And would not the whole of history be contained in a very short time for a consciousness at a higher degree of tension than our own, which would watch the development of humanity while contracting it, so to speak, into the great phases of its evolution? In short, then, to perceive consists in condensing enormous periods of an infinitely diluted existence into a few more differentiated moments of an intensive life, and in the summing up of a very long history.
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
Ordinarily, human experience of events is, like that of every creature, limited by what ethologists have deemed our "moment": by, that is, the innate biological pace at which we, like all creatures, are capable of perceiving the world. Since our species' moment is approximately 1/24th of a second, any event which in its "presentational immediacy" (Whitehead) is more rapid cannot be consciously detected by us.
A series of taps administered to the skin at a very rapid rate of speed will thus be perceived by us as one continuous tap. Or, to use a better known example, if motion picture film is projected onto a screen at a rate of twenty four frames a second, each image remaining on the screen for approximately 1/24th of a second, the image will appear to the human mind as continuous, thanks to "persistence of vision." Every movie is, in reality, a very rapid slide show, but the innate limits of our moment keep us from seeing it as such. Our inability to see any faster than we do "animates" the individual photographs and transforms them into a moving picture. Similarly, extremely slow events--for example, the blossoming of a flower--are below our moment and likewise imperceptible. Thus every creature's moment locks it into the world at a particular frequency, allowing experience of only a limited range of tempos, though worlds upon worlds--dimensions which I will called, taken collectively, the "momentous"--continue to exist beyond its ken.
Fascinated with the nature of the phenomenal or self-world surrounding every living creature, including human beings, pioneer German ethologist Baron Jacob von Uexkull (18xx-19xx), author of such works as A Stroll Through the Garden of Animals and Men and Theoretical Biology, suggested that every sentient being is governed by what he called an "Umwelt." A creature's Umwelt, Uexkull thought, is a biologically determined adaptation to a particular environment, the long term result of a lengthy period of evolutionary development and the immediate effect, in part, of a creature's very metabolism, of its moment.
An Umwelt, Uexkull imagined, is like a soap-bubble surrounding the individual being, filtering all that it sees and feels, and yet it is almost impossible to grasp and to witness, so close does it lie to the intrinsic, tacit nature of the creature, so much does it constitute the substance of its accustomed orientation.
As the spider spins its threads, every subject spins his relations to certain characteristics of the things around him, and weaves them in a firm web which carves his existence.
In Heidegger's ontological terms, the Umwelt is a "world" which cannot be easily observed because it is that "with which" we see, rather than "what" we see. (This tradition of thought has its origin, of course, in Kant's conception of the "categories of human understanding, a tradition to which Uexkull consciously attempts to add a biological and semiotic grounding.)
The Umwelten of some creatures, Uexkull informs us, are rich, while those of others are exceedingly poor. For a cattle tick Uexkull describes, up to eighteen years may pass without a single accented sensation! (Bleibtreu 17). But for every creature the situation is, in one sense, the same:
All psychic processes, feelings, and thoughts are invariably bound to a definite moment and proceed contemporaneously with objective sensations. . . . . Time envelops both the subjective and objective worlds in the same way, and, unlike space, makes no distinction between them. (Theoretical Biology 15)
But human beings, of course, can escape the moment. We alone among the species on this plant can come to know something of the "Momentous" itself. What other creature shows such concern, both scientific and artistic, with the inscapes of other living creatures? What other creature can transcend its own moment to investigate the duration of the cosmos itself? What other creature could realize the Theory of Relativity or propose the idea of the Big Bang?
As the Dutch phenomenological psychologist J. H. van den Berg has shown, we have in the modern age nevertheless become increasingly oblivious to the "tempo" of the world. Building on a Cartesian, quality-denying philosophical foundation, committed ideological to the equalizing of all dimensions, epistemological as well as social, increasingly obsessed with domination, through speed and power, of a landscape for which we have little respect, convinced that time itself represents imperfection, and aided mightily the omnipresence of mechanical clocks designed to "restrain the changing of things, to camouflage this changing as much as possible" (113), we constructed from 1740 through 1900 an homogenized world almost devoid of tempo.
"Time exists," van den Berg observes, "only when one takes the time"--a contemporary rarity. When he himself "takes the time" in Things: Four Metabletic Reflections, he discovers that "each place has its own time," its own tempo: clouds, trees, plants, the whole of the surrounding landscape are filled with different times:
In between the flowers a different time prevails than on the lawn. Times goes a little faster there. Above me, among the feather clouds, time goes even faster. . . . The sea has a different time than the land. A lake in a forest is a realm of a different time. Sometimes a single tree or bush can draw attention because of the distinctive time prevailing around it. There are flowers which disclose new times at certain moments of the day. When the thorn-apple opens up in the evening, a new and faster time governs this flower. And the real reason isn't that the flower moves at that time, but just the opposite. Because a different time governs that flower in the evening, the flower opens quickly in that particular way and invites the hawk-moth, which is endowed with fast time and flies precisely in that particular way. For what is speed if it isn't born by speedy, "time-consuming" things, plants, or animals?
