“When I blinked it was over. I was thinking my life would get slower. That I’d sort this stuff out when I’m older.” ~Typhoon (“Young Fathers”)

“Lost in a dream, or just the silence of a moment? It’s so hard to tell.” ~The War on Drugs (“Lost in the Dream”)

Spots of Time

“Our language is so saturated and animated by time that it is quite possible there is not one statement in these pages which in some way does not demand or invoke the idea of time.” (Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths; “A New Refutation of Time,” p. 218)

Something very strange opens the novel The Nashville American, and a reader’s first impression is to see this as a spooky and ominous sign that the foregoing book will be an erudite and esoteric enigma, or perhaps the fever-dream of a nearly-crazy philosopher. This strange thing is the epigram which quotes from the fragmentary denouement of a short story by Jorge Luis Borges called “Averroes’ Search.” In it, Averroes, the 12th Century Andalusian philosopher, has just written in his manuscript the findings of a search which should have been impossible to complete. Strangely (very strangely), it wasn’t Averroes who wrote this answer in his notebook, but Borges, believing himself to be Averroes while narrating the story about the experience of aporia in Averroes’ search. The moment in the short story illuminates the opening of the novel because both stories take place within spots of time. There is no straight-forward way to explain this idea, so please expect me to stagger my way through it. As I do, I will try to gain a clear vantage on a non-linear view of time—one which cannot possibly be real. Strangely (again, very strangely), this outlook is held as a fundamental pillar in the ontology of most of the nation/culture of Megana. It sees the flow of time not as a forward march of progress but as an intentional cycle honed upon meaning, purpose and identity. And if I may, I will discuss this topic here. “Will”—see? Borges was right. So much of life is just chance, but every now and then you know you’re in the right place. I had this happen once in a philosophy class where we got on the subject of time. I was a spectator in a short disagreement between two other students, a guy and a girl, who were seated directly behind me. I will name them Nick and Jess, just for clarity. With the attention of the class on them, there was something in the assigned David Hume reading which had Nick and Jess debating the influences of time…And yeah, you’re thinking this is the kind of nonsense that happens in Philosophy classes, which is why you left the subject to the pot-smokers while you occupied a seat in a Business Accounting class. Whether or not this was for the best in your case, reader, here is what you missed:

Jess: …Yes, but how do you know your choices are in your best interest?

Nick: Because I’m choosing to do them.

Jess: You chose, but that was earlier. How do you know you still agree? How do you know you’re even the same person?

Nick: I am.

Jess: Yeah, but how do you know?

Nick: I just do.

Jess: Yeah, but how do you…like…know?

