Conclusion: The New Phusis

True imagination actually "sees" the "subtle" processes of nature and their angelic prototypes. It is the capability to reproduce in oneself the cosmogenic unfolding, the permanent creation of the world. . . .
--Maurice Aniane

"To perceive consists in condensing enormous periods of an infinitely diluted existence into a few moments of an intensive life, and in the summing up of a very long history," wrote Henri Bergson at the beginning of this century (in Matter and Memory, 1911). "To perceive," Bergson concludes, thinking of the Western mind-set under the auspices of science, "means to immobilize." Elsewhere (in Creative Evolution) the French philosopher had wondered aloud why another alternative kind of perception did not evolve:

parallel to this physics [in which perception immobilizes the world-in-process], a second kind of knowledge ought to have grown up, which could have retained what physics allowed to escape. On the flux of duration science neither would nor could lay hold, bound as it was to the cinematographical method.

Bergson goes on to imagine for us what this "second kind of knowledge," free from the tendency to dissect the world into frames of thought, conscious instead of the "absolute flow of becoming," might have been like:

It would have called upon the mind to renounce its most cherished habits. It is within becoming that it would have transported us by an effort of sympathy. We should no longer be asking where a moving body will be, what shape a system will take, through what state a change will pass at a given moment; the moments of time, which are only arrests of our attention would no longer exist; it is the flow of time, it is the very flux of the real that we should be trying to follow.

Our normal knowledge of the world, Bergson observes, allows us to be "in some measure masters of events" (a fact which Nietzsche comprehended as well); it allows the world to be manipulated, to be used as an instrument of human action. But we pay a price for this increase in power, for our ordinary knowledge "retains of the moving reality only eventual immobilities, that is to say, views taken of it ["snapshots," as Bergson was fond of calling such excerpts] by our mind. It symbolizes the real and transposes it into the human rather than expresses it."

The "other knowledge" which Bergson imagines, would, in stark contrast, be "practically useless"; would not "extend our empire over nature"; and would "even go against certain natural aspirations of the intellect." It would, in fact, offer no advantage to an evolving being but one: the perception of "reality itself . . . in a firm and final embrace." Completing the rational intellect by "install[ing] itself within the moving," it would "open a perspective on the other half of the real."


Does not time-lapse photography, paradoxically enough, offer us, through use of a "cinematographical method," a glimpse of what it might be like to experience nature through this anti-cinematographical "second kind of knowledge" for which Bergson longed? Whatever the technological basis for time-lapse photography, our experience of it would certainly seem to be phenomenologically close to this sympathetic vision of becoming. It is as if evolution were once again an experience for us and not merely a theory: it is as if time-lapse photography offers us our initial lessons in "exact, concrete, imagination." "In biology and in geology," writes the historian of religions Schwaller de Lubicz, "Time [under the hegemony of modern science] is made to intervene as the factor measuring evolution, when in reality, Time is this evolution" (91). Does not the world seen in time-lapse hint of this ultimate, yet forgotten, wisdom?

In the "true metaphors" of time-lapse photography's visual poetry we again see phusis, again quicken into life the forgotten relationship between the mind of man and the "absolute flow of becoming" of which he, his imagination, and his poetry are both the momentary expression and the only means of revelation. Time-lapse photography reminds us that we are momentous beings.