Compared with the toad, the frog is fast, even when it doesn't stir and, on the basis of its particular speed, the frog leaps, while the toad crawls by virtue of the time that is its own.
Human beings, van den Berg reminds, are likewise governed by their own, often idiosyncratic, tempos: "Even people have a time of their own; each one, I suspect, has one for himself. The botanist is marked by a different time than the geologist. The zoologist who specializes in diptera is by virtue of his time, his tempo and duration, a different man than his colleague who prefers to limit himself to bumble bees" (123).
All these tempos, van den Berg discovers, co-exist, moments of the Momentous, in a marvelous ecology:
An effortless unity governs what I see, a unity in time, strange as it may seem. For just now when I observed for the first time that in different places times move at a different speed, I thought that I therefore ought to conclude that the places of such different times couldn't possibly remain synchronous. One place would lag behind the others and be stuck with a surplus of time at the end of the day, while other places would run short. But I see my mistake: I was fooled by the idea of an absolute. Uniform, uniformly progressing time possessing only one speed. I must abandon that idea. (122)
That very idea, however, has fooled, and continues to fool, most of us: "There is hardly anybody who still thinks that things change in reality" (114).
Writing in the 1920s, Paul Valéry insisted that "we--who cannot even perceive our own growth--are unable to visualize a movement so slow that a perceptible result springs from an imperceptible change." The human mind, Valéry wrote, "can imagine the living process only by lending it a rhythm which is specifically ours . . ." ("Man and the Sea Shell" xxx).
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Thinking of the radical nature of modern knowledge--in cosmology, geology, evolutionary biology, physics--Teilhard de Chardin observes in The Phenomenon of Man that in this century our species seems to be acquiring new senses, the latest additions to a "whole series of 'senses' . . . whose gradual acquisition . . . covers and punctuates the whole history of the struggles of the mind." One of these new senses he describes will be one Valéry denies us: a "sense of movement, capable of perceiving the irresistible developments hidden in extreme slowness--extreme agitation concealed beneath a veil of immobility--the entirely new insinuating itself into the heart of the monotonous repetition of the same things" (34).
Time-lapse photography, as we shall see, may prove instrumental to the perfection of this sense, but the sense itself is not in essence instrumental but part of human potential inasmuch as we realize ourselves to be momentous, poetic beings. It would appear that ability to see "the irresistible developments hidden in extreme slowness" may have long been with us.
"The sages," said the Taoist philosopher Chuang-tzu, "contemplate ten thousand years and count them as a pure complete oneness" (Chang 73). The final effect of the acquisition of an evolutionary sense, from cosmology through biology, might be to make men into such sages.
"He saw the face of a fish, of a carp, with tremendous, painfully opened mouth, a dying fish with dimmed eyes. He saw the face of a newly born child, red and full of wrinkles, ready to cry. . . . He saw corpses stretched out, still, cold, empty. . . . He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand relationships to each other, all helping each other, loving, hating and destroying each other and becoming newly born. Each one was mortal, a passionate, painful example of all that is transitory. Yet none of them died, they only changed, were always reborn, continually had a new face: only time stood between one face and another. And all these forms and faces rested, flowed, reproduced, swam past and merged into each other." (Hesse 121-22)
"Chan-jen (an eighth century thinker of the T'ien-t'ai school" of Chinese Buddhism) suggests that we have no real way of knowing what is sentient and what is not. So in the "common sense" of society we use--although quite arbitrarily--various degrees of mobility for judging and putting things into our categories." It is true that some are "barely in motion" while others "make haste" but, as Chan-jan saw it, the sentient/insentient distinction had no ultimate validity. He relativized it: animals move faster than plants move faster than soil moves faster than mountains. But all move! Later Zen masters were to pick up the point, writing cryptically of mountains moving through many kalpas of time and, even, of giving birth." (Lafluer 254)
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In Woman Warrior, in the chapter entitled "White Tigers," Maxine Hong Kingston, enthralled by her mother's "talkstory" versions of ancient Chinese myths, imagines herself as Fa Mu Lan, a fabled woman who apprenticed herself to an elderly man and woman in a mountain sanctuary in order to become a woman of power. As part of her archetypal training as a warrior, she learns from her mentors the distinctly Taoist aptitude for seeing "the Dragon," always, in ancient Taoist lore, a figure for the living Earth and its ways.
"After I returned from my survival test," Kingston recalls, "the two old people trained me in dragon ways, which took another eight years. . . .
You have to infer the whole dragon from the parts you can see and touch," the old people would say. . . . dragons are so immense, I would never see one in its entirety. But I could explore the mountains, which are the top of its head. "These mountains are also like the tops of other dragons' heads," the old people would tell me. When climbing the slopes, I could understand that I was a bug riding on a dragon's forehead as it roams through space, its speed so different from my speed that I feel the dragon solid and immobile.
