time and writing

7/30/2019 TIME AND WRITING

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TIM E AND WRITING

Reading and cir cumstance

Part 1:

One of the many pleasures I have enjoyed during my retirement from

the world of jobs, of paid employment, with its 50 to 70 hours a week

of responsibilities, is the freedom I have found to read what I never

had time to read, and write what neither time nor circumstances

allowed. In my younger years, from childhood and adolescence to

early-and-late-middle-age, I also did not have the interest and, when I

had the interest, I did not have the time.

I was occupied with all sorts of things: with growing-up from

childhood to adulthood, with sport and having fun, with getting an

education, with relationships involving the opposite sex, with family

and friends, with social life and many community responsibilities: the

Lions Club, the Red Cross, Rostrum, volunteer teaching, the Bahai

Faith, inter alia.

Part 1.1:

This piece of writing benefits from the availability of many free

online electronic journals and, as I approach the age of 70 in the next

14 months, a broad interest, a developed interest, in many disciplines

and fields of learning. One subject of interest developed over the last

three decades has been autobiography.

I have written my autobiography by stages from 1984 to 2013. I havewritten it from many different locations: in the Northern Territory of

Australia, in Western Australia, in Tasmania, in several towns and in

several places in those towns. I have written at many different times

of the day, at virtually any of the days 24 hours. I write after I have

experienced some activity or event that moves my emotions or mental

faculties, that creates a nostalgia or energy, or both. Each time I write

is a now time, a unique time, a unique viewpoint from which my past

and future extend from the poi nt at which I am writing.


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During each of these now times, the history of my life, my society,

and my beliefs is described differently. There is a different tone and

weight, thickness and mode, manner and style to what I write. As I

direct my attention to my experiences over the last 70 years, they

seem distant or near, indifferent or touching, engrossing or dull,

according to the light and manner in which the present moment

envisages them.

I use the word seem with some care and caution. Is the history of my

life really dependent on the mode and manner in which that history is

seen from the particularnow in which I write? The word seem can

mean appear in the sense that it only appears but is not real, is not a

fact of my life. I might say I seem to be sick in the sense that Imnot faking the fact that I am sick. Seem can also mean appear in the

sense of something coming into appearance, becoming visible. The

sense in which my personal history is deployed, is described, is

something, as I say above, that feels near or far, indifferent or

touching. Will the personal history I am writing be different at the

three different times during which I am writing today? That question

can be answered as follows.

Part 2:

Something, some fact, in my history will not be different at three

different times today. The real chronology, my historical timeline, the

actual events will be the same in the face of all of the nows during

which I write. Such is the way it seems to me. But will that really be

the case? Will the timeline of my life really be the same at all three

times? Will the sequence of facta, of data, that compose my life-history be the same throughout the day despite the multiplication of

nows from which my personal history is deployed by me while I am

writing today? I am forever adding historical facta and subtracting or

redescribing them. If a new event is added to my timeline registry,

thanks to some activity I have remembered, this may lead to a

redescription of a sequence in my life-history, my life-narrative.


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Certain events in my historical timeline may be highlighted by others.

Timeline debates--what goes where, what effect a given addition has--

are the daily fodder of the classroom historian. They often modify the

historical sequences of my life. By and large, though, the timeline is

not subject to change; my personal history may take on a different

quality according to the light in which the moment presents itself, but

the event itself has an unchanging facticity.

Part 3:

Over the years, as I write my autobiography in thousands of pages, I

look at different kinds of history. There is what you might call an

unchanging timeline history on the one hand and, on the other, an

affectively shaded, idiosyncratic, history governed by the multiple

nows in which I am writing, whenever I begin my account, my story,

again.

My affective and factual personal history is a landscape pitted and

scarred and humped beyond description. It is also at times smooth, at

other times flowing like a river, and at still other times like the watersin the ocean during a tempest. I have created, over these last 30 years,

a myriad of fragmented mini-histories. The multiple now perspective

does not undermine the key doctrine, the key facticity, of chronology;

I still have a unitary past-to-present-to-future movement in human

time taking place.

