Poems and “The Order of Time”

Last few days have seen me return to poems – call it my poetry phase. A lot of TS Eliot and some EE Cummings. Between breakfastfood and coffeespoons, myriad meanings inherent in words occupy me.  I love being in that space, but words, at times operate in the realm of uncertainty. There being no one reading of the poems, sometimes one can be so lost in such triggered thought chains that it messes up one’s sense of perspective and objectivity.

Deep in a poem, it dawns on me that poems don’t deal with centre. They tend to deal with the extremes, the edges of emotions (of what I get of poems). Edges are where life finds meaning and its bounds, yet edges imply quite high highs and low lows. And yet again, if not for the edges, how does one even define centre? And most daily life happens in the solid centre. To be able to traverse and occupy both the edges as well have a solid grasp of the centre stays a perpetual aspiration, but not there yet.

By opening up to a poet’s influence and hosting a poet’s words in your mind, one begins to think in their metaphors and turns of phrase not knowing when the influence becomes one’s own belief. And I wonder at what point does the quote stop being a quote and becomes one’s own thought. Most of the time if it is a poet, it doesn't & perhaps shouldn't matter - the influence works for the better. But unless one perpetually questions, one risks rational, free and independent thought.

So how is one to restore objectivity?

There are many ways (I hope). At times, solving bounded, finite, complex problems works for me  – problems grounded in certainty. Where there are infinite interpretations to poems, there is only one possible picture waiting to be revealed by a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle, or one clean solution to  a difficult Math problem, or workings of an excel model. A consuming issue requiring every shred of attention and thought with just one possible answer helps at times.

Sometimes the displacement provided by a good novel or sci-fi works. At other times, science helps. It brings back the scale perspective.

**

With that, I started reading Carlo Rovelli’s  “The Order of Time”. This one is a small book, similar to his “Seven brief lessons on physics”.  It is focused on the nature of time.

The first section crumbles time for us, stripping it of all the conceptual layers that we think it of – of it being unified, of it flowing in one direction, of it being present, of it being independent. The second part describes and explores time thus delayered to its essence, and the final section rebuilds time for us. I am still in the first bit.

"Do we exist in time, or does time exist in us"

The puzzle of time is one of the fundamental puzzles linking the unanswered questions of gravity, consciousness, and perception, our existence itself. Like the people few centuries ago beginning to grapple with the idea of Earth being round and a moving body and not a fixed centre with the heavens moving around it, we find it challenging to accept time as not a uniform, constant, forever kind of thing the way we perceive it.

"We inhabit time as fish live in water" 

(and perhaps DFW would then ask, ‘how’s the water?’)

The subject fascinates me immensely. Previously, while reading another of Rovelli’s book, I had to resort to this freewriting post to find a home for my fascination. Even now, I have very limited understanding to have any coherence of my own thoughts on the subject. I’ll resort to quoting from the book.

Here's Carlo Rovelli talking about Einstein in that chain of exceptional people, Copernicus and Anaximander, and taking away the unity of time (that time passes slowly in some places and rapidly in others).

“The ability to understand something before it’s observed is at the heart of scientific thinking. 

In the course of making such strides, we learn that the things that seemed self-evident to us were really no more than prejudices.”

The relativity of time:

“Times are legion: a different one for every point in space. There is not one single time; there is a vast multitude of them. “

Moving to the direction of time, the difference between past and future:

“The difference between past and future does not lie in the elementary laws of motion; it does not reside in the deep grammar of nature. It is the natural disordering that leads to gradually less particular, less special situations.”

Talking about a pack of cards, sorted and then shuffled, and how our perception of entropy defines the shuffled pack being disordered, he draws the point that each ordering is as unique but we limit ourselves to noticing only certain aspects of the cards (say, color or suit or numbers – everything else seems to be non-unique). But the understanding that everything is particular makes the difference in past and future vanish.

The disconcerting conclusion -

“the difference between the past and the future refers only to our own blurred vision of the world. …is it really possible that a perception so vivid, basic, existential—my perception of the passage of time—depends on the fact that I cannot apprehend the world  in all of its minute detail? Even allowing for the fact that our perceptions of the world are frequently wrong, can the world really be so profoundly different from our  perception of it as this?”

Next he dismantles the idea of ‘now’:

“The idea that a well-defined now exists throughout the universe is an illusion, an illegitimate extrapolation of our own experience."

And temporal structure without the present:

“In short, a common present does not exist: the temporal structure of spacetime is not a stratification of times … it is, rather, a structure made up entirely of light cones: More than a hundred years have passed since we learned that the “present of the universe” does not exist. And yet this continues to confound us and still seems difficult to conceptualize. 

If the present has no meaning, then what “exists” in the universe? Is not what “exists” precisely what is here “in the present”? The whole idea that the universe exists now in a certain configuration and changes together with the passage of time simply doesn’t stack up anymore.”

And this is where I pause. A lot more still to go and gradually the time spent on each new page has increased. He also quotes a lot of poetry, and notes “Perhaps poetry is another of science’s deepest roots: the capacity to see beyond the visible.”

**

Although most other times, science tends to work, today, I think I should have picked up a jigsaw puzzle instead or fiction. Even after those hours deep in Carlo Rovelli’s book, for the closing word  to capture some of Rovelli's essence of time, I still think of Eliot's words:

"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.”

I feel like quoting the whole poem. He further says:

"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance."

Come to think of it, Four Quartets and Carlo Rovelli are a good pairing.

But the thing is, the problem I set out to solve still remains.  

Perhaps, time itself is the solution.