The Finding — and Making — of Relevant Time

[Image: “Future Past + Presence,” by a photographer and digital artist who goes by the handle “Hartwig HKD.” Found on Flickr, of course, and posted here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!), having trimmed only a black top and bottom border from the original.]

It’s been one of those weeks — you know, the ones in which time lays a hand on your wrist and, with restless taps and nudges from its bony fingers, keeps reminding you… reminding you that while you may have forgotten it, it has been keeping careful tabs on you. (Lucky you!)

While we were both working, The Missus and I shared a sort of mental fountain which burbled with the waters of our everyday life for years, with only minor adjustments. Then came 2020, a year which (for pretty much everyone) sneered at the notion of everyday life — or rather, mandated that we rethink it. What does it mean to have a “schedule”? How many layers of fallback schedules are required to keep us feeling “on track”? And so on.

Particularly, for me, this past week reminded me of the tyranny of small-scale, immovable schedules, those bound up with the schedules of other people — of whole institutions, particularly bureaucracies. I’ve had to deal with some of that while on the road, of course, but the first week of 2022 has brought a bunch of them into close jigsaw-puzzle proximity. Medical appointments and re-appointments, car maintenance, summons to answer civic duties back in Florida, missed video calls requiring recalendaring…

Ironically, early this week, whiskey river offered up a question which seemed to speak to this:

Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant?

(Franz Kafka [quasi-canonical source])

A couple of days later, the whiskey river blogger even seemed to present an answer to their own question:

We respond to this question through our deeds, through the action of writing. We know that to answer it directly would be impertinent, not necessary, but we also recognize that imagination has to struggle with the dragon of time afresh each day. Time brings about new things, good and bad; we must ascertain them. Time kills people and civilizations; we must save them, to remember them in poetry. We understand that the ongoing war between imagination and time (alas, a war that will never be won) cannot end, that we cannot turn, all of us, into historians of poetry and content ourselves with reading old poets. Poetry must be written, continued, risked, tried, revised, erased, and tried again as long as we breathe and love, doubt and believe. We always remember, of course, that we write our poems in the gigantic shadow of the dead and that we should be humble, at least in those long hours when we do not compose. (Being too humble in the very moment of creation would not be very wise.)

We need to go on, paying the price, sometimes, of being not only imperfect but even, who knows, arrogant and ridiculous.

(Adam Zagajewski [source])

Zagajewski, an internationally famous poet, was no doubt speaking literally of poetry at the time. (He was reflecting on having received the Neustadt Prize in Literature.) But his words have value as metaphor, too, even for those of us who don’t write poetry — or those of us who go through similar motions with prose, but only when prodded hard by circumstance…

…which reminds me of a passage I remember from an early 20th-century “fantasy” I read back in college. Here, a character identified only as “the Philosopher” has been through a certain number of trials and revelations in old Ireland; as he returns home to his wife, pursued by police, he is joined by a group of leprechauns who accompany him the rest of the way. They offer him sanctuary, and this conversation ensues:

One of the Leprechauns here interposed.

“Noble Sir,” said he, “there isn’t much room in our house but there’s no stint of welcome in it. You would have a good time with us travelling on moonlit nights and seeing strange things, for we often go to visit the Shee of the Hills and they come to see us; there is always something to talk about, and we have dances in the caves and on the tops of the hills. Don’t be imagining now that we have a poor life for there is fun and plenty with us…”

“I would like to dance, indeed,” returned the Philosopher, “for I do believe that dancing is the first and last duty of man. If we cannot be gay what can we be? Life is not any use at all unless we find a laugh here and there.”

(James Stephens [source])

I never knew James Stephens, obviously, so have no way of knowing for sure what he really wanted us to see and hear in this passage. Still, if anyone who reads his words wants to insist that he here speaks literally and only of dancing… well, perhaps I should gently escort such folks to the emergency exit.