Time On My Hands

A text came through on the Cuzzins thread from Shana the other night:

They’re tearing down the woods where Grandma G was raised (Grandpa Knute’s) 😥😥

No more wondering if we can find her handprint…

What my cousin meant were the actual outlines of my great-grandmother’s eight-year-old hands once plunked in the fresh cement of her pappa Knute’s new barn foundation. They had hardened for almost a century now into the familiar shape of a family pilgrimage, a place we always revisited to recognize both the fragility of mischievous children’s fingers and gruff, stoic Norwegian fathers who could be won over by their daughters.

It was a good story.

Now, like many good stories, it will be unceremoniously buried by a backhoe. It will disappear into the earth like the bones of those who once lived and told them. Something in me wants to lay down in front of the construction equipment and stop time. I would eagerly offer up many hours to visit this obscure place again but time (as they say) has run out.

I don’t have time, repeated in endless variations of resignation and exasperation throughout a typical day. The real irony is that it’s utterly true. I do not have time. I do not hold it in my hands, no matter what impressions I may leave behind. I do not have control over it. Also, it is not ticking away, money, or even of the essence. I cannot kill it, waste it, save it, and it most definitely is not on my side. It is a mysterious substance I’m not going to pretend to understand but I also cannot keep myself from thinking about it.

Time, properly speaking, does not exist and yet we are subjected to it. This is our condition. We are subject to something which does not exist. Whether it’s a duration of time passively endured (physical pain, waiting, regret, remorse, fear) or whether it’s time we actively wield (order, method, necessity), we are attached in a very real sense by unreal chains. (Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace)

The gut punch here is that even when we think we’re in control by wielding our Google Cal expertly, coming up with more efficient ways of working, or being on time to school drop — it’s still unreal. Neither my subjectivity nor my agency (my me and my say-so) make it more real. This is revelatory. I have kept self-improvement lists and schedules for myself all the way back to grade school. Incriminating evidence is periodically found in the notebooks I find in my own parents’ closets when they ask my brothers and me to please come take it all away. But what if Simone’s right and it’s all bunk?

On the other hand when we really feel subjected to time (as we wait in line at the on-ramp traffic signal or for a biopsy report for a loved one), reminding ourselves that the numbers on the clock do not actually exist can be a truly welcome thought. We can enter another kind of space in our mind, a radical acceptance of the now. That we do en-dure as human beings, we last within, is perhaps a hint that more is going on than my Iphone reminders, the setting of the sun, or even the handprints in the cement. We are still here and now.

For about a year and a half, I have made several running starts to tackle a formidable (to me) tome called Time and Free Will by Henri Bergson. He was a genius (used to argue with Einstein…and lost, but heck…) who thought a lot about time. He really loved this idea that there was another kind of time out there, one that could gather up the yesterdays and today and make sense of it. He called this pure duration and has this great metaphor to illustrate it.

If a piece of music is playing, each of the notes is successive and each dies out, but somehow our mind makes sense of it as a whole melody. We gather things and combine them, backwards and forwards. Even hours. A clock can’t do that. The clock is only good for 2:12 p.m. As soon as it’s 2:13 p.m., 2:12 p.m. is useless (we humans can refer to it, but it no longer is true). Also, if you think about it, clock time is also just a measurement of our planet’ s position in comparison to the sun so the way we must commonly talk about time is just another form of space. (It doesn’t exist, like Simone said.)

Whoa.

I have not been able to pinpoint why I find this idea of pure duration so comforting but there’s something in it that makes me able to accept the burial of the “barn foundations” of my life. Another way of saying this (my so-called Heart Before the Course) is that we all must reckon with the Course — the flow of time, fate, event — crashing onto our shores. Putting the Heart first (whatever that means TBD) is at the very least an exercise in remembering that whether we are suffering time or brightly taking on the world with our plans, that something else is operating in the background, something that endures and enables us to endure.