Thirteen Ways of Looking at Twilight—5
Spring, of course, doesn’t come all at once like Christmas morning, or Dorothy stepping out of her storm-tossed house into Oz, but in slow, grudging steps. It’s always the same: the teases, the relapses, the sequence of late storms and cold fronts. You could almost use Japanese magnolias as a metric—early bloomers, then prey to fickle Mother Nature.
The anticipation of spring is the template of all anticipations. The rhythm of death and rebirth is foundational to human experience—and as I have remarked many times, we owe it all to the 23½ degree tilt of our pale blue dot on its axis. It’s easy to speculate life on untitled planets having no philosophy or religion with any kinship to ours. Imagine an untilted, tidally-locked planet: no seasons, no alternation of night and day—would the inhabitants there, if any, have any conception of rhythm at all?
We should count ourselves fortunate for the innate rhythms that drive our souls, the only drawback the possible numbing effect latent in endless repetition. As the years add up, and I realize that the springs that have been far outnumber those yet to come, I’ve reluctantly noticed that the accumulation of repeated experience can contaminate anticipation with nostalgia. Is the thrill I feel for what’s coming, or an echo of what I’ve felt before?
What moves us most deeply: Heaven or the Garden? The paradise we imagine, or the one we imagine we’ve lost?
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These reflections led me to a contemplation of the entangled duality of what we perceive, and how we perceive it.
Déjà vu, for example. In one sense, we have been here before, but not exactly here. For me, the most plausible explanation of the sensation of déjà vu is the processing of present experience through the memory function of the brain. A type of dual processing. Like experiencing the fitful coming of spring as a memory.
Or consider color. Most of us are trichromats—we have three types of cone cells in our retinas. People we call “color blind,” and most other mammals, are dichromats—they have two types of cone cells. The number of colors we see increases exponentially with the increase of cone cells. Each type of cone cell can distinguish something like a hundred shades of color; with three types you get about a million possible combinations.
And then there are tetrachromats: people and other creatures with four types of cone cells and the ability to see—can it be true?—maybe 100 million colors, reaching into the ultraviolet wavelength. Of course that’s their reality and to them it’s not amazing. Owing to genetics, most human tetrachromats are women, sometimes painters, who see a medley of colors where most of us see only one.
Then I started thinking about the processing of time, which I suspect is different from one person to the next, though I can’t think of any way to prove that. I only know that I myself don’t even experience time always the same way. Einstein taught us that time and space are inseparable. As I understand it, space is not something that’s just there, with things filling or not filling it up, but something that exists when there are things. Same with time—not an entity in itself, moving along and available for something to happen in it, but something that exists when there is motion. Another dimension, physicists tell us—like verticality, which doesn’t have any meaning, any existence, until there is something vertical. Time and space are not the stage where our reality is enacted, but are created by the enactment itself.
We should know by now that time is relative—not only to speed or gravity, but to significance. We say time seems slower or faster depending on the nature of the experience—I say it is slower or faster. What’s the difference? There is no master clock. They say people who have lived a life filled with purpose, rich experience, and deep memories feel the human life span as longer than people who haven’t. Stephen Jay Gould wrote about the relative equivalence of mammal life spans. Any mammal’s heart rate is about four times per breath, and all mammals (humans are outliers, who live longer) live for approximately a billion heartbeats. Again, there is no way to “prove” it, but a mouse and an elephants feel their life spans equally.
I wondered if there were a name analogous to “tetrachromat” for people who experience time more richly than most of us. I looked up “panchronology” but found no such word. I thought about the shallowness of our current political discourse—or any discourse that doesn’t involve research, study, analysis, creative thought. People with no real information at all spouting sound bites from their preferred propaganda as though it were truth. People who in complete ignorance of the depth and complexity of an issue or situation assigning facile blame to their slightly different neighbors. People who have been conned into thinking the worst problems aren’t real, or into fabricating problems out of what doesn’t really matter. People whose brains have been hijacked into thinking that exchanging one group of politicians for another will make everything better.
You know, everybody.
We’re all dual processors to some extent: processing what is or is not familiar to us through the moral function of what is right and wrong.
But some less than others. Panchronologic people. People who because of some genetic mutation see phenomena not as discrete points on a line, having reference only to immediately neighboring points, but as spectrums stretching into the long history of what came before, and into the myriad possibilities of what might come after.
I guess there is a word for that. Smart.
Celebrate spring.
As always.
April 4, 2022