O world! O life! O time!

Phil Burpee

Phil Burpee, Columnist

"What seest thou else

in the dark backward and abysm of time?"

So asks Prospero in Shakespeare's 'The Tempest', speaking to his daughter Miranda, and he tormented by various nymphs and spirits following the wreck of a ship in a great storm.

"Time, time, time is on my side - yes it is now............."

So affirmed the Rolling Stones, once upon that self-same time. But then again, what does a gaggle of debauched Limey rockers really know about anything, especially when you consider the rough treatment meted out to these lads by Time after these fifty-odd years of service? - ravaged, cadaverous faces and a half-century of unseemly adolescence, notwithstanding Mick Jagger's tenacious slatherings of Grecian Formula. Well, at least they have resisted keeping the company of Brangelina and Bono, and haven't for an instant pretended to be at all sensitive to the plight of the poor, hungry and enfeebled. Eventually I suppose , they will collapse into piles of bones on stage, empty bags of leathery skin crumpled into the remains of velour and sateen rags that used to be, once upon a time, ultra-fashionable skin-tight pants........."Thank you..........and good night."

Yes, the years are indeed great in number - greater in number than we can even begin to grasp in the normal context of things. Global Positioning telemetry reveals to us that Europe and North America are separating one from the other at about the rate fingernails grow - grinding, inexorable and regardless. So, if you haven't booked that flight to Paris that you've been promising yourself this past while, you better get on it, 'cuz in about a hundred million years or so air fares are going to get pretty ugly when the Big Pond is about three times wider than it is right now. The thing about time is, of course, that it goes by. And even though, according to Albert Einstein's 'Special Theory of Relativity', time itself can apparently stretch out like the old professor's socks, for us it is essentially a linear phenomenon - yesterday becomes today which in turn becomes tomorrow - and soon enough the show's over and out go the lights. Blink.

Take the seasons for instance. The old dugout's getting low over there on the other side of the creek and the mudflats are getting wider. Mud-puppies are bobbin' around looking kinda panicky. The killdeers don't mind it at all mind you, dancing along the mud in that dainty way of theirs, nabbing snails and whatever other beak-size morsels might present themselves. A solitary muskrat seems to have moved in late in the summer, but I'll leave him be - the dam is thick and anyway his den is way over on the other side away from any rupture danger. The tree swallows have moved away wide on the wing with their fledglings and aren't spending any time skimming the water anymore. Even a few waxwings stopped by last week for a few days - itinerant I'm sure - making their way slowly towards some forest bounty for the upcoming lean times. Last year's snowdrifts never really came, so the water never did come very high. By October there won't be hardly enough left to wing a skipper across. Time - once was full, now near empty.

It has been said, I think right here in a previous column come to that, that time is irreducible beyond the moment. Likewise, it is unexpandable beyond that same moment. From a perceptual point of view, it can only exist in the fleeting and ungraspable slipstream swirling between what just was, and what just will be. By the time you stop to figure out if you're actually having an experience of the moment, that moment itself has gone, dumped into the great and abiding sea which we choose to call the Past. Similarly, everything that cannot be relegated to the Past, or presumed, falsely, to constitute the Present, must be attributed to that fantasy we call the Future - that strange aspect of time based purely and entirely on blind conjecture. Time rules it all, though. We drop our little breadcrumbs along the way in the form of legend and history and scripture and memory, and toss a weighted string in front of us like a deckhand from an old Mississippi paddle-wheeler, trying to ascertain whether or not there is enough water ahead to accept our keel - 'Mark Twain!' they would cry if the water was deep - onward, onward upon the mighty current. But lurking around each bend was, of course, that unholy cottonwood snag, rearing its diabolical head up out of the depths to reach out towards the onrushing craft. Woe betide - the river, it turns out, is ever-changing!

roll on big river

roll on down to the sea

tumble mountains into sand

and let the rain run free

roll on big river

take my dreams upon your flood

let me fill this old tin cup

and taste the sweetness of your blood

roll on big river

I’m tossing bread crumbs on your crown

in hopes of finding home again

when I’m finally carried down

roll on big river

won’t you call me by my name

and see upon your darkening banks

this solitary flame

roll on big river

with your whirlpools and bends

an owl is calling in the night

oh, the echo never ends

so, roll on big river

abandon me no more

I’ll travel with you down to the sea

and set sail for that distant shore.

Ah, tick tock, tick tock – hickory dickory dock - what to make of it all? Flowing, flowing, flowing down the valley of our times. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, etc.”

Yes, time is a slippery thing. Just as we can fantasize about the future, so can we choose to knead and sculpt the so-called past. For history, that which we think we remember of people, places and happenings, is famously written by the victors - those who have survived to interpret the present in a sometimes fabulous and tailored context. And given that, as Voltaire would have had it, "God is always for the big battalions", we can see that the passing of time itself is fraught with inconsistencies, mighty armies laying claim to righteousness, and events become mere playthings of a capricious Universe. Because it is the very plastic and malleable nature of time that throws us off. Was it indeed just yesterday? Did I put out the cat? Next Tuesday at 11:00? If I take off at the speed of light and head out in a big loop, apparently next Tuesday at 11:00 will become last Friday at 4:00 - in about the year 2086 - and everybody will have become too old to remember what I was booked in for anyway. Whoa - shifting sands..................

O world! O life! O time!

On whose last steps I climb,

Trembling at that where I had stood before;

When will return the glory of your prime?

No more - Oh, never more! - Percy Bysshe Shelley - 'A Lament'

So I am hoping for big snows next Winter to drift up and fill that old dugout. We never even got the rowboat on to it this year, what with it being so pokey and all. Meanwhile, I feel quite sure that tomorrow will be a new day, and the swallows will return in their season. Que sera, sera. And notwithstanding Time’s implacable gobbling up of all things, perchance glories will be found in the cracks between what was, and what will be.

Phil Burpee

August 11, 2012