Beyond time's boundaries

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HOW is it that we seem so securely locked into unidirectional time? Everything but time seems to have more dimensions and directions than we can know. Time is something we experience plainly enough, as life’s tomorrows turn to yesterdays… or do we merely imagine it?

We live on a turning planet that orbits its sun and is itself orbited by a moon; a planet turning at some other speed in some other orbit around some other sun would give its creatures a different experience of the succession of nights and days we call time but how different would the raw nature of time be?  Our time is conventionally bound to conditions and perspectives that are unique to our planet, yet different cultures have found different ways to organise concepts of time around those perspectives and “measured” time has been variously understood as cyclic or linear despite broadly similar experiences of days and seasons, flows and tides, hunger and satiation, births and deaths and bodily changes, and contexts of constant change. Measured time has long been problematic, not least because the natural phenomena on which the definitions have been based are themselves variable.  (The current scientific definition of one second of time is impossible for us to relate to in our day to day lives — it’s based on the transition periods of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom at rest at absolute zero: 9,192, 631,770 of them….)

So desperately does the so-called “human condition” cry out for illusions of order in the midst of apparent chaos that it’s hard not to imagine that time does not have something to do with consciousness. Does consciousness need some organizing construct to exist? Without the framework of time, would consciousness collapse into disjointed sensation? Do we imagine time as a kind of skeleton, a helpful illusion or construct that’s necessary to give consciousness a form we can experience and utilize? Do we need a concept like time to lift experience from an ocean of chaos and personalise it as a sense of selfhood?

Certainly, a living organism without consciousness (as we think of it) can continue to exist, morphing from one generation to another with no pressing need for individuality and, arguably, with no particular attachment to time. After all, our own DNA carries physical, identifiable remnants of life’s earliest origins. (See: Creation story…)

Without time, would our conscious existence, perhaps more realistically, be just another mystery?

Consciousness, after all — even our personal experience of “time” — is individualistic; and our sensations of it stretch or contract depending on what we’re doing.

Simply “being” is rendered difficult by the album of our memories. First experiences become consequential to a conscious being, memories of them coloring every subsequent approach or aversion. Pull away the struts of time and who would you or I be?

But experience radiates backwards and forwards in time. I walk, for example, through an unkempt field. It is midsummer. Long-stemmed seedheads arch over the purple vetch and mauve clover flowers. A warm breeze sends satiny waves of shade and light through the long grass. Dandelion heads, fragile, grey, sway on the point of disintegration; tiny, white, ten-petalled flowers are knitted into cool, dark spaces close to the ground and, when I part the grass I see a solitary five-petalled pink flower. It is tiny. Above them rise the gaudy yellow blooms of some other weed. There seems no particular order to it all but that does not stop the field laying down a fresh sheet of memories in my being that in some slight but enduring way alters the sum of myself.

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 A change has taken place that’s side-stepped my conscious control: something that’s not to do just with the various ways of “knowing” but also with my ways of coming to know. It gently recalibrates the ways I open or close to whatever experiences follow, and even to the memories that have already stored themselves away in the complicated networks of my consciousness.

What is especially hard to imagine is the consciousness that was the sum of “me” before the field. That “self” has passed in an instant. Could I ever return to my earlier engagement with life as though the field had never existed?

For example, how do I now remember the summit of Mt Ruapehu in New Zealand. I vividly remember the day, the friends I climbed with, snatches of 40 year-old conversation, even the feel of the wind on my face. In my being, that peak now seems just a little higher than it was before I walked in the field, the wind a little sharper. There are remembered seas that seem a little wilder, moments that seem sweeter, or funnier. All of them passed long ago, except in my memory, and even there they are susceptible to change.

The malleability of memories is well known. And it points to dimensions of what’s called “learning” that go far beyond skill sets and adaptive, utilitarian “knowledge” to the shaping and shading-in of the “person”. Yet the experiences that manipulate our memories and personhood are not of our own making, and their impacts and effects can only very loosely and unreliably be predicted, even if we have chosen to set out on on a particular path of action and interaction. Outcomes are constructed in the loosest and bluntest of ways. The nuances of meaning are always discoveries after the fact.

