Sense Of Timelessness Research Articles

An Imagined Shrinking Community: Japanese Nationalism and The Chronology of the Future

ABSTRACT How should we understand the relationship between nationalism and discourses of national decline, and more specifically the discourses of a shrinking nation? Driven by this question, this article highlights how bleak imaginings of the future also work to construct the relationship of the individual to the putative national community, creating forms of sentimental national belonging. This article analyses an emerging genre of best-selling books in Japan, Mirai no nenpyō [The chronology of the future] series, that present a dismal vision of Japan’s national demographic future. Their goal is to provoke a sense of national urgency by encouraging Japanese nationals to feel personally the shrinking nation through imagining its coming consequences for everyday life. Such narrations of an imagined shrinking community act to create a timeless sense of national belonging, with daily lived experience in the imagined future interpreted through the lens of the contracting nation. Importantly, the future that these discourses present is nationalized within boundaries separating it from global developments and intercourse. Ultimately, this form of nationalism is constituted not by dying for the nation, but instead by people seeing the continued stability of everyday life as intricately tied to the fate of the national community.

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE INDIVIDUAL SUBJECTIVE WELL-BEING AND THE MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE PRODUCED BY THE USE OF PSYCHEDELICS

Respondents with experience in the use of psychedelics (psilocybin, LSD, ketamine, MDMA, etc.) participated in the study. Based on the subjective assessment of the level of awareness in the topic of psychedelics, it was found that 49% of respondents have a high level, 47% have an average level, and 4% have a low level of awareness in the topic. Most of the study participants were in Ukraine (84%); outside Ukraine, in particular in such countries as Germany, Israel, Bulgaria, the USA, England, Switzerland, Spain and the Czech Republic were 16% of participants. With the help of correlation analysis and the analysis of the significance of the differences between the average values of the studied indicators, the nature of the connection between the psychological well-being of the individual and the mystical experience produced by psychedelics was revealed. It has been established that the subjective awareness of the subject of psychedelics is not directly related to the actual mystical experience that arises as a result of the use of psychedelics, therefore the mystical experience is not a part of "self-suggestion", it is a real phenomenon. The mystical experience produced by psychedelics has been shown to be related to the subjective well-being of the individual, especially to happiness as its structural element, particularly in terms of a sense of unity, euphoria, and a sense of timelessness or boundary-breaking.

Music as a Liberal Art: The Poetry of the Universe

This article explores the place of music in the classical liberal arts curriculum, which consists of the trivium (the arts of language) and the quadrivium (the arts of number). Music is part of the quadrivial disciplines and studied as applied arithmetic. However, as argued in this article, it is also a bridge to the discipline of rhetoric, which is part of the trivium. The article begins with a brief review of St. Augustine’s De Musica, the first in a planned (but unrealized) series of dialogs on the value of the classical liberal arts to the emerging Christian culture of Antiquity. It proceeds to a discussion of music and its relation to the contemporary American liberal arts curriculum. Two case studies follow that address the ontological reality of music as a time-bound medium, and attempts to mute this reality in the service of creating a sense of timelessness. Thus subsuming the temporal into the Divine–what Augustine called “a poem of the universe”. The first case study is Dante Alighieri’s Paradiso, which is a journey through the heavens with each planet representing one of the seven liberal arts as preparatory to the Beatific Vision. The second case study focuses on J.S. Bach’s attempts to create a sense of timelessness in the St. Matthew Passion by the use of musical forms and musical rhetorical devices that tend to abolish time. The article concludes with suggestions on how teachers can use 20th and 21st-century movements in Western art music as pathways to appreciate music’s pivotal role in the Catholic liberal arts tradition.

Путешествие как категория философии транспорта

This article deals with the challenge of travel as a category of the philosophy of transport in the unity of its ontological, epistemological, social and existential characteristics. Travel has its own ontology: this is a kind of beingness, defined as being-on-the-move. A trip becomes a travel through the reflection of an individual going on the trip. Travel has epistemological potential, it activates the cognitive activity of a person, creates new meanings and value paradigms. Travel is a social value as a means of transforming habitual social roles, destroying stereotypes, educating the ability to dialogue and tolerance towards the Otherness. The travel is not only a cross border process, but rather a transcultural one. The purpose, meaning, and result of a travel may be not just the change of a cultural picture, but of the entire cultural paradigm. Railways, being a purely technical phenomenon, have a well-known metaphysics which determines the existential transformations of the travelers. A railway line going beyond the horizon symbolizes a kind of existential infinity, limitlessness and vagueness. A travel is a kind of act of «communion» to this infiniteness, creates a sense of timelessness, while at the same time maintaining a sense of finitude, a blind end. The railway is a metaphor for a life’s journey, which has original and destination stations, and the train is an allegory of moving along it. A railway station is a metaphysical point of return/no return, separating life, people and actions. The railway and the travelling along it link together the beginning and the end, finitude and infiniteness, certainty and uncertainty, motion and immobility.

