III. HISTORCISM AND THE NATURE OF TIME
Any concept of time which is not essentially linear poses an especially difficult challenge for those who insist that originality is the ability to create something absolutely new, to discover that which was never known or never existed before. Some of these nonlinear views of time, however, enjoy considerable currency in scientific and other learned circles, and shed additional light on the significance of historicism.
Nonlinear Time
Antihistoricism seems to have been sustained by the well-entrenched belief that time--and history--are invariably unidirectional: one can move forward into the future, but not backward into the past. Therefore, any attempt to do so in life or in art is not only foolhardy but downright unnatural. Believing that time can travel in only one direction, however, actually makes about as much sense as insisting that the world is flat: the possibility of reaching directly into the past has moved beyond the realm of fantasy and has become a matter of growing interest among theoretical physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, and other thinking professionals.
When one seriously considers the subject of time, one must inevitably come to terms with the universe predicted by Albert Einstein's revolutionary theory of relativity, to which W. H. Williams humorously alluded in a poem presented on the occasion of the great physicist's visit to the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena in 1924:
You hold that time is badly warped,
The mail the postman brings today
That even light is bent;
I think I get the idea there,
If this is what you meant;
Tomorrow will be sent.
The shortest line, Einstein replied
is not the one that's straight,
It curves around upon itself,
Much like a figure eight.
And if you go too rapidly
You will arrive too late.70
In relativity theory, absolute time simply does not exist: each observer measures time in a personal manner which depends on his position and motion.71 Space is curved by the force of gravity to varying degrees and time is perceived subjecively to "flow" at different rates depending upon where one happens to be in the universe. As Capra explains, "We have thus come to apprehend that our notions of a three-dimensional Euclidean space and of linear flowing time are limited to our ordinary experience of the physical world and have to be completely abandoned when we extend this experience."72
Circular or Cyclical Time
The idea of progressive linear time, in fact, goes back no further than the seventeenth century, and did not really come into prominence until the nineteenth century.73 Circular time, on the other hand, has enjoyed a far longer history. In ancient Hindu cosmogony, the cyclical rhythms of nature were symbolized by the wheel of samsara, and it was believed that every 4,320,000,000 years a world cycle or kalpa was completed which marked at once the destruction and recreation of the universe. The term lila describes "a rhythmic play which goes on in endless cycles, the One becoming the many and the many returning into the One."74 A similar world cycle is represented in Jain iconography by a serpent devouring its tail.75
Cyclical time was by no means confined to the Orient. Heraclitus believed that everything would perpetually return to a prior state. Aristotle, too, espoused a circular conception of time, for to his mind the perfection of the circle was analogous to the orderly motion of the stars and planets.76 This classical tradition was bequeathed to the Renaissance: according to Francis Bacon,
Salomon saith; There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination; That all knowledge was but Remembrance: So Solomon giveth his sentence; That all noveltie is but Oblivion. Whereby you may see that the river of Lethe runneth as well above ground as below.77
Centuries later, Nietszche still conceived of a cyclical universe that repeated itself ad infinitum. Unfortunately, Nietszche's views would later be twisted by Nazi propagandists for their own ideological purposes. As Halpern observes, Hitler was able to gain considerable power
by exploiting the longing of the German people for a simpler, agricultural period. Although Hitler's policies were actually quite different, in his propaganda he emphasized his desire to restore medieval Teutonic values to Germany society. The idea of circular time played a major role in the Nazi myth, namely, the concept of the return of the Phoenix from its ashes. This was expressed in Hitler's vision of a thousand-year Reich. He argued that a new Germany would arise out of its devastating defeat just as it had in past cycles. It is no wonder that the detested emblem of the Nazis was a swastika--the ancient Indian symbol of circular time."78
Hitler's perversion of this ancient world view certainly did a great deal to undermine the historicist aesthetic in post-war Europe and America, but the moribund condition of agrarian life as an essential basis of social order may have had even graver consequences. With the advent of a highly technological capitalist society in which brute efficiency and the progressive accumulation of wealth have achieved paramount importance, human beings have been almost completely cut off from natural temporal cycles and have lost a sense of the sacredness of eternal repetition.79 Jeremy Rifkin observes:
While the clock established the notion of artificial time segments--hours, minutes, and seconds--it remained tied to the circadian rhythm. The clock dial is an analogue of the solar day, an acknowledgement that we perceive time revolving in a circle, corresponding to the rotation of the earth. On the conventional watch, it is possible to see where the time has come from and where it is going. The location of the hands on the circle provide a reference point for both past and future.
