BLOG ON TIME
I’m listening to 50 years ago, and my hand holds 200 million years ago. The half-a-century-old artifact is Love’s great album Forever Changes, recorded around the time of the Summer of Love on analogue tape, transferred to vinyl, and now blasting from a disk whose tiny pits respond to the probing of an invisible laser. Two hundred million years is the approximate age of a fossil on my shelf: a hand-sized hunk of ancient horsetail, which back then grew to the size of a tree. What is now Prince Edward Island detached from a part of Africa with the same iron-reddened earth and gradually moved west, it brought this trace of the ancient plant. That giant horsetail was alive long before humans were a probability.
The giant horsetail is considered an example of devolution—the tendency of long-surviving species to gradually downsize. Consider that birds, warm-blooded beings who lay eggs, may be the last descendants of flying dinosaurs. That wren out your window? A long-lost cousin of a pterodactyl. Maybe.
Do I have a point about poetry and time? I hope so. Humans deal with the here and now, always keeping a weather eye for chances of danger or advantage. We can change the here, travelling around the world, and for a very few, to the moon. But how do we change the when, other than journeying back through the hallways of our own memories? Was the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus right to say “You could not step twice into the same river”? If we understand time to be a relentless onward flow, yes. This thought, I noticed earlier today, is echoed by an inscription on the Queen Street bridge over the Don River, installed as part of a renovation completed in 1996: “This river I step in is not the river I stand in”. Part of Eldon Garnet’s public art piece for the bridge, the text is accompanied by a nice irony: the clock beside it stopped working, and the face and hands were removed in 2010.
Certainly we can bond with things from the past, or recreations of them in movies, but we cannot easily move back to fully experience it – although quantum physicists say this may be possible. I wrote a long poem, “Time Slip”, which explores this possibility that the past can suddenly recur in the midst of the present. This suggests more the clock without hands than that with; time is more variable than it seems to our everyday perceptions. Science, whose vision continues to extend with new technologies, tells us that our experience of existence is a point in a vast sea of space and time. The universe, as far as we can tell, is larger than we can understand. More precisely, according to relativity, the universe is finite but curved.
The further we can see, with radio telescopes and equations, the further there is to see. After all, if the universe ended at a wall somewhere, what would be behind the wall? I hope not President Trump. Time, it appears, is a little more finite. Our earth is thought to be about 4.5 billion years old, the universe somewhere around 13.8 billion. These expanses of time are impossible to wrap our minds around. Presented with the discoveries of cosmologists, many of us would rather contemplate grocery shopping, or whether Kanye and Kim will stay together. We read the words and numbers of physicists describing space and time, but cannot experience them in our bodies or memories.
By comparison, a human life span is a flicker in endless darkness. This can be depressing, just as contemplating the billions of galaxies (and, possibly, universes) can be depressing. We feel infinitesimal. But we do feel. One of the values of poetry is that it allows us to navigate, at least emotionally and imagistically, these long expanses. It is a way to commune, through intuition and imagination, with forces much larger than we are. Other galaxies don’t notice you or me, but we can speak to them. By connecting big thoughts with the details in everyday consciousness, poetry jumps the gaps. Poetry also can leapfrog us across time, into the head and life of someone who is long dead.
Because of its emotive and musical power, it is “news that stays news,” as Ezra Pound said of literature. Long after the battles and scandals of the day are relegated to the dustbins of history, a good poem is still working, opening a window into another’s feelings, perceptions, and intuitions. This is true whether we are reading the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer, Sappho, or Keats and Emily Dickinson. Sometimes, when I try to teach others the value of poetry, I ask them to do a little exercise: go silent for a couple of minutes, and try to monitor everything that fleets through their mind: physical sensations, memories, bits of music, fantasies, hopes, fears. What do they smell? What do they hear? What would they rather be doing right now? Often, what a poet does is sample some of that flow, and craft it into a text that is worth reading and reciting long after the poet has gone the way of all flesh.
That is news that stays news, a bridge, however slender, across time. We are beside Odysseus as he surveys the wine-dark sea, walking with Emily when Death kindly stops for her. Ever notice, when you’re doing a crossword puzzle, how the puzzle creator often labels bygone words and expressions like “the gloaming” as “poetic”? It suggests poets often archaic words. In fact, at the time of writing, the poet who included this term was simply reflecting a usage of his or her time. Language evolves, and words atrophy. But the power of the poem means that the language attracts us strongly enough to do a little research, or read the notes, to find out what the no-longer-current term means. When Hamlet fantasized committing suicide with a bare "bodkin", it was a commonplace word for a small dagger. Now, like my long-dead horsetail, it is preserved by the energy field of poetry. Poetry is also inherently relational. It makes metaphors and similes, works with echoes, allusions, and juxtapositions. By bumping together previously unconnected parts of our experience, it creates a new whole.
We are used to understanding velocity as relational… one thing moves faster than another. But we are not so used to seeing time the same way. According to relativity and quantum physics, space and time are no longer separate. It’s nice to think that by moving downhill we might actually age a little more slowly. In Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, Carlo Rovelli tells us: “Place a watch on the floor and another on the table: the one on the floor registers less passing of time than the one on the table. Why? Because time is not universal and fixed: it is something that expands and shrinks, according to the vicinity of masses. Earth, like all masses, distorts spacetime, slowing down time in its vicinity.”
Another sense in which poetry and time are intertwined is that of music. Many poetic forms have a rhyme scheme and a metrical (time-keeping) scheme. Shakespeare’s plays, for example, are written in iambic pentameter, a fancy name for five units each consisting of a weak beat followed by a strong one – an iamb. To BE or NOT to BE – that IS the QUESTion. But wait, I hear the accountants and musicians among you saying. He cheated on that that line; there’s an extra weak stress at the end! True. A metrical scheme, like a musical rhythm, loses something if it is followed too slavishly, and Shakespeare often varied the iambs in lines. Consider the difference in music between hearing a good human drummer, who subtly shifts the beats and stresses to support the lyrics and the other players, and a drum machine, mindlessly cranking out accurate , cost-effective but lifeless booms and clicks.
Most contemporary poets no longer observe fixed metre in their writing, preferring the flexibility and conversational effect of free verse. But sounds, and music, are still part of the craft. You just have to listen a little harder. Consider these lines from the American poet Lew Welch: “My finger on the throttle and my foot upon the pedal of the clutch”. That is a very rhythmical sequence of sounds, even though it’s not in a rhyming poem. Other sound effects like alliteration, rhyme, half- or slant-rhyme, onomatopoeia, and assonance still play a major role in poetry. A poem is a text that modulates meaning, but is also a construct of sounds set in the time it takes for it to be read or spoken. Its music makes it stick in our memories too, which is why many of us can recall poems we memorized for school. I can still recite most of "Jabberwocky:" “Twas brillig, and the slithey toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe… All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.”
That verse, incidentally, was written a century and a half ago by a mathematician and photographer. Photographers also are students of time, as they confront the paradox of choosing and manipulating an image of something that may last less than a second, but will endure long after the people in it. Despite Lewis Carroll’s wild imagination, he probably didn’t imagine that another poet in Canada would be quoting his lines to throw light on how poetry and time interweave. As Love’s main man Arthur Lee wrote in “You Set the Scene” from that album Forever Changes I mentioned so long ago at the start of this:
"This is the time and life that I am living
and I’ll face each day with a smile
for the time I’ve been given’s
such a little while…"