Parental experiences of the liminal period of a child's fatal illness.

The article offers a description of parents' experiences of their child's ultimately fatal illness as it unfolds over the successive stages of medical treatment, in the context of the liminality theory. The parents (N = 23) were interviewed 1-4 years after their child's death. The research method involved conducting narrative interviews with parents in order to obtain a spontaneous narration of the child's illness as it unfolded. The grounded theory approach, including the narrative and performative aspects of such parental utterances, was applied as the main research strategy. The results provide insight into the main areas and processes of common parental experiences, such as the pervasive sense of becoming trapped in timelessness and ambiguity. Further states reported by parents included oscillating between a distancing stance and involvement, and a dualistic relationship with medical staff and the medical system: between alignment and disharmony. The study indicates the importance of treating delivery of such a diagnosis as a process rather than as a one-time event. The sense of ambiguity is treated as a kind of necessary parental coping mechanism, whilst the sense of timelessness gives parents a unique sense of time in which they do not have to think about the child's potentially imminent death.

Navigating the COVID-19 pandemic from Mexico City.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced immediate changes to clinical practice. The article presents some adaptations undertaken during the first outbreak in Mexico City, from March to June 2020. Key modifications were the telephone mode, the boundaries of personal space during the session, and the pace of the analysis. Regressive topics were recurrent, and some patients exhibited paranoid features related with contagion and vulnerability. Feelings of frustration, longing, and loneliness were pervasive, oftentimes accompanied by the symptoms of anxiety and depression, and an overall sense of timelessness was common. As the pandemic intensifies, fear and grief came closer. The experiences of the first outbreak might help other psychoanalysts navigate a complicated period.

King John

Reviewed by: King John Gemma Miller King JohnPresented by the Royal Shakespeare Company at The Swan Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon. 09 24, 2019- 03 21, 2020. Directed by Eleanor Rhode. Design by Max Johns. Lighting Design by Lizzie Powell. Music composed by Will Gregory. With Rosie Sheehy (King John), Bridgitta Roy (Queen Elinor), Charlotte Randle (Constance), Michael Abubakar (The Bastard), Tom McCall (Hubert), David Birrell (King of France), Katherine Pearce (Cardinal Pandulph), and others. Although King Johnhas a far patchier performance history than many of Shakespeare's plays, particularly in the past one hundred years, it is not difficult to see its contemporary relevance. From fake news to breaks with Europe, broken vows to divisive politics, this is most certainly a play that speaks to Britain in the twenty-first century. Director Eleanor Rhode and designer Max Johns gave their 2019/20 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company a 1960s aesthetic of clashing colors which gradually descended into a darker, more medieval feel throughout the second half. This collision of historical settings simultaneously conveyed a sense of timelessness while also suggesting that the post-war boom was a high point in history—one from which we have seen an unstoppable decline ever since. The play opened with a hungover King John (Rosie Sheehy) staggering across the stage shading his eyes and wincing. From a transistor radio nestled between two old-fashioned dial telephones, the clipped voice of a reporter announced news of an impending war with France. John broke a raw egg into a tall glass, topped it up with tomato juice, stirred it vigorously, and drank it down whole. As he slammed the empty glass down onto the table, his courtiers entered dancing exuberantly, seemingly oblivious to threats of a "fierce and bloody war" (1.1.17) from Europe. This opening sequence was a riot of sound, provided by a live five-piece band, vibrant costumes, and psychedelic lighting that established John's rule as one of complacency and decadence. [End Page 259] The set was dominated throughout by a large tapestry hanging over the back wall depicting John at its center, besieged by threats from all sides. It was a historical patchwork of mafia-styled men toting machine-guns, Elizabethan archers wearing pantaloons, a particularly grumpy looking Plantagenet lion, and Chinook helicopters. The aesthetic was a similar pastiche of styles—think the Bayeux tapestry crossed with Grayson Perry. Above the center of the thrust stage was suspended a large metallic coronet with a fleur-de-lys pattern repeated around its circumference. At first the coronet hung unobtrusively over the stage, but as parley descended into physical conflict, it was periodically lit from within with a bloody red light. This was particularly effective when it coincided with lines such as Blanche's "The sun's o'ercast with blood" (3.1.326). The coronet descended in the second half to hang a foot above the stage, functioning as an increasingly insistent and repressive symbol of violence. The blinding of Arthur, which opened the second half, was played out inside the lowered crown. Nurses wearing surgical masks lit candles around the top of the coronet which created flickering shadows around the darkened stage. As Hubert, similarly styled in a hospital white coat, carefully selected implements from a trolley and approached the boy, the coronet added to Arthur's sense of entrapment in a most sinister way. John's claim that his order to murder Arthur was inspired by Hubert's "abhorred aspect" (4.2.224) was literalized by having half of Hubert's face marked with burn scars. He was, like Arthur himself, a victim scarred by tyranny and trapped in the play's harsh and unremitting power struggles. The blinding scene excepted, much of the violence underpinning the play was presented in a farcical way. The initial confrontation between France and England began as a dance-off and then transformed into a boxing match, with foam fingers liberally distributed among the audience. The citizens of Angers, three women positioned on a balcony at the back of the stage, tucked into popcorn as they enjoyed the spectacle. At Blanche and Lewis's wedding, Anglo-French relations broke down...

