Natural Time Research Articles

Temporal Perspective in Augustine and the Troubadours

TEMPORAL PERSPECTIVE IN AUGUSTINE AND THE TROUBADOURS I should begin by making it clear that the following essay is a preliminary effort, a roughing out ofan area that I intend to pursue in greaterdepth in the future. So let me start with a question: why do all the best translators of Bernart de Ventadorn insist on mistranslating the opening line ofone ofhis most famous cansos, "Lo tems vai e ven e vire" (P-C 70,30)? Literally this reads: "Time goes and comes and turns." Translators, however, invariably switch the verbs around and render it as "Time comes and turns and goes" (Goldin); "Time comes and goes and runs its round" (Press); "Time comes and goes returning through days and months and years" (GaIm and Nichols). There is a reading implied in each case: all translators adapt Bernart's line to suggest that time travels in a continuous path as it comes and goes. Time, in other words, at least in the translations, constitutes a system—a closed and integrated system—that flows in unbroken fashion before the singer. It seems to me that the chaotic nature of time suggested by Bernart's actual word order is intended and should be preserved. Ifhe had wanted to indicate that time travels an unbroken path he could have done so; each of the verbs vai, ven, and vire is easily rhymed; with only the slightest reworking Bemart could have presented the verbs in such a way as to suggest a continuous path. The order in which he chose to present them, if left as written, suggests rather a perspective on time—a relation between the seeing, singing "I" and time—that is crucial to understanding the development of the poem. The very fact that time is presented not as a unified system but rather as a chaotic, random and external force is important, not only to this poem but to an understanding of the troubadour corpus as a whole. Foritis therandom nature oftime, suggested by thisopening line, that is reinforced in the body ofthe poem in two different ways, first by its contrast with the stolid and steadfast singer whose desire is always one: Cades es us mos talans, Ades es us e no s muda." ('For my desire is always the same/ Always the same and it does not change.' 3-4). Second, and perhaps even more tellingly, by its being compared through theremainderofthe poem with the singer's lady, whose most notable characteristic is her fickleness. Her changeable nature thus offers an echo of time's varying ways, and her unpredictability is the TEMPORAL PERSPECTIVE IN THE TROUBADOURS59 equivalent of time's seemingly random progress. It is precisely the chaotic, unsystematic nature of time, seen from the stable vantage point of the singer, that is being lamented here; time, like the lady, is no longer either comprehensible or useful to the singer; he is both alienated from it and left without an entrée into its seemingly random ways. Charlotte Gross has recently suggested a parallel between the ways Bernart presents time here and the understandingsoffered by his contemporaries, the Chartrians. They too speak of an isolation from time as they attempt to masterand manipulate this external force. Yet it seems to me that therandom, unpredictablequality Bernartascribes to time speaks louder of another impulse; his observation that time, likea lady, is fickle, suggestsratherthebreakdownofakeyperceptual system. T. S. Kuhn, in his Structure ofScientificRevolutions, argues that "the perception ofanomaly—ofa phenomenon, that is, forwhich his paradigm has not readied the investigator—play[s] an essential role in preparing the way for perception ofnovelty ... the perception that something ha[s] gone wrong [is] only prelude to discovery" (57). He continues: "characteristics ofall discoveries from which new sorts of phenomena emerge include: the previous awareness of anomaly, the gradual and simultaneous emergence of both observational and conceptual recognition, and the consequent change of paradigm categories and procedures often accompanied by resistance" (63). What I wish to suggest here and through the rest of this essay is that Bernart's presentation oftimeas arandomandchaotic forceis thefirst stage in a crucial paradigm shift that occurred in the twelfth century. Curiously enough, the resistance that Kuhn marks as frequently...

Making Fence

tied to the house the way Grampa said, but a boat to take her away. In the fall, when the floods came, people said the rivers swelled so big that if you were crazy enough you could take a little fishing boat all the way to the Mississippi River, and from there, you could ride the rough water to the sea. She thought of the two ofthem together in the boat, Mamaw in the back, wrapped in aquilt, two long gray braids falling over her shoulders, looking like a picture of Pocohantas in Alice Ann's history book at school. Alice Ann would do all the rowing , and, who knows, they might end up on some island where it was summer all the time? Yet even as she saw the picture, Alice Ann felt her chest grow heavy with the impossibility of it. She knew she would leave as soon as possible, either when her father came back for her at the end of the summer, or later, on her own. But Mamaw would never come along. She took one ofMamaw's hands andput it under the blanket, to warm it. They both heard a sound and tensed, listening, but it was neither Grampa waking, nor a baby crying, but a semipassing on the highway that ran the ridgeline above them, its tires singing a little across the pavement, the way truck tires do. ^Di1><*¦ Making Fence "Make sure it's square with the world." His big paw clutched at the cedar post And I half-hidden, one eye squinting behind Another, my mind unsure of priceless longitude. All day long, the cocky diggers bit the hole, Their sharp lips gobbling up and spitting out Cold red clay. All day long, the ragged obelisks Penetrated the earth, posing for a time In awkward rebellion to our precious pattern. And we, content to be some kind of Prósperos, Ordered them into long, unbending rows. But I thought in nature's time They would weaken from our packed earth And rise triumphant in those broken lines Of victory. -Marshall Myers 56 ...

Time on the Cross: White Fiction and Black Messiahs

Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery is the title of one of the most controversial studies of this decade. Its opening sentence picks up the refrain: 'The years of black enslavement and the Civil War in which they terminated were our nation's time on the cross.' Yet nowhere is that title expounded or explained. It is expanded merely in an emotive crescendo that rises from 'a sense of shame' (at the system of slavery) to 'the worst holocaust of our history' (the Civil War).1 This is odd. For the Christian metaphor, arresting in itself, becomes doubly so in the 'cliometric' context of graphs, figures, and tables. What can Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman have intended? That America's black slaves were a crucified people? Apparently not. For the whole thrust of their study was to demonstrate that the severity of slavery had been grossly exaggerated. The whole American nation, then? But the Epilogue nails only the American negro to this crux: 'Time on the cross did not come to an end for American blacks with the downfall of the peculiar institution. For they were held on the cross not just by the chains of slavery but also by the spikes of racism' (p. 263). In a study where all aspects of plantation slavery (its relative responsibilities, managerial skills, life expectancy, social stability, sexual exploitation, and economic success) are put in doubt, this crucial password alone, it appears, is beyond question. Nor have some damaging critiques, most notably Herbert G. Gutman's Slavery and the Numbers Game, explored the equation.2 What links the economics of slavery with Jewish concepts of the scapegoat and the redeemer? The cross is one of the oldest and most artfully developed white metaphors for the black experience. So haphazard a revival seems, to say the least, suspicious. It is not the numbers game, therefore, that I wish to expose here; but, by retracing the black messianic theme through American literature, the covert symbolic game.

The time services of the U.S. Naval observatory

ONE HUNDRED and one years ago the Naval Observatory was created. Since then it has had the determination and broadcasting of the nation's time. This is broadcast in mean solar time although kept in sidereal time. Measurement of time is based upon the earth's rotation and is very accurately observed and calculated. Observations are made by transit instruments with which the successive transits of predetermined stars are observed.