Shanghai Writing Program
Men and Time: a brief approach
by Enrique Solinas
1. The ancient world: From cyclical time to linear time
Cyclical time refers to the first notions of time developed by early man. This surely came to him after his keen observation of nature. In fact In fact, in the world of nature everything happens within a cycle. For instance, planet Earth takes a whole year to move around the Sun and a whole day to turn in on itself. The sun "rises" every single day and with it everyday life starts again. Spring comes after winter and with it a new annual cycle recommences –and this is essentially identical to the previous one. We also speak of the water cycle. Snow on the high mountain tops melts in spring thus forming rivers and brooks; these run into wider rivers which finally pour into seas and these into oceans. Then, due to insolation, water in the oceans evaporates and this gives origin to clouds –and these, pushed by the winds and stopped by the high mountains, turn themselves into rain or snow. And this way the cycle is started once more.
It was mainly the Eastern cultures the ones that developed the cyclical time philosophy. In the American continent cultures there are also references to a circular conception of time; in general all the polytheistic cultures are also related to this philosophy.
In primitive civilizations cyclical time results from a deep interaction between nature and man to the point of determining the idea of whole or entirety. To Debord "cyclical time already predominates in the experience of the nomadic peoples for they come across the same conditions every moment of their journey". Hegel, on the other hand, notes that the wandering of nomads is only formal since it is limited to uniform ground or land. During all the long time this conception predominated there was the idea of eternal return –one in which even the self same spirit restarts. In the first circularity there appears a mythic time characterized by the absence of the value of temporality. This was a permanent characteristic in the early primitive peoples. Centuries afterwards there would appear a larger structure and the key element to this was the rise of agriculture and mysticism. Under such mysteries nature was sacralized and this gave birth to the founding myths and these gave way to the first great cultures. The Egyptians and the Mayas ended up with a history marked by the times of nature and fantasy. Here, the calendar becomes vital.
The Hindu conception sets forth the idea of reincarnation. This answers to a need to put man to test and to experience, along countless lives and various circumstances, all that he dreams and wishes until he himself forges a deeper and more evolved reality. Such conception seems to behold man as one who travels over the events and civilizations, though deep inside it conceives time as something that runs under his feet, so that the experiences he undergoes in this life or in several others serve to the profound non-perishable comprehension of the inner man - the one we are beyond the clothes we gain during every individual life. As many of you here may know, there was a similar conception in China. We mean one similar to the Mayan, hence the coincidence in the conception.
The old Babilonians and then the Greek marked off a sort of transition in the cyclical conception of time through the idea of "event". To the Greek the notion of change and permanence was under the influence of cultural contacts –mainly with the Jew people and their complex development of present time in their Kabbalah. However, it will not be until the advent of Christianity that the Jewish ideas of "linear time" rise with power and become fundamental to the Western world and its idea of progress. To some authors the fall of modernity - or the rise of postmodernism [this depending on the approach)- also entails the end of "linear time" to the Western world. Other authors consider "cyclical time" is also a characteristic of Christianity as far as "in the end of times God's own hand shall establish a new golden era or a new Garden of Eden for humanity".
In the world of the Mapuche people, time is not conceived as unidirectional from past to future; to them it is bidirectional. Future is expected to lay behind us while past is what we have in front of us, or viceversa. The aboriginal man lives present time within a reality of a continual cyclical movement of nature and his culture. The "We Tripantu" (/wi: tree-pahn-too/) of the Mapuche nation is a natural rebirth, the end of a year is the beginning of a new life and not the sum of cumulative years. The aboriginal universe is a living network through which energy runs all the time as well as information does; this takes place under an order which is self regulated by the very nature of things. In the aboriginal thought everything is interconnected, nothing is separated from the whole.
In ancient Egypt time was not conceived as an orderly magnitude going towards future but as a twofold phenomenon: the cyclical repetition and the eternal duration (the "neheh" and the "djet"
2. From linear time to time without achievement
In the modern world the concept of time has always differed according to different social and cultural contexts. First, we can define it as the "physical dimension which represents the succession of states though which matter passes" and also as a "determined period during which an action is performed or an event unfolds". Yet, such concepts are but relative when we think of the passing of time in the world. And literature is the concrete and inescapable evidence of what man thinks about this topic. Actually, literature will be the one to show the world the sings of modernity. Authors like James Joyce in his Ulysses or Virginia Woolf in Orlando anticipate the rapid pace of the cosmopolitan cities, where the eternal becomes ephemeral and time passes faster than in any of those minor, inner cities in any country.
Xavier Zubiri asserts that "Time is something "happening" to us: present is becoming past and runs towards future Time is, then, a happening which has three ?parts? of its own –present, past and future. His proposal, made from the field of philosophy, is a timeline, the symbolic line expressed as consecutio tempore - this is the way we perceive time. But T.S Eliot in The four quartets posits : "Tie present and time past. / Is all time is eternally present/ All time is unredeemable". Thus he breaks the timeline we all know to show us another possibility: time in itself, as such, does not exist. Present and past live in the present here and now. What has happened does happen for I can remember it, and on every occasion I remember it I set that past in action, I update it and make it present now. And this also happens with future as far as I foretell it, I screen it, I bring it to this present time. Consequently, time is an abstraction, it does not exist in itself. It's an entelechy.
From linear time we procede to fragmentary time, as a result of different contemporary discourses. These propose new looks when they want to tell a story. Death and the compass by Jorge Luis Borges, Wiliam Faulkner's "The sound and the fury" or the short stories by Julio Cortazar in "La noche boca arriba" [The night face up] are clear samples of the very fragmentation of postmodernity –not only of speech but also of space and time.
For these reasons we consider literature shows and accelerates those processes that exist in reality, and nowadays this happens with the aid of contemporary cinema which also sets forth new ways of telling.
The hours now with us becomepast as soon as I pronounce them. From this present time projected towards future. From that future which will come just now.
Bibliography
? *Bury, John (1986), La idea de progreso, Ed. Alianza Editorial, Madrid.
? *Horkheimer, Max y Adorno, T. W. (1994) Dialéctica de la ilustración, Ed., Trotta, Madrid.
? *E. P. Thompson. (1979) Tradición, revuelta y consciencia de clase. Estudios sobre la crisis de la sociedad preindustrial. Barcelona, Crítica.
? *ELIOT, T.S, Four Quartets, (1943), Harcourt, USA.
? Nisbet, Robert A. (1987), Historia de la idea de progreso, Ed. Gedisa.
? *ZUBIRI, Xavier, (1976) REALITAS II: 1974-1975, Trabajos del Seminario Xavier Zubiri, Madrid, pp. 7-47