120 lines
6.0 KiB
HTML
120 lines
6.0 KiB
HTML
<!doctype html>
|
|
<html>
|
|
<head>
|
|
<title>Zk | 2013-11-10-on-time</title>
|
|
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Gentium+Plus&family=Lato&family=Ubuntu+Monodisplay=swap" />
|
|
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/style.css" />
|
|
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />
|
|
<meta charset="utf-8" />
|
|
</head>
|
|
<body>
|
|
<main>
|
|
<header>
|
|
<h1>Zk | 2013-11-10-on-time</h1>
|
|
</header>
|
|
<article class="content">
|
|
<hr />
|
|
<p>type: post
|
|
date: 2013-11-10
|
|
slug: on-time
|
|
title: On Time</p>
|
|
<hr />
|
|
<p>I wrote a story in high school called “All of Time at Once” which was about the
|
|
first large-scale time-travel proof-of-concept project. It involved sending one
|
|
person back in time two years to meet themselves with minimal exposure to the
|
|
outside world at large. Additionally, they were not to let on that they were
|
|
the same person as themselves to themselves in the process so as to keep any
|
|
sort of psychological break from happening. It was merely a means to show that
|
|
it could work, that a person could be sent back a reasonable period of time,
|
|
interfere with someone unimportant enough that it wouldn’t do anything weird,
|
|
and then, carry on as some sort of amanuensis, living proof that it had worked.</p>
|
|
<p>Of course, it didn’t work like that.</p>
|
|
<p>The story wasn’t about the technological feat that was involved in sending
|
|
someone back through time, nor about somehow maintaining the integrity of the
|
|
timeline, but what it would do for someone to be confronted by someone who was
|
|
exactly them, how much damage it would cause internally.</p>
|
|
<p>The story wasn’t well written - I was 16 or something - and I keep thinking I’ll
|
|
revise it some day, but I never get around to it, of course. The idea and the
|
|
title have stuck with me throughout, however.</p>
|
|
<p>Particularly because what happens to the main character as they spend two years
|
|
confronted by exactly themselves in every way except looks (some cosmetic
|
|
surgery before the experiment being obligatory) and age is that they spend
|
|
basically two years in a dissociative panic attack. One that is only relieved
|
|
when they, in turn, travel back to meet themselves at that crucial moment and
|
|
they finally get to see “all of time at once”.</p>
|
|
<blockquote>
|
|
<p>Really?</p>
|
|
</blockquote>
|
|
<p>Shut up, I really liked Heinlein growing up.</p>
|
|
<p>I am coming down (I think) from a dissociative panic attack, typing with the aid
|
|
of whatever spell check vim has to offer. I spent most of the last
|
|
<code>$PERIOD_OF_TIME</code> on a dog walk starting somewhere before the peak of things;
|
|
I’d call it maybe halfway up (as compared to my two-thirds of the way down right
|
|
now). I spent most of that walk thinking about time, when I was thinking
|
|
coherently.</p>
|
|
<p>It seems to me that the problem with losing time during panic is that the
|
|
further into panic one gets, the smaller a quanta of time gets. It’s as though
|
|
the amount of cohesive time I can possibly hold in my head is limited to
|
|
whatever space is left to cognition, and that space diminishes, and then later
|
|
expands, during a panic attack. By the time words and language started coming
|
|
back to me around the south-west edge of the lake, I was operating at about one
|
|
step’s worth of time, and up to about five steps by the time I made the decision
|
|
to turn right and extend the walk a little further so that I wouldn’t be totally
|
|
off by the time I got home. At my pace, that’s a little less than a second, and
|
|
about three seconds respectively, which probably could be extrapolated into blah
|
|
blah blah.</p>
|
|
<blockquote>
|
|
<p>Really?</p>
|
|
</blockquote>
|
|
<p>I’m not done yet. That’s not even what I’m about, dude.</p>
|
|
<p>Either way, it made me think back to that story because the ultimate relief for
|
|
the main character, the ultimate end to all of their panic, was that final
|
|
experience before they landed somewhere back in the past, where they were
|
|
allowed, for one brief instant, to experience all of time at once.</p>
|
|
<p>That translated, on my walk, to the idea that maybe that’s the type of thing
|
|
that plays a big role in some of the more contemplative religions and mysticisms
|
|
out there. The perception of time in such a way as to provide some sort of
|
|
enlightenment. The idea makes less and less sense to me as time goes on, as
|
|
such things are wont to do, but the dire import struck me on my walk, as I
|
|
slowly increased the amount of time that I perceive as a cohesive or coherent
|
|
“moment”.</p>
|
|
<blockquote>
|
|
<p>Really?</p>
|
|
</blockquote>
|
|
<p>Sometimes frameworks help to provide context for the incomprehensible.</p>
|
|
<blockquote>
|
|
<p>Sure, but you realize that
|
|
he corollary is that there is some ultimate state of panic, some sort of true
|
|
hell, which involves being simply reduced to some Planck unit of time as one’s
|
|
cohesive or coherent “moment”.</p>
|
|
</blockquote>
|
|
<p>True hell is a bit dramatic, isn’t it?</p>
|
|
<blockquote>
|
|
<p>But the panic made the whole experience cohesive to you, even if perception of
|
|
time was not. There was some bit of you that lasted through the experience
|
|
in order to tie it together into a story after the fact. If there was some
|
|
bit of you experiencing truly dissociated moments of incomprehensible input
|
|
reduced to an impossibly short measure of time enough to tie them together
|
|
into a story…</p>
|
|
</blockquote>
|
|
<p>Pleasant. Okay, I’ll accept hellish.</p>
|
|
<blockquote>
|
|
<p>Good.</p>
|
|
<p>After all, that’s all you are, anyway. Panic is just recognition of that
|
|
fact.</p>
|
|
</blockquote>
|
|
</article>
|
|
<footer>
|
|
<p>Page generated on 2023-05-10</p>
|
|
</footer>
|
|
</main>
|
|
<script type="text/javascript">
|
|
document.querySelectorAll('.tag').forEach(tag => {
|
|
let text = tag.innerText;
|
|
tag.innerText = '';
|
|
tag.innerHTML = `<a href="/tags.html#${text}">${text}</a>`;
|
|
});
|
|
</script>
|
|
</body>
|
|
</html>
|