In contrast, computer time is independent of both nature and duration. A digital timepiece displays numbers in a vacuum--time unbound either to a circadian reference or the past and future. By eliminating the circle, the digital watch helps eliminate the notion that time is cyclical and related to the larger rhythms of the earth and solar system. By displaying only the current time, the digital watch eliminates a reference point for observing where the time came from and where it is going. The past and future are nowhere to be seen. Only the present exists.
The digital watch is a fitting metaphor for a society in which the time orientation is becoming increasingly separated from the ecological rhythms of the planet and in which the expediency of the moment takes precedence over a sense of historical reflection and future projection.80
Cyclical time is so fundamental to human consciousness that it is reflected in the very structure of language. The prefix "re-" is a simple but telling example: having lost or forgotten something, we are relieved to know that it can be "re-covered," "re-membered," or otherwise "re-called." In a number of languages, including English, an historical present tense is used to describe past events as they are--or as if they were--being "re-lived." Recounting one of the most famous scenes from Shakespeare, for example, one might say, "First Casca, then the other Conspirators and Marcus Brutus stab Caesar. Caesar exclaims, 'Et tu, Brute!', then falls down dead."
Palindromes and curious symmetries of various kinds in language and the arts also document man's awareness of cyclical recurrence. In the rondeau "My End is My Beginning and My Beginning is My End" ("Ma fin est mon commencement et mon commencement est ma fin") by late-medieval composer Guillaume de Machaut, the text actually describes the structure of the music, in which one voice is given the same melody as a second voice, only in reverse (cancrizans), and the melody of a third voice is bilaterally (temporally) symmetrical. Since all voices are sung simultaneously, the effect is at once that of the present moving towards the future and the future moving towards the past on three parallel planes.
Some six-hundred years later, Jean Cocteau achieved magical effects in La Belle et la Bête and Orphée by reversing the direction of short segments of film so that an event which appears at the time of viewing to progress from present to future is actually one that progresses from future to past. In Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on the novel by Arthur C. Clarke, the cyclical nature of time is demonstrated through a visual simile linking primitive man's discovery of tools to his invention of a rotating twenty-first-century space station in orbit around the Earth. The significance of this cyclical/circular simile is reinforced by relevant music--Richard Strauss's orchestral interpretation of Nietszche's Also Sprach Zarathustra and Johann Strauss's "The Blue Danube."81 In the final sequence, an astronaut enters a state of consciousness in which he alternately appears as a young man, an elderly man, a dying man, and an embryo: past, present, and future--birth, life, death, and rebirth--are thus seamlessly united.
Some scientific cosmogonic models predict that the expansion of the universe, which began with the "Big Bang," is slowing down and will eventually result in a contraction--"The Big Crunch": "These models describe an oscillating universe, expanding for billions of years, then contracting until its total mass has condensed into a small ball of matter, then expanding again, and so on without end."82 Thus, the universe will give birth to itself in an endless series of cycles.
If time is ultimately circular, then the notion that anyone actually creates anything new is meaningless, for everything that is has already existed before, and all novelty truly is but oblivion.
Illusory Time and the "Eternal Now"
A second, related concept of nonlinear time is that of the so-called "Eternal Now," and it, too, is both ancient in origin and universal in scope. According to this view, past and future are integral aspects of the present, and the mind's tendency to discriminate between them is illusory. As D. T. Suzuki explains in his book, On Indian Mahayana Buddhism,
In this spiritual world there are no time divisions such as the past, present and future; for they have contracted themselves into a single moment of the present where life quivers in its true sense . . . The past and future are both rolled up in this present moment of illumination, and this present moment is not something standing still with all its contents, for it moves ceaselessly on."83
A somewhat different interpretation is given by Dogen Zenji:
It is believed by most that time passes; in actual fact, it stays where it is. The idea of passing may be called time, but it is an incorrect idea, for since one sees it only as passing, one cannot understand that it stays just where it is."84
German mystic Meister Eckhart stated essentially the same thing in the Middle Ages, but from a Christian perspective:
A day, whether six or seven ago, or more than six thousand years ago, is just as near to the present as yesterday. Why? Because all time is contained in the present Now-moment.
