Three-dimensional time

Beside the glittering turquoise sea, the oddly sculptured rocks of Costa Brava shine in the late afternoon sun. Now red, now limestone white, now smooth, now spiked with urchins, their surrealism opens otherworldly shapes inside the mind.

The sand is more like tiny shards of crystal glass: beautiful to behold, but sore for any lengthy walk barefoot. I launch into the sea, freeing myself from land, feeling intense, immediate relief, to leave the heat and pointed sands behind.

In the sea, time begins to still and focus on singular points of being: without past, present or future. There is just the sudden sense of depth: luminous surfaces and darkened beyond, unburdened by the chores that tie us to solid land: amorphous, primordial flow.

As I dive into the cool, inviting depths, I think about the nature of absolute darkness. I wonder how the creatures of the deep organise their understanding of life without the steady totem pole of the sun round which to fix their dances, their sense of time, divisions of night and day, weeks and years.

Back on the beach, my companions bid farewell. They have booked a hotel for the night. I prefer the open skies, the coarse, paradisiacal beach.

At sunset, the beach empties. I am blissfully alone. A wild cove, or as wild as any cove on the Costa Brava gets. I remember the last time I camped along this coast. It was back in 2016, a few hundred metres north of the light house of Cap de Creus,  with my girlfriend of the time. It was a moment of serenity in an otherwise dysfunctional and turbulent relationship. My then girlfriend surprised me by her peaceful demeanour throughout the trip. I still remember the delight with which she repeated a fragment from a book we were reading: ojos oceanicos (oceanic eyes). She said our eyes were like the sea, swirling with misty visions, fantastical or prosaic interpretations, always changing their ways of perceiving.

Although I am perfectly happy with my current partner, I cannot help but feel a trace of longing, an old echo drunken inside me. Three-dimensional time is filled with overlaps, old tides sleeping inside us. Our lives are tied not only to the linear past-present-future trajectory, but also to the memories that shape our emotions and perceptions.

Memories of love are especially powerful. People often talk of love as a kind of drug that blinds us to the defects of our partner. I would say that love fosters dependency on the goodness of another: less going blind than turning a blind eye. In the grief of separation, in the siren-call of nostalgia, it is the memories of good that return most vividly. Melancholia shines with a warming, golden light that contrasts our present sense of alienation. We find ourselves gasping for air, wondering how we could have let those happy times slip through our hands with such careless ease. It is no mistake that guilt and regret often accompany feelings of grief.

I wrote this poem several years ago. It is about the death of my father, but it could also be about the continued loss and presence of any loved one, be they friends, lovers or family members. It reminds me of the hidden, sunken structures out of which the present sprawls.

Thank you for your time and for the flowers.
They are so beautiful on my windowsill.
Whenever I look outside I am reminded of you.

I’m sorry you have to leave, this time for good.
Many of our moments were magic.
But comedies are not comedies without the tragic;
Neither good nor bad nor fair nor unfair,
Merely abandoned, every so often,
By fortune’s wasteful wheel.

Thank you for your time and for the flowers.
They are so beautiful on my windowsill.
Although sometimes I wish they would, I know they’ll never fade.
Memory has made me love’s eternal slave.

No culture is complete without musing on the nature of time. In his essay, The doctrine of cycles, Jorge Luis Borges expresses his fascination with the doctrine of eternal recurrence. If time is truly infinite, but the elements of the universe limited, it is strange but logical to posit that everything eventually must be repeated. Socrates berates the profligate Athenians. Plato founds his academy. A confused disciple turns in his beloved teacher for thirty pieces of silver. Dante’s two tantalising glimpses of Beatrice, first in the Portinari house, and second on a street in Florence. Hitler invades Poland. An atomic bomb liquidates hundreds of thousands of innocent lives in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. None of these events have an ending. They will happen again and again since time is infinite but the materials of existence are finite.

Although I do not subscribe to this doctrine, I enjoy its strangeness. Time is much weirder than we think. In his recent book The Order of Time, the quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli compares time to the dance of ten thousand gods. There is not just one time but multiple times: one time for terrestrial life: another time for a spaceship travelling at the speed of light. Even on earth, time travels at different speeds. Those who live on mountains age more quickly than sea-level dwellers. Newton’s constant, eternal t, as steady as a divine river, is intuitive but incorrect.

It is perhaps the mysteriousness of time that sustains appeal for philosophers and poets of all ages. How does time function in the afterlife? The poet and painter Gabriel Dante Rosetti once wrote that ten years on earth equalled a single night in heaven. However, in the tradition of the Isra’ & Mi’raj, Muhammad travels to heaven and meets God and the angels in a single earthly night. Time in dreams is also said to move more slowly than earthly time.

The three-dimensional Tibetan mandala of Kalachakra shows time as a temple constructed on the changing waters of Samsara. The path to enlightenment (and ultimately liberation from time) passes by three conceptions of time: the Outer Wheel of Time, the Inner Wheel of Time, and the Other Wheel of Time.

The Kalachakra Mandala, by Mandala.life

The Outer Wheel of Time is the external world of the environment, the procession of the external solar and lunar days, the delusion-inducing  waters of Samsara. The Inner Wheel of Time is the human body: the three dimensional temple whose five stories represent the five senses, and whose various entrances invoke the different energy channels and chakras of Tibetan psychology and spirituality. The Other Wheel of Time is the ideal destination: the pure centre of enlightenment, the still point of the wheel, represented as a lotus flower.

If there is anything that can truly be attained from time, it is, paradoxically, a sense of timelessness, a flower of endless calm and light that vindicates our earthly labyrinths.