Time Again

Though we acknowledge the cyclical nature of time with the equinox, our cultural habit is to think of it as a line. My very first post in 2008 was about time. The circumstance was my resistance to the idea of linear time when my grandfather died. Thinking of the passage of events as a timeline entails a sense of loss as things disappear into the past, never to be seen again, so my theme centered on the idea of mapping time as an image not a line. Iain McGilchrist’s book, “The Master and His Emissary” describes how the dominance of the brain’s left hemisphere leads us to think its way of structuring reality is true. Linear time is the left hemisphere’s order just like separating, naming and sorting. The right hemisphere perceives wholes in an ongoing present and intuits the feeling/meaning of the whole situation, feelings being the first meaning in our sense of something in relation to us. When Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor had her left hemisphere stroke, disabling it, she said objects started to lose their boundaries and that she felt part of a continuum in the right hemispheres ongoing present. In 2008 I chose to think of time as an image and envision my grandfather’s life as a painting. Even when it’s finished it’s there. Though an insect crawling on the painting would experience the blue as happening before the yellow, the sense of past and future is created by its path. The ability of images to improve our understanding has been known by science for a long time. In the 2008 post I mentioned a National Science Foundation Visualization Challenge. The call for entries included the statement. “You can do science without graphics. But it’s very difficult to communicate it in the absence of pictures. Indeed, some insights can only be made widely comprehensible as images.“ Struggling to make sense of Michael’s disappearance, I find myself going back to the image. Though it’s hard for me to think of Michael’s painting as finished, having that image is better because not only did I paint on his, he contributed plenty to the painting of my life so far. Not just mine but his students, friends and colleagues. That doesn’t go away. Every human connection is adding to the big picture, what’s living and growing develops that area of the painting. When an area isn’t developing anymore it still influences whatever else unfolds, sometimes dramatically. We are all working on one big image of the evolving human consciousness. Similar to the way biologist Rupert Sheldrake sees the field of all human mind as including everything everyone has perceived; we are all sense organs for the whole mind.