I sat down to write this with some sort of confound idea that it would be a piece with an idealistic message. And then I sat. And sat. And sat.
I stared at the screen for over an hour, fingers tapping out a mindless rhythm on my desk. Just sitting, waiting for the words to come. There was nothing. Nothing had been written, nothing had been said in a profound manner, and the deadline was still approaching.
I guess there is something to be said about why I chose to do this to myself. A petty act of self-hatred, of unmotivation. A perverted sense that anything not written in perfect prose is not worth reading wobbles through my mind. The perfect prose still hasn't come to me for this piece. No flowery language, no flashy protagonists, no real plot to be had. (You could say that I am the main character of this, but I'm no protagonist. There is no battle to be won here.)
And yet, the deadline still approaches.
I have changed topics about six times now, started three structured essays and deleted them. Deadlines are enough structure; I'm no novelist.
I recently reread Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. People like to say the star-shaped doodle on the spines of his books is his own interpretation of his asshole, which in my opinion is the perfect way to describe Vonnegut's writing. So it goes.
He writes, on the twenty-third page of the 2009 Dial Press Trade Paperback Edition of Slaughterhouse-Five (or The Children's Crusade, A Duty Dance With Death), "And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep."
Do I know what that's supposed to mean? Not at all. Could I presume a purpose? Possibly.
Can the present even be perceived as wide? Or deep?
I only exist in the typical three dimensions.
The premise of the movie Interstellar reminds me of the premise of Slaughterhouse-Five. Both deal with unconventional methods of time travel, utilizing the fourth dimension as a way to witness the past or the future.
The biggest difference is this: the Tralfamadorians explain to Billy Pilgrim that there is no way to alter the events of the universe, even if one knows the outcome. "The moment is structured that way." The test pilot has always pressed the button and will always press the button, and the Universe always disappears.
Whereas, in Interstellar, Cooper is able to alter events of the past after traveling into a black hole at the center of a solar system far, far away. After he passes through the event horizon, he enters the tesseract, a physical representation of the past believed to have been constructed by humans in the far future, after having realized the fourth dimension. He is able to save the human race by manipulating the past.
My father has a huge book all about the science of Interstellar. He urges me to read it every now and again, but I look at it, and then I look at it closely, and it invokes a strange fear in me. I will never read it. So it goes.
A friend of mine recently gave me a pocket copy of Voltaire's Alphabet of Wit, a collection of articles originally known as Questions on the Encyclopedia. It is full of strange, short pieces of writing that go through topics that begin with every letter of the alphabet, starting with Adam and ending with Zeal. It is full of quirky sentences that make the reader really question whether or not Voltaire was actually a philosopher or just a very crazy man.
Voltaire has only one article in the "T" section of his alphabet. It is not about time.
(It is about testicles. I am not quite sure why that is more important than time. Maybe Voltaire was not the existential type.)
He must not have anything interesting to say on the topic.
Last week, I attended an open mic night at a tiny coffee shop. The walls were yellow and the air had become poetry. People shared poems about love, death, politics, finding a voice, sadness, and justice.
There were no words spoken on the topic of time.
I often stare at analog clocks that hang on false walls, watching the second hand tick out rotation after rotation after rotation, counting down the minutes until calculus class is over. The audible tick from my wrist watch is a comforting reminder that even when I do not feel like I exist, time continues to pass. It will never cease to pass.
Every now and then, upon leaving calculus, someone at school feels so inclined to shout through the halls that "Time doesn't exist!" and that "It's a human construct!", but of course it's a human construct. Without our concept of time, society would fall into shambles immediately. So it goes.
Maybe time will only cease when the universe ceases.
Does anything have an impact on the future? On the past? On the present? How much of it is mine to keep?
I doubt I will ever find the answers to these questions. A different friend of mine asked me to read one of her poems recently; she writes, "I am looking for answers I cannot formulate questions to."
She is asking questions she cannot find answers to. But her questions are not about time.
I am searching for answers to unasked questions. I am searching for a meaning in all of this.
I feel like I am drowning in an ocean of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years.
"So it goes", Vonnegut writes. I agree with him wholeheartedly.
