Time and Textual Practices

I have been mulling over two recent posts on time, one at “Reading Archives” and another at the Long Now blog.

The first post considers how time is reflected in records—how recordkeeping can provide insights into timekeeping. (Note the date and time recorded on this post.)

The second post considers the phenomenon of “temporal chauvinism,” an uncritical adoption of a view of time that is disproportionately fixated on the present. (Note the order of the posts here—the past is epi[b]logue.)

Reading through the papers of a former college president recently, I was fascinated by his insights into a time that was characterized by new media, liberating play, and short attention spans. He was writing about the 1920s.

Links to posts: http://readingarchives.blogspot.com/2007/09/time-and-record.html
http://blog.longnow.org/2007/09/13/we-are-all-temporal-chauvinists-now

Image: The Clockmaker, detail from a watchmaker’s advertisement, Maclean’s Magazine, 1954

The Billion-Year Record

Last week was the 30^th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 1. In the New York Times, Timothy Ferris reflected on the gold-plated phonograph records that were attached to Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2. Ferris writes that the “information [i.e., a collection of sounds and images of life on Earth] etched into the grooves of the records is expected to last at least one billion years.”

Near the end of his article, Ferris concludes that “the very existence of the two spacecraft and the gold records they carry suggests that there is something in the human spirit able to confront vast sweeps of space and time that we can only dimly comprehend.” Perhaps it is this confrontation with the “mind-boggling” limits of known time and space that inspired the title of this piece, “The Mix Tape of the Gods.”

Something of the divine-like ambitions of the Voyager program is present in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). This was one of the first movies I ever saw and I found it be excruciatingly boring (I believe it put me to sleep)—but the set-up is worth recalling here. A damaged voyager spacecraft is found by an alien race of machines, who believe the spacecraft’s origin and mission to be divine. They fix it up to collect information and return to god (i.e., Earth), with disastrous results (until, of course, the Enterprise shows up to save the universe). I suppose an alternative sub-title of “The Collector of the Gods” would have given too much away.

Link to the Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/opinion/05ferris.html

Link to the Voyager web site (and source of image): http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec1.html

Supernatural Dialogues

On his blog “Reading Archives,” in the context of a discussion about the book Remembering War (Yale, 2006) Richard Cox suggests that archival research is something like a “supernatural dialogue.”

Many of the earliest texts and textual practices known to us were meant to function in a preternaturally dialogic way: gods inspired sacred texts and humans wrote for divine readers. A few of the oldest records in the collection I curate are documents that were not intended for human eyes—they were Sumerian prayers, written on cuneiform cones, which were inserted into temple walls to be read by the gods. Only millennia later, when the walls were ruins, were they read by humans.

Image: Cuneiform Dedication Cone (circa 2050 BCE)

Link to post: http://readingarchives.blogspot.com/2007/09/remembering-war.html

The Oldest Repositories

… were for seeds. An interesting article from the New Yorker: “Sowing for Apocalypse,” on seed banks from 6750 BCE to the Doomsday vault being built today.

“Almost all the plants we use in agriculture today were domesticated before historical times.” Seed deposits contain “a record of more than ten thousand years of human experience with crops.”

Abstract available from: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/27/070827fa_fact_seabrook.

Image available from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6335899.stm.

Literary Manuscripts in the Digital Age

In an article in The Chronicle Review, “Hamlet.doc? Literature in a Digital Age,” Matthew Kirschenbaum draws attention to the information that one could, theoretically, discover about electronic records and writing practices if we could preserve digital texts, their associated metadata, and the appropriate software and hardware. Imagine if Shakespeare had had a hard drive, and that what was on it could be rendered …

In his lecture “The Enigma of Shakespeare,” Jorge Luis Borges said that Shakespeare’s contemporaries “did not seem to have had him much in view.” He was not an epic poet, a great “author”; he wrote, for the most part, plays. Not only was his work for the stage, but it belonged to the acting company for which it was written. As de Quincey explained, for Shakespeare “publication was not the printed word. Shakespeare did not write to be read, but to be performed.” Thus Shakespeare retired to his native village, literally leaving his work behind him, Elizabethan equivalent of the hard drive and all. His work had been for the moment, not posterity. “History,” says Borges, “did not exist for him.” In the end, the document that mattered most for him was Will’s will.

Kirshenbaum writes that “challenges in the realm of digital preservation … are best understood as at least as much social as technological.” But there are other challenges, older than literature, such as perspectives on cultural productions and individual recordkeeping practices.

Borges’s reflections on the enigma of Shakespeare also made it into a prose poem, “Everything and Nothing,” which concludes with information from a different sort of record:

History adds that before or after his death he found himself facing God and said: I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man, myself alone. From out of a whirlwind the voice of God replied: I am not, either. I dreamed the world the way you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare: one of the forms of my dreams was you, who, like me, are many and no one.

Chronicle article available from: http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i50/50b00801.htm.

Gilgamesh at the Sea

While vacationing by the sea, I read the Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh’s quest for eternal life sends him across the waters of death to meet with his father, Utnapishtim, who offers him this bit of wisdom: “There is no permanence.” Utnapishtim’s story of the Deluge, which follows, underscores his point. So Gilgamesh returns home not with eternal life but with a story, which he engraves on stone. In this way, through writing and literature, Gilgamesh achieved immortality—after being buried, with the library of Ashurbanipal, for a number of centuries.

Image: The Deluge Tablet, 7th century BCE

Source: http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/me/t/the_flood_tablet,_relating_par.aspx

Layers of Time

Through James Michalko and Stewart Brand, I found my way to Freemon Dyson’s six time scales of survival: the individual (measured in years), the family (measured in decades), the tribe or nation (measured in centuries), the culture (measured in millennia), the species (measured in tens of millennia), and life on the planet (measured in eons).

Somewhat correlative to these time scales, Brand proposes six levels or layers of human civilization, each moving at a difference pace. Moving from the fastest layers to the slowest, these are: fashion/art, commerce, infrastructure, governance, culture, and nature. The faster layers can be more innovative; the slower layers can stabilize and make continuous progress possible (see The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility [Basic Books, 1999], 34ff.).

Michalko contends that libraries, archives, and museums operate at the “deep cultural layer … where we keep time in centuries, in millennia.” Cultural heritage institutions or “memory institutions”

collect, maintain, and provide access to the cultural record. The contents of these institutions are what permit us to reinvent, to innovate, to grow, and to progress at all the other layers of civilization. They inform us about what we know. They help us understand how we govern. They dictate and describe the nature of our infrastructure. They provide the record of our commerce and even shape the fashion and art that we create (“Libraries, Archives, and Museums: Achieving Scale and Relevance in the Digital Age,” RBM 8:1 [2007]: 76).