TIME AND TIME AGAIN

 TIME AND TIME AGAIN

 

The newly installed Webb telescope can ‘see’ some 8.5 billion years ‘back’ into space, i.e., the light captured by the telescope took so some 8.5 billion years to get here. It follows that we have absolutely no idea as to what is happening there right now, i.e. we have to wait another 8.5 billion years to find out. Chances are that right now these sources of light don’t exist anymore.

Since the ‘speed’ of light seems to be scientific fact, we can more easily visualize – and therefore comprehend – the much closer scenario whereby the sunlight takes about eight minutes to get to your eye here on earth. It is therefore equally logical that we have no idea what is happening on the sun right now. Since everything we ‘see’ here on earth, like the fly on the wall or the tree in the garden, is a reflection of light, we are always a few microseconds behind the time we think of being ‘now’, expressed as the present tense in English. One could argue that the ‘minute’ light hits me, I am in the present but for you who sees me I am already in the past. This may not be entirely the case for my conscious self, as the complex mediation of my mind emanating from my brain is based on biological processes that are a fraction slower than the speed of light, I.e. my perception of myself is technically also one of the past. When I hit my thumb with the hammer the sensation of pain took some time to be mediated via my nerve cells to reach my brain, which in practical terms is of no real consequence unless – now imagine this – my thumb is a light year away from my brain: I will see the hammer hitting my thumb quite some time before I feel the pain. Furthermore, I will have no way of telling if my thumb and the hammer is still in existence by the time I see and feel it. 

So, what in these terms happens when I die? It seems logically impossible that the last message delivered to my brain is technically from the past. Maybe this is where the crux lies, at least as far as my mind is concerned: this is the moment in time when the universe ceases to exist inasmuch as all my formerly well-organized atoms have lost their mind. The lucky ones still alive will of course claim that the universe is still intact even though when they declared me dead it was a bit after the time it actually occurred – not that it matters but imagine again the death of the space traveler who was a light year away at the time. 

The main point is that ‘to be in the present’ – or even ‘to be in the presence of’ – is technically impossible because we are told that we cannot move with the time that travels at the speed of light. As such I resurrect again the Polynesian concept whereby in front of our eyes is only the past – and we back into an unknown future. Those unfortunate people who cling to the present and look forward to the future are condemned to repeat history over and over again, as evidenced by the current state of affairs on this earth. Aliens a billion light years away will see the sad spectacle a long time after it actually happened. 

As a linguist I am also interested how this works for language. Apart from repeating my previous assertions that the category of tense in English and many other languages is a binary one between past and non-past – or realis versus irrealis - (and future belonging to the modal category), the question arises how in time language arises from the brain. Equating thought with language in the first place, one can also ask how in time thought arises. Given minute (excuse the pun) time lags between linguistic operations in the brain – as compared to the speed of light – one is astonished that in terms of the human imagination nothing is impossible, defying the laws of nature as much as formulating them in the first place. Chomsky’s idea that a finite – and quite minimalist - set of bio-linguistic rules can generate an infinite language output of expressions speaks to the human imagination as infinitely generative. If we compare this process to other systems that have that infinite quantity, e.g. numbers that seem to have a beginning but no end, we are stuck with mere ‘quantity’ that lacks any sort of discernable quality. From here on one can only speculate and here I always feature a solution suggested by Engels in his assertion that there is a leap from quantity to quality, attributed only to human evolution. This interesting question is of course how much quantity is required to make the jump to quality. Infinite numbers do not seem to make the grade but infinite combinations (Chomsky’s ‘merge’) of lexical items do. This unique quality – which I would equate solely to language and thought – allows us to articulate concepts like the speed of light but sadly also allows us to think of the best way of terminating the lives of those we do not like.

This last point is the seemingly unsolvable contradiction between man’s ability to assemble a telescope a million miles from earth, peering into the cosmos looking back 18.5 billion years to the near point of the so-called Big Bang, while mankind descends into a billionaires’ wormhole of war and famine, into the proverbial black hole from which light cannot escape – the associated puns and metaphors boggle the mind. And yet, as Cassandras like Noam Chomsky indefatigably point out, as long as there are people with a modicum of common sense, there is hope that they will prevail, that cracks will open up where the light comes in – note the correct use of the present tense as far as the light is concerned. To further run with the metaphors we live by, Chomsky’s pun that our quest for knowledge resembles the drunk who looks for his lost car keys under the street lamp – for that’s where the light is – is indeed quite profound: hope comes with the speed of light. If you happen to see it, be aware that it is a message from the past.

