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Times: (Hi)stories and Poetry
Does time have a name? What is it?
In Hubert Selby, Jr.’s novel Requiem for a Dream (1978),[1]
time is suspended within unbearably long non-existing hours of waiting for the
connection. Clock face melts with the sweat pouring down sick bodies shivering,
crumbling in a subzero summer which does not recognize the winter that
conquered it months ago. Clock hands are nothing but the extremities of the
body parts serving mainly one particular purpose, i.e., providing access to the
bloodflow, this, in turn, being a distributor of the vitalizing elixir spreading
throughout the system called the body, the mind…u name it.
In Hubert Selby, Jr.’s novel Requiem for a Dream, time acquires a sensible signification only as
a constitutive part of the idiom doing time. Interestingly, in that context neither
of the words integral to the expression means what it does in its original,
literal form. Together, however, they generate a meaning in its own right,
independent of each particular ingredient’s. Not only is it the intricacy of
the symbolic of this phrase pertinent to distorted perception of realities
intrinsic to the characters of the novel, but to the layered structure of the
symbolic in question, as well.
Namely, one would be prone to contend that divested
of the lexical aspect signifying action, the verb do, from which the gerund and/or
the present participle are/is derived, within the idiom doing time might also be
freed from the burden of purposiveness in the key of Steven Connor’s meditation
on intentionality in his essay “How to Get out of Your Head: Notes toward a
Philosophy of Mixed Bodies.” And yet, it is highly doubtful that those who do
time, such as the characters of Harry Goldfarb and Tyrone C. Love, can be
imagined to be leisurely immersed in the directedness, void of goal-chasing
mindedness. Even in jail, on their way to Miami, somewhere in the south, disconnected
both legally and geographically from their New York underworld--from the
source--scoring remains a pattern deeply ingrained into their mindset. Either unconscious
summoning of the highs unalienable, inviolable, inaccessible to time quirks,
“nodding in time to the music” (257) or crushed by sickness and pain
annihilating a sense of temporality, mobilizing chrono-inhibitors, they seem to
be resistant to the cognizance of the names constitutive of time:”The time seemed to drag as they stared
ahead, not noticing the trees and poles rushing by” (261).
Sara Goldfarb, Harry’s mother, is sucked into the
tornado of TV fuelled fantasies, amphetamine whirlpools of chasing media
imposed models of bodily perfection, and insurmountable detachment from the
pain separating her from the genuine intensity of emotions, blinding her to the
abyss separating her from her son Harry, from being present in the way that
would sharpen her awareness of it. Having undergone a series of shock therapy
treatments, she is tied to a wheelchair, humiliatingly soaked in wastes,
abandoned by negligent staff, by insensitive workers in the service of
medicine. She is waiting to be examined and, subsequently, admitted to a mental
hospital.
In the meantime, time is dispersed across her blurry
perception of realities. Heavily medicated, she is in the waiting room with
little hope to be provided with the care she needs. She does not know the word
scoring. Nor is she familiar with its manifestations. She certainly has no
knowledge of the slang term connection, and she can hardly be imagined to
relate to the subcultural aspect of the lexeme. And yet, it is highly unlikely
that she is focused on the aim/object based directedness, rather than
purposiveness:”From time to time someone would open a door and call a name and
one of the attendants would wheel the patient through the door, and they seemed
to disappear, yet there always seemed to be just as many people in front of
Sara” (263). Only the mention of the name does draw her back to the moment in
which she finds herself present:”Time continued to be time and Saras name was
called” (263).
As for the other characters, tired of sick, cold,
panic, and vacuity, Alice--Tyrone’s former girlfriend--leaves their junk nest
for her family home. Marion, Harry’s sweetheart, the only one-- if seemingly,
artificially, and infinitely unconsciously happy--is biding her time in an easy
buck, hard earned paradise in the midst of the city heavy traffic beehive.
As the novel closes, each of them fades away, ever
so ambiguously, into blackness--blackness that haunts their dispersal, their
dissolvement into a diluted shadow of the dream in which they once seemed to
believe. Or, they did not. Blackness like the frozen moment in Irvine Welsh’s Skagboys, the south like the L.A.archipelago in Dennis Cooper’s Try.
Time evaporated into the haze of static saturating the computer screen,
condensed in the mist of waiting for the connection in the limbo that knows no
interconnectivity. To such timespace, peaceful/peaceable resistance is the
vibrant response.
To some, time is a word spanning the trajectory of
ten ghostly years featured in the title of the chapter in a book, as it is in
“Time Passes” in Virginia Woolf’s novel To
the Lighthouse (1927). To others, it is dust of an omniscient significance,
as suggested in the title of the essay “The Dust That Measures All Our Time”
(2010) written by Steven Connor. In science, it is the notion pivotal to the
hybrid concept of the cosmic curve, as revealed with the introduction of the
twentieth century discourse, the legacy of which is still with us.
Some are prone to emphasize the question of
transient, multifarious, versatile chronology and temporality, as does Stewart
Home in his novel Tainted Love (2005),
conjuring up the subtitle “The Times Change and
We Change Too.” Ten years prior to the publication of the novel, Home
presents a more overtly humbleness invoking stance claiming:”We change and yet
remain the same” (Cranked up Really High:
Genre Theory and Punk Rock 122).
