Sat, 3 Jun 2023
Unstuck
Listen:
Jesse Timm has come unstuck in time.
Or at least so it was with one of my favorite fictional characters: Billy Pilgrim, of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, who perceives of time as an object or phenomenon as rigidly fixed as any physical entity, occurring in complete nonlinear simultaneity.
This apparently asynchronous and immutable temporal existence leads Billy to adopt a philosophical demeanor resembling aspects of stoicism and determinism that somehow at once appear to manifest as resignation to kismet’s inevitability—utterly immune to willful influence—while also not diminishing his perceived sense that his actions are his own, that fate has chosen him as the human observer to its orchestral cosmic symphony.
But while Billy’s conscious experience of time may seem an allochronic microcosm to those of us bound by a linear chronological understanding, all moments of his life are more accurately in constant synchronism; from beginning to end, every moment of his life is all happening right now all the time.
In Slaughterhouse-Five, time as a fixed object is represented by way of analogy: each person, from the unstuck perspective, is not a singular individual moving through time and space, but rather, an unbroken millipede. Its origin dawns at the earliest point of an individual’s life and the arc of that life appears to snake along as a singular entity with multitudinous legs skittering along from birth until eventual death.
So it goes.
In my view, this is how time works. No, not the literal and fantastical elements of the book (like the influence of the extra-dimensional Tralfamadorians), but the conceptualization of time as a fixed structure more akin to an architectural installation or natural geological wonder than a philosophical construct or abstraction. I suppose this view likely makes me a hard determinist of sorts, a disbeliever in free will as a meaningful concept, one who might deny the importance of choice as a superficial emergent property of other far deeper and more primeval forces. And in levying such an accusation my way, you would be more or less spot on.
That's not to say we don't have agency; we are most certainly active agents in this fatalistic drama. But active agents are seldom, if ever, the authors of their own destinies. They make decisions, of course, but those decisions are cosmically scripted and only serve to further the dictates of the plot, such as it is. And for any actor in a play, they must embody their character or the whole charade falls apart. As such, they must truly feel as though they are the decision maker, that their choices have weight and impact.
The more thoroughly an actor believes they are in the driver’s seat, the more believable their performance and the better the audience reception will be as we will find it easier to adopt that all-important suspension of that pesky disbelief. Such an actor may actually persuade us that what we’re seeing is real (and, truthfully, it is real in much the same way that emotions are real, even if they hold no tangible physical properties).
But even (or especially) the best and most immersive dramas are scripted. Yes, even unscripted reality television has a script—it’s simply written in the cutting room, after the actors deliver their lines.
Is this an imperfect analogy that falls apart entirely upon deep reflection? Almost certainly, in exactly the same way that most analogies eventually do. Nevertheless, it effectively demonstrates what I aim to discuss here.
Because, listen:
Jesse Timm has come unstuck in time.
***
A counterintuitive—borderline ironic—paradox exists for me given my view of time as fundamentally deterministic and unalterable. At first blush, one might imagine that viewing the universe in such fatalistic terms could send one into fits of nihilistic self-destruction or worse. If my choices aren't mine, if nothing I do affects any real outcome that could have been different but for my willful participation, what point does anything have? If we all-too-self-aware active agents are incapable of exerting even the faintest hint of authentic influence over the fabric of space and time then everything is meaningless, right?
That's one way of looking at it, sure, but I find that unimaginative pessimism to be rather boring. Another way of looking at it is more akin to observing some artistic or naturalistic expression of beauty. Is there any source of ultimate moral value in a sunset? Is there any cosmic significance to a painting of that same sunset? Does that diminish the subjective aesthetic appeal of either?
If everything worth anything must have some form of absolute existential value, then yeah, I guess that makes both sunset and painting worthless. But if value can exist beyond the limiting context of intrinsic moral absolutism, then I would argue it doesn't matter whether there is ultimate purpose in anything for it to be worthwhile.
But I digress.
For me, a deterministic perception of time doesn't diminish my own sense of personal agency, responsibility, and accountability. If anything, it amplifies my belief—no, more than that; my conviction—that my own inevitable integration into the cosmic tapestry of all things is as much an unavoidable and obligatory element of the universe as is the Big Bang.
Every moment of time up to now led to this very moment, just as this moment is a necessary catalyst and essential component of all future moments. And yet, all of these moments are also an enormous cosmological accident as devoid of elemental importance as the actor's identity outside of the character she embodies.
***
So what is it like to be unstuck in time? Well (to bastardize a well-known lyrical pleonasm), I'm a linear girl unstuck in a temporal world, so I can't really tell you. What I will say, though, is that I do often find myself at times thrust into moments of the past in a less corporeal sense than, say, one Billy Pilgrim. But, in some ways, that is no less "real" than the actor’s belief in some cognitive or emotional ownership of his lines.
Upon encountering a certain smell that hearkens back to the foaming hand soap we had in the bathroom of my childhood home, I am suddenly thrust back to the family computer room playing Age of Empires II in the days before easy access to the Internet.
Upon hearing the song A Comet Appears by The Shins, which was new to me as I began experiencing some new and foreign adolescent emotional realities, I am suddenly once again in high school discovering heartbreak for the first time.
Sometimes, for no consciously discernable reason at all, I find myself reliving moments of nostalgia so intense it is hard to tell if I'm experiencing traumatic regret or the wistful homeopathic memory of a bygone good feeling.
Because I am just as trapped as you are in this chronologically linear temporal plane, I can be unstuck only in a retrospective capacity. I cannot experience the future as one who has been there, but I do know it is a there to be.
Like the rest of us, I exist in the future—at least until I don't—and my prior experiences, while faded and flawed, offer up clues as to my future states. Myriad branching possibilities will ultimately give way to a singular experience (assuming there is only one universe and discarding the idea that each branching decision fractures the nature of reality into infinitely bifurcating timelines, which—if the case—only compounds my convictions notated herein to an exponentially more expansive and ensconcing take on the meaninglessness of free will as a concept).
That singular experience, as it solidifies into the concrete, imperfect certitude of the past, appears inevitable in hindsight, which is simply because it always was. The opaque unpredictability of the future is in no way an indictment of its inevitability.
Even so, those glimpses into the past, this experience of the present, every moment informs possible eventualities that fluctuate in apparent likelihood depending on mutable and mercurial momentary circumstances. Being unstuck in time is unreliable for us otherwise temporal creatures. In much the same way past events distort in our conscious memories after each subsequent remembering, so, too, do future realities distort themselves through the prism of our transient existential blinders, whether pleasurable or unpleasurable.
In a moment of abject depression and sensory overwhelm, for example, I may experience a vivid future of my fatal leap from that bridge I know all too well. In a moment of contented peace and hopeful bliss, I may experience an equanimous future of my own salvation in a life more suitable than that which I am now living.
At the end of the day, though, at my cognitive baseline, this philosophical bent towards determinism imbues me with a certain stoic confidence, a materialistic mysticism that belies my claim of atheistic sensibilities. For all my lack of god belief, I hold this universe with the utmost awe and reverence, as though it were some legendary auteur, some famed director of a renowned stageplay into which I have somehow miraculously been cast, though I am but a lowly bit part grateful to have any lines at all.
That this universe would deign to bestow upon me, upon any of us, a conscious role in the drama is a wonder and a horror, a blessing and a curse of engulfing totality from which there is no escape. If I am here, I have always been here. And if I have always been here, then I always will be.
After all, when one is unstuck in time, one is as immortal as the very material makeup of the universe itself—the inevitable punctuating moment of the final curtain notwithstanding.
So it goes.