To talk about the world as being made by God tomorrow, or yesterday, would be talking nonsense. God makes the world and all things in this present now. Time gone a thousand years ago is now as present and as near to God as this very instant.85
The eminent logician Kurt Gödel accounts for the illusory quality of linear time in "A Remark on the Relationship Between Relativity Theory and Idealistic Philosophy":
It seems that one obtains an unequivocal proof for the view of those philosophers who, like Parmenides, Kant, and the modern idealists, deny the objectivity of change and consider change as an illusion or an appearance due to our special mode of perception. . . . Change becomes possible only through the lapse of time. The existence of an objective lapse of time, however, means that reality consists of an infinity of layers of 'now' which come into existence successively. But, if simultaneity is something relative [according to Einstein's special relativity theory] . . . , reality cannot be split up into such layers in an objectively determined way. Each observer has his own set of 'nows,' and none of these various systems of layers can claim the prerogative of representing the objective lapse of time.86
In his book Parallel Universes, theoretical physicist and author Fred Wolf describes the "Eternal Now" from the perspective of quantum physics:
The tiny quantum, through the reality of the quantum wave of probability and its behavior in spacetime, already implies that information can flow from past to present and from future to present. Thus it implies the existence of both the past and future "simultaneously" with our own time.87
If all times are one time, then the distinction between what was, what is, and what shall be is fundamentally meaningless and originality cannot be construed as "innovation" since there is no independent past in which something did not yet exist.
"Many Worlds," Many Times
In the "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics promulgated by Princeton University graduate Hugh Everett (1957), wave functions, rather than collapsing, are constantly splitting into multiple copies of themselves, engendering a sort of "multiversal" reality. According to Everett's interpretation, each observer, through the simple act of measurement, unknowingly bifurcates into numerous separate entities who occupy their own time dimensions.88
If such a plurality of worlds actually exists, it presents some fascinating implications for artists: by choosing to pursue one particular style from among a wide field of possibilities, the artist theoretically splits into as many alternate selves as the choices with which he is presented. For every modernist in this world, then, there may be many more historicist counterparts in other worlds, representing every known style in terrestrial music history. (Unfortunately, this interpretation also implies that somewhere and somewhen, there is a woman who chose not to retract her claim that she was the mother of a certain now irreversibly dissected infant, and a Solomon who is probably remembered more as the perpetrator of an egregious infanticide than as a wise and just ruler.)
Multidirectional Time
There is physical evidence that time reversal is a phenomenon completely consistent with empirical observation. Radiation, for example, has been described by Halpern as time-reversed absorption, for, as he points out, in both Newtonian mechanics and electromagnetic theory there is no distinction between forward and backward time directions.89 In their space-time diagrams, physicists do not impose any temporal sequence, for "all particles can move forwards and backwards in time, just as they can move left and right in space."90
Stephen Hawking, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, entertains the possibility of time travel based on physical and mathematical projections. In four-dimensional Euclidean or imaginary space-time, events have specific time-coordinate values and, since the laws of science do not differentiate between past and future, "there is no difference between the time direction and directions in space."91 Hawking has speculated that "so-called imaginary time is really the real time, and that what we call real time is just a figment of our imaginations. . . . So maybe what we call imaginary time is really more basic, and what we call real is just an idea that we invent to help us describe what we think the universe is like.92 Further, Hawking points to certain solutions of the general relativity equations which suggest that it is possible for an astronaut to encounter a naked singularity--a point in space-time of infinite curvature not surrounded by a black hole near which it would be feasible to travel to the past.93 There may also be a region inside black holes where space and time actually reverse roles, such that one "can move freely in time but not in space."94
Frustrated by his inability to control the direction of time, man generally finds it easier to deny the existence of the past rather than to explore the very real possibility that it is retrievable, that it is, indeed, no more remote than the distance between one thought and the next. Reversing time technologically or biologically may just be a matter of further evolution as multidimensional entities. It should be remembered that not until the advent of aeronautic science were human beings able to move vertically into space as easily as they could move horizontally across the surface of the earth. Perhaps the customary three dimensions of space and one dimension of time obtain only in the material or objective world, whereas time exists multidimensionally in the psychological or subjective world of the unconscious, thoughts, dreams, and the imagination. Historicism itself is intimately linked to such subjective perceptions, and the arts continue to provide compelling evidence for the existence of such alternate temporal realities.
