Tipping Over the Actuarial Tables

No one in neuroscience thinks time is not important. Criticisms arise with how time management is achieved. - Dr. Patricia Churchland, philosopher/brain scientist 1. When handling the past in the present tense, chronology is of the utmost importance. Suppose I say I’m eight years old and all the rooms of my father’s house are larger than life. Then I say Two days after my first divorce, the only landscape I know is simplified, bone-smooth. The past remains practically undisturbed. But suppose I reverse the order in which the episodes are recreated, and time goes on a rampage, and I find myself coming and going. Journeys on land have a spherical tendency because this is always at some level the nature of the ter- rain. The anthill crumbles in the rain and the ants returning with more provisions walk past the leveled mound; having noticed noth- ing, they keep looking for home. Though each mouth carries its crumb of substance, tradition and evolution will see to it that it isn’t eaten until the journey has been completed. It’s not unusual for the ants to walk repeatedly over the ruins. A squirrel chases itself so fast around the trunk of a palm tree that it appears to be standing still, like propeller blades in midflight. (I used to know the cause of this illusion.) I say Someone’s at the door, somebody please get the door although I haven’t lived there in years.Somebody please get the door. I want nothing more than my share of the past. 2. True. There are degrees of isolation. Sixteen days after a shopping center collapses like a punctured lung in Seoul, South Korea, a nine- teen-year-old girl is found alive in an elevator shaft. Her only nour- ishment throughout the ordeal is an apple that a monk gives her in a dream. The doctors are skeptical and attribute her survival, instead, to “her false perception of time.” The brain—with its network of rivers and tributaries, the flow rigorously controlled—is taxed by a sudden drought. Or an apple passes from one hand to another. In both versions, extraordinary measures achieve a modicum of nor- malcy, shaken again when a boy—age thirteen, his circadian rhythms still fighting the syncopation of jet lag—walks out the window on the thirtieth floor of a Swedish building. They’re calling it “a sleep- walking accident,” as if sleep were a cognitive state. If that were the case, our sheep and our prayers would keep us up all night, count- ing and repenting, and there would be degrees of salvation. I can tell you that none of this is true, but much of it is, and you will not for- give me when you discover that I’ve led you to believe otherwise. The truth, in one form or another, has ways of finding you. Blame it on your false perception of the facts. Time the sniper has lapses in which its eyes tire and its focus falters and it aims at itself. So the window opens; the girl shakes the rubble from her dress; a monk, gathering apples in his robe, almost catches the falling boy. 3. They say that when the Who performed at Leeds University on Valentine’s Day 1970, Pete Townshend played against his own echo during some of those riveting excursions he launched into through- out the band’s quarter-hour-long offering of "My Generation." I lis- ten to it differently now. I wait for the echo they tell me is there, preceding each note, and it’s as if I were experiencing the music a pri- ori. I listen to the chords or whole riffs bouncing off the walls versus sound in real time. Doing so, I miss the actual song, which is also delayed because this is, after all, a recording. Once, the concept of real time was redundant. Before the first gramophone. Before we learned to manipulate the speed of things to come. And long before that, the idea of a spirit that takes over for the temporary body was already popular. Perhaps our first attempt to deny the unavoidable. One new religion offers immortality. For a price. Unlike traditional religions in which death is a prerequisite, this one teaches the body to bypass the soul, that middle man who always gets in the way, and the here-and-now becomes a here-and-always. It’s all up here, one of its members says to me, pointing his index finger at his temple, as if mimicking a gun. I may actually want to die before I get old, I think, the radio as loud as it’ll go, one chord after another bouncing off the walls so many years ago at Leeds, the road much longer than I’d expected, the signal grow- ing weaker and one station giving way to another. From feedback to static to a preacher who invites me or commands me or dares me to lay my hands on the radio. Both hands, he says. I raise my legs, raise my whole body (although it’s not levitation or anything nearly as glam- orous) to steady the steering wheel. 4. In The Book of Ironies they forgot to write that a superstitious woman will end up marrying an atheist. Curiously, in all the cases I know, it’s the man who doesn’t believe. The woman is always open at the very least to the possibility of that “something out there.” At times her superstitions are proof of God’s constant tinkering with the cogs and wheels of the soul. There are atheists with proof of a finite world, atheists in need of a finite world, reformed atheists whose image of God has become so pure over the years that it has gone from inevitable to unnecessary to simply impossible. One believer argues that only the next life makes this one tolerable and lends it purpose, that only the idea of being part of something cir- cular can keep us from going mad, because true madness is linear and the points at either end are clearly defined. This is an uncom- fortable thought for her. I wonder if her belief is, more than any- thing, a way to keep at bay this linear derangement. The atheist lying beside her is beginning to sink into sleep when she speaks: she has carefully chosen this moment, thinking he’s vulnerable enough to say what she wants to hear. He sits on the edge of the bed and won- ders for a moment what it would be like to take that leap forward; or backward, which is something she doesn’t mention: believers of her kind tend to discount any previous incarnations, as if eternity began here. Being here, he says to himself as he has said to her so many times,is the point. Then he tries to think his way back to sleep: wedding band, crown, zero, smoke ring, lasso, hula hoop.