on my being’s phantom limb.
Here, in this very different space from the space I call home, I’m learning how to immerse myself in time.