Time, Hologram, and Holomovement
In Roman mythology, the god Janus was worshipped as the "custodian of the universe," and his double-faced image was often prominently displayed at entries. The opener and fastener of all things, he looked simultaneously inwards and outwards, backward towards the past and forward towards the future.95 Janus seems to be a particularly fitting metaphor for a kind of a consciousness in which all matter, space, and time are enfolded and unfolded--the holographic universe.
Holograms have become rather commonplace objects during the last decade, and appear everywhere from the face of credit cards to the covers of National Geographic. One remarkable property of a certain type of holographic film, however, is that when it is cut into pieces and illuminated by laser light, each of the pieces displays the three-dimensional image of the original whole. This rather mysterious property, in which microcosmic part reflects macrocosmic whole, recalls the first line of William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence":
To see a world in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
Interest in the hologram and in certain contemporary theories in neurophysiology, theoretical physics, and biology which have invoked it as an ontological and epistemological metaphor has so intensified in recent years that the co-called "holographic paradigm" has begun to make a decided impact on popular consciousness. In Michael Talbot's book, The Holographic Universe (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991), p. 50, the author gives a concise summary of this emerging model of nonlinear space-time:
Just as every portion of a hologram contains the image of the whole, every portion of the universe enfolds the whole. This means that if we knew how to access it we could find the Andromeda Galaxy in the thumbnail of our left hand. We could also find Cleopatra meeting Caesar for the first time, for in principle the whole past and implications for the whole future are also enfolded in each small region of space and time.
Following the classic investigations of Karl Lashley to locate memory traces within the brains of rats, monkeys, and chimpanzees, Karl Pribram, a neurophysiologist at Stanford University, conducted research which led him to conclude that memories are stored in a distributed manner analogous to a hologram. Pribram also entertains the possibility that "in the holographic state--in the frequency domain--four thousand years ago is tomorrow."96
The central figure behind the so-called "holographic model" was Dr. David Bohm, an internationally respected theoretical physicist who received his doctorate from Berkeley; later served as assistant professor at Princeton, where he enjoyed a particularly close relationship with Albert Einstein; and concluded his career as Professor Emeritus at the University of London. Bohm's revolutionary theory is explained by Dr. Rupert Sheldrake in his book, The Presence of the Past:
According to this theory, there are three major realms of existence: the explicate order, the implicate order, and a source or ground beyond both. The explicate order is the world of seemingly isolated "thing-events" in space and time. The implicate order is a realm in which all things and events are enfolded in a total wholeness and unity, which as it were underlies the explicate order of the world we experience through our senses.
The implicate order is not somehow inserted into material systems in space and time; rather, material systems and space and time themselves all "unfold" from this underlying order. Any describable event, object, or entity in the ordinary, explicate world is "an abstraction from an unknown and undefinable totality of flowing movement." This universal flux Bohm calls the holomovement. "The holomovement, which is 'life implicit,' is the ground both of 'life explicit' and of 'inanimate matter,' and this ground is what is primary, self-existent and universal." The holomovement "carries" the implicate order, and is an "unbroken and undivided totality."97
This concept of undivided wholeness, already suggested by Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum physics, carries with it some astounding implications. Sheldrake, for example, who received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Cambridge and was a Research Fellow of the Royal Society, has proposed a complementary hypothesis of formative causation, in which each natural system--from an amoeba to a sperm whale--is associated with a particular non-material region of influence called a "morphic field." These fields, "localized within and around the systems they organize," are said to "shape all the different kinds of atoms, molecules, crystals, living organisms, societies, customs, and habits of mind."98 When a living organism dies, its morphic field remains as a potential organizing pattern of influence which may reappear again physically under the right conditions, even in remote times and places. More astonishing than this, however, is Sheldrake's view that these reincarnating fields "contain within themselves a memory of their previous physical existences."99 The process by which the past manifests in the present Sheldrake calls "morphic resonance," which also endows a given field with a built-in memory of all previous similar systems.100 He entertains the possibility that most and perhaps all new patterns of activity that appear on earth have already "appeared frequently elsewhere in the universe or in other or previous universes."101
Bohm was sympathetic to Sheldrake's theory, and interpreting it in terms of his own "holomotive" model, suggested that when a field
projects back into the totality (the implicate order), since no space and time are relevant there, all things of a similar nature might get connected together or resonate in totality. When the explicate order enfolds into the implicate order, which does not have any space, all places and all times are, we might say, merged, so that what happens in one place will interpenetrate what happens in another place.102
These extraordinary ideas have a direct and overwhelming significance for the arts, a fact which has not escaped Sheldrake's notice:
The influences of different schools on each other involve an in-fluence--literally, a flowing in--of forms, styles, and spirit. Such transfers between traditions as well as transmission within a tradition can be thought of in terms of morphic resonance.
