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April 2002 Volume IV, Number 5
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Remembering Time
Reflections on Youth
Interview with Father Thomas Keating
One Second More
Lonely Landscapes
Walls of Jerusalem
Ruminations on Time
Book Review: For the Time Being by Annie Dillard
To Be Silent Time
Ancestry
Time
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Remembering Time (top)
Erin Swails Clocks are the beginning of the end of childhood. The world was simpler for me when I was a child, especially the first years of which were almost primitive in their lack of structure. My concept of time then was quite unconventional. When the world was green and the air was warm enough for me to go barefoot outside it was summer again. Later when the leaves on the trees faded from green to miraculous red and gold and orange it was autumn. At night, when my favorite television show was over, I went to bed. When my mother woke me, I got ready for nursery school because it was morning, even though my room was still dark. Then somebody taught me to read clocks and gradually my life was divided into seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years. My recollection of this milestone is marked by the gift of a pink Snoopy alarm clock on my sixth birthday. At the center of the clock's face, Snoopy and Woodstock played an eternal game of cards as Snoopy's paws swept around the perimeter of the clock, pointing to each minute and hour as they passed. After the gift of the alarm clock, my mother did not come to wake me for school on dark mornings. The insistent beeping alarm jolted me from my dreams to a state of wakefulness at precisely 6:30am every weekday morning during the school year. Like potty training, learning to tell time was a step towards becoming completely responsible for myself. Before I had my own wristwatch my favorite babysitter used to let me borrow hers when I rode my bike solo around the block. Her fashionable watch without numbers on its face was difficult for me to read, so as she strapped the timepiece onto my arm, she would tell me to be back when the long hand got halfway around the circle. I felt very mature wearing my babysitter's watch. I was no more than six years old but I had places to be and times to be there. Eventually, the greater part of my life was completely scheduled into neat blocks of time. I found myself squeezed between the boundaries of school days, practice sessions, and meetings. My whole existence was measured in units equal to the circumference of a clock's face. Now that I am older I have stopped believing in clocks. Every college student must flout convention and rebel against something, and I chose to rebel against time. I suspect that it's the same impulse that motivates people of my age to challenge the existence of God. I have declared a moratorium on setting alarm clocks during the weekend, and I despise the very idea of economizing time with friends. In my adolescent existential musings, I couldn't convince myself that our concept of time comes anywhere close to the truth. We seem to think that we have captured time and tamed it. We have confined it to the boundaries of day and night, divided it into equal pieces, and named each of its parts, as if by giving it a name we could prove that it exists. But a second, being a division of a minute, and no more, only has meaning relative to a minute. A minute only has meaning relative to an hour, an hour to a day, a day to a week, a week to a month, a month to a year...but there is no way to parcel eternity into neat pieces. We force time to run a tight circular path on the faces of alarm clocks and wristwatches. But we are mistaken if we think that we control its passing. We cannot speed it up, slow it down, or reverse it by our power. Despite this reality, time deceives us with its seemingly elastic properties, ignoring incremental boundaries that we impose upon it, expanding a moment of anguish interminably, and in the last hour before a deadline, shrinking into nothing. Nevertheless we can do nothing to modify the passage of time, and no one can stop a child from growing into an adult. When I am backpacking in the mountains for multiple days, I do not wear a wristwatch. After we park our vehicle at the trailhead, before I hoist onto my back everything that I really need to sustain life and little more, I remove my watch and stow it in the most inaccessible pocket of my pack. On the trail, a clock is of little or no use, and we return to the blissful primitive state of childhood. We hike until we are tired, we eat when we are hungry, and we make camp when the sun goes down. There is no strict schedule demanding our adherence. You never get as far as you think you can in one day, but it doesn't matter as long as you get there. Actually, sometimes it doesn't even matter if you don't get where you're going. The journey is as beautiful as the destination. On the best hike I ever had, I never made it to the top of the mountain. The important thing, at the end of the day, is that everybody is safe, warm, and well-fed. On the trail, priorities are reordered and our concept of time regresses. The sun does not check its pocketwatch before it sets, and I don't think that the mountains believe in the kind of time that we teach to our children. In the life of the mountains a human minute is an insignificant measure of time. When you are more than 450 million years old, the span of a minute is hardly noticeable. Very long ago, before humans evolved to think of trying to tame time, the puzzle pieces of the earth floated on a globe of molten rock. They jostled each other as they drifted upon the currents of geological time, barges loaded with the origins of life. The jostling deformed the surface of the puzzle like a hand crumpling a piece of aluminum foil as wrinkles in the surface of the earth were shaped into a rugged mountain range. Slowly the hands of time smoothed the jagged peaks. Much later humans evolved to name these formations. They called them Appalachia and thought that they had been as they were since the beginning of time. In their limited span of existence humans cannot see that time is what moves the mountain every day. In the mountains I remember life when I really understood time, before I learned how to read clocks. Before I knew that the seconds of my life were slipping away, every day was an eternity. Erin Swails is a senior at Duke University majoring in biology.
