"It's About Time", a dialogue between Joachim Frank and Ricardo Nirenberg

 

The present dialogue about time is, like so much else, the result of a coincidence in time, a synchronicity.  Ricardo read a post (“The Angel of History”) in Joachim’s blog dealing with the period of time right after WWI. Since those post-war years happened to be the same period of time Ricardo had been reflecting on, he mailed Joachim some of those reflections, including the brief text, “A Note on the History of Time.”

The post in Joachim’ blog recalls Walter Benjamin’s vision of history, inspired by Paul Klee’s famous monoprint titled “Angelus Novus,” as an Angel looking back wide-eyed at the dustheaps of the past as a storm drives him to fly into the unknowable future, “to which his back is turned.” In this picture, time is the awareness of an unfolding past, and it was captured by Klee when the atrocities of WWI were fresh in everyone’s memory.  As for Ricardo’s “Note”, it is a critique of Einstein’s account of the genesis and essence of our “concept of time” based on memory and the mathematical notion of order.  Rather, as Ricardo suggests, psychological time – time as we experience it – is intimately related to the mental and physiological feeling of tension, originating early in a child before mental concepts are formed: the two words, time and tension, are in fact related in the Indo-European languages.

RN: I revisited your blog on Walter Benjamin and Klee’s Angelus Novus (I had read it long ago).  Your reflections on Benjamin and Klee and what you say about the year 1920 brought my mind to a subject I’ve been mulling over and writing about for these past months.  This is not only because, as you say, during that year the great disaster of WWI and the influenza pandemic that killed even more millions were fresh in people’s mind, but also because it seems to me that the ensuing lustrum from 1920 to 1925 was most wondrous for poetry in the European languages (I’m thinking, among others, of Valéry, Rilke, Eliot, Montale, and the Peruvian César Vallejo).

JF:  Yes, it’s almost as though ashes and annihilation make it possible to re-think and re-cast our existence in poetry and art.  This makes me wonder what we would count as a WWII counterpart of this generational renewal.  As someone born in German during WWII and growing up in the post-war time I experienced years of denial; the Holocaust was unteachable and untaught in school, and as a concept totally incomprehensible for a child growing up.  Writing poetry (and reading it as well) was thought to be impossible after the Holocaust. Whatever chances there were for renewal, for starting from scratch, they were not realized until much later.  But who would you highlight here?

RN: At the end of WWI Spengler published his very influential book Der Untergang des Abendlandes in which he proposed to revise the nature of math and science so as to avoid a playback of the recent catastrophe.  After WWII no one seemed to be envisaging such foundational revisions.  Look at Hermann Weyl’s 1946 address on the occasion of Princeton University bicentennial.  Confronted with the dreadful prospect opened by the atomic bombing of Japan at the end of WWII, and as if opening his arms in powerlessness, Weyl pronounces in Latin: Crescet scientia, pereat mundus! (Let science grow, though the world perish!)  Then he offers a piteous pseudoscientific reason for the plight of the contemporary scientist: “Technological knowledge is such a dangerous tool in the hands of man, because of the second law of thermodynamics; it is much easier to blow up a building than to build it.”  And he concludes: “What to do is a question every one of us must answer according to his own conscience. I can suggest no universal solution.”

No period of artistic and literary plenum came after 1945 as it had happened beginning in 1919.  On the contrary, in his 1972 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities (the inaugural one), Lionel Trilling said that “the exclusion of most of us from the mode of thought which is habitually said to be the characteristic achievement of the modern age is bound to be experienced as a wound given to our intellectual self-esteem.”  And then he asked, “About this humiliation we all agree to be silent, but can we doubt that it has its consequences, that it introduced into the life of mind a significant element of dubiety and alienation?”  Paul Valéry wrote in La Crise de l'esprit (1919): “Nous autres, civilisations, nous savons maintenant que nous sommes mortelles,” or “Now we, civilizations, know that we are mortal” – what would he have said in 1945 (alas, he died that same year, two weeks before the atomic bombings)?  Probably something like this: “Now we know that humanity and life on earth are mortal.”  The mind of thinkers after WWII was occupied, or rather terrified, with the new atomic weapons.  Finally, after WWII the mind of thinkers lacked all confidence in the very value of thinking: if Germany, the nation that had nurtured so much culture, so much science, philosophy and art, had fallen into the hellish abyss of Hitlerism, what is the use of thought?  Heidegger, it is true, had lectured on thought, Was heißt Denken? in 1951-2, and he had no problem with that, since he was a Nazi at core. A remarkable exception is W.H. Auden's long poem “The Age of Anxiety” (1947), a meditation on the modern barbarians by a poet who was intimately familiar with both English and German literature.

JF:  It took so much longer for any kind of normalcy to return, and something coming close to the 1922-1925 heydays of poetry you talked about.  Yet let me come back to Angelus Novus:  we can again see his wings flapping, a storm coming from the past like no storm before, the face of the angel contorted in horror at the sight of world-wide destruction and genocide.