The Old Truck by Jarrett Pumphrey

Reviewed by: The Old Truck by Jarrett Pumphrey Natalie Berglind Pumphrey, Jarrett The Old Truck; written and illus. by Jarrett and Jerome Pumphrey. Norton, 2020 [40p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-324-00519-3 $17.95 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-324-00520-9 $17.48 Reviewed from galleys R 3-6 yrs An old red truck is used by a couple and their daughter for tasks "on a small farm," but it eventually ages, as does the couple's daughter ("the old truck grew older," the caption says, as the girl grows taller). The truck, abandoned, sits in a patch of grass by the farm long enough to turn brown with rust, until the cycle is started over when the girl grows into an adult: "On a small farm, a new farmer worked hard." The woman repairs the truck, and on the last page, she is seen on her own farm with her own daughter with a red truck. This readaloud uses easy, repetitive language that kids would be quick to catch onto; much of the narration happens visually, through uniquely crafted stamps that depict the farm, the truck, and the Black family that own them in blocky shapes that are textured to fade around the edges. This picture book addresses the circular tendency of time as the truck and the girl end up where they started; the faded colors give it a vintage feel that adds to its sense of timelessness. It's a quietly lyrical treatment that represents the diversity of the farming business and celebrates the labor of families that work the land. [End Page 223] Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Broken rhythm and slow time: temporalities in John McGahern’s novels

ABSTRACTThis essay, informed by postcolonial and ecocritical criticisms of modern temporality, examines the “strange sense of timelessness” in John McGahern’s novels. McGahern’s novels are punctuated with dysfunctional timepieces, which seem to invoke a modernist sentiment that distrusts mechanic time. Differing from modernist works, however, McGahern’s novels are primarily concerned with rural Ireland, as opposed to the urban settings with which his modernist predecessors were mostly preoccupied. The “broken rhythm” in his rural writing, then, may signify the multi-layered temporalities in postcolonial states, where colonial modernity is paradoxically resisted and replicated. The meandering narrative and a sense of environmental consciousness in his later novels, moreover, register an ecological “slow time” at odds with the modern temporality of speed. Beginning with modernism and moving on to postcolonial and ecocritical frameworks, this essay explores the ways in which McGahern’s use of time, suggested by his temporal figures and narrative strategies, serves as a subtle critique of the globalising modernity of our time. In thus doing, this essay teases out the enduring social critique in McGahern’s work and engages with the growing scholarly interest in ecocritical aspects of his writing.

‘Once Upon a Time in Marseille’: Displacement and the Fairy Tale in Anna Seghers’ Transit

Written in 1941, while she was living in exile in Mexico, and published in 1944 in Mexico and the United States, Anna Seghers’ novel Transit replicates on a formal level an experience of displacement, statelessness, and exile. In the following analysis, I examine Transit as a text of forced migration. Several features of the novel attempt to produce an experience of displacement: the narrative situation, the incorporation of descriptions that place the events of World War II into a longer history of forced migration, and the use of references to the genre of the fairy tale. The descriptions that engage with past forced migration and displacement attempt to universalize the historical specificities of the time period, whereas the references to fairy tales generate a sense of timelessness associated with this genre. Through these strategies, Seghers’ novel itself attempts to displace time. Seghers situates Transit within a long history of forced migration and exile, in which the categories that are often used to define and divide populations—such as nationality, ethnicity, and religion—are in flux. By emphasizing the role of mistaken identity, Seghers destabilizes the concept of immutable identities in a period of upheaval and transition.

