Tea Time

(excerpted from M.C. Gardner's Buddha Boogie)

The speed of light is impervious to the speed of the bodies from which it emanates. Einstein realized that the discovery of that aberration would necessitate a reworking of our commonsense notions of time and space. Speed was always viewed as a relation relative to the ground by which it was measured. You are walking forward in a train at a pace of two miles an hour. Your speed relative to the passing countryside is a consequence of the addition of your speed to that of the moving train. If you had been walking toward the caboose we would have subtracted the speed of your perambulation. This is elementary physics. If light operated in an elementary way we would conclude that the speed of light, as issuing from a flashlight held in the direction of the train’s forward movement would be greater than light turned in the direction of the caboose. In one experiment the measurements were taken in relation to the light reflected from a moon of Jupiter. It was confirmed that the speed of light was unaffected by any of the relational speeds to which it was measured. Einstein realized that if the speed of light was constant, we would have to have a more plastic notion of the time and space in which it was propagated.

If you can’t add speed to the movement of light, then the variables of space and time must mutate to allow for its constancy. Curved space and time dilation were predictions of general relativity that have been empirically confirmed. Our mythos of an observable space proceeding in a measurable time has been discovered to be relative to the speed wherein the measurement is made. Whimpy’s promised payment for a hamburger today is scuttled if he departs Burger King approaching the speed of light. His intention of proffering the promised quarter (on the ‘morrow) will be thwarted by alterations in space and time.

Returning from a day’s flight around the cosmos he’ll find his lenders long since interred within the earth and hardly a hamburger in sight. Augustine admitted feeling quite comfortable with the notion of time until he subjected it to the scrutiny of thought. (1) What is this river whose torrent carries us inescapably to an anticipated oblivion? The physical apprehension of time is simply a measurement related to the ticking of two different clocks. The ticking of your Timex is related to the pulse that is the earth’s circumnavigation of the sun. We call this relation a year.

If our ticking must measure shorter intervals we might compare our sweep second hand to the beating heart of the cesium atom. We would thus determine that our atomic clockworks had ticked off some 9,192,631,770 oscillations during the passing of one second into another. (2) This is over 4 times the number of seconds in an average life span. An event relative to this time frame could be said to endure (during the passage of one second) considerably longer than our three score and ten. The universal pulse is thought to have begun fifteen to eighteen billion years ago. If we multiply the number of oscillations in the cesium atom times the two billion seconds in an average lifetime we arrive at a number approaching 18x10^18. This is of a similar magnitude to the number of seconds in the previously mentioned 18 billion years {56x10^{16 seconds}}.

Each of these clocks, and I am not forgetting the Timex, need no winding for they tick quite naturally of their own accord. An event in time is enclosed by a measured interval. It may be said to be floating in a present that is demarked from where we define the event to have begun and where we arbitrate that it has concluded. At a given juncture of space-time these words were jumping fitfully upon a computer screen. We could designate the present that the previous sentence occupied by punching the A key that began the sentence. We could, thereafter, be cognizant of its departure to the past with the punch of the n key with which the sentence concluded. We could have, as well, designated a shorter period of duration by designating the enclosure of an individual word or the punch of a single key. Either interval would, as well, have participated in a considered present before departing to its regarded past.

The writing of a single letter could also be placed in relation to a single oscillation of the cesium atom. In that instance the event interval between punched keys would make the writing of this book a formidable task. By measuring the event interval in relation to the formation of our home galaxy we can see some measure of light at the end of the tunnel. The effort of our writing (in that regard) as well as your reading (not to mention the passing of our respective lives) will conclude momentarily. Time is a relation and its duration is determined by which clock we choose to so relate it. A psychological present moment is only enclosed by events reflected upon as having receded into the past. In any discussion of time we must designate an event horizon. We may take note of passing moments. We may, as well, see our youth as a single event proceeding the adulthood we presently find ourselves within. A father may always think of his daughter as his little girl and be amazed to find himself a grandfather.

Marcel, in A La Rechere du Temps Perdue, was annoyed to find himself at a party for which he should have worn a costume. His annoyance turned to despair when he realized that no one was actually in costume. He and his friends were simply clothed in the cloth of old age. This was an outfit he was unaware of owning, he had no memory of its time or tailor.