A review of Yasunari Kawabata’s (1954/trans.1974) novella The Lake

 A review of Yasunari Kawabata’s (1954/trans.1974) novella The Lake

 

Having stumbled on a reference of Kawabata being a Zen Buddhist (of sorts) and Japan’s first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, I finally read The Lake which happened to be in my bookshelf. In retrospect, after also reading Kawabata’s very perceptive Nobel Prize lecture that mainly deals with Japanese Zen Buddhism – a topic I used to be quite interested in – I should have paid attention to the plaudits on the back cover which noted that while his ‘other’ work is ‘delicate and understated’ this novella will ‘surprise’ the reader ‘and perhaps even be shocked by the brutal sensuality of some of the scenes’. I would have been surprised by the phrase ‘brutal sensuality’ which seems an oxymoron. 

 

So, when reading the story unencumbered by the knowledge above, one increasingly gets the impression that this a Japanese version of Lolita – written only a year later (maybe Nabokov was inspired by The Lake), especially as both share the theme of the middle-aged teacher having an affair with the young school student. Given the notoriety of Lolita, it is perhaps no surprise that the quick reviews on the back cover of The Lake sound tantalizing warnings like ‘master of the erotic’ or ‘the mysterious relation between beauty and evil’. On the surface one can of course invoke the base mentality of misguided, if not criminal obsession of the older male with the young, underage female. Gimpei, the unfortunate protagonist may well be an understudy of Kawabata’s weird fantasies but as an obvious master of storytelling, we are drawn into an intricate web of the most unlikely scenarios happening before our eyes, in both urban and rural Japan – before and after WWII. Let’s begin with the ending: after having somewhat unsuccessfully stalked one of his young victims during a firefly festival, Gimpei, after wandering around Tokyo’s Uneo underground station (the vagrants living there are a class below that of Gimpei’s, as are prostitutes), emerges in the surrounding streets and follows a not so young woman wearing gumboots although it is not raining – which intrigues him no end. He engages her and buys her a few drinks at a local bar until she is quite drunk and ready to take him to her place. Having told him that she has a daughter, he leaves her standing on the street:

 

            “If your child is waiting for you, go home”, he said and left her.

 

She throws stones at him and hits his ankle. When he gets home, he pulls off his socks and ‘his ankle had turned faintly red’. The End. Of course, we know by now that Gimpei is also obsessed with his ‘ugly feet’, so it is a fitting ending. 

 

One of the more bizarre stories within the story is the account of Gimpei as a university student frequenting various brothels with the consequence that one day a baby is left at his lodgings – for Gimpei by Gimpei. He and his friend return the baby to the prostitute’s alley. Years later when crawling through a ditch to stalk a young girl he has visions of crawling over a baby ghost. The psychoanalyst reader will interpret this as the unbearable guilt that Gimpei carries in his head. 

 

Gimpei’s – or shall we say Kawabata’s - sexual fantasies seem to be fixated on the breasts of his victims and it never quite clear if the sexual relations with his former school student went further than that. At one stage he takes Hisako’s eyelid between his lips. What kind of gesture is this? At another point Gimpei threatens Hisako’s friend:

 

            “… I’m not above hitting or kicking a woman, you know.”

 

There are no scenes in the novella of obvious violence, sexual or otherwise. Mostly we see Gimpei as a less than threatening but more of a pathetic, self-loathing creature, even vaguely sympathetic as an aimless wanderer whose life has no value. Do adolescent girls fall for such characters as Hisako does? I doubt it. That students have crushes on their teachers is nothing new but never as the beauty and the beast – generally it is a relationship between two beauties. When I was in high school in Germany, the young, very good-looking German teacher seduced one of the female students in my class – or was it the other way round? The student, all her sweet seventeen, was of course a beauty too. In those days the power imbalance between student and teacher was not an issue and since nobody from the school administration had noticed, the affair never came to light. However, the idea of Gimpei, the weird, ugly middle-aged teacher seducing his beautiful student is immediately repulsive, even though elements of true love being blind seem to intrude. 

 

In contrast and in true Zen tradition, Kawabata’s descriptions of nature – even in urban settings – are fabulously evocative, be it the fireflies, the gingko trees or the skies appearing in blue and pink hues. Human nature may be both crass and beautiful at times but Japan as the ultimate Zen Garden has no equal beauty. Not that Zen is ever mentioned here. That Kawabata was a conflicted writer is not difficult to find out – his suicide notwithstanding. There is a photograph of Kawabata with his wife and her sister on either side of him – on Wikipedia – with his wife looking glum but her sister looking radiant. What is going on there? Kawabata’s treatment of human relations in The Lake are a dream scenario for the Freudian psychoanalyst – the complexes men and women suffer from, unknown to the men and women in question.

 

There is the famous Zen story of the Zen Master who meets a prostitute who asks him to marry her, to get out of prostitution. He does so without a second thought. Kawabata’s protagonist doesn’t rise to the occasion, presumably because he lacks enlightenment – Satori. Should we therefor ask Kawabata’s ghost, à la Derrida, if we can forgive the unforgivable?