can-opener
Like most everyone, there are innumerable thoughts in my head throughout a day. Sometimes I want to write about one of them, but mostly they just come and go and, like many of my dreams at night, I can only remember a vague shadow of them when I try to recall them later.
I guess it's pretty much summer now. I know it is still spring, calendrical-speaking, but the sun is overhead and hot here.
I pretty much cannot fathom time at all. Some things I can get my mind around. For example, the evolution of the can-opener. I was on an archaeological dig once and, while excavating a deep latrine, we found old, rusted metal circles with a hole in the center. Eventually, we realized they were lids from food cans that had been opened using an earlier incarnation of a can-opener. Anyway, I can kinda understand the way can-openers developed and changed over time, at first as a response to the new practice of preserving and packaging food in tins and, as time went on, fine-tuning around concerns of ease-of-use.
But the passage of time...that I do not understand.
It just happens and it goes.
One minute it is now, and the next it's not. Or it is, but it's not what it was.
And you can't put your finger in the dike. You can't turn off the faucet. All these water analogies makes me think of dams. If time flows like water...what is a time-dam...? I suppose maybe time-dams aren't "things" but, rather, periods of time when life and everything seem to pool out into a larger era. The difference, though, is that dams are meant to stick around (although, in the long-run, of course, they'll be nothing more than a dusty memory), and time just can't do that, even if for certain periods in our lives it feels like time dams up and widens instead of simply flowing inexorably forward.
Maybe time is death. In certain ways it is, I suppose. From beginning to end. Or from one iteration to another. I think in physics time is a component of space. Like matter and everything else. But our lives span more than can be reckoned by any particular means of measuring the universe.
Time is also life, I guess. Probably it wouldn't even be around, if it weren't for that. So, I guess maybe it breaks even at the end.
Maybe we should live in a world that breaks even at the end.
I guess it's pretty much summer now. I know it is still spring, calendrical-speaking, but the sun is overhead and hot here.
I pretty much cannot fathom time at all. Some things I can get my mind around. For example, the evolution of the can-opener. I was on an archaeological dig once and, while excavating a deep latrine, we found old, rusted metal circles with a hole in the center. Eventually, we realized they were lids from food cans that had been opened using an earlier incarnation of a can-opener. Anyway, I can kinda understand the way can-openers developed and changed over time, at first as a response to the new practice of preserving and packaging food in tins and, as time went on, fine-tuning around concerns of ease-of-use.
But the passage of time...that I do not understand.
It just happens and it goes.
One minute it is now, and the next it's not. Or it is, but it's not what it was.
And you can't put your finger in the dike. You can't turn off the faucet. All these water analogies makes me think of dams. If time flows like water...what is a time-dam...? I suppose maybe time-dams aren't "things" but, rather, periods of time when life and everything seem to pool out into a larger era. The difference, though, is that dams are meant to stick around (although, in the long-run, of course, they'll be nothing more than a dusty memory), and time just can't do that, even if for certain periods in our lives it feels like time dams up and widens instead of simply flowing inexorably forward.
Maybe time is death. In certain ways it is, I suppose. From beginning to end. Or from one iteration to another. I think in physics time is a component of space. Like matter and everything else. But our lives span more than can be reckoned by any particular means of measuring the universe.
Time is also life, I guess. Probably it wouldn't even be around, if it weren't for that. So, I guess maybe it breaks even at the end.
Maybe we should live in a world that breaks even at the end.
Labels: ephemera
posted by matt iv at 6:24 PM
1 Comments:
This is a great post. I felt a strong connection with your thoughts on such matters and our thoughts together remind me of the classic poster child strand of DNA, two strands gently weaving in and out from each other but certainly connected.
Jim Croce "Time in a bottle"!
I will call soon, take care my friend!!
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