My personal history, though, is affectively shaded; it is differenttonight from what it was this morning. The construction of

chronology is the primary function of thought within a spaco-

temporal framework. I examine my inherited spaco-temporal system

sometimes in a shaky and self-interested way, at other times in a

confident and knowing way. I am not changing my personal or

institutional memory, but I often give it a particular ontological

dignity and meaning. I have opened the door of meaning by the use

of multiple nows; my door has been opened for at least the last 30years while Ive been writing my autobiography. Questions have


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legitimately poured-forth over these years, questions of meaning,

interpretation, description.

Part 4:

Is the story, the history, of my life always the same? If time can be

fractured into the deployment of multiple nows, can the rigid past-

present-future linearity of the timeline be sustained? In a new, in a

different, perspective I may write in a now which is deeper into the

past than those events were dealt with last time I wrote. In fact I have

imagined many different personal histories; I have been into my

past at all sorts of depths and levels, times and sequences.

I approach the multi-directional flow of time in my life, parting that

fabrics web from the far as well as the near side, reflecting on time

and myself as a being-made by time, as well as myself as a fait

accompli. As I do this I experience, I suffer, the out-flowering flow of

time. I also wonder at the vastness of what has become of my life in

time, in the history of my 70 years of living. To cast my eyes over

times valences is to feel the huge asynchronous inner-web of the

temporal which is driving me into some corner of the instant, the nowtime. There is also an opening through me from that instant, that

now, in my disclosure, to the power, the vastness, of the past.

I am at every instant inter and intra-creating; my compassion is driven

into the open. It can never be driven in such a way in a survey of time

linking past to future by a causal chain like one of my favourite

historians. This is not to say that the causalists like Gibbon or

Toynbee do not shed compassionate understanding onto vast swathesof chronology. They do so, though, from within their perspective in

which the past is over and done with; here the historians

magnanimity accords new life to all it touches.1

Part 5:

Physical time moves both backward and forward. Psychological time

can move both backward and forward as I describe something in my


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past or present. I can dawdle into the past or actively recover the past

with a great variety of speeds. I can fill the present with the anxieties

and dreams of the future. Affective-historical time is distinct from

psychological time. It is a time as real as the time of physics or

psychology. This affective-historical time is the medium and occupant

of a unique realm of variable past-present relationships. This time is

susceptible to diverse directional arrows. It is through that aperture,

that opening into a past, my past, that I see the bi-directional

movement that appears to regulate the flow of time.

Affective time is graspable as a whole, but not in the same way as

the historical whole understood in chronometric history. The great

system thinkers in the philosophy of history: Vico and Spengler,Toynbee, among others--have sought to embrace the totality of the

human experience. Affective time presents a different kind of

challenge to the holistic thinker; he/she must factor in a mathematical

dimension, a calculus of the multiple relationships between any now,

any knower, and the past, a flexibility to include the bi-directional

character of time. He/she must have some susceptibility to

geometrical relations, as they play out in trans-historical relations. But

the skill-set required of the affective time historian is not formalistic;he/she must be able to appreciate, inside the calculus of relationships,

the privileged, the indifferent, and the meaningless/null category of

juxtapositions.1

-Ron Price with thanks to Frederic Will, TemporalFoundations in the Construction of History: Two Essays, in:Cosmosand History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 5,

no. 2, 2009.

I often cannot absorb all of somejournal article, or all of what has

been my life. I can only get part

of the parcel, and there is so very

much to get, so many parcels, that

there is little point in belabouring

the fact that I cant take it all in

Thats part of the reality of my life,& thats the way it has always been.


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As far as time is concerned, there are

so many ways of looking at it. For the

moment, I thank you, Frederic Will,

still going into your mid-eighties!!!1

1Frederic Will(1928- ) is a Midwestern American writer. Will has

been active in many genres: poetry, fiction, cultural history,

philosophy, translation, travel memoir. Will was raised on the

campus of the University of Illinois, where he remained until going to

Philips Andover for his senior year of high school. His subsequent

education was at Harvard (1946), Indiana University (B.A. in Classics,

1949), and Yale University (Ph.D. Comparative Literature, 1954). Hecurrently teaches in the School of Advanced Studies of the University

of Phoenix(2008-).

Ron Price

11/5/13

time and writing

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