This hypothesis also suggests that styles and forms of art represent morphic fields which are expressed in the individual paintings, sonnets, sonatas, et cetera. Just as the morphic fields of an animal species are expressed in individual animals, and just as these individuals contribute cumulatively to the morphic fields of the species, so the individual works of art produced within a given school have a cumulative influence on the morphic fields of the school. These fields, like . . . social and cultural fields . . . , work through the behavioural and mental fields of individual members, and are in turn influenced by these individual's thoughts and actions; nevertheless, they are fields at a supra-individual level and have a life or spirit or atmosphere of their own.
The notion of morphic resonance helps us to understand the maintenance of forms and styles, the continuity of traditions, and the transmission of influence. . . .103
Both historicists and modernists may find in these theories a vindication of their respective positions. Historicists may point to the fact that, because of morphic resonance, it is only "natural" for them to continue to express themselves in styles and forms associated with the past. What is more, at a more fundamental level of reality--the implicate order--, time is nonexistent and the question of priority or originality is thus ultimately irrelevant. Modernists, on the other hand, may claim that through morphic resonance they are able to give expression to patterns never before perceived on earth, in other words, never before manifested as explicate terrestrial realities. Although these emergent forms may already have come into existence in other worlds light years away--possibly even in the remote past--they are at least "new" with respect to this world and the present time. What is more, Sheldrake imagines that morphic fields may have an inherent "creativity" which enables them to open up new pathways of adaptive or evolutionary behavior and development, although he admits this is "inevitably mysterious" and that he can say little more about the subject.104
Sheldrake's theory appears to be weakest on this very point, because he adheres to the modernist view that creativity, mysterious as it still remains, must involve "the appearance of patterns that never existed before."105 The difficulty is, of course, that according to Bohm's theory these patterns may somehow already exist in the implicate order before they become explicate through artistic activity:
Because the implicate order is the foundation that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it also contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be; every configuration of matter, energy, life, and consciousness that is possible, from quasars to the brain of Shakespeare, from the double helix to the forces that control the sizes and shapes of galaxies.106
If the minds of Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Michelangelo still exist, perhaps in resonance with the minds of all great authors, composers, and artists, then it would be of immeasurable value to historicists to discover how to put themselves in direct communication with the implicate order. Robert M. Anderson, Jr., of the Rensellaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, posits the existence of a "personal resonance" which confers the ability to recover personally relevant information stored in the implicate order in a manner analogous to a vibrating tuning fork which resonates with another tuning fork of similar characteristics.107 This concept also explains why not every individual has easy access to the entire store of cosmic knowledge: a composer, for example may be able to "resonate" very well with Palestrina, Scarlatti, Beethoven, Tchaikowsky, or Copland, but poorly or not at all with Savanarola, Newton, Adam Smith, Darwin, or Curie.
But there are certainly many more potential factors than shared artistic ability which facilitate "personal resonance," for how else might one account for an individual like Rosemary Brown, a housewife with only rudimentary musical training who gained international celebrity in the 1960s and 1970s when she produced a number of particularly accomplished historicist compositions? This was only possible, she claimed, because she was regularly visited by the spirits of Liszt, Schubert, Beethoven, and other eminent composers of the past who beneficently guided hands her at the piano. The fact that Ms. Brown's creative output was not consistently on a par with the lofty talents of the composers who supposedly dictated music to her is besides the point: the fact remains that she produced some astonishingly good work for someone with only an elementary knowledge of music--good enough at least for it to be recorded on the prestigious Philips label and for The New Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians to chronicle her contribution.108 Talbot suggests that "a shift in the focus of one's attention may be all that is needed to access the past."109
Theories and Concepts of Psychological Time
In addition to the scientific theories already explored, other theories and concepts have been advanced to explain the intimate connection between past and present. Freud, under the influence of Nietzsche, Havelock Ellis, James Sully, and others, concluded that the analysis of dreams would lead to "a knowledge of man's archaic heritage, of what is psychically innate in him" so that it would be possible to achieve a "reconstruction of the earliest and most obscure periods of the beginnings of the human race."110
Relatively early in his career, Jung was struck by the fact that his patients' fantasies, dreams, hallucinations, and art were rich in thoughts and symbols the presence of which could not be accounted for by their personal histories. He explained the existence of these archetypal images and thoughts by his widely known theory of the collective unconscious. In his article about Jung in The Oxford Companion to the Mind, however, David Cook states that is is unclear whether Jung regarded the contents of the collective unconscious as primarily genetic in nature or as the numinous manifestations of "communion with some divine or world mind."