Besides, the will we exercise when we make our choices has also been shown to carry the scars and rewards of our pasts. Consciousness is acted upon as significantly as it acts, yet we accept its governance over our lives as the mediator of both our intentions and the experiences our actions lead us into.

We grant consciousness its authority because it feels like the stuff of our “selves”. Moreover, it shapes our interactions with other people and is fitted into the bedrock of whatever society we have become a part of. But it is a mistake to never question its nature or challenge its easily mistaken and often misleading dictates. Our consciousness can lead us into false complexities and unhelpful choices; ways of being that cripple our true capacities and trap us in apparent inevitabilities.

Time is the mainstay of its throne and the linchpin of its seamless coherence. Measured time can become a dictatorship that crushes questions and subjugates the soul, that often opaque inner sanctum of our being, and turns selfhood into servitude. Life, no longer an open-ended adventure becomes a steep pyramid of goals and factitious “needs”.

Letting go of time is the secret to restoring the balance of the self’s countless illusory and sometimes painfully contradictory understandings of what we “know”  — all the supposed causes and effects — and the felt compulsions of our life’s apparent trajectory, of its boundaries and possibilities.

One way to step back from time and the rule of unquestioned selfhood is meditation. Meditation is often taught with its own encumbrances and contextual baggage. But at its essential core, in offers simple, effective techniques — a focus on the breath, for example — that banish time from our awareness.

Another way to thwart time is to enter into the experience of sights and sounds that deepen our engagement with beauty — and they are readily available all around us, in a patch of unkempt grass, in the labyrinth-like tracery of a spider’s web, in the natural flow of water, in the muttering embers of a spent fire, in the elegant structure of a flower and the detailed form of a tree, in the gait of an insect, in the gatherings and passages of clouds, in the slow-cycling of the stars… in the letting go of that compulsion to understand and systematize and explain. Nature is at its core chaotic, and when its chaos produces what we recognize as beauty, it has the power to overlay our accumulated memories with a rich cloth of reassurance. It is reassurance without meaning, without particular content: it is a reassurance that comes from transcendence into the intact, undissected coherence of elemental, restorative beauty. Entering into it without anything more than openness to the experience it offers lets the self to get on with that recalibration of all that we are that is sometimes called “inspiration”.

Recognising and accepting the gift of beauty is a respite from the snares of time and the domination of a noise-filled, damaged and fatigued consciousness. It just takes a summoning of the will to see gently and trust open discerningly but deeply… and let the self rediscover coherence in contexts of joy.

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Seen the news today?

...towards 'restorative news'

IT’s amply been demonstrated that gloomy, violent and troubling television news reports encourage us to catastrophise our personal anxieties; they encourage us to focus more vividly on worst-case scenarios in our own lives. They spoil more than our day.

Researchers have documented the extent to which the enormous attention given to the 9/11 attacks in the United States, for example, with television networks endlessly running images of the collapsing World Trade Centre towers, intensified whatever stress and depression people had been feeling before 9/11.

Extended media coverage stepped up the impact of the terror attack.

One research group identified the emotions stirred up by vicarious exposure to the attack as ranging from shock and anger, through fear and anxiety to feelings of helplessness, guilt and depression. During the first week, shock and anger tended to subside, but anxiety and depression-related emotions deepened. The more time people spent in front of the television, the greater were the impacts.



BUT it happens all the time: “bad” news is not hard to find, and a diet of “bad” news has known physical and emotional consequences. Now it's the stupid economy. And those consequences are certain to flow on into society at large, given the spread and reach of mainstream media.

This could easily turn into a “so let’s shoot the messenger” rant… and, indeed, the media are commonly blamed for all sorts of societal failures. But I believe it’s a far deeper issue than that.

