120 lines
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120 lines
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<title>Zk | 2013-11-10-on-time</title>
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<h1>Zk | 2013-11-10-on-time</h1>
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<p>type: post
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date: 2013-11-10
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slug: on-time
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title: On Time</p>
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<hr />
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<p>I wrote a story in high school called “All of Time at Once” which was about the
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first large-scale time-travel proof-of-concept project. It involved sending one
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person back in time two years to meet themselves with minimal exposure to the
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outside world at large. Additionally, they were not to let on that they were
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the same person as themselves to themselves in the process so as to keep any
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sort of psychological break from happening. It was merely a means to show that
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it could work, that a person could be sent back a reasonable period of time,
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interfere with someone unimportant enough that it wouldn’t do anything weird,
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and then, carry on as some sort of amanuensis, living proof that it had worked.</p>
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<p>Of course, it didn’t work like that.</p>
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<p>The story wasn’t about the technological feat that was involved in sending
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someone back through time, nor about somehow maintaining the integrity of the
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timeline, but what it would do for someone to be confronted by someone who was
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exactly them, how much damage it would cause internally.</p>
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<p>The story wasn’t well written - I was 16 or something - and I keep thinking I’ll
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revise it some day, but I never get around to it, of course. The idea and the
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title have stuck with me throughout, however.</p>
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<p>Particularly because what happens to the main character as they spend two years
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confronted by exactly themselves in every way except looks (some cosmetic
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surgery before the experiment being obligatory) and age is that they spend
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basically two years in a dissociative panic attack. One that is only relieved
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when they, in turn, travel back to meet themselves at that crucial moment and
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they finally get to see “all of time at once”.</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>Really?</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>Shut up, I really liked Heinlein growing up.</p>
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<p>I am coming down (I think) from a dissociative panic attack, typing with the aid
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of whatever spell check vim has to offer. I spent most of the last
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<code>$PERIOD_OF_TIME</code> on a dog walk starting somewhere before the peak of things;
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I’d call it maybe halfway up (as compared to my two-thirds of the way down right
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now). I spent most of that walk thinking about time, when I was thinking
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coherently.</p>
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<p>It seems to me that the problem with losing time during panic is that the
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further into panic one gets, the smaller a quanta of time gets. It’s as though
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the amount of cohesive time I can possibly hold in my head is limited to
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whatever space is left to cognition, and that space diminishes, and then later
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expands, during a panic attack. By the time words and language started coming
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back to me around the south-west edge of the lake, I was operating at about one
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step’s worth of time, and up to about five steps by the time I made the decision
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to turn right and extend the walk a little further so that I wouldn’t be totally
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off by the time I got home. At my pace, that’s a little less than a second, and
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about three seconds respectively, which probably could be extrapolated into blah
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blah blah.</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>Really?</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>I’m not done yet. That’s not even what I’m about, dude.</p>
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<p>Either way, it made me think back to that story because the ultimate relief for
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the main character, the ultimate end to all of their panic, was that final
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experience before they landed somewhere back in the past, where they were
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allowed, for one brief instant, to experience all of time at once.</p>
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<p>That translated, on my walk, to the idea that maybe that’s the type of thing
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that plays a big role in some of the more contemplative religions and mysticisms
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out there. The perception of time in such a way as to provide some sort of
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enlightenment. The idea makes less and less sense to me as time goes on, as
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such things are wont to do, but the dire import struck me on my walk, as I
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slowly increased the amount of time that I perceive as a cohesive or coherent
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“moment”.</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>Really?</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>Sometimes frameworks help to provide context for the incomprehensible.</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>Sure, but you realize that
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he corollary is that there is some ultimate state of panic, some sort of true
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hell, which involves being simply reduced to some Planck unit of time as one’s
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cohesive or coherent “moment”.</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>True hell is a bit dramatic, isn’t it?</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>But the panic made the whole experience cohesive to you, even if perception of
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time was not. There was some bit of you that lasted through the experience
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in order to tie it together into a story after the fact. If there was some
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bit of you experiencing truly dissociated moments of incomprehensible input
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reduced to an impossibly short measure of time enough to tie them together
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into a story…</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>Pleasant. Okay, I’ll accept hellish.</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>Good.</p>
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<p>After all, that’s all you are, anyway. Panic is just recognition of that
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fact.</p>
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</blockquote>
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</article>
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