In experiments with LSD conducted by Stanislav Grof, chief of psychiatric research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center and assistant professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, subjects were evidently able to access the consciousness of their relatives and ancestors, in some cases describing events that had taken place long before they were even born.111
Philosopher O. Costa de Beauregard has proposed in "Time in Relativity Theory--Arguments for a Philosophy of Being," that dreams and unconscious thoughts bring about a kind of perception in which time effectively ceases to flow and through which one may enter the timeless reality of a "block universe" in which space and time are fused. Halpern suggests that in this transcendent state, the unconscious "can run free and explore moments from the past with great ease."112
Stephan A. Schwartz, a former editorial staff member of National Geographic magazine and a member of the Secretary of Defense Discussion Group on Innovation, Technology, and Society at MIT, suggested that retrocognition is not only an actuality but that it will also ultimately bring about changes in scientific thought no less significant than those precipitated by the discoveries of Copernicus and Darwin.113
In his book Parallel Universes, Fred Wolf offers some captivating insights and speculations about the nature of time:
Every observation--every act of conscious awareness--sends out both a wave toward the future and a wave toward the past. Both the beginning of the wave and the end appear to begin in our mind--our mind in the future and our mind in the present.114
Our minds are thus tuned or are tunable to multiple dimensions, multiple realities. The freely associating mind is able to pass across time barriers, sensing the future and reappraising the past. Our minds are time machines, able to sense the flow of possibility waves from both the past and the future. In my view there cannot be anything like existence without this higher form of quantum reality.115
Physicist William Tiller, head of the Department of Materials Science at Stanford University, suggests that reality may well be similar to the "holodeck" on the television show Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which members of the "Enterprise" crew interface directly with the ship's computer to create extremely realistic simulations of virtually any period in their personal or galactic histories. For Tiller, reality is "a vehicle of experience" whose operating laws human beings and other living creatures create.116
Physiological Time
It is common knowledge that the light one observes emanating from distant galaxies left them millions of years ago, and that looking at the myriad stars and planets of the night sky is the same thing as observing the past.117 This fact alone sufficiently demonstrates the absurdity and impossibility of "breaking with the past." But the "presence of the past" is not merely confirmed by an occasional glance at the heavens. The fact is that, from a clinical point of view, one actually never sees the world as it is now, but always observes it as it was slightly in the past. Because light and sound travel at finite speeds, the information they convey is invariably old; some sensations, such at smell, travel at even slower speeds.118 Rucker explains, with characteristic wit:
You certainly don't see all of space right now. The tree you see is really the tree of a ten-millionth of a second ago, the moon you see is the moon of two seconds ago, and the light from the setting sun started out nine minutes ago, and the twinkling stars are scattered back hundreds and thousands of years in the past. In point of fact, you can't see anything that's happening right now. You have to wait for the light to get to you.119
For some, this knowledge brings with it a sense of despair. In Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), for example, the author writes:
We are all of us doomed to spend our lives watching a movie of our lives--we are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30 of a second ago. We think we're in the present but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past, and we will never really be able to control the present through ordinary means. That lag has to be overcome some other way, through some kind of total breakthrough."120
Others, like Rucker, take the contrasting view that being cut off from the past places one is "an extremely rootless and vulnerable position."121
Recent experimental research confirms that there is even a delay in cerebral response time which indicates that the brain requires a full half second before it lets the observer know that something has taken place. Drs. Libet and Feinstein of Mt. Zion Hospital, San Francisco, measured the time required for a touch stimulus on a subject's skin to produce an electric signal in the brain by directing the subject to push a button upon becoming aware of the stimulus. Although the brain registered the stimulus only .0001" after it occurred, the subject did not press the button until 0.1" after stimulation, and did not become aware of either the stimulus or depressing the button for almost a full 0.5 second.122
If living in the past is inevitable from a purely physiological point of view, then all human beings are in a real and objective sense inextricably connected to history. With the past as the basis of all sensory experience, and the interpretive function of memory wrapping sensations in yet further layers of tradition, history, it might be said, is fundamental to human experience. It must follow, then, that historicism is fundamental to art.
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