Sources of information have become so numerous, so pervasive, so heterogeneous, so entangled with entertainment and so idiosyncratic that any big “story” almost instantly shatters into dozens of angles, interpretations and versions. Meaning dissolves into floods of images and assertions: confirmations, denials and conspiracy theories, re-tellings, deceptions and misconceptions.

In this post-Murdoch era, print media have very largely abandoned their credibility. For various reasons, television, having never managed to find itself, has become background noise that’s influential only through the imagery it disseminates. Radio — a medium with tremendous potential — has very largely become a low-level promotional tool and source of free muzak. And the Internet thrives as a cauldron of hopelessly relativistic nonsense.

In this information environment, most of us inhabit tiny zones of immediate personal consequence and necessarily tend to exponentially trivialise information according to its distance from the centre that is ourself.

The forces of information overload are nudging us towards ever-narrowing individualisation and away from socialisation; ironically, globalisation is leading us not to any celebration of our universal humanity but away from it. Bespoke worlds are the order of the future. Games designers and the like are designing and manufacturing them now, and gaming principles are being experimented with in workplaces. We are become less articulate and more removed from decision-making as we undertake humanity’s next great migration: the journey to virtual worlds. There, we will find we all have become slaves.

In many ways, you could claim that journey began long ago, certainly with the advent of the printing press: the ability it gave us to freeze particular versions of narratives into an enduring, portable form that could be widely distributed. To the Western mind at least, bookish reality has long seemed to offer clearer certainties than the fluid mutability of oral tradition where a single narrative can unfold into many meanings depending on the contexts in which it is heard and the particular ways it is told. A book can seem to escape its contexts and, distanced from us, tempt us to grant it far more universality and authority than it ever, in fact, has deserved.

The book was brought low, though, as per-unit production costs fell and literacy became a norm. The paperback revolution placed ephemeral and trivial publications on shelves that, till then, had been reserved for “literature”, a status conferred by the fact of publication. Book publishers quickly turned status objects into recyclable pulp; no longer was typography a badge of esteem or authority.

At the same time, riding high on the fallacy that seeing in believing, television — a medium that was originally hailed as the harbinger of worldwide educational opportunity — was almost immediately lured into a business model that subordinated content to mass appeal and advertising revenues. Along with mass-market cinema, it made a god of entertainment and, in doing so, opened the door to new media able to far more cost-effectively serve that god.

The trajectory has been from elitism to populism, as though those are the only options, as though they are necessary polar opposites.

For as long as we see things that way, we are likely to remain blinded to the fundamental social need for narrative.

Narrative is the source of social meaning. As communities, we tend to care nothing for things we do know nothing about. “Knowing” in this context is not about facts or theories or data and statistics. It is about the intimacies of encounter.

It seems to me that we’re not helped by news styles that present world events as a disordered succession of ugly detonations; as ongoing tableaux of inexplicable violence and catastrophe that sometimes occur close at hand and at other times explode far away. “News” has become a sensationalist feeding frenzy. It does nothing but cultivate a widespread state of anxiety and hovering gloom. Its widespread consequences are most likely to include the rekindling of atavistic fears of strangers, change and risk exposure. And this is what the “news” media and much internet chatter tends very largely to do.

As a daily newspaper journalist it often nagged at me that what I was doing — what “we” were doing — was excerpting incidents from the ongoing flow of activity around us and clipping it to fit in five, ten or twenty column inches of type as if they were independent, free-standing events. Of course, they were not.

The incidents we presented as “news” were all part of far larger stories of causes and consequences, people and circumstances, very little of which could possibly fit into the stories we published. And, of course, by the time any of these stories were read, life had moved on. A news story gives a glimpse of what was, not what is. And it is a partial, incomplete glimpse at best. Seldom does a news story have room for any meaning.

