Tag Archives: time

3 AM

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This seems like an appropriate time to write this week’s blog post on time/space and history– I guess I fell asleep at a weirdly early hour and ended up waking up at 3 AM. It feels kind of wrong to be hanging around, doing things, having coherent thoughts at 3 in the morning without the lingering guilt from staying up until 3 intentionally or the utter dread of waking up at 3 to catch a flight or something. I’m up right now, and I am not tired, and I will not be tired tomorrow, and soon I will tire and sleep again but there will still have been this odd little bubble of awake at this usually very asleep time. The understanding of 3 AM is a human name for an event during which one should be in bed and dreaming. I play along with that normally because it helps me function in society, but there is nothing inherently bed-y or dreaming-y about 3 in the morning so of course it is just as weird for me to wake up at 9 AM as 3 AM. The perception of higher weirdness is a human construction.

History was on my mind as well this week as I finished reading a biography of Jack Kerouac. He’s an interesting man because he very violently became a product of his surroundings. All people are such products, but I find myself feeling that there is more to Jack’s subjectivity. And, as this particularly biography addressed a few times, there are differences in the “factual” history of his life. He lived from the twenties to the sixties, and he wrote slews of journals documenting almost every day of his life, but still we cannot be sure what exactly happened. It seems miraculous, then, that we could ever trust world history to be unaltered truth when such a perfect candidate for accurate remembering has proven to be so mystifying. It brings me back to my favourite notion of the week– that just as we do not, cannot, fully experience and understand the present, we cannot, and do not, fully experience and understand the past.

Perceptions on Space and Time

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I think it’s interesting to see the difference in how people measure and objectively view time and space in comparison to how people feel and perceive them. The Theory Toolbox explained using several examples that although within society we have numerical measurements for time and space, whether it is seconds or days and different lengths of distance, how time and space is experienced often depends on the individual. In regards to the idiosyncrasies of personal experiences, many people can relate to the idea of time moving ridiculously slow during one activity but flying by in the next just depending on one’s attitude or perspective. For instance, a student who has done all the reading and understands the chapter on Space/Time for this class may have felt the discussion time move quickly because they were fully engaged. However, the exact opposite could be said for the student who didn’t read the material and had absolutely no desire to even be in a classroom, let alone talk about The Theory Toolbox. What appears to be a set one hour and fifteen minute class can actually feel completely different depending on a student’s attitude and perspective.

In the same way, Nealon and Giroux propose that space can also be dependent on the individual instead of just basic dimensions and measurements of distance. Take, for instance, the idea of the city as a space. In regards to a class system, some would view the city through its positive and “high-culture” characteristics such as fine dining and cultural works like art and the ballet. However, the same city can be seen as dangerous and run-down due to high poverty, crime, and poor infrastructure in lower-class neighborhoods. Space relative to an individual’s perspective is interesting because people often view space as a static backdrop for the events of our lives, yet it constantly changes due to how we perceive it.

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It must be that some texts that are the embodiment of their time are kept and looked at by generations and generations because the time they are of is so far gone, and the times that each look at it in a new way are each so different, both in contrast to the text and to each other in various developments, censorships/morals, and moods, that the text is used as a steady constant to use for comparison.  And to contradict that –then, indefinitely, the text is changed because it is each time read with a new eye seeing new things.  It is each time, over the gaps, more disconnected and then, actually, more connected by this (being that it can be what makes your time visible to you), to each generation (and here can come in the universality of it).  Because, each time a contrast is done, the critiquing culture has been critiqued, making said text an alive and working tool.  For a text to have relevancy, it is that it makes one reflect (-not the only reason).  A reader should not expect for a text to be embedded (in print, actually literally spelled out) with traits and ways that are constant all the time; and this meaning you don’t have to connect with the text’s ways at all (for if you don’t, then that has shed a very bright light on your own culture and the tolerances, &c –and that being all to do with change, from all of expectedness of individuals, &c.) .  And so, the times themselves can make a work stand Time.

the Story’s Nuances

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Our last class touched quickly on something that, I think, has become a pretty prevalent issue for our generation. In an attempt to accommodate and assimilate new ideas in as much of an objective manner as possible, we rough the rather refined edges of established doctrine. For example, the concept of a story presented some difficulty in pinning down. Most traditional definitions for a story have some allusion to plot action, or events about characters, happening over time, and relayed to an audience. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, for example, tells the story of a schoolmaster and his misadventures in a haunted region, pretty straight forward; and the article we read seemed pretty devoid of plot elements. Some, rather open minded readers, as we have been somewhat trained to be, may argue for the existence of plot elements in the essay, but here I think we can agree, it is not a story. The sonnet, however, shows how we blur these lines drawn by definitions. Here we have, what I saw, to be a description of the speaker’s feelings as he deals with the irrational nature of love. With this in mind, I tend to lean away from the notion of this as a story. This is more or less what we decided in class. However, the more I thought about it the more I could see, perhaps, an argument for an implied plot line. Clearly a character, the speaker, experienced an event, falling in love and feeling its particular brand of suffering, which happened in time and was read by an audience, us.

This issue of time is where the controversy arises. Seeing poetry, in many ways, as an attempt to capture a moment, I again assert my opinion that this is not a story, though I may have moved on the continuum. It seems to me, that the story of the speaker falling into irrational love is traced, as he describes the conflict between reason, personified as a doctor, and love. This may be the play action, to put it in football terms, that has events occurring over time. A stretch, in my view, but I think it shows a particular quality in the later generations of literary critics, scholars, and students. We are becoming less willing to accept established doctrine and more likely to try and see things in different ways. I wonder if this sort of concept, that of this sonnet being thought of as a story or not, would even have been entertained in a college setting 20 or 30 years ago.