Ancient moonlight, sinking fragrance
Reworking my relationship to time
“Let’s enter the world without time.”
The Order Of Time—Carlo Rovelli
I had some anxiety about not having the time to write this post, which is ironic, since it’s about Time.
How is it that I’ve had at least five conversations with friends about Time in the last few weeks, all in which we lamented not having enough time? But my friends and I - mostly women in the 40-adjacent age group - were not moaning in that neverending-laundry-pile kind of way (though that is very much part of the equation). Greeting each other with a mere pleasantry or two, we wasted no time in launching straight into deep and existential gripes about Time, with all the frazzled efficiency typical of millennial women who once wished to juggle everything and unfortunately got it all.
Our gripes were not about ageing, per se. Sure, I dislike ageing, though it’s never been about death avoidance. It has always been about fear of the unknown. Unknowing what effects time will have - on me, my loved ones, the planet. It’s fear of suffering. And, yes, my girlfriends and I all confessed our fears of running out of time, as if it was always a gods-given right that we receive unlimited reams of it, unspooling into our laps from the great universe’s temporal spinning wheel.
I’m troubled by my anxieties. When did I become that person who dreads turning another page in the calendar? Who can’t decide where to go on holiday because it would take all other options off the table? I wonder if oak trees fear their brevity on earth. I wonder if mayflies go through as many existential crises in a second as I do in a year.
I need to heal my relationship with time.
In one day I read Carlo Rovelli’s The Order Of Time, an emotionally engaging, mind-expanding book that uses the language of philosophy to convey quantum physics. Rovelli first undoes our understanding that time is uniform by talking about how time fluctuates according to gravity; it actually slows down in lower altitudes. The interdependence of the two makes sense; I’m now realising that as humans we resent our relationship to time by our relationship to gravity. We start shrinking. Our jowls sag. Walking speed decelerates. Everything is drawn downwards, until we ourselves are returned to the ground. Now I understand why narcissistic psychopaths like Musk want to shoot their ashes into space (and are offering you their service, too). Wishing to defy gravity, even after death.
Rovelli’s book is existentalist Xanax; while reading it I even experienced the fluidity of time he talks about. A minute on a page passed like an hour. I felt soothed, and simultaneously vastly stupid in the way that one only can when one looks up at the vast, vast universe. But he’s also very good at making you want to believe his ideas: that time is illusory and subjective; that the world is made up of a series of events rather than things (even rocks are events!); that we cannot talk about time without negotiating it through space.
A series of reincarnations
I was consoling my friend Emma, who disbanded her indie band after twenty years and all of a sudden found herself quite naked, without the stage costume that she had worn all her adult life. I had to grieve too, since our music making was a huge part of my life and identity. Funny how life presents itself as a series of cycles, I mused to her. Everything will come around again. “Oh I have thoughts about this too! Like reincarnation happens constantly throughout our lives,” she WhatsApped me.
Maybe you subscribe to the astrological belief that we experience karmic and spiritual regeneration every seven years. There’s a scientific understanding too that our body has regenerated all its cells in that same period. This revised understanding of ageing - where we always return to a reset, like mini-homecomings - is comforting. For me, life has thus far been a constant battle to return to the self. Having gone through a few of these periodic cycles thus far in my life, I can confirm that there have been some profound, almost uncanny ritornelli. In which case, I look forward to what lies ahead, because I have removed the unknown from my timeline. In the fog of the uncertain future, there exists only my true self.
Ancient moon shines on the present
At an incense workshop recently, I learned about traditional Chinese incense making. Most interesting were the non-western empirical methods of measuring premium ingredients; like observing how much a piece of precious agarwood will sink in water. Sinking agarwood is dense with desired oils, and hence it is called 沉香 / chén xiāng: ‘sinking fragrance’. Or, simpler still, just knowing when enough is enough - as in the case of the incense teacher’s sifu, who waited seven winters to collect a certain ingredient that could only be gathered after the snow, but before the spring.
The workshop was run by Nero Lu, founder of GYZJ Incense, quite the vowel-less mouthful to pronounce. GYZJ are the initials of 古月照今 (gǔ yuè zhào jīn). It loosely means ‘the ancient moon shines on the present’. Nero chose to leave it untranslated, because he couldn’t find an eloquent enough English phrase. Rather stick to the clunky acronym. Fair enough, I agreed. The moon represents traditional craft, like incense or calligraphy, and how it endures even today, Nero said. I like that, I replied.
But I translated it a different way, even before I started reading about the quantum non-linearity of time. I interpreted the phrase as meaning that the past and present, even the future, are all happening simultaneously. When we admire the stars, we are looking at light shining from the past; emitted light years away/ago. The moonlight, to a lesser extent, takes 1.3 seconds to reach earth. Yet the ancient light glimmering in our eyes as we turn our faces upwards still constitutes part of what is known as our ‘expanded present’. We are receiving the past, right here and now, in our present.