Time for you and time for me,Sometimes we stumble over places, quiet places where time grows still and the ticking of a watch grows silent. Last summer I found it in the Deep South, where the railroad winds through a small country town. Outside the place where the sidewalk crumbles to a stop, a sign marked the entrance to a long drive. At the end of the driveway and over a bridge between two ponds, a community rested. A working-together community of seven families and a few single people, bound by a desire to help refugees. The summer I was there the refugees were from Sudan. Supported by outside donations, the people lived and worked together to serve refugees from war-torn countries and kept their resources pooled so as not to pay war taxes. Temporary volunteers, like me, took part in sharing the news before lunch, teaching refugees, childcare, gardening, and community meals twice daily. The young community was established in the early 1980s and is still perfecting the intricacies of a life of sharing. With heavy pacifist Mennonite influences, most of the people were students of nonviolence. Their creed was Christian, their mantra, "faith through action." I watched the daily events with skepticism. But what I found there was between labels, outside boxes. It was an unproselytic alternative to capitalism, mingling the arts of mass blueberry production and mass dish drying. They were an organic food eating, bicycle riding, war-tax resisting, question-asking cluster of craziness. That is all that it could be, I decided. However, I wanted to be on the career path in Washington, D.C. with a lobbying group, not some glorified babysitter. It seemed I had stumbled upon the Summer from Hell. Who gives up purchasing power willingly? Clearly this was counterintuitive in a world of immeasurable wealth. But time marked the changing season of my concept of wealth and my concept of the world. With the morning swims in the pond, slippery brown algae darkened my watchband. So I took off my watch, artifact of a world measured by time between coffees, a world robed in the scratchy garments of misfit modernity, confusion for my philosophical maternity. I think my eyes were born last summer. Born to new concepts of time: of time and a garden, of a berry turned from green to blue, of time and learning to ride a bike. The community was an anachronism, against the death penalty in the heart of the few remaining states that institute it, and listening to the radio in a world of humming television sets. It was an eclectic mix of nationalities, languages, and theologies somehow working together, surviving, thriving. The refugees spoke a tribal dialect called Dinka. Other community members spoke Cambodian, Spanish, Bosnian, French, and German. Most of the other volunteers were English-speaking Mennonite college students from the Northeast and Canada. Each night they spilled their harmonic voices into the clean Georgia air. So I listened. Although my vocal chords did not absorb their harmony, my shaken nerves were soothed by the rhythm of life sounded out by the crickets, of children playing, plants growing in the garden, and most of all, the music. Sometimes, in the light of the fading sun, we would sit on picnic tables sprinkled with freshly-cut grass with The Lost Boys of Sudan, as they are sometimes called. We exchanged English idioms for greetings in Dinka, although our mouths could not quite form the words. Our teachers were filled with the patience of ten years spent waiting in a refugee camp in Kenya called Kakuma; of waiting twenty-three hours between meals. In English tinted faintly with British accents, they told the volunteers of that place. Kakuma was a time vacuum. In the northern desert lands of Kenya, there is little climate change to mark the seasons. The refugees, now numbering almost one hundred thousand, sleep in tents or small shacks made out of wood scraps, but most of the trees have been used for fire or building. Sometimes families would gather and boys would challenge each other to jumping contests, an ancient tradition also practiced in the Masai tribe. Their tone was reminiscent of Time in Sudan; it is how long the body lingers in the air, suspended in one's zenith. Time is the distance between rains. It is the length folk stories are held in the throats of singers and poured into the ears of children. Time is the distance the Lost Boys carried the memories of their parents, across hundreds of miles and over rivers. In Kakuma, they said, time is the number of days between the postings of The List: grand arbiter of fate, indiscriminate magistrate of destiny. Each week, The List marks the time of transition when soon, a few of the marked foreheads of the children of the Dinka will blend with the clean shiny foreheads of children of America. Those who find their names will journey across the sea, hurtling towards a distant U.S. city. But their souls linger in the desert sand where Time is the distance it takes to forget Kakuma. Time is an eternity. As the refugees walked back to their small cluster of cabins, home for three months before relocating to the greater-Atlanta area, we sang songs and played the guitar. A Nancy Griffith tune hung in the dry heat. Oh, I wish it would rain, and wash my face clean; I wanna find some dark cloud to hide in here. Oh, love and memories, sparkled like diamonds; when the diamonds fall, it burns like tears. Beside the volleyball court that night, I read to children under fading lamplight. Storybooks with watercolor pictures blended gray as sunset fell and lightning bugs began to glow. Earlier I had mown over the cord marking the sand square for volleyball. The yellow thread ends of my mis-cut lawn disaster paralleled my own bedtime story, read in the air-conditioned library, Revenge of the Lawn by Richard Braughtigan. Sometimes order is an un-mown lawn, his words seemed to say. It gave me peace to know that no one even noticed, for the remainder of the summer, the shredded rope and the absent symmetry of the amoebic volleyball court. Under the pines and the steep grade of the hand-built roof, I dreamed in colors. That spring of my freshman year, I was the only one in psychology class who didn't dream in color. "I dream in black and white," I said, feeling like a newspaper in a room full of glossy Technicolor photo-journals. Perhaps my struggle to place things in distinctive regions of black or white, right or wrong, true or false, was infiltrating my dream world. The questions are better than answers, the search is more important than the destination, and like the theme in Thoreau's work, when you forget about finding the path, you will be on it. One of the members of the community, an older man named Al, awoke at five o'clock each morning to walk the back roads of Georgia pine country, cultivating a sense of quiet. He was like the monks we visited at a monastery in Conyers, disciplined and committed to a pattern of meditation—walking. He was a retired English professor and he had been through a time of great darkness. Al called it, "the other silence," or atheism. Then, fifteen years ago, he came here. Unaware of my lawn-mowing misadventure, one day he asked me to shave his head with an electric razor. The unneeded jacket of thin gray hair fell to the floor. Buzzzzzzzz. I almost cried as a small spot of blood began to slowly filter through the uncut stubble. Al smiled at me in forgiveness and urged me to finish. That night I dreamed in red. One day I destroyed another volunteer's herbal mint tea by adding real tea to the mint in water. Time is learning to make mint tea. I sabotaged someone's mint tea because I did not know what it was. Defining tea is relative. Even if it is just mint in water; it is still called mint tea and it is still legitimate and good and true and real. As Sara looked into the pot, she laughed at the once clear green water now tainted brown. And then I dreamed in green. Slowly the color palette of the dream world grew with the blue of the blueberries, the bright silver of lightning and the amber glow of the tiny scuppernongs in the garden that grew like my sense of smell and taste. All food was garden fresh, mostly vegetarian, and prepared by rotating cooks. Dessert night at the community is very special because it only comes three days a week; the simple diet is iced over with sucrose on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Exceptions are on birthdays, which are always dessert nights. I spent time in anticipation of those nights of sweet delicacies: blueberry crisp, ice cream, molasses, cookies, and watermelon. Most of the time, the refugees declined dessert. They didn't mark time by dessert nights and birthdays. Their sense of time was different, each year blending into the next with unmarked certainty. They were given birthdays by the US government. Most of their IDs were marked January first with a year: around 1982 or 1983, but these were only estimations from some hurried routine physical exam. Here our time is measured in increments of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, of driver's license to career. What does it mean to be "on time?" the Lost Boys would ask. I tried to forget, and measured time by the bell outside the dining hall, or from meal to meal, from sunrise to sunrise, or from step to step, river to river.
My ears rang with the message of one of the community members. He had said at our last meeting together, a seminar on nonviolence, "Time is running out for us to be anything less than serious peacekeepers." I pictured an hourglass slowly filtering the sands of time through its tiny eye. But the sand was white, and in my dreams, white was the color of hope. White was the color of forgiveness and peace. Yes, the sand IS steady running, and we can measure it out with T.S. Eliot's coffee spoons, from watchband to watchband or sunrise to sunset. It is the measure that counts. Amanda Wilson is a sophomore at UNC-Chapel Hill majoring in Journalism. |