I had a particular loathing of court and crime stories. They are basically cheap and easy to get, a stenographic job at best. And they trivialise it all. The format is simple: a few words from the charge sheet, maybe a pithy quote from the judge (if there’s one to be had), and a note of sentencing. There is no room in the story for explanations, and subsequent appeals seldom make it into print. But, if you sit down with the perpetrator or the victim, with an arresting officer, with a lawyer, or with somebody’s mother, you can find stories, real stories. These stories often have little to do with the charge or the sentence, and everything to do with the intimacies of encounter that carry meaning. What happens in court is the depersonalised working out of an institutional process, and the less intimacy the better. Nobody really lives there.

The reader gets nothing of substance from this sort of reporting, nothing of use and no understanding or meaning.

News is, I believe, absolutely necessary. It is essential to us individually and communally. But news need not be clinically depressing. Nor does it all need to be escapist jolliness. It just needs to be real.

But news gathering and presentation are in crisis. You’ll find it evidenced everywhere, whether it be in the opinionated inaccuracies of an amateur’s blog, in a manicured segment of a prestigious television network’s prime time newscast, in a carefully edited radio news item with its obligatory clip of gritty actuality, or in a facts-filled item in a leading daily newspaper. The crisis is its meaninglessness.

Meaninglessness is what gets in the way of our engaging and our understanding.

To introduce meaning to news presentation, there is a desperate need to learn afresh from the basic elements of effective narrative as they’ve been known for millennia in oral traditions.

An effective narrative shows transformation and consequence, in involves change; a narrative has characters whose actions make sense, even if only to them. An effective narrative is essentially compassionate. An effective narrative invites us to enter into a situation and relate it to our own experience. An effective narrative respects all of it characters, even the “evil-doers”. An effective narrative helps us to understand ourselves, not just our surroundings. An effective narrative challenges and changes our assumptions and enhances our way of seeing things.

How might it be applied to news work?

A community newspaper I once edited won an award because one of my staff was willing to spend a week working alongside a make-work project team, spot-spraying and grubbing thistles on farmland. Mainstream coverage tended to feed a stereotype of lazy bums and beneficiaries getting a timely taste of the meaning of a day’s work. My reporter was able to write about an energetic group of people delighted to be part of a team with some purpose available to it, with a role and a challenge, instead of feeling isolated by a contemptuous community that they felt consistently denied them opportunities to work.

The feedback from the coverage was all positive and I believe the community benefitted. My reporter got over her blisters and aching back and, I think, was all the more glad to be a journalist.

To cover crime, I encouraged reporters to talk to police, criminals and criminologists and write about perceived “problems” rather than cryptic entries on charge sheets; to look into why different types of crime might be happening. To cover local body meetings, I encouraged reporters to get out and talk with the people who would be affected by a decision before the meeting at which a decision would be made, rather than transcribing agenda entries.

I wouldn't say that this is never happening, just that we could use is as a norm.

The key to what I’d call “restorative journalism” is getting the story, not just the “facts”; facts tell us far less than they purport; the story tells us far more.

Shared stories draw us together; facts, too often, push us apart.

It's just "the way you hold your mouth"...

“HABIT” isn’t quite the right word for it; neither are “knack” or “acquirement”… nor is “technique”, although each has a bearing on it.

I’m looking for a word — an everyday word — that gathers up all of those things we learn to do that, once learned, we seldom think of again but continue to do: that riding-a-bicycle sort of thing.

“It’s the way you hold your tongue,” my dad would tell me.

The way these things are learned is often more a case of assimilation than study. It would be a sad and lonely geek, for example, who’d go to scholarly journals and books to learn how to ride a surfboard, make a good fly-fishing cast, ride a bicycle … or, to get exotic, bring down a wild cow with a triple-weighted gaucho boleadora. These are “cultural” things, to be sure, but they’re also physical.

Our unique bodily constitution and physiology play a role, setting limits and horizons: I could probably have learned to run faster but I could never in my life have become a competitive sprinter.

And another dimension to this sort of learning lies among other people, and the whole business of acquiring skills or attributes.

I remember watching in awe as one of my dad’s friends deftly rolled a cigarette with one hand. And the two-fingers-in-the-mouth whistle was another sure-fire way to impress boys like me. Now I watch handymen and carpenters with the same envious awe… there are definitely “cool” and “uncool” ways to handle a builder’s hammer, pencil, tape measure or chalk line.