"… And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last forever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrow and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as my father has been able to tell Mamma to "Go with the child." Never again will such hours be possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of sobs which I had the strength to control in my father’s presence, and which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. Actually, their echo has never ceased: it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that I hear them afresh, like those convent bells which are so effectively drowned during the day by the noises of the streets that one would suppose them to have been stopped for ever, until they sound out again through the silent evening air." (3)

Despairing of time, let us join Marcel for tea:

"… one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petites madelieines,’ which look as though they had been molded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disaster innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself…I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake but that if it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?"

How indeed?

While he sips his tea, if he doesn’t delineate between the events of heating the water, dipping the tea bag, and stirring the cream; each of these events will take place in the experienced present of drinking his tea. It is clear that any of the events, as so described, could have been ripped from the seamless whole of tea-time by simply reflecting that any aspect of the experience was no longer there. On a level that we have little awareness any event can be a shattered fragment or a contiguous eon.

There is a measurable past taking place as Marcel drinks his tea and a measurable future residing in the framework of the same series depending on how he defines the horizon in question. We can plot designated intervals and accept as real, events whose minuteness is distantly beyond any possibility of awareness. We can also plot a temporal framework that stretches our present moment to levels of time and interval reclamation that are also only dimly perceived - though they may rise to the intuition:

"I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop… And then for the second time I clear an empty space in front of it. I place in position before my mind’s eye the still recent taste of that first mouthful, and I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed."

A digital watch informs in the fundamental pulsing of a quartz battery in intervals of seconds, minutes, and hours. Let’s imagine a timepiece that only pulses upon the hour. Much more of our present would be packed into such an interval than in that demarcated by seconds. On a psychological level we might assert that any number of events had retreated to our past before the hour struck. We are, however, entertaining time as a mechanical measurement — be it the turning of the earth or the hourly pulse of the timepiece we are considering. The hourly interval is our designated event horizon. The events therein can be designated as one event or we could take their measure by the 9 billion oscillations exploding every second in the cesium atom. We shall instead modify our Timex until it only ticks once every 365.25 days. Our experience as measured by this clock will produce a present moment that will not cease until the earth returns from yet another sojourn of the sun.

We are the clockmakers. At any interval in which the tick is measured we are the hearts responsible for the measured beat. That beat can be said to have begun long before our birth and to enclose a horizon extending long after we cease to be. We are at the heart of a tick that pulsed 15 billion years ago. In this the present moment we carry those years with us as surely as those subsequent soon to follow. The continuum of time is only experienced in the moment we call the present. An event horizon is an arbitrary device that can be modulated to include any aspect of the past or future. It was in a correspondent faith that Whitman, in addressing a reader a hundred years hence, could express his desire to companion his distant ‘comerado’ and caution his future reader to be not too sure that this wasn’t in fact the case. (4)

The desire for continuance has saddled us with a soul and a baggage of dualities that have never been experienced. To that baggage we cling in a desperate attempt to engage the mystery of life so as resist the prospect of a final dissolution. The soul is a projected ego that is no more protected from oblivion than oblivion is protected from the soul. The problem of the ego is not in its appreciation of itself, but rather in its lack of identity with its not self, - which is to say the ground from which it, of necessity, flowers. Its being-here-now springs as surely from its not being before it was, and its not being thereafter it ceases to be. The limited event horizon in which life is commonly defined is to only see oneself, in Whitman’s phrase, ‘between your hat and your boots.’(5)

The mythos of genealogy is a record of one’s family’s participation in the makeup of a particular genetic code. The mythos of biology traces the constituents of that code back four billion years in the tag team of what we call living evolution. The physicist enlarges the myth by extending the cell’s non-living constituents through a devolution extending back to the initial conception of the Big Bang. Whether immaculate or no it is from whence we’ve come a calling.

We might only question by which clock we take our measure and in which space we lay our rule?

"…and suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine… on Sunday mornings at Combray… when from a long distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers… immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents… and with the house, the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or house or people, permanent and recognizable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and M. Swann’s park, and the water-lillies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwelling and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surrounding, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea."

 

When our trusty Timex ticks its last and the rising and the setting sun (the light from which illuminated the mind of young Einstein) ceases to be drawn in relation to the evening and morning of the first day (when darkness and light were first designated) then the last beat of our hearts will retreat to an era long before it was given a name and be more distantly primeval than what cosmology presently considers a beginning –

and we shall have a cup of tea…

From the perspective of the Paradigm, time is a tautology. Each moment is generative of all others and is their equal.