tese

How do I work this?

And you may ask yourself

Where is that large automobile?

And you may tell yourself

This is not my beautiful house!

And you may tell yourself

This is not my beautiful wife!

Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down

Letting the days go by/water flowing underground

Into the blue again/after the moneys gone

Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground.

Same as it ever was... same as it ever was... same as it ever was...

— David Byrne, The Talking Heads, "Once in a Lifetime"

If you wish an Aborigine a happy birthday, or better yet, given the season, a happy New Year, he's liable to give you the same puzzled stare he'd give a tap-dancing wallaby.

He might even cold-cock you with his didgeridoo before moving on.

Aborigines don't celebrate birthdays or New Year's. It's not because they're primitive party poops or because they don't have a darn thing to wear, but because they don't conceptualize time in a way that can be measured or divided. Therefore, birthdays or New Years don't have any meaning to them.

There is merely now. Same as it ever was.

But of course that's not true of all primitive people. The Aymara people of South America sure as hell conceptualize time in a way you can divide and measure, but it's opposite from the way practically everybody else on the planet does. To them, the past is ahead of them and the future behind.

If an Aymara speaker were to talk about how Chicago Cubs will do in the upcoming season, he'd point backwards over his shoulder with one hand while probably giving a thumbs down with the other. (He is, after all, talking about the Cub's prospects.)

If he talks about the past, he'll wave his hand in front of himself.

Rafael Nunez, an associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, has studied the Aymara people extensively and he has an idea about what makes them real-life representatives of the Bizarro world:

These findings suggest that cognition of such everyday abstractions as time is at least partly a cultural phenomenon. That we construe time on a front-back axis, treating future and past as though they were locations ahead and behind, is strongly influenced by the way we move, by our dorsoventral morphology, by our frontal binocular vision, etc. Ultimately, had we been blob-ish amoeba-like creatures, we wouldn't have had the means to create and bring forth these concepts.

So an amoeba, since it has no face, no fly on its Dockers, no consistently "forward" motion, might not perceive the future as being in front of him. He's amorphous and oozes any-which way, almost in four dimensions. Still, how the Aymara picked up this strikingly different perception of time is hugely puzzling.

One thing seems clear, though: our concept of time isn't universal. The Aborigines don't divide it and the Aymara flip-flop it. I'll do them one better. Personally, I don't even believe in time, at least the common Western perception of it.

I'm not a physicist, so I lack the language and understanding to discuss it in such terms, but I know there's something wrong with the way we look at things. I don't know why or how I know. After all, we're talking about something that can't be felt, heard, tasted, or smelled. St. Augustine apparently had the same problem:

"If nobody asks me, I know what time is, but if I am asked, then I am at a loss what to say."

It's the commonly held linear perception of time that confuses me. Past to present to future. Left to right. You and I are standing alongside a river, facing downstream, and the river is time. We only see the dead, bloated bodies, condom wrappers, and occasional rubber ducky when they float by us but we have no idea of what lies upstream.

But practically nothing in nature is linear; nothing is a straight line except for maybe trees and the perpendicular alignment of humans. Likewise, I suspect that space and time aren't linear, either.

And before you dismiss me as some temporal crackpot, there are at least a few smart guys who've got my back, Plato among them. He dismissed the whole notion of time as nothing more than illusion.

Oh, I believe time exists, but not in the way we perceive it. Copernicus famously said, "We should be careful not to attribute to the heavens what is really in the observer." We're interpreting time through our brains and our experience and that could hugely distort things.

I like to think of our brains as billion gigabyte I-Pods. The music — the information — is stored on chips as ones and zeros, and the I-Pod interprets those ones and zeros the only way it knows how and the result is familiar music. But what if the I-Pod took those millions of ones and zeros and resequenced them in any one of an infinite number of ways? The result would be new music, or a whole lot of cacophony and some new music, at least.

Maybe our brains are only interpreting the sensory perceptions regarding time — the ones and zeros — the only way it knows how, in a linear sense from "left to right". The cup falls off the cupboard and breaks. The process doesn't reverse itself, even though physics doesn't disallow that possibility.

The poet William Blake felt that "if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite, for man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern."