Frozen Time in Gustav Deutsch’s "Shirley: Visions of Reality"

Gustav Deutsch’s film Shirley: Visions of Reality 2013 is a slow cinema film which employs Edward Hopper’s paintings and reproduces their aesthetics. Both Hopper’s art and slow cinema can be characterized by silence, passivity, and the theme of alienation. The mood of alienation and loneliness, accompanied by the visual motifs and the tension between light and shadow taken from Hopper’s paintings, create an image of suspended time in the film. This is also enacted by the techniques characteristic of slow cinema that the film uses, particularly the long take. The poetics of slow cinema is employed to present the protagonist in in-between spaces, times and states that are located beyond the productive precinct of capitalism. The painterly stillness evoked in the film reflects the continuous present of the character’s existence and her subjective experience of time away from the culture of acceleration. Her interior time is juxtaposed with other time vectors: the historical time of 1930s–1960s America, historical decontextualization and the temporality of non-places. The distinct time vectors contribute to the sense of timelessness that the film ultimately generates.

Creative writing and academic timelessness

ABSTRACTTime is a rare commodity in the academy. Academics are often inundated with multiple teaching, administrative and coordinating tasks, which detracts from time for creative writing and research. This paper discusses the problem of time poverty in academia. It proposes that engaging in creative modes, such as expressive, embodied and poetic writing, can generate a sense of timelessness. Timelessness will be defined as the sensation of fixed or frozen time, where academics are so fully engrossed in an encounter that they are unaware of time passing. Creative writing can evoke such timeless moments by connecting academics to intrinsically meaningful work that gives them pleasure.

Imprints in time: towards a moderately robust past

Presentism says that only present objects exist (timelessly). But the view has trouble grounding past-tensed truths like “dinosaurs existed”. Standard Eternalism grounds those truths by positing the (timeless) existence of past objects—like dinosaurs. But Standard Eternalism conflicts with the intuition that there is genuine change—the intuition that there once were dinosaurs and no longer are any. I offer a novel theory of time—‘The Imprint’—that does a better job preserving both the grounding and genuine change intuitions. The Imprint says that the past and present exist (in the timeless sense), but where the present exhibits mass-energy, the past only consists of curved empty regions of spacetime. We therefore avoid saying that there are dinosaurs, since there is no mass-energy in the past; but the curvature of the past gives us a way to ground the truth that “dinosaurs existed”.

Time and Mortality

ABSTRACTThe author describes a patient’s experience of the simultaneity of past, present, and future, and draws some parallels to Freud’s sense of timelessness. Free time, or freedom from time, can be considered both an achievement in analysis, like the achievement of free association, and a defense against the sense of one’s own mortality. Ultimately, the patient’s capacity to grieve the anticipation of his own death alleviated some of his terror of the end of time. Some correlations with literature and painting are considered.

Non-technical approach to the challenges of ecological architecture: Learning from Van der Laan

Up to now, ecology has a strong influence on the development of technical and instrumental aspects of architecture, such as renewable and efficient of resources and energy, CO2 emissions, air quality, water reuse, some social and economical aspects. These concepts define the physical keys and codes of the current ׳sustainable׳ architecture, normally instrumental but rarely and insufficiently theorised. But is not there another way of bringing us to nature? We need a theoretical referent. This is where we place the Van der Laan׳s thoughts: he considers that art completes nature and he builds his theoretical discourse on it, trying to better understand many aspects of architecture. From a conceptual point of view, we find in his works sense of timelessness, universality, special attention on the ׳locus׳ and a strict sense of proportions and use of materials according to nature. Could these concepts complement our current sustainable architecture? How did Laan apply the current codes of ecology in his architecture? His work may help us to get a theoretical interpretation of nature and not only physical. This paper develops this idea through the comparison of thoughts and works of Laan with the current technical approach to ׳sustainable׳ architecture.

Children of the Alley: Mahafouz's Allegory of Violence and Oppression

The study is an attempt to read the novel as a political allegory of exploitation and oppression in post-independence Egypt. An important objective of the study is to show how the use of allegory in the novel is necessitated by a political reality characterized by violence and oppression and how this allegorical aspect gives the novel a sense of timelessness and universality that makes it relevant to today Middle East. It tries to answer questions like; how repressive regimes are created? The study finds out that Mahfouz employed the existing myths to deal with political themes like oppression, tyranny, revolution and abuse of power. He also secularized the religious history of humanity to show us how repressive regimes are created and how can people get rid of them?

The tragic undertones that mar our best achievements, and: When you think of the past, what comes to mind is the dead