This is the part where the whole class burst out laughing. Not because of Jess’s insistence on her question, but because of how the guy next to Nick reacted. Tom—I’m calling him “Tom”— had one of those full-on mind-blown reactions which always seems comical and which instantly reminded me of Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter in the movie Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Tom had been listening intently to the discussion, not seeming to have taken a side in the matter. But when Jess emphasized her idea, he was sent down the rabbit hole. He turned his attention away from Nick and Jess, and like a seasoned actor who knows he’s captured the moment of the scene and can simply react, looked forward vacantly and said “Whoa…” Tom’s reaction aside, it’s hard to make a case that we’ve somehow gotten it wrong with our intuitive understanding of time and continuity. There was a past, there will be a future, and this is the present; I am myself in each of these instances, and this idea couldn’t be more straight- forward and self-evident. Meanwhile, any outside claims which go against this way of thinking seem to be some eristic form of sophistry—like trying to trip someone up with Zeno’s Paradox while losing to them in a footrace. “Yes, you’re closer to the finish line, but you’ll never actually cross it! You’ll only get half way, then half way again until infinity! …” Yet, races are won. Likewise, idealism can only go so far before it must yield to reality. So in order to consider alternative perspectives on time, we need to justify its usefulness…or, at least, its rationality. Mathematics professor Sir Roger Penrose had a good solution for this sort of problem: He said, in theory, we can’t always know which postulates are true and which are false. But the truth tends to perform better than nonsense in real-world situations. So to find out what’s right and what’s wrong, we should put everything in play and find out what works and what doesn’t. And what works so well with our linear view of time is that it reflects the way we engage with our environment. As living beings, we are each a succession of physiological processes; we are, each of us, a multitude of chain reactions. Each process keys upon the momentum inherited from the collective moment which directly proceeded it. Applying Neko Case’s perspective in “Nothing to Remember” is entirely straight-forward: “I’m just action—and at other times reaction.” (Imagine the fictional character who has this thought as an anagnorisis…). Our existential paradigm is to consume mass and convert it into energy; through the emergent complexity of our extraordinarily intricate biological system, an internal awareness comes to perceive and analyze this process by seeing the self within the present moment. As memory unfolds, making an impression of each previous instance, time seems to roll forward like a wheel, tangentially touching the ground which represents the continuous, static and transitive span between the past and future. This thin band of time which we know as the present moment is no more than about thirty seconds, although I personally assume it to be only two or three seconds. When the present moment records itself through replication and memory, a dialectic emerges between the physiological process (the living being) and this emergent entity (the self). This was Jess’s point with Nick. She was saying the present-moment-Nick was under orders from the previous-moment-Nick (a series of them, actually). But since there is momentum and memory driving Nick’s understanding of the process—both of which are feedback loops—he is fooled into believing in a chimera of persistence. But, Jess would say: Only one version of you exists: the present one. Luckily for Nick, and for the rest of us as well, this statement is incomplete. Because of our memories, when we wake up with a hangover (or reckon ourselves to a similar self- destructive or disappointing consequence), we can ask ourselves: why did I do this to myself? Without memory, the present person would always be forsaken by all those yesterdays who had no sense of some future self. Without memory, we would always wake up to an empty stomach—or at least to an empty fridge. But because of memory, we can take a moment to reflect and find a fair balance between now and later. Because surely it’s the role of the present to employ the resources of the past and set the course of the future. All of this adds up to a postulate which is likely true: Our belief in the flow of time is reasonable. Yet it leaves the intriguing question: what if there’s another way to see it? Also: are there any flaws or gaps in our perception, opening the door to a slightly different or radically different concept? One outcome of our firmly-grounded understanding of time which instantly comes to mind is the oddity of time-travel—just by the fact that it even seems plausible. I am a big fan of time travel movies in general; I am inspired by the premise of Time Cop starring Jean Claude Van Damme and by the Stephen King novel and miniseries 11.22.63 about an attempt to go back in time to prevent the JFK assassination. But Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and the Back to the Future trilogy are definitely my all-time time-travel favorites. Bill and Ted’s is a must-see movie for anyone and everyone. Not only is it funny and surprising, but the two main characters essentially have the same mission as I do in these essays, which is to gather a group of historical figures to express a cohesive perspective of the world. And while I make my time-travelling circuit with the help of my books, the public library and the internet; Bill and Ted do it with the help of Rufus, their guide from the future, and his late 1980s phone booth-time machine. Along with sharing a few key characters to illuminate our history reports (Socrates, Joan of Arc and Sigmund Freud—but not Billy the Kid), I also named a central character in the early stages of The Leviathan of Megana after Ted Theodore Logan’s little brother, Deacon; because he was right to ditch that dick Napoleon at the bowling alley. Of course, the whole story in Bill and Ted’s is absolutely absurd, but the central absurdity is a re-visitable past and a pre-visitable future. Strangely, though, we see it not as impossible but as currently-not-possible. There’s a big difference here. Like the famous flying cars in Back to the Future II—it could happen; it just hasn’t yet. Trying to find the difference is part of the fun of science fiction. But how does time travel even make sense to us? It should be as backwards and nonsensical as a movie which begins as a Disney cartoon which ends with you standing beside a dumpster behind the movie theater. Like: what the hell just happened there? …It’s interesting to me that one of the major hang-ups with time travel is the Grandfather Paradox: the problem arising from a person going back in time and accidentally (or not accidentally) killing their grandfather and thus preempting their chances of being born. This is the central premise in Back to the Future. Yes, this would be a predicament, but this isn’t only a paradox, it’s a contradiction! The Grandfather Paradox is the central player in a reductio ad absurdum proof to invalidate the possibility of time travel! Yet somehow we still feel somewhat comfortable with these bendable space-time continuums… If there is a flow where the past and future exist as a timeline with the present in between as a single, rolling point, I definitely have an awareness of the timeline in my own life. I see it especially in my writing projects and how they unfold and change over time. Consider this essay set. It is nearly the end of May and I am nearly done, but I planned out the story arc nearly a year ago. According to this plan, I decided to write about Odysseus, Oedipus, Medusa and Macbeth. And although I had a few big ideas and knew I would need to establish several big premises along the way, I didn’t know precisely what I would have to say. It’s surprising to me to see major themes emerge—as though I planned them. In most cases, though, I didn’t. For instance, I decided to write about a metaphysical examination of time—which is this essay. I noted how Borges discusses the subject, and since I’d wanted to talk with him anyway, I decided to have a conversation with him and include it as the sixth essay in the set. Strangely, though, before I could get to work on the essay, I had the dream which is portrayed in “Eventide.” This happened about a week before I was planning to set out and write such a conversation—I even said to Borges at one point: “I am actually going to write an essay about you!” It was the strangest thing… I might reasonably assume my subconscious mind was already getting to work on the subject. But even so, it’s alarming when you come up with ideas which you know you never could have come up with yourself. Like I said, Borges has plenty of thoughts on the subject. In his essay “A New Refutation of Time,” Borges goes through his perspective on this metaphysical subject, which he makes very vividly with an example involving a character by Mark Twain. Here is Borges:

“I do not know what right we have to that continuity which is time. Let us imagine a present moment of any kind. During one of his nights on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn awakens; the raft, lost in partial darkness, continues downstream; it is perhaps a bit cold. Huckleberry Finn recognizes the soft indefatigable sound of the water; he negligently opens his eyes; he sees a vague number of stars, an indistinct line of trees; then, he sinks back into his immemorable sleep as into the dark waters.” (Jorge Luis Borges, “A New Refutation of Time”)

Borges supposes this moment occurs on the 7th of June at 4:11 am CST. He goes on from here to draw a connection between the two banks of the river and the moment just before and just after this little scene. His main point is to suggest that we don’t need to presuppose the two banks of the river to understand what’s happening here, yet we feel the need to presuppose the moment before and the moment after. We do it almost intuitively. So what makes our understanding of this incomplete if we let ourselves be satisfied with the caret initio et fine of Huck waking up, glimpsing his surroundings, and falling asleep again? I find this scene and scenario to be absolutely fascinating. This is something I would describe as a spot of time. I realize beforehand that what I am about to suggest is the sort of thing one is libel to hear in a college philosophy class: that Borges might be somewhat or all-what correct to say a person who is fully enveloped in a reading or performance of Shakespeare is, in some mystical or metaphysical sense, Shakespeare himself. Here is Borges saying it:

“…[We] can postulate, in the mind of an individual (or of two individuals who do not know each other but in whom the same process works), two identical moments. Once this identity is postulated, one may ask: Are not these identical moments the same? Is not one single repeated term sufficient to break down and confuse the series of time? Do not fervent readers who surrender themselves to Shakespeare become, literally, Shakespeare?” (Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths; “A New Refutation of Time, p. 224”)

