Why do scientists have such trouble with the theory of time? (Einstein turned it into an aspect of space; Godel seems to have denied its existence, except as a kind of subjective illusion.)
Maybe because time is not a thing.
Time has no tangible properties in itself - it's only manifest in its effects. It's not even a mathematical object - it can't be quantified (except in "relative" terms - & the theory of relativity has nothing to say about time as we know it subjectively).
Godel's interpolation of the General Theory of Relativity hypothesizes "closed timelike circles" open to "time travel" (though it's not strictly time travel, because there is no time).
Fiction (& sometimes poetry) - & not just science fiction - provides forms of virtual time travel. As we write, we relive. A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.
Showing posts with label time-space. Show all posts
Showing posts with label time-space. Show all posts
5.09.2005
7.19.2003
Obviously the wine was getting to me last night, & I apologize to my readers for the scatterbrained incomprehensible vagaries of yesterday.
& what were the main points?
1. The ancient notion of time-space : the future physically "behind", the past before them; thinking of this while pondering the futurepastness of poetry in english.
2. The hypothesis that poetry is deeply motivated by a kind of gyroscopic drive to achieve balance out of crisis & chaos : the pressure of the upheavals of 20th-century only intensifying the poetic search for origins, models, stability/reformation.
3. Remarking unavoidable brightness of the Moderns in that retrospective - their own renaissance of past poetries made new. & in the American context, a divided stream, divided between the expats who sought a synthesis of the Western tradition as a whole, and the natives, still engaged in the project of creating an independent New World center of gravity.
4. Pound & Eliot gravitating toward Dante; Crane (& Williams?) toward Melville & Whitman; Stevens finding sort of a middle path, emanating from the British (Shakespeare, Romantics). Frost, like Stevens in a way, finds a New World context without violent breaks with the English past. My aim is not to oversimplify, but to look at the general tendencies as a start toward a perspective.
5. US developments in poetry in english similar to colonial situation around the world, with the difference created by ascendant global political power. If the future is behind our backs, it's global english seeping through; it's the dramatic increase in available translations - the globalization of literary tradition(s) - with the concomitant difficulty in sorting out the bland globalized re-makes from authentic work. These new developments cast a different light on, create a new context for, the project of the "American Renaissance" or the project of the Moderns (both expats & stay-at-homes).
& what were the main points?
1. The ancient notion of time-space : the future physically "behind", the past before them; thinking of this while pondering the futurepastness of poetry in english.
2. The hypothesis that poetry is deeply motivated by a kind of gyroscopic drive to achieve balance out of crisis & chaos : the pressure of the upheavals of 20th-century only intensifying the poetic search for origins, models, stability/reformation.
3. Remarking unavoidable brightness of the Moderns in that retrospective - their own renaissance of past poetries made new. & in the American context, a divided stream, divided between the expats who sought a synthesis of the Western tradition as a whole, and the natives, still engaged in the project of creating an independent New World center of gravity.
4. Pound & Eliot gravitating toward Dante; Crane (& Williams?) toward Melville & Whitman; Stevens finding sort of a middle path, emanating from the British (Shakespeare, Romantics). Frost, like Stevens in a way, finds a New World context without violent breaks with the English past. My aim is not to oversimplify, but to look at the general tendencies as a start toward a perspective.
5. US developments in poetry in english similar to colonial situation around the world, with the difference created by ascendant global political power. If the future is behind our backs, it's global english seeping through; it's the dramatic increase in available translations - the globalization of literary tradition(s) - with the concomitant difficulty in sorting out the bland globalized re-makes from authentic work. These new developments cast a different light on, create a new context for, the project of the "American Renaissance" or the project of the Moderns (both expats & stay-at-homes).
7.18.2003
Rain falling in Providence. Time on my hands tonight.
Read an article somewhere stating that the ancients (BC, roughly) had a different spatial concept of time. The future was behind them, physically, spatially; in front of them was the past, shining, complete; the future accumulated as they walked into the past, followed the patterns laid down.
If we think of new developments in poetry in this ancient sense, what do we see? The brilliance of the great Moderns, the second thoughts of those who followed.
I can't think of the Moderns except in the context of civilizational crisis. Poetry = seismic reading; response to disequilibrium. (Psychological, as I wrote somewhere in the archives : poetry a reaction, an antidote, to tremors of adolescence.) It was WW I (& decadence preceding) that spurred Pound & Eliot to look over the shoulders of the Victorians, to the whole sweep of the past. Longfellow & Tennyson & Browning did same; but they didn't , as the Moderns did, unite an obsessive grasping after classical models, with a stylistic extremity, which overthrew any simple or assumed continuity with same. This was a purely 20th-cent phenomenon.
What this meant for US poetry, though, was defined by a particular decision : were you an American, or an expatriate? Stevens & Williams on one side, Pound & Eliot on the other. There were political underpinnings : an American was a democrat; an expat was a monarchist or aristocrat. Never mind for a moment the complications : Eliot's intuitive grasp of the middle, Pound's intuitive awareness of the low, Williams's status (like Dante, in an odd way) as immigrant-outsider, Stevens's very American macho businessman snobbery (the independent CEO, no academic "bought man"). These are side issues to the pivotal question : does US democracy inaugurate a verifiable new civilization, a new reality, a Novus Ordo Seclorum (fun to read Rabid's de Tocqueville quotes)?
Read an article somewhere stating that the ancients (BC, roughly) had a different spatial concept of time. The future was behind them, physically, spatially; in front of them was the past, shining, complete; the future accumulated as they walked into the past, followed the patterns laid down.
If we think of new developments in poetry in this ancient sense, what do we see? The brilliance of the great Moderns, the second thoughts of those who followed.
I can't think of the Moderns except in the context of civilizational crisis. Poetry = seismic reading; response to disequilibrium. (Psychological, as I wrote somewhere in the archives : poetry a reaction, an antidote, to tremors of adolescence.) It was WW I (& decadence preceding) that spurred Pound & Eliot to look over the shoulders of the Victorians, to the whole sweep of the past. Longfellow & Tennyson & Browning did same; but they didn't , as the Moderns did, unite an obsessive grasping after classical models, with a stylistic extremity, which overthrew any simple or assumed continuity with same. This was a purely 20th-cent phenomenon.
What this meant for US poetry, though, was defined by a particular decision : were you an American, or an expatriate? Stevens & Williams on one side, Pound & Eliot on the other. There were political underpinnings : an American was a democrat; an expat was a monarchist or aristocrat. Never mind for a moment the complications : Eliot's intuitive grasp of the middle, Pound's intuitive awareness of the low, Williams's status (like Dante, in an odd way) as immigrant-outsider, Stevens's very American macho businessman snobbery (the independent CEO, no academic "bought man"). These are side issues to the pivotal question : does US democracy inaugurate a verifiable new civilization, a new reality, a Novus Ordo Seclorum (fun to read Rabid's de Tocqueville quotes)?
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