It seems that, as Martin Heidegger’s lyrically charged
philosophical idiom offers in Being and
Time (1927), only contained within a measurement is time worthy of the
names attributed to it by humans.
Skin-popping & Anchor-doping
“Find
me, help me, retrieve me. Stop me.”
Jeff
Noon, “Somewhere the Shadow” / Pixel
Juice
In
Ian McEwan’s story “Cocker at the Theatre” from the collection First Love, Last Rites (1972),[2]
the question of deceitful perception of realities is approached from a slightly
different angle. The story opens with a scene suggestive of an empty stage. It
is a short description providing a glimpse of the theater which is soon to be
reanimated with the introduction of the cast positioned on the stage. There are
many actors and actresses on the stage. They are all naked.
Jasmin,
the director, is strict regarding the policy: no hard ons, no transcending the
boundaries of acting, no—in other words—confusion of categories and/or blurring
the distinction between the metalevel and the object level. His close
collaborator and an ally named Dale, the choreographer —an energetic lady and a
dedicated professional—is monitoring the dynamics on the stage, simultaneously
devising suggestions, so that the scene can be sustained intact.
In
couples, they are rocking in time to the music managed by Jack, sound designer.
The play, via the music, promotes copulation nationwide. It was the time when
insistence on the privacy of intimacy mattered and smoking was allowed in
public places. Jasmin smokes as he makes comments on the details from the
scene. He seems to be particularly keen on his habit when he feels irritable.
The
couples are rocking. Dale remarks the extent of the persuasiveness of their
acting. She seems especially pleased with the movements of the couple in the
back of the stage. She is satisfied to the point of being somewhat unsettled.
However, not all of them demonstrate the same degree of enthusiasm. Jasmin is
annoyed:”Stop. Enough” (76). He emerges from the dark of the auditorium. Urges
them to immerse themselves in the fantasy of pleasure. He knows it’s hard (76).
Some of them are responsive to the director’s input. Some are questionably so.
That’s what worries Dale:”The two on the end are moving well. If they were all
like that I would be out of job” (76). But, she is wrong. Not only does each of
them feature a different amount of eagerness, but the two that are supposedly
moving well are particularly suspicious. They are decontextualized, dislocated,
and demonstrating bewilderment caused by miscommunication between the body and
fantasy, between the metalevel and the object level. They are moving “too
well,” so to speak. The director notes:”Cut. Stop” (77). Strangely, no one is
able to prevent them from continuing with the distraction into an act
superseding the framework of stage performance. Thus, they are let go.
Ian
McEwan presents two salient reflections addressing the distinction in question,
thereby sharpening and enhancing the critical edginess and problematizing
senseless interlacing of discourse and
the extralinguistic. One of them is manifested in the way he articulates the
invitation to the cast to enjoy what they do:”It’s fuck, you understand, not a
funeral” (76). Clearly, it is a freudian insight calling for further discerning
and sustaining the distinction between
petite mort and death. Within the scene in the story when he dismisses
Cocker after he and his partner finish their unstoppable bodily practice,
Jasmin makes a point that undoubtedly concerns two distinct notions and
perceptions of manhood. The director states:”Well, Cocker, you and the little
man stuck on the end of you can crawl off this stage, and take shagging Nellie
with you. I hope you find a gutter big enough for two” (78). Jasmin withdraws.
He descends back to the comfort of invisibility. From the auditorium, only the
microtorch crowned with ember tenderly glistens. Radiating from the cigarette
just lit.
How
does this inform the possibility to divest the notion of manhood of the burden
of potency, thereby freeing one from the self-aggrandizement fixation and a
deviant perception of power? How can one learn what death to self can ensure
within the fellowship of human beings? How can one make choices with respect to
human communication? What is the role of humbleness within cultural realities?
Where can one find the basis for integrating solidarity into the way we live, think, talk, create, learn, know, do?
Given
the ruminations, little doubt remains regarding the validity of Dale’s
uneasiness. There is a job for Dale because we do need guidance: restraining, yet
liberating, anchoring and restorative. Unshakably resilient. We do need
guidance: the source of perpetual reintegration and affirmation of the sensibility
of being friendly to one’s body, to all the aspects constitutive of that who
one is. Authority, not oppression. Power, not coercion. Unlike houses of Horne
from Joyce’s Ulysses where nakedness
is the only common denominator for the inherently natural. Unlike those
vulgarizations of grand narratives, as the character of King Lear in Shakespeare’s
play of the same title brings to awareness. Against such a biological determinism
that reduces humans to an image delineated solely by the threshold of natural needs, patience is needed, indeed. So
is modesty, as one learns from the actors in Hamlet. So is perseverance. So is resistance: refraining from ossification
and destructiveness toward oneself and others, as Rorty urges in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.
Because we are learners. We ceaselessly seek avenues for reconstituting sound
creative / critical responses.
[1] Selby, Hubert, Jr. Requiem for a Dream. New York: A Playboy
Press Book, 1978. Print.
[2] McEwan, Ian. First Love, Last Rites. New York: Random
House, 1972. Print.
