Time and its discontents

As we grow older there awakens in us the yearning to "search for ourselves". It coincides less with puberty than with the period when we've become aware that our lives are not experienced in fullness. Or, understood from the consciousness before the realisation, when the world unfolding before us is taking us further and further away from the fullness we used to know.

Even as the future possibilities increase, the experience of loss becomes more pressing. As Zerzan would have it it is precisely time (which makes the future possible), or Time - of the chronoligcal linear construction - that has chopped up our lives and dispersed our fullness into abstraction (and perhaps repressed its experience). What we are searching for is what Proust alludes to in A La Rechercher du Temps Perdu (literally, In Search of Lost Time) when he says that "a minute freed from the order of time has recreated in us ... the individual freed from the order of time" (quoted from Zerzan, p. 30). Yet we usually limit our "search" to scheduled time - when the wholeness is only available outside time.

It is remarkable how many thinkers, particularly literary and philosophical figures, have said as much. Zerzan quotes T.S. Eliot in Burnt Norton:

Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness
To be conscious is not to be in time

Poe, Pater, Swinburne, Baudelaire, Beckett's Waiting For Godot. Then there is Marcuse ("Timelessness is the ideal of pleasure") and Freud who both (roughly) see desire as operating outside time. Marie Bonaparte, probably investigating desire within time, according to Zerzan argued that time eventually comes to serve and becomes flexible to the pleasure principle as ego controls are loosened.

Dreams, too, are seen as existing outside the constraints of time (which makes them irresistible). Nietzsche's emphasis on the consciousness that is playful like a child's is not mentioned, but it may find support in Piaget's finding that children appear to have no inherent understanding of time, i.e. time is abstract and we are in a more "natural" state without it.

In our search for ourselves, which is really a search for what is not within time at all but timeless (as opposed to eternal, which is forever and therefore of time), we are really trying to re-be outside time. As stated there are some (Freud et al) for who desire fulfills the criterion, and it occurred to me suddenly that the yearning is nowhere better expressed than in Ernest Dowson's most famous poem where Cynara comes to personify desire. He uses "desire" instead of "Cynara" in the second last line and in that simple act, almost magically, lifts the poem's dreamy subject matter into the conceptual world:

from
Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae
("I am no longer as I was under the good Cynarae"):

But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

In his essay Time and its Discontents John Zerzan gives satisfying insight into the treatment of time by a variety of thinkers, who largely fall into two camps: those who subscribe to time and those who don't (well, those who had nothing to say about time were probably just left out! so that figures). A variety of philosophers and thinkers, scientists and physicists, literary figures, and psychologists are sampled.