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| The Flying Scotsman, derailed by saboteurs on 10th May 1926 in Cramlington, Northumberland. The Train was being driven by volunteers breaking the General strike of 1926. Miners had intended to derail a blackleg coal train but also hit the passenger train carrying 281 people. Mercifully no one was killed because 'trouble' had been suspected and the train was traveling slowly. |
“What is time then? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I do not know.” ― St. Augustine
It is said that, aged just nine, JW Dunne asked his nurse
about the nature of ‘Time’. He went on
to write an influential book called ‘An Experiment with
Time’ (1927), treated seriously at the time by the scientific
community. In time however, the power of his
argument waned as scientific culture changed.
And there it would have stayed but for the interest of JB Preistley, who in
1937, used it as the basis of a play called ‘Time and the Conways’. He went on to write the 'Time Plays', which included 'Dangerous Corner,' and 'An Inspector Calls'.
An Experiment in Time.
Dunne’s theory was that there are two states of mind. One is confined by time, the other is
not. These are wakefulness, and
sleep. In wakefulness, time passes like
a river flowing down hill in just one direction. ‘Now’ is where we are on the river at a given
moment. We can look back at the journey
we have made, and look forward to an inevitable destination. My explanation of Dunne’s theory is to use
the analogy that life is like a video tape.
We can watch the film and not know what will come next. But with the video cassette in my hand, I hold the complete story. In sleep I am lifted above the
confines of the ‘cutting edge’ of the projected film, and am able to experience
any part of the ‘whole’ thing.
Dunne asked the British public to record their dreams. He instructed them to put a notebook and pen
by their pillow and instantly write as they awoke. Dreams are like pictures painted in water that
evaporate quickly. Dunne’s book
describes many dreams that appeared to tell stories of the future and the past,
unknown to the dreamer, but evidently true.
Dunne himself reported dreaming about a terrible train crash. This was a premonition of the crash pictured above, of the Flying Scotsman in 1926. Dreams have a
long association with prophecy going back to Joseph’s interpretations of Pharaoh’s
dreams. Also across many cultures, such as in the Australian aboriginal culture called the Dream Time.
Dunne’s theory uses the fourth dimension as the ability to
rise up above the constraints of time and examine the picture below, seeing all
things, as from a biplane. Dunne was after all an aviator.
Dunne's theory however did not focus on the proportion of false premonitions being record. In a dangerous world, is it a surprise that trains crash? The science is week because perhaps, somewhere in the world, everything conceivable in dreams is happening.
Time and the Conway’s sounds like a truly depressing
play. The play starts in 1919 with the
end of the First World War, a time of celebration for the Conways, who look forward to
a strong and bright future. Act 2 moves
to 1937 (the present) were the family lick their wounds of misfortune. Act 3 returns them to 1919 to the very same
time presented in Act 1. Now we are
alert to the possibility of misfortune.
We are able to read the portentous signs of doom awaiting them.
My Theory of Time.
God created the world in six days….but perhaps when the
world first got spinning it was spinning so fast that a year took one of today's seconds. The velocity of the spin has
been decreasing on an exponential downward curve.
As the Biblical letter writer, Peter say (Book 2 Chapter 3 verse 8)....
“But do
not forget this one thing, dear friends: with the Lord a day is like a thousand
years, and a thousand years are like a day.”
So the dinosaurs lived on ‘fast forward’.
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| Graph of the deceleration of the spin of the Earth. |
NOW is the only moment in time that exists. But what is now? Even the light, the sounds, and the
sensations that enter my brain are from the past. My reality is an examination of past
things. It’s like observing the light from
a distance star that tells us exactly what was happening in the universe ‘light
years’ ago. So my ‘now’ is fuzzy. If I try to measure the length of the table
in front of me, I find that the atoms of the table are joggling. I am forced to make an approximate measurement – ‘this
long, give or take…’
I can only really understand NOW because I have an appreciation
of the past, and also what is to come.
But our understanding of the past is fickle. As Michel Foucault says, “We
cannot learn from history because history is constantly being re-written.” Our future on this planet is also blighted by ideas of some new disaster after another. This
drives some in the rich West to pump valuable resources into the idea that life
beyond this planet is somehow desirable. In reality we discover that life in Antarctica, or the Sahara is likely to be considerably more luxurious.
Now and again, we are freed from the 'funicular cog' of time. I think of cricket, fishing and knitting as the English expression of meditation. Time loses its potency when we have no idea whether time has passed in minutes, or hours. This is similar to sleep, where we enter a nightly, new and alien world.
Last night I dreamt that I met a warden from my days working in
Spitalfields Crypt. In what felt like
Romania, or Moldova, I bumped into an older man, with just the features of ‘Clive’. I had attended Clive’s wedding, but in the dream I struggled to remember his wife’s name (I still can't remember it). Clive
needed his memory jogging to recall me, but he did, and we embraced. Was this the present? Was it the future? As with so much in dreams it was filled with
the familiar, and the different. The
emotions too were mixed. Joy,
unease, disorientation, and intrigue.
My theory of time is that this life is lived in one long
plane. We travel South to North. We die along this route. Our next journey is East to West, and we find
we all start at the same point and we step away from South-North. So we all die at exactly the same time. This is the
day of judgement.
The Creator is out of time, so can see exactly what will happen. This make predicting the future simple. We can predict what is best for the future, just as an averagely intelligent thirteen year old can solve the problems of the whole world within 30 minutes.
Our challenge is to get the balance right, between the past and its influence on us, the present, and the future.
So for now...I consider what is worth living for is the experience of 'NOW'. NOW is good enough. I do not need tomorrow...The coming of the long run. I do not need my dreams. I hold my past lightly, with gratitude. May NOW last forever.
There are many 'Theologies of the Present'. Here are a few I have been looking at.
Renovare - Denver based Christian Centre
The Sacrament of the Present Moment: Abandonment to Divine Providence by Jean-Pierre De Caussade.
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