Every moment of our existence is linked by a peculiar triple thread to our past - the most recent and the most distant - by memory. Our present swarms with traces of our past. We are histories of ourselves. Narratives.1
In my mind, Rovelli’s The Order Of Time and this ancient Chinese saying 古月照今 offer a whole new perspective on the much parroted phrase ‘Be Here Now’ (most famously coined by Ram Dass), for we cannot talk about which Now without defining which Here.
Raging torrents, thundering waves
Since the 14th century, mechanical clocks have dictated how we measure time, but before then time was just the Aristotelian notion of ‘the measure of change’.2 I find translations of pre-modern recipes in my Chinese cookbook collection fascinating, especially for the methods by which change - and therefore transformation of raw materials - are measured.
Incense was historically used in East Asia to measure time, sometimes with different types of fragrance in one stick so that you could smell the changes in time intervals. And after the Zen Buddhist priests of China introduced incense to Japan (around the 12th century), incense sticks were used to keep score of geishas’ - ahem - activities during the Edo period.3
It’s not so surprising then, that we used to use our senses and acquired indigenous knowledge to measure things, rather than relying on modern technology. I love this tidbit from my friend Carolyn, not least for the imaginative visualisation of bubbles through crustacean eyes of varying sizes:
Perhaps we can all benefit from learning to cook without watching a clock. The key is as obvious as the nose on our face. To listen, smell, look…
The future is all around us
Language shapes thought, postulates the well known Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. As Lera Boroditsky persuades in her work on linguistic relativity, if various cultures communicate space and time differently, so various indigenous timekeeping systems conceptualise time in different ways according to language. For example, in your language do you move towards the future, or is the future approaching you? In which case - do you stand still while time moves through you, or are you the traveller through time, which is fixed?
In research that asked the Pormpuraaw, a remote Australian Aboriginal community, to physically map the flow of time, it was found that time was not told left to right (or even right to left, as with some languages such as Arabic or Hebrew). Rather, the Pormpuraaw mapped out time as cyclical, using the cardinal directions (North, South, East, West).4 Meanwhile, the Chinese conceptualise time vertically as much as they do horizontally. There is the word 上 / up to indicate the past, as in 上次 (‘last time’), and the word 下 / down to indicate the future, as in 下晝 (‘afternoon’).
In other words, the past is not always behind us, and the future is not always ahead.
How do you conceptualise time in your language?
“Inexorably, then, the study of time does nothing but return us to ourselves.”5
I started with a vow to heal my relationship with time and I’ll end with a promise to my future self: that I will not measure time by minutes, weeks or years, but by the colours of new shoots and fragrance of incense sticks, the decay of fermenting vegetables and roiling peaks of noodle water. I will measure the changes on my body not in inches and lines, but as a series of events; of spinal stretches and bramble scratches, fading scars and gravity-flouting smiles. I will let go of my fear, for all that lies ahead are my memories, my narrative. I will - I can - slow time down until I have all the time in the universe, until I have enough of it - to write the article, to read the book, to finish the conversation. I am here now, waiting with certainty for the next reincarnation. But not in another lifetime - only in this one.
⏳
I will leave you with one last conversation on Time, because there really is so much more we could explore… It’s from conductor, pianist and activist Daniel Barenboim, who’s know for questioning pedagogic standards of musical tempo, among other things. He’s definitely a dream dinner party guest of mine:
On tempo — Daniel Barenboim
We have become completely slaves of tempo as if the tempo were an independent phenomenon that controlled everything. The tempo doesn’t control anything at all. The only element that tempo controls is how long a piece takes. Does it take 3 minutes or does it take 5 minutes? Basically, this has nothing to do with the content. It gives the possibility for the contents of the music to come to the fore and be audible or not. But this is about all.
It is as if you are going on a trip and you don’t have a suitcase. What do you do? Do you buy a suitcase and see what you can put in it or do you try to imagine what you want to take: how many pairs of shoes, how many books, how many this, how many that and then you find the right size suitcase. The tempo is the suitcase. If the suitcase is too small, everything is completely wrinkled. If the tempo is too fast, everything becomes so scrambled you can’t understand it. And if the suitcase is much too large for what you are taking, all the objects inside swim inside and cannot really stay in place as they are supposed to. If the tempo is too slow for the content, the whole energy of the music dies away and there is no continuation. This is what tempo is. It is very clear that the wrong tempo for the content can be catastrophic. Therefore, it is the last decision to be taken by a performer but in many ways the most important.
Buy the suitcase for your possessions; not the other way round!
C. Rovelli, The Order of Time, Allen Lane, 2018, p. 154.
Rovelli, 57.
S. A. Bedini, The Trail of Time, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 64.
Boroditsky, Lera, and Alice Gaby. “Remembrances of Times East: Absolute Spatial Representations of Time in an Australian Aboriginal Community.” Psychological Science, vol. 21, no. 11, 2010, pp. 1635–39.
Rovelli, 147.
<3 thank you so much, I really enjoyed reading and I think that you would really like Tao Leigh Goffe's writing: https://sweetjuly.com/editorial/the-year-of-the-water-rabbit-calls-for-honoring-afro-asian-intersections/