Is not one single repeated term sufficient to break down and confuse the series of time…This idea is one which rings very true to me. In fact, I wrote about it specifically in my essay “The Rebel” when I described the eternal return of a disappointing incident involving an avocado. Eternal Return is intuitive to me because I already have the sense of a repetition of events being linked so closely together that in some ideal sense, or in some emergent quintessential occurrence, they are the same moment. Here is my best example: There is an obscure gentleman’s rule in cribbage which goes as follows: At any point in the game, if the dealer offers a cut of the deck to the opposing player and the opposing player cuts, the dealer automatically gets two points. This is because, by cutting, the opponent has implied the dishonesty of the dealer, who surely must have manipulated the deck and thereby necessitated a cut. This is a cutesy explanation for the rule, because the real reason is it’s just a chance for a momentary battle over who’s paying attention. Cribbage is a unique game because it’s primarily a card game, but it uses a special scoring board which moves pegs on a loop. You can play cribbage without the board, but it’s just not the same. Cycles are a common theme in my essays and stories. The saunterer who walks for so long that the destination fades away. Sisyphus, who pushes his boulder, knowing it will roll back once it reaches the top. And, of course, Theseus within the labyrinth. So it makes sense that I would be fond of a game like cribbage. And to finish my point: every time I offered my Dad a cut in cribbage in order to sneak two extra points, every single time, he refused to cut. I never got him once. And each of the 500 instances of this happening was essentially the same moment. A spot of time, as I am defining it, happens within an enveloping cyclical experience where the beginning is forgotten and the end is not expected…“He walked across the land until he came to the sea…” Within this moment of caret initio et fine, the flow of time is as still as the water beneath a floating raft on the river.* This is why Borges’ Huckleberry Finn river scene is an example of a spot of time: it doesn’t just happen on the 7th of June at 4:11 am, but rather it happens at all times and in all places which fill the empty spaces within a moment. The moment stretches not between the opening and closing of Huck’s eyes, but through night and day and in and out of weeks. Any time and place which isn’t impinged upon by preceding or following moments persists statically in some absu no-place. This concept is represented in mathematics with the mystical and logically-proven “Empty Set” (all sets contain the null set…all sets…). And what Borges and I seem to be suggesting, if even only as a metafictional conjecture, is that spots of time are accessible and translatable from all non-times and non-places; to and from the past and future; even to and from fiction. This is nonsense, I know. It could be that this is idea is nothing but hypothetical, serving only as a metaphor, but one which lights the pathways to other, more real possibilities. However, I have had enough strange encounters with it that I feel I am remiss to not highlight them at least for a moment. There is something very curious about the plot of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure involving a missing set of keys, and to some, it might seem that what happens next is a simple case of a screenwriter needing to get everything into blurfect alignment in order to move into act 3. This happens at a moment when Bill and Ted cannot figure out how to break in and out of a police holding cell which requires a missing set of keys. Ted—Keanu Reeves—has a bright idea; which, if you’re familiar with the movie, you know it couldn’t possibly be that bright. He decides to commit to what the solution to the problem ought to be. They need a set of keys in this moment, and the keys are presently missing (because someone stole them or Ted’s dad lost them). Ted decides they will use their time machine, go back and steal the keys at a time when Ted’s dad actually has them (!!!), then bury them right where they are standing at this precise, precise moment (beside a sign post). In the most spooky and curious of coincidences, the missing set of keys is indeed buried right there, beside the sign post. This a-posteriori guiding-force premise gets outlandish rather quickly for Bill and Ted, but thankfully the ensuing absurdity only lasts for a short while (Trash can! Remember a trash can!). However, I have to say something in favor of the basic premise of Ted’s idea: that by deciding on a momentary sense of what ought to be, to committing to it in the moment and reflecting on it conscientiously in the future, there seems to be some mystical sense of a swerve which tends a moment towards an optimal outcome. I know this is a strange thing to say, but remember: this is the reason we are here right now. Be the Tom to my Jess, if you will. I love cribbage, but I haven’t played a game since early December of last year. The game was with my dad, and I lost by a single point. To lose while 1 point short is “being left in the stink hole,” and it’s worse than getting skunked (losing by 30 or more), because at least in a skunking you know there was nothing you could have done one way or another to change the outcome. To lose by one, however—you probably could have pegged differently or thrown differently to the crib at least once or twice…But alas, this is the kind of second-guessing that does us no good in our time-moves-forward-damnit reality. At the end of the game, I found myself with four to go, and Dad had three to go. It was my deal, which means it was my crib, but he counted first. Cribbage players know: I will lose—unless I peg. Not only would I need to peg, I would need to peg 4 before he pegs 3; which takes a bit of skill, a bit of luck, or a bit of both. It was at this time when I offered Dad a