This except adapted from the Proceedings of the 7th Annual A.J. Liebling Invitational Short Fiction Conference, “Time: Make it Stop” by Tim Carey, (c) 2013 A.J. Liebling Invitational Short Fiction Conference, all rights reserved
“Poo-Tee-Weet”
I have become obsessed with time.
I don’t just mean that I have become obsessed with time management, or spending my time wisely, or using my time well, or making sure that I am using all the minutes… even all the fucking seconds (86,400 of the little bastards everyday[1]) in a socially acceptable way. I am not interested in spending time that through charitable works benefits the homeless, or convinces people to enact gun control laws, or protects abortion rights[2]. These were all things that I once spent time on, but now I am no longer interested in how I spend my time at all. My obsession has taken a different tack.
I have become obsessed with time in that I want it stop.
Now. Really.
I am serious.
“If we can intuit sameness, time is a delusion”
Jorge Luis Borges tells us that[3]:
“The basic elemental moments are… impersonal – physical suffering, and physical pleasure, the approach of sleep, listening to a single piece of music, moments of great intensity or great dejection. I have reached… the following conclusion: life is too impoverished not to also be immortal.”
Borges is attacking the problem in the second manner of Zeno’s infinities[4]. In a so-called “fixed” time interval, there are an infinity of individual points. If we can experience each one, instead of jumping to the end, we can experience an infinity of subjective time without violating the constraining boundary conditions of the larger universe. In effect, we would be causing our local entropy, and hence our subjective time experience, to deviate from the average entropy (and average time flow) of the universe.
I have, for personal reasons I do not wish to disclose here, had been trying all of this out last summer around Labor Day. My methodology has closely followed Borges’ lead: concentrating on moments of physical pleasure, of physical pain, listening to a single piece of music; experiencing moments of great intensity or dejection. I summarize several attempts below. I readily admit that the techniques are not perfected yet, they are not ready for “prime time”, yet the modest successes I’ve experienced in slowing down, and in one case even stopping time for several hours show the validity of the concept. Perhaps other researchers can find ways to make these efforts more practical.
The first example is the least practical. This is pleasure through sexual orgasm. There is no doubt that time stands still during a sexual orgasm. I think we can all agree on this. Borges would tell us that every orgasm is the same orgasm. The reason that this is not very practical approach to stopping time is one we are all familiar with: diminished sexual desire as we age. I’m 56 years old, my sex life is not what it used to be. This could be a viable technique for a younger, more virile man.
I’ve had more success with listening to a single piece of music over and over again. I chose Mott the Hoople’s classic No Wheels to Ride from the 1970 album Mad Shadows[5] Specifically the guitar solo that comprises the bridge of the song. This guitar solo, while only lasting a little more than a minute thirty-two seconds[6], I have successfully stretched into nearly 15 minutes of subjective time. When it comes on, I simply kind of zone out. The listening has become a single event in my Minkowski space-time continuum, my trajectory revisiting the same space-time coordinates again and again, an almost black hole of thousands of listening, each with its own memories, all remembered simultaneously.[7] The musical technique for stopping time definitely seems more promising than the orgasm technique for the simple reason that Mott the Hoople is more readily available than quality sex.
The pain techniques I have been experimenting with have been quite successful at stopping time.
Severe abdominal pain can definitely stretch out time. A few minutes can easily seem to last a half an hour. Abdominal pain, though, in the end is too varied an experience to be reliable. Every little abdominal pain is different and they are constantly morphing from one to another location, subdividing into different memories and breaking up into individual events that eventually cause entropy to flow again.
I’ve have much more luck with back pain. There are two kinds I have been playing around with: a diffuse lower back pain and a sharp lower back pain. Both are good for stretching time by an order of magnitude, a minute seems like an hour.
My best results have come from constipation. No kidding, ten minutes on the toilet trying to squeeze one out can last several hours. My most successful attempt occurred this August during my family’s annual golf weekend outing[8]. Taking advantage of an episode of constipation accompanied by lower back pain and some dejection, I was able to stop time completely for three hours and fifteen minutes.
Although, as I said, I recognize that these techniques are not ready for wide dissemination (after all who wants to spend eternity sitting on a toilet constipated) the proof of principle has been demonstrated. I acknowledge that I have failed in prolonging time through moments of great intensity and elation. Perhaps other researchers are better suited by temperament and physical condition to achieve success with these.
I’m not giving up though. I’m going to make this work. I’m now obsessed with time and I will make it stop.
I will become unstuck in time.
“Poo-Tee-Weet”
[1] Thank you to the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians for developing an exceptionally arcane way or reckoning time, seriously… base 60 arithmetic?
[2] Am I the only idiot that was stupid enough to send money to OFA after the last election? OFA is “Organizing for America” (or is it “Obama for America”?) I now get about 10 email-twitters-instagrams a day wanting me to organize for various causes. Even if I believed in time, I would have better things to do with it than sitting around with a bunch of other get-a-lifers with nothing to do until the next 2016 election cycle. (Which I guess has already started…)
[3] See A New Refutation of Time, Jorge Louis Borges, pages 317-332, from Selected Non-Fictions, ©1999 by Maria Kodama, Viking Penguin Putnam, ISBN 0-670-84947-2
[4] See the discussion in The Principles of Mathematics. Page 367. Bertrand Russell, 1903, 1986, New York, NY: Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-31404-5. OCLC 247299160
[5] Island Records, 1970.
[6] The solo runs from 2:24 to 3:58. The composer and performer is Mick Ralphs… founding member of Mott the Hoople, founding member of Bad Company, and all around guitar god.
[7] Examples: 1973, doing homework, 1979, Thanksgiving dinner with Jimi Hendrix (not the Jimi Hendrix. We actually knew someone named Jimi Hendrix and it amused him to spell it the same way), 1982 listening on a cassette tape in a car, yesterday while trying to write this piece).
[8] 108 holes of golf in four days with back pain and constipation… you can only imagine…
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