In alchemy, there is a famous symbol—the ouroboros—that signifies the eternal return. The cyclical nature of time. The oldest-known ouroboros comes from a 13th-century BC shrine in the tomb of Tutankhamen. It’s a symbol for the mystery of cyclical time—Egyptians understood time as that which flows back into itself, a series of repeating cycles, rather than something linear and evolving—it was the flooding of the Nile each year, the journey of the sun. It’s a symbol that occurs in different iterations throughout many religions as well—in Norse myth, the Jörmungandr, the Midgard serpent, is a worm/dragon/snake that encircles the world tree, biting its own tail. Should he ever stop—or when he does—is when Ragnarök, that world-ending battle, will begin.
The pandemic has most surely exposed us all to a different understanding of time. Articles and studies have addressed the way that our collective experience of time has changed with the disruption of “normal” routines, commutes, school, and work outside the home. We all were forced to be rather than do—and that made time behave differently, melding into a sense of time that was less distinguishable by minutes and weeks. Articles on languishing and the term “blursday” proliferated—of adjusting to the passage of time without the regular or normal markers of time—such as “date nights,” “commutes,” as one article suggests.
What to make of an uneventful duration of time? A time that blurs and moves indistinguishably from head, body, tail without end?
Before the mid-19th century—before railroads were built to mine and extract resources from stolen lands, electricity made night indistinguishable from day, and the telegraph relayed information with seemingly instantaneous magic—time was much more personally, locally, commonly measured. Noon was the highest point of the sun, varying by natural degree from town to town. Clocks—introduced in earnest in the 14th century—beat as long as they were wound and set by the household.
In medieval Europe, hours were marked in the day, but the hours were governed by daylight—twelve sunlit hours for every day. Seb Falk describes this method of time reckoning in his book The Light Ages:
…twelve sunlit hours for every day, summer and winter. This meant that the length of each hour varied during the course of the year. In the summer, each of the twelve daytime hours would be rather longer than each of the twelve night-time hours; but in winter the situation was reversed, and the twelve daytime hours would fly by. These 12 + 12 unequal hours, invented in ancient Egypt and used by Jesus, were still common in medieval Europe.
It wasn’t until the 14th century that the equal hours we live by came into common use—which occurred at the same time that the striking clock was developed. The sound of the bell became the mark of each hour—an event distinguishable enough that it became the name of this new way to track and measure the time—clocca means bell in Latin. When time shifted and became standardized—yet another form of colonization unleashed on the globe—time of the clocca, of the clock, o’clock became the way to denote the official measure of time.
Soon the precision of clocks was able to parse the hours into minutes, minutes into seconds of each day, governing work life, defining when one could return home, perhaps distinguishing that break from labor with a cocktail—a division between work time and leisure time that became known as cocktail hour, and cocktail bars, happy hour, and cocktail dress became a part of standard parlance.
But the first measurer of time was the moon, which renewed itself ever 29.5 days, from head to body to tail and back again—a moon, a month—which is derived from the word for moon. The moon governed time, as well as tides. One source I read suggested that the next measure of time was woman, who knew that if her cycle stopped for nine moons, she could expect to give birth in that tenth moon.
My own sense of time became much more aware of the changes in light during these years at home, the events of the sun angling in a different way across the room the new markers of time—the return and departure of birds, the color of the leaves, as I’ve written about before. Aside from markers of sunrise and sunset—which change so dramatically this time of year past equinox—there is the beginning of the school day, the return home. But time still blurs as I get older and have more experience of it. We’ve stayed home, travelled much less, and I admit there is a part of me that worries that I’m not doing more to distinguish moments of my son’s teen years as he grows closer to leaving the house, wondering if I’m missing something by not doing more to mark or create events to distinguish—to plan trips we’ll remember and not leave to the blurring of routine and the day to day that continues on as the pandemic still trudges on in ambivalence. I sometimes fear the only way I will be able to remember any of his childhood is with images, because it was such a blur between parenting, adapting, living, working, parenting, so many years not sleeping. It’s hard to put a fine point on the month that his voice changed and the now… that anxiety of trying to hold sand. And yet I know fundamentally it all happened, I was as present as I could be, and that my life will never not know the deep love I hold for my child since the beginning of his life.
Memory can be fickle. I’ve been wondering what memory and time was like for centuries of people who had no access to portraits, no photographs, no alchemy of chemicals that would invite the inscription of light. There were centuries without electricity, when light and stars and moon were more a part of daily awareness, and light to work or read by dependent on how many candles you could afford in the evening. The passing of time would be less precise, unfrozen, reckoned by sunlight rather than mechanics. I’m curious about how time and memory—particularly for moments of longing, of times that won’t return—served in a world without the reflexive impulse to photograph. And how reliant we are for images to document ‘real life,’ when it is really an unreality that never exists—because time never freezes. Photographs become a fragment of a whole that we can never really see, only feel.
I started thinking more about our perceptions of time these last years—if the blurring of time is a way of understanding something different about time—of perhaps having to rely more on an awareness, an experience of time that is cyclical, that the return is as important as the departure. That there is no arrow of time. The symbolism is not subtle—I’m reminded of Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of fiction, in thinking about the way that the world wants to speak of arrows and rockets rather than that which is gathered and contained. What if the blurring of time doesn’t have to be an anxiety, but a way to experience time as it was before clocks governed our days—a time that can be contained in routine that allows imagination to take root, rather than having to choose a next step at each turn?