Then there are tricks like ear waggling and knuckle cracking… it is all of these kinetic relationships and their interactions that refine the “knack” of doing something, and we experience the “knack” subjectively as an attainment and usually perform it in our own characteristic way. And the sum of it all becomes a part of our identity.

These little accomplishments, all added up and implicated with each other, become almost impossible to analyse, disentangle and describe in detail: think of the scientific elaboration and technical description, the psychological expertise and the physics you would need to objectively describe, detail and explain the implications, causes and consequences of, say, a golfer’s remark that “my drive was a bit off today”.

I’m sure that most of what I know about this side of myself is beyond my own view. I only get glimpses of it when I see someone giving me odd looks or doing something in some obviously different way but with the same practised facility and the same lack of self consciousness that I experience when I’m doing it “my way”. And it’s only then that I’m able to find a way to ask myself about the nature of our difference.
Perhaps the worst of it is that it is so easy to fall, in the same sort of way, into similar patterns in the way we think, cluttering our heads with untested assumptions, familiar ways of thinking, habit-formed ways of evaluating things, attractive or flattering ideas, popular wisdom, common sense, ideas about the way things are without really examining them... all of them cramping our imaginations and annihilating possibilities, opportunities, insights and adventure.

So, by way of example: 
Being used, I guess, to handles on things, I always peeled a banana by clasping the fruit in one hand and tugging at the stalk with the other. It never occurred to me to think about this. My dad did it this way. Sometimes the peel comes away reasonably easily; sometimes — especially if the banana is not so ripe — it’s a bit of a wrestle. I’ve even gone to the knife drawer and got the job started that way. For more than 50 years, that’s how I peeled a banana.

Then I learned that monkeys and sensible people peel bananas by nipping the opposite end of the banana with fingertips: the skin obligingly splits and the peel comes easily away. Having never lived among people that sensible — not at banana-peeling time anyway — and, having never been familiar with hungry monkeys and wild banana plants, I never learned the easy way to peel a banana. I’d never thought there night be a better way than struggling with what looked most like the tear-tab.

Sometimes — often, in fact — there’s not a lot at stake between one way of doing something and another. Learning several ways can sometimes be handy. And learning a whole lot of good ways to do a lot of stuff is how plumbers, electricians and carpenters, piano tuners, fitters and turners, surgeons and all of the other tradespeople make themselves so valuable to the rest of us and to society.

And often these things come out simply as mannerisms and accents: those particular ways of being who we are, a part of our social identity… our personality’s signalling system. We often can’t recall where or how we learned our particular little ways, and they are often unconscious… they’re “just the way you hold your mouth”.

At the beck and call of our personality, they can mean the difference between “cool” and “naff”, attractive or irritating. They’re often the characteristics our teenage children loathe most about us… while we grit our teeth as they endlessly repeat the latest “cool’ word. In other people, less well known to us, they lead us to draw conclusions about their background, interests, occupation, status, attractiveness, personality… they undoubtedly help to maintain class distinctions.

And from there, we are led to judge them.

We easily forget that it takes two to make a difference.

We easily forget that people who agree with us, and act like us, teach us little.

We easily forget that both sides of an argument can be — and often are — “wrong”.

We easily forget that the same signal can mean many things to many people… and can be disastrously misleading where there’s a cultural divide between us.

We easily forget that the “right” answer to the “wrong” question is as misleading and dangerous as the “wrong” answer to the “right” question.

We easily forget that people who seem very different from us can be as “good” as we are… and, given half a chance to express their intentions, may even turn out to be even more generous-spirited, more open, more hospitably motivated and more given to goodwill than we are.

We easily forget that it is too easy to esteem people who seem to exemplify our own aspirations… to be drawn to the resounding attraction of the affirmingly familiar, as opposed the apparent obstacle of the somewhat different.

And it can all boil down to “just the way they hold their mouths”… and maybe our timidity.