cut. Ever since I was 10, I would offer a cut in this particular situation: at the very end of a game where it was close enough for two points to matter. And remember that the first 500 times I tried this trick, it failed. Dad always responded in one of two ways: either he would reach for the cards, catch himself just at the last second and grin at me as if to say “nice try,” or he would sit still and grin at me as if to say “nice try.” This last instance was one of the latter. I don’t know if this was in my mind only or if it was in his as well, but every time I’d offered a cut, in each of those instances throughout our lifelong series of games, I’d always wondered if one day he would absent-mindedly make a cut. Because this is one of the personality traits that Dad and I always shared: a keen awareness of the situation and of the motives of others. It’s one of the hallmarks of an excellent card player. So there was always this thought in my mind—and again, perhaps in his mind as well—of some future cribbage game when I would catch him off guard. The play would only be for two points, it would only impact a single game, but for both of us it would signify a lack of sharpness which in turn would signify something else. So as Dad had gone through his cancer treatment last year, knowing each game might be our last, he might have wondered if I would stop taking this cheap shot at the most critical moment of the game. Because to lose in such a way would be undignified; yet to stop offering means I’m going easy on him. So there we were, in an incredibly close cribbage game in early December of last year. I offered a cut, and Dad refused, leaving the score where it was. We both threw to my crib, we both pegged to the best of our ability, and I came up short; leaving him a layup for a point or two which he made easily with his count. Moments after he’d won, he revealed to me that he’d split a pair of fives. And this is the really significant part of the situation, and I’m sorry if the detail is too subtle for anyone who isn’t a seasoned cribbage player. Because, in the situation we were in, there was only one thing that mattered for Dad: to prevent me from pegging 4. Only a good cribbage player knows this. Only a really good cribbage player knows how to alter their throw in order to sabotage my chances to subvert the win. And only an extremely good cribbage player— which my Dad surely was—would dare to break up a pair of fives, knowing what a handcuff they are in a pegging situation, even though in the counting phase they are pure gold. But also, his throw makes no sense if I intended to go easy on him, knowing this might be our last game. The game played out as it must, but only because we had the blackwood understanding that even though this might be our last game, if I threw the game we already weren’t playing cribbage. Two days later, I met with him again in a hospital on east bank of the Mississippi where we knew he’d been given less than a day. He said kind and significant things to Henry and Will. Then, with me, I interrupted him. I said: “Two days ago, we played a game of cribbage—” He interrupted me back and said “And I beat you!” I said: “Yes, you did.” Unsaid between us was the blackwood understanding of everything it meant—both within the game and within the fact that we’d both intended to bring it up. This is a spot of time. All of everything that goes unsaid within it is met with all the things meant and said in other places and times—all of what’s known to be certain and the sure sense that one is where one is meant to be. And looking back on it, I couldn’t calculate the odds that we would get the hands we got in that last round of our cribbage game, but never, ever, had I seen Dad split a pair of fives. These are conjectures, and if we must, it’s okay if we leave them behind in this essay. “Behind”—see? Borges was right again. As people, we are primarily physiological processes, established to process energy in a living world: thriving, for us, aims more towards survival than to philosophy. Still: there must be some value to meaning. I’d like this to be my enduring outcome, and I hope I get a chance to reflect this value in my writing and particularly in Megana. In places like Weissagon, which is a state and culture on the Eastern side of the continent and professes no knowledge of time whatsoever. There are also stories to be told in Sarvaque, where the state motto is: “The Past Is Before You.” For me, the most valuable keepsake from this conversation is the reminder that more is gained when one can act and react as one must. Presence and mindfulness are rewarding practices, and in my opinion, they exude and demonstrate the virtues of humility and generosity. And last, it’s fun to see where these ideas can take you, especially when you have the spooky realization it’s a place you’ve already been…

Kevin Umhoefer May 21st, 2020 Thank you

* My use of the term caret initio et fine (without beginning or end) began in the essay “Star, Heart and Follow” and runs as a thread through every essay in this set. Strangely, while writing, I stopped for no reason and grabbed my book Latin for the Illiterati off my bookshelf. By absolute whim, I flung open the pages and landed on the term. I decided then to incorporate it as well as I could and see where it took me.

* Yesterday morning, while I was writing about cribbage, my phone began to ring. I didn’t answer it, because good luck interrupting me while I’m writing. I checked my phone shortly after and saw it was my Dad’s old iPhone (which my Mom still needs to deactivate). I called the number back and didn’t get a response, so I called Mom’s number. After she said hi and I said hi and she didn’t dive into a reason for the call, I clarified that I was calling her back. She said: “Oh, I didn’t call you—did I?” So no, she didn’t.

* “Through night and day and in and out of weeks.” is a direct echo of Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, which is also a depiction of a spot in time.