Maybe if we opened up our doors of perception, we'd live in the kind of world alluded to in the following paragraph from The Last Unicorn, a work of fiction by Peter S. Beagle:

But the skull was laughing again; this time making a thoughtful, almost kindly noise. "Remember what I told you about time," it said. "When I was alive, I believed — as you do — that time was at least as real and solid as myself, and probably more so. I said 'one o'clock' as though I could see it, and 'Monday' as though I could find it on the map; and I let myself be hurried along from minute to minute, day to day, year to year, as though I were actually moving from one place to another. Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekends and New Year's Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. Now I know that I could have walked through the walls.

Or maybe we'd be like the Tralmafadorans in Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse Five. The Tralmafadorans were aliens that have the misfortune of looking like toilet plungers, but they have the admirable ability to perceive existence in four dimensions, the fourth one being time.

To them, there's no difference between birth, life, and death. All are merely moments that exist simultaneously, but they can choose to focus on any moment of their lives they wish.

The Tralmafadorans have books, but they're simply collections of marvelous moments. There is no cause or effect or chronology. John Grisham, Stephen King, and Tom Clancy sell very poorly on Tralmafadore. Tuesdays With Morrie? What's a Tuesday?

You've probably noticed that I've been quoting or referring to a lot of writers and poets and philosophers instead of scientists or physicists, but that's mostly because the former group is the least reluctant to tackle the subject.

There are, however, scientists who ask the same questions, most notably the physicist Julian Barbour, author of The End of Time.

"My basic idea is that time as such does not exist," explains Barbour. "There is no invisible river of time. But there are things that you could call instants of time, or 'Nows'. As we live, we seem to move through a succession of Nows, and the question is, what are they? They are arrangements of everything else in the universe relative to each other in any moment, for example, now."

I wish I could quote more of Barbour's work, some succinct passages that would prove, undeniably, that time doesn't exist. I can't. Barbour's book is half philosophy and half an attempt to merge Einsteinian physics with quantum physics, which is largely way above me. Likewise, he names the true, timeless universe Platonia, which, if nothing else, invites derision from skeptics.

I was hoping that Barbour would give me the ammo I need to fuel my belief (or delusion), but he didn't. Like time itself, his rationale was elusive.

Regardless, I still believe that our perception of time is lacking. I believe in transition — Barbour's succession of Nows — but time is merely an invention of man to help measure and process this transition but this measurement is highly elastic. For example, it's pretty much accepted in physics that as a man approaches the speed of light, time slows down---at least in relation to those of us who are plodding along at more terrestrial speeds.

Want to make the New Year's holiday last? Want a little more time off before going back to work Tuesday? If you live in an apartment, go downstairs. If you live on the ground floor, go to the basement. The closer you are to the center of the earth, the stronger the force of gravity and gravity...slows...down...time. The simple act of spending the next 3 or 4 days downstairs will extend your time off by a whole 100 billionth of a second. Not too shabby, huh?

Consider, too, the Big Bang Theory, the supposed first word in the whole cosmic novel. Does anyone else have trouble grasping that the whole universe started out as a tiny dot no bigger than the period at the end of this paragraph? 'Scuze me, but I hardly have enough room in my closet, let alone this tiny dot.

But since we think in terms of linear time, we assume a beginning and an end to the universe (and for that matter, all things).

I find it much easier to believe in a universe that always was and always will be. Perhaps, like most of nature, time is curved or even circular and it even repeats itself. Or maybe it doesn't repeat itself; it just is. Only my limited human mind leads me to believe in concrete beginnings and finite ends.

But try as I might to free my mind, I can't do it, not completely. I keep hoping that suddenly, like Neo, I'll see the entire world as it really is — a series of ones and zeros. I'll pick bullets out of mid-air and my entire life will be lived as a protoplasmic Tivo where I can instantly relive any moment in my life, minus commercials.

Or, at the very least, I'll stop living in the past or anticipating the future. Now is where it's at. Sure, I'll keep the concept of time around for knowing when to meet Jasmine for a booty call or when to watch a new episode of The Office. I'll continue to use time to coordinate work engagements or to track batting averages from week to week, but beyond that I don't have much use for it.

Why suffer the mistakes or misfortunes of the past? Why fret over the future? Why let my mind run renegade and disrupt my calm? And why let some totally artificial construct like New Year's have any bearing on my actions?

That's why I abhor New Year's resolutions to lose weight, quit smoking, or to quit scratching yourself in public places. Are you fat now? Do you disapprove of your fatness now? Are you unhappy now?

Do something now. There is only now.

This might be as close to timelessness as we're liable to get.