An article I read last week writes:
Our time is typically punctuated by events, such as dinner dates or daily commutes, Grondin and his team wrote in October 2020 in Frontiers in Psychology. Such events provide temporal landmarks. When those landmarks disappear, days lose their identities. Time loses its definition.
And yet, in his book Time Travel, James Gleick writes that
…the year 1800 had passed with no special fanfare; no one imagined how different the year 1900 might be. ..There is no record of a “centennial” celebration of anything until 1876…The expression ‘turn of the century’ didn’t exist until the twentieth.
So interesting that the turn of the century is a product of an age being lit up by electricity, where space and time condensed in unprecedented ways with the railroad and the telegraph.
What happens when time flows in a way that is not punctuated by external measurement, but by internal measurement? Why are we told that our capacity to accurately measure time is so vital to an understanding of ourselves and the world around us, that without it we fall into depression? Is it really? What if it's all enough in its indistinguishable-ness—that even though we know the seasons will turn, we can be surprised by the color of the leaves in the fall, or for every spring to feel miraculous after the length of cold and dark in winter, without distinguishing the week or month they arrive? What if the repeating of each season in years of pandemic slowness offers the sense of return, welcome—of a rhythm that is circular—to be the distinguishing mark? To know the love I feel for my son as I witness him growing into adulthood is real and profound without the photos, the marked events, the anxiety of missing something, of parsing out each year?
What if the indistinguishable-ness of unmeasured, unmarked time is a way of finding our own internal rhythms, a resistance to a world marked by commutes, cocktail hours, and dinner dates? To find beauty in the repetition of rhythms, the reassurance that comes with departure and arrival, of an eternal return?
In the 1960s, there were several studies that began to explore the idea of an internal biological clock, and the effects of isolation in understanding the passage of time. Michel Siffre, a speleologist, decided to live for two months within a subterranean cave in isolation, to discover the natural rhythms of life if lived “beyond time.” Siffre went on to conduct other such isolation experiments on himself as he aged, as well as with other participants. Similarly, studies at the Max Planck Institute in Germany studied people in isolation from all sound and sight of day and night, but with light they controlled themselves. In all of the studies, people overestimated the lapse of time, believing it to be much earlier than it was when they emerged, that their period of isolation was shorter than it actually was. Time slowed down. Their sleeping and waking cycles smoothed out to their own sense of need. Many arrived at their own length of day, averaging 25 hours, rather than our familiar 24. Some cycled in 48-hour shifts.
James Gleick references such experiments, writing
Cut off from the world, with no sensory perception, we may still count the time. Indeed, we habitually quantify time…This leads to a plausible definition; time is what clocks measure. But what is a clock? An instrument for the measurement of time. The snake swallows its tail again.
The Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra the Alchemist is known for its use of the ouroboros symbol. Not the Egyptian queen, but another Cleopatra, who lived in the 3rd or 4th century AD and was seeking the philosopher’s stone—the knowledge of turning any metal into gold, which would also heal any illness, and grant immortality. While so much of alchemy takes on mythic stereotypes of original mad scientists in their labs, much of the work was more in alignment with medicine, the knowledge of plants and minerals, and of distillation—a key component of alchemy, as well as of the practical skills of making medicines. Cleopatra the Alchemist is often thought to have created the first alembic—a key tool still used in distillation today. The texts that survive of Cleopatra’s are also notable for being one of the earliest scientific texts authored by a woman.
Cleopatra's use of imagery—specifically the ouroboros—reflects the alchemists’ knowledge of cyclical time, of renewal and transformation of life. The beginning is the end, and the end is the beginning.
The way that time has blurred into something else—something less linear, less distinguishable than the world would have us believe we need—it allows a sense of time that can be governed by an internal understanding of the world, unmarked by the many distinguishing factors that society tells us we must create in order to make meaning, to accurately be in synch with the world’s time. To instead observe or experience what cyclical time—how cyclical time—truly is. And maybe that allows us to think beyond the linear sequence, a reliance on the stacking of instants blurred together like film into a narrative, an identity. Like so many routines, the routines made in slowing down, of staying in place, allows us to move beyond the need to constantly choose, and instead to imagine and be.
Hannah Arendt, in The Life of the Mind writes of
a timeless region, an eternal presence in complete quiet, lying beyond human clocks and calendars altogether…the quiet of the Now in the time-pressed, time-tossed existence of man…This small non-time space in the very heart of time.
What if there’s nothing wrong with a perception of time that slows and merges, returns to its own tail, becoming less distinguishable, less linear. A small non-time space in the very heart of time.
Blursday might actually mean we’re experiencing something more eternal about the passage of time.
I had to read your article several times, I found it so utterly absorbing. I have to admit to being fascinated by this subject. I recently wrote a piece on the subject of plants and their daily rhythms - exploring the question "Do plants go to sleep?" Have you read about Linnaeus' "Dial of Herbs"? It's a fascinating account of the timing of leaf-bud burst in different trees and bushes. The idea was further explored by John Henry Ingram in his 1869 Flora Symbolica, who went as far as to detail a precise method for creating such a dial. His list begins with Goat’s Beard (opening time 3 am,) and ends with chickweed, which is a relatively late riser in the plant world, waking up at about 9.15 am. I digress...thank you for this extra-ordinary thought provoking piece. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Woman as a measure of time... love it.