But she expands her moment to encompass that of the dragon.
In quarries I could see its strata, the dragon's veins and muscles; the minerals, its teeth and bone. I could touch the stones the old woman wore--its bone marrow. I had worked the soil, which is its flesh, and harvested the plants and climbed the trees, which are its hairs. I could listen to its voice in the thunder and feel its breathing in the winds, see its breathing in the clouds. Its tongue is the lightning. And the red that the lightning gives to the world is strong and lucky--in blood, poppies, roses, rubies, the red feathers of birds, the red carp, the cherry tree, the peony, the line alongside the turtle's eyes and the mallard's. In the spring when the dragon awakes, I watched its turnings in the rivers.
"The closest I came to seeing a dragon whole," Kingston notes in passing, "was when the old people cut away a small strip of bark on a pine that was over three thousand years old. The resin underneath flows in the swirling shapes of dragons."
So far advanced, in fact, is our current awareness of the "the entirely new insinuating itself into the heart of the monotonous repetition of the same things," so close have we come to contemplating nature and time as a "pure complete oneness," that at least one contemporary physicist has argued that we can no longer even be certain that "rocks, and even mountain ranges, do not react as living organisms with a reaction time so slow that to catch it with time-lapse photography would require millennia between exposures . . . " (Zukav 46-47).
Einstein himself, the father of such relativistic thinking, was fascinated with the prospect offered man by the potential acquisition of new senses like Teilhard described. In his conversation with Alexander Moszykowski he speculated about the biological implications of his own theory of relativity and their effect on our perception. Since every creature's internal clock--its moment--gives it only a relative, subjective perception and orientation toward the multiplicity of tempos in the world, a drastic change in man's clock, Einstein hypothesized, would presumably alter our very measure of relativity; for as Moszykowski explains (paraphrasing Einstein):
Only when compared with our own measure of time does an organic individual, say, a plant, appear as something permanent in size and shape, at least within a short interval. For we may look at it a hundred times and more in a minute, and yet notice no external change in it. Now, if we suppose the pulse-beat, the rate of perception, the external course of life, and the mental process of Man, very considerably accelerated or retarded, the state of affairs becomes greatly changed, and phenomena then occur which we, fettered by our physiological structure, should have to reject as being fantastic and supernatural, although on the supposition of a new structure they would be quite logical and necessary. (163-64)
If, for example, our pulse beat were a thousand times faster, Einstein predicted, we would be able to see a bullet at each point of its flight as easily as we now follow the course of a butterfly's movement. Or, if our pulse were increased by a thousand times again, a flower would appear as rigid and immutable to us as the earth's crust now seems; and the motions of animals would be too slow to be witnessed and would have to be inferred, as the motions of stars are now. At an even greater acceleration, Einstein speculated, light would become audible.
But if the human moment were, conversely, slowed 1000 times--if we acquired a time-lapse vision of things--a year at present would become a third of a day: growth would spring up so rapidly that it would be scarcely perceptible; the sun would flash rapidly across the sky. Another slowing by a thousand times would result in the total elimination of the difference between day and night, and all changes of form would melt into a "wild stream of happening engulfed in its onward rush. ("In reality," Henri Bergson writes in Matter and Memory, "there is no one rhythm of duration; it is possible to imagine many different rhythms which, slower or faster, measure the degree of tension or relaxation of different kinds of consciousness, and thereby fix their places in the scale of being . . ." [xxx].)
These breathtaking flights of Einstein's imagination--are they not, in a sense, the very accelerations and retardations of the human moment the "real" existence of which he took to be merely hypothetical, a "thought experiment"? For is not the human imagination the means by which man escapes, through the gate of the imagination, the biologically given boundaries of his own moment in order to explore and to understand, and even to empathize with, all possible moments--those of other creatures, for example, and the realm of time-in-the-abstract which contains them all, what we might call "the momentous"--thereby discovering such momentous new perspectives on the world (new senses, Teilhard would call them) as the theory of relativity, or the idea of evolution?
In this century, "the age of Einstein" and of relativity, in a time in which van den Berg detects "the mutability of things again [gaining] the upper-hand" (117), when "we even hear of a discovery of time . . . held to be the essential mark of modern thought," when time has even come to be "recognized as the foundation of all existence," and "to renounce temporality is not to renounce imperfection but rather to renounce true being" (Zuckenkandl xxxx), art's faithful remembrance of phusis/poiesis has been aided by the advent of a new art form: the movies, the art of the 20th century and an art seemingly well suited to reminding us that things do change in reality. The "prison-world" of the known, Walter Benjamin wrote in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936), was "locked-up." But "then came the film and burst the prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second."
And along with the invention of this new technology of artistic seeing came the perfection of a specialized kind of "dynamite," a photographic technique which, it might be said, seemed virtually a modern reincarnation, a second coming, of the ancient consciousness of metamorphosis: time-lapse photography.
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