Poetry and Understanding Time
“Blessed are those who know the causes of things”
Virgil, Georgics, Book II, 490
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
W. H. Auden, As I Walked Out One Evening
The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung believed that the psyche was “not entirely confined to space and time”. In a 1959 interview with the BBC, he said “you can have dreams or visions of the future, you can see around corners, only ignorants deny these facts, it is quite evident that they do exist and have existed always, now these facts show that the psyche in part is not dependant on these confinements, and then what?”
Besides the point that many today who are certainly not ignorants would deny these facts, it is a peculiar consideration that the father of analytical psychology didn’t entirely believe that what we are is limited to the apparent concepts of causality most of us take for granted. It seems intuitive to us to recognise that things in the past cause things in the present, things in the present things in the future. In fact ‘present’ itself merely constitutes a kind of vantage point from which we perceive a half-completed sequence of unfolding events, each thing itself the product of a chain of deterministic causes. We have this sense because of several observations, firstly our own intuitive experience, our way of describing things “that happened because of so and so”, and feel the completeness of the past as proof, and secondly at the level of material science, the causal sequences of evolution, entropy, all the way down to the baffling world of quantum physics. Cause and effect seems unavoidable. Time is our element, it seems, the river we raft on.
But we also have intuitions that already take us beyond this kind of causal sequence. Most of us believe in, or at least act out a sense of free will that implies a contingent but non-temporal causation rather than material determinism, and the way we would understand historical events involves analysis of choice and actions that imply concepts of will and cause at the level of meaning. To say ‘this event happened instead of something else because of so and so’ implies the something else could also have happened. Because of our position in the present, where we remember the past and the future hasn’t happened yet, so we sense that every possibility exists ahead of us, and so it did at any moment in the past. All possibilities are reduced into actuality by the mystery of choice and circumstance and so while everything has a cause, an antecedent, multiple paths seem to remain in front of us.
An aspect of the problem here is ontological, that is to say that while we might understand present existence as caused by a past existence, being has to in some sense justify itself in the present. That is to say, cause or antecedent doesn’t give an ontological justification for why things are. Reality, rather remains contingent. The sequence a causes b doesn’t provide us with an explanation for the existence of a or b, rather a sequential link between them. If we ignore the ontological problem we end up with arguments about first cause, or the problems of an eternal chain of causation. It’s easy to fall into the idea that all science should require is a justification for the first a and that after that a causes b causes c causes d, up until now. This is a peculiarity implied by responses from certain public scientists who deride the question “why is there something rather than nothing?” as a question science can answer from simply providing a mechanistic or temporal cause. But this is to ignore the obvious problem that the question is ontological, it’s not just asking “why were things caused” but “why do things exist now, what is being?”
This raises a frustration with arguments by those who are religious, or not, for and against God in relation to modern science. Claims that God is an ‘uncaused first cause’ implies at best deism, but either way are as shallow as any materialism that ignores the sheer absurdity of the ontological question. We can understand things as they are, but nothing we can possibility grasp can provide mechanistic explanations for why they should be so. In-fact the very because-ness of things means that all reality we wish to explain is unavoidably contingent. Something exists behind all things that is absolute, that we cannot comprehend by finite terms.
The theologian Jonathan Edwards used the idea of moonlight to illustrate the absoluteness of God, that reality is seen as the brightness of the moon, a wholly dependant phenomenon that requires the light of the sun in order to shine, but remains it’s own phenomenon. Arguments for and against God aside, this is an important illustration of the ontological problem — reality is contingent — reality is constantly upheld by something — reality is caused to exist at a remove from sequence or causation. In other words reality demands a non-temporal causation.
It is common throughout the history of myth and religion to also look outside of our own time and circumstance for forms of ordinary causation. The sense that things happen simply as a chain of billiard ball like events has never exactly been an intuition, indeed, the very idea of gods or God imply a kind of external causation. Such ideas can have a useful role in perspective. The medieval idea of the Rota Fortunae or the wheel of fortune for example in which the goddess Fortuna spins a wheel to decide the fates of wealth and misfortune goes beyond our belief in economic causation to a recognition that however much we can dissect these kinds of mechanical causes something remains a mystery. How never exactly answers the question of why. The very fact that someone is born in the gutter, someone is born in the palace, and our sense that it could have been the other way around, go beyond us. Who really decides? We can understand the wheel of fortune as a metaphor, but one that shines a light on how we think about equality, that there is something about reality that goes beyond mere economic or systemic solutions to a recognition of what the author Marilynne Robinson called “givenness”, the sense that everything that is is miraculous precisely because it might not have been, and that it could be otherwise. That you that you think of as so deserving of your position in the world could have been born in the gutter, could have fallen out of the system, could have struggled to climb beyond your circumstance, and such a recognition demands humility, empathy and generosity.
It is here that we move to a consideration of the role of poetry. The problems framed here are twofold, firstly that science and mechanism cannot take us beyond contingent reality, the second is that given the way that consciousness relates to time — both seemingly always ‘here’ now and also always moving through time — the way in which we talk about it must inevitably rest upon metaphors.
Metaphors for time abound, time is a river, time is traffic, time is a healer, time is a thief, time is money, and on and on. We use many of them regularly (how did you spend the day, the day flew by). In The Hobbit one of the riddles told between Gollum and Bilbo goes “This thing all things devours; Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; Gnaws iron, bites steel; Grinds hard stones to meal; Slays king, ruins town, And beats mountain down.” The answer of course is time. Time is infused with our language without ever really being known, and this intuition that metaphor is our best route to a way of understanding it is clear from how we speak. Time is a metaphor.
Uses of metaphors in speech reflect underlying metaphors we share, phrases like “we got off to a bumpy start” reflect a metaphor such as a relationship is a journey that itself reflects the peculiar metaphor time is space. We move from there to here, in time, a metaphor of location and because the connection is sequential or linear we often use the metaphor of a path or a journey.
The role of poetry is to take the metaphors of everyday use, of idiom and expression and bring them into the realm of the aesthetic. Here we have a kind of epistemology that recognises that reality extends beyond the merely objective. More than that it recognises that as subjective creatures all of our sense of truth is conditioned by our perspective. Poetry as epistemology is not simply about creating descriptive statements of a truth that is ‘out there’ but rather is about allowing us to see, turning our perspective, shining a light all around what we perceive. We learn to recognise that so much of what we insist is rational proof or thought are reflections of preference for how we want the world to be, “involuntary and unconscious autobiography” in the words of Nietzsche, and that beneath it lie the tensions of ego and morality that guide us through the world. Asking the question of, for example, whether there is a God is also to ask the question, what is the difference between a christian and an atheist? Is it really an argument of fact or is it an argument of preference? Can we really use forms of argument unless they properly engage both the objective and the subjective aspects of our world-views?
For the poet then, because reality is both subjective, and partakes in a moral and aesthetic world, temporal causation is at best only one metaphor among others. Often in the modern world, where many kinds of ways of thinking of cause other than the scientific have become kinds of superstition, time as a metaphorical presence often lurks with a sinister quality. In W. H. Auden’s ‘As I walked Out One Evening’, time is the haunting whirr and chime of clocks that “coughs when you would kiss”, always there, as the “deep river” running on. In T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets there is a similarly disillusioned view of time ‘if all time is eternally present / all time is unredeemable’, Burnt Norton ends with the lines ‘ridiculous the waste sad time / stretching before and after.’ Philip Larkin in his poem ‘Days’ says to the question: ‘Where can we live but days? / Ah, solving that question / Brings the priest and the doctor / In their long coats / Running over the fields’. Here is a recognition that time is the primary aspect of the human condition that must be redeemed. The modern condition only increases the apparent questions of time. Time is decay, time is death, time is ridiculous, time is what we must escape if we wish to find deliverance. Time is the question we must and cannot answer.
Poetry also apprehends the world through the prism of meaning. For a religious person a prophet might be able to ‘predict’ of ‘foresee’ future events, but for the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a poet is a prophet not “in the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell the form as surely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the pretence of superstition”, but rather that they understand the spirit of things, the meaning, and so have an understanding, fragments of vision as to the form of what will be: “For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time”. This is, for Shelley, what makes prophesy an aspect of poetry rather than poetry an aspect of prophecy.
Poetry, like music, also raises something of the strangeness of how consciousness relates to time. Memory and apprehension are not always as obviously separable as we might think. When you listen to music, as when you read a poem or prose, you are simultaneously in the exact moment at which the music is now (think of the moving bar along the track), and taking in the thing in it’s whole. This becomes especially true with re-reading and re-listening, which are the most important aspects of music and art. Once we start to ‘know’ a piece of music it becomes increasingly meaningful, people want to see artists or bands playing songs they know. In such an experience the meaning is constituted by the relationship of the apparently infinitesimal moment to the experience as a whole. We are never exactly just here, now. Or rather where here is, is where we perceive from, not just what we perceive. When people describe an experience such as attending a festival or concert as “being in the moment” (assuming they put their phones down long enough), they are using the “moment” to refer to the wholeness of the experience rather than the fraction of time we seem to exist in. T. S. Eliot talks about “becoming the music while it lasts”, an important observation about the relationship of music to consciousness, that it somehow exists both in and outside of time, and what constructs the outside-of-time perspective is the continual construction of meaning and familiarity.
What is the product of this vision? What can we learn from poetry about redemption? In the next part of this essay here I am going to look at how materialism has mired us in epistemological quicksand, and in the third part here I am going to look at time and the possibility of redemption, transcendence and deliverance through the lens of poetry and literature.