RN: But as a period of plenum follows a catastrophe like WWI, so does catastrophe follow upon plenitude.  Take, for example, the beginning of the seventeenth century — let’s say the first fifteen years of that century — saw Shakespeare’s Hamlet and King Lear, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, Cervantes’ First Part of Don Quixote in 1605 and the Second in 1615, Monteverdi’s music, including his opera L’Orfeo (1607). It saw Galileo refuting, with his inclined plane experiment of 1604, the Aristotelian tenet that bodies fall with constant velocity, and concluding that, instead, they fall with constant acceleration, a conclusion that led to the new physics and the mathematical toolkit of the calculus, invented later in the century. And let us not forget that Johannes Kepler in his Astronomia nova of 1609 established the laws of planetary motion. As if such prodigious production called for an equally prodigious destruction, the Thirty Years’ War started in 1618.

JF:  The Angel’s face lit up in delight at the sight of bliss, unaware of the coming years of wide-spread destruction and misery ahead.  In a way it is the opposite of Benjamin’s vision. The word "recrudescence" comes to mind, a little known word that recently, after the election, gained currency again. Recrudescence: a new outbreak after a period of abatement or inactivity, from Latin recrudescent – 'becoming raw again'. It is no wonder that the word first emerged in mid 17th century, right at the end of the Thirty Years' War. My other observation is that, instead of making steady linear progress, we have the notion of time as a cycle. A cycle of destruction and renewal.

RN: Time, in other words, as a sequence of epochs. This started me thinking (inspired by Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus of 1922) of time in a very general way, as a sequence of alternations of opposites, of presence (Anwesenheit) and absence (Abwesenheit), of fulfillment and void, an Orphic breathing in and out.  

JF: Yes, alternation of day and night, presence and absence of consciousness, being awake and asleep, breathing in and out – they all are units of our physiological time.

RN: Rilke reminds us of it in this poem, written two decades before his Sonnets to Orpheus:

Herbsttag (Das Buch der Bilder, 1902)
Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
und auf den Fluren laß die Winde los.

Befiehl den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;
gib ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
die letzte Süße in den schweren Wein.

Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.

Autumn Day
Lord, it is time. The summer was surfeit.
Let your shadows fall and tell the time
let the winds blow on the open fields.

Urge the tardy fruits to ripen fast
grant them yet two days of sun,
urge them on toward fulfilment, to drive
the final sweetness into the arduous wine.

He who has no home now, will not build one.
He who is alone will remain alone for long,
will stay awake, read, write long letters,
and will restlessly wander here and there
in the alleys where the leaves are drifting.

JF: For me this is one of the most touching German poems; it has this solemn rhythm of speech of a man who has lived long, who looks back and sees an organic order in the ways of the world.  Here time is cyclic, measured by the journey of the earth around the sun; it so happens that it is fall again, and certain housekeeping chores can no longer wait. But what has always bothered me about this poem is that it addresses God the Almighty, who is supposed to be responsible for the sweetness of every single grape on this planet – a ridiculous concept.  This is why I still prefer Rilke’s Karussell (“und dann und wann ein weisser Elefant”).

RN: Yet see how Karussell ends:

Und manchesmal ein Lächeln, hergewendet,
ein seliges, das blendet und verschwendet
an dieses atemlose blinde Spiel.

And every now and then a smile, turned hither,
enchanted, ravishing, and lavishing
upon this blind and breathless game.

Here the motion is circular, and if there are, let’s say, ten animals in this carousel, every one reappears periodically with a period of ten.  In breathing, instead, it is only in – out – in – out ... so the period is two.  Is that why Rilke calls this game or Spiel “atemlos”?

Leaves play an all-important role in the physics of breathing, in the alternation of plenum and void, of presence and absence.  For we breathe by taking oxygen in and exhaling carbon dioxide, and there would not be enough oxygen in our mostly nitrogen air for all of us to breathe if it were not for plants, which take in carbon dioxide through their leaves, and use sunlight to convert it into oxygen through photosynthesis, releasing the oxygen back into the air.  The Orphic alternation requires the essential help of trees and other leafy plants: that is why Orpheus was sometimes depicted not just holding his lyre but also with a tree growing out of his ear, and this not because of the preposterous reasons that have been hitherto advanced.  The very first of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus begins:

Da stieg ein Baum. O reine Übersteigung!
O Orpheus singt! O hoher Baum im Ohr!

Leaves, though, fall, many in autumn, though not all, and we ought to celebrate their annual obsequies with the adoration and the praises that the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob doesn’t deserve, for he is the god who arrogates to himself the breath of man before there were leaves, in Genesis 2:5:

“Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth and no plant had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground, but streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground.  Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

I remember your lecture at the University at Albany; I think I recall your talking about leaves and the miracles inside them, and how you marveled at those when you were out there.

JF: Yes, this was one strong moment of Eureka! which I still remember as though it had happened yesterday.  My vision brought together my lab’s fresh, still unpublished discovery of the ribosome as a molecular machine that moves like a ratchet as it makes proteins – one subunit rotating back and forth fifteen times a second against the other –with the experience of driving through the forest (it was Vermont, in June) realizing that every cell on every leaf on every tree had thousands and thousands of ribosomes in it that were all doing this dance right at that moment. Here again we have a unit, an increment, of physiological time, but a very short one at that.

RN: Holy Leaf, Joachim!  This reminds me of Yeats:

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

And you have discovered that the chestnut tree itself owes its existence to the dance of quadrillions of ratcheting ribosomes.

JF: We all do. We all do! What a dance!