Alan Lightman. Einstein's Dreams. Warner Books, 1993.
---. The Diagnosis. Pantheon Books, 2000.
Memento. Dir. by Christopher Nolan. Columbia Tri-Star, 2000.
Don DeLillo. The Body Artist. Scribner, 2001.
This phrase, appropriated from a Nextel Billboard ad, seems to verify Paul Verilio's belief that reality itself is accelerating. As if we didn't already know it. In fact, it's probably not too long before reality begins hyperventilating as well. Already the brightest are bored quickly, and exotic drugs or plug-ins can't be found soon enough. Technology and business are also bored with the constraints of time. They look longingly toward a future (if we can still call it that) when "I want it yesterday!" is not an impossible, or even an unreasonable, demand.
The Nextel ad, which brushes aside the human intention behind ASAP in favor of chip technology, which is far quicker, also embraces the sentiment that we should be able to manipulate time. As speed becomes more of a factor, time becomes more of a drag. What if time, not just our perception of time, was malleable? Someone, somewhere, with a lot of money and tools is thinking this exact thought. In the words of British poet Arthur Buller, "There was a young lady named Bright/Whose speed was far faster than light/She set out one day/In a relative way/and returned home the previous night." Why not?
Exactly what is time, is a question that has fascinated humans for eons, but never perhaps has the motivation been boredom or the speed of cash flow. The increasingly weird world of science, which will soon be launching stem cell monsters to graze the terrain, and is successfully evolving cyborgs, may soon turn its powerful gaze here. Where the money flows, so they goes, as they say.
Is time separate from the experience of time? Or, if time fell in a forest would anyone be late? Alan Lightman, in his 1993 book Einstein's Dreams, seems to advance the theory that time is both independent of the experience of time, yet inseparable.
Einstein's Dreams is a short book with a long shadow. It is not often a book on time by an MIT physicist jumps onto the New York Times Best Seller List and hunkers down for a long stay. In lucid shimmering prose, somewhat reminiscent of Italo Calvino, though not as shimmering, Lightman, a physicist and teacher of writing at MIT, gives us thirty vignettes that depict life, largely in Bern, Switzerland, under different theories of time. The framework of the book is such that these scenarios came to Einstein as dreams while he was developing his theory of general relativity. They are sandwiched between sections featuring Einstein at work and at dream.
While Lightman was primarily interested in the role of the imagination and dream (he has written on both imagination and metaphor in science previously) in science, the result is an array of possibilities, most of which seem much more intriguing than the daily grind. Here we find time that moves in a circle and as a consequence events are repeated exactly and infinitely, without previous knowledge by the participants; time that slows with altitude so the higher the elevation the greater the property value; time that stops, runs slowly, fitfully, whimsically, leaving different people with different perceptions of time. Lightman writes of worlds where cause and effect are exchanged, where time moves slowly for children, quickly for the elders, where people receive fitful glimpses of the future, and where time moves more slowly for those who move fast. This wonderful read can hardly be called a novel in the conventional sense, but bookseller's descriptions should be ignored anyway. Read it or stay slow.
A book and a movie have recently come along that might have been chapters of Lightman's book, at least with respect to their theories of time. The movie is Memento, the book The Body Artist by Don DeLillo. I don't have time to read long books, which is why I'll probably never read Proust nor Benjamin's Arcades Project, and for the same reason haven't read DeLillo since Mao II, which was extraordinary. My loss, I know. But I wait anxiously for DeLillo's short books, and The Body Artist, weighing in at a featherweight 124 pages, was a blessing I could toss from hand to hand without wrist strain. The opening line, "Time seems to pass," foregrounds a central theme of the novel, that of time, and the perception of time.
The novel focuses on Lauren, a body artist (a type of performance art where the artist uses their body as the medium of expression), a woman whose husband Rey (a famous film-maker) has just committed suicide. The setting is a lonely house on a nameless rural coast. Lauren stares for hours into a webcam that films a desolate, deserted stretch of highway in Finland. I was reminded of David Byrne's line, "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens," and Lauren seems desperate to stop time, or at least slow it to an excruciating crawl, not for heaven's, but for grief's sake.
Suddenly, mysteriously, another resident surfaces. Whether this fellow is an escapee from a local mental hospital, a specter, or a projection of Lauren's broken grieving mind, or something else entirely remains unclear. Lauren names him Mr. Tuttle, and although there are overtones of fear, he seems harmless, an innocent, and Lauren accepts him as part of her immediate environment. In addition to his unearthly mien, Mr. Tuttle converses almost entirely with non sequiturs, which Lauren wrestles to make meaning of.
It gradually becomes apparent that Mr. Tuttle is not only mimicking the voices and mannerisms of both Rey and Lauren, but that what he says are the actual lines that Lauren and Rey once used, or in the case of Lauren, will use. Mr. Tuttle it seems, has no regard for our system of time, and speaks words that have been uttered, are being uttered, or will be uttered.
Memento is a rather silly self-conscious movie by Christopher Nolan and starring Guy Pearce, a movie whose themes of identity and writing the body are forgettable. What interested me was its portrayal of time as a river that washed away memories, revived them, then washed them away again.
Guy Pearce plays a protagonist who has no short-term memory, forgetting everything as soon as it occurs. This causes him to ask the same questions and repeat the same mistakes over and over. He is trying to work backward, piecing together chips and clues, (many of which he has tattooed to his body in an attempt to anchor time) to reconstruct his past, which ironically, lies in the future. The core mystery that Guy is trying to unravel is who was behind his wife's brutal rape and murder. We are led to believe that Guy's character was injured while struggling with the antagonists, and an injury sustained there caused his memory loss. This is left deliberately unclear, however, as is much in this movie, and a possibility is that Guy killed her himself and has always had this condition. Although with no way of really finding out it almost doesn't matter. What does matter is that time is destined to repeat itself over and over, and Guy is trapped with no means of escape. Perhaps Guy Pearce takes this role too seriously?
These three texts deal with our desire, and ability at least within the imagination, to manipulate time. Time is portrayed as a playground of possibilities, a mysterious force that some have apparently more insight into than others (Mr. Tuttle), and an antagonistic force that must be beaten to submission before it will release its secrets. Contemporary culture is an age of faster connectivity, multitasking, information overload, and the hyperreal. Time is ever quickening, and resistance is nearly futile. The quiet interlude of a lover's eyes and a glass of chilled Madeleine Angevine can be ripped from existence by a beeper or cell phone, and the need for either of these is continually re-enforced. It is not surprising that time is more than ever the enemy. It is not surprising that we are fighting back.
Chris Marker's La Jettée and James Cameron's The Terminator are both traditional tales of time travel, and they pose the usual questions - if I killed your father before you were born, and married your mother, etc. But Einstein's Dreams has ripped the field wide, opening up a number of possibilities, including the greatest of all, which is the possibility that time and our perception of it can be altered. Allan Lightman's newest novel, The Diagnosis, is all about getting out. In a culture where worth is measured by the amount of information produced divided by time, the protagonist experiences amnesia, or a zero-state of information. And since amnesia is the primary condition of Memento, perhaps The Diagnosis is a scene behind the scenes of the movie.
In a world where freedom from time has been reduced to a marketing principle, amnesia seems like a response to paradoxically keep (or hide) something of oneself. His subsequent breakdown is one of productivity and the inability to function within time at all, such that he eventually becomes worthless.
Lightman, Nolan and DeLillo all seem to be demanding that we expose time to artistic exploration, and through this exploration, hopefully, find a more interesting and sane way to live. Slowing down our lives might be a start, or finding the time to read long books. As artists may still be the antennas of the race, let's hope those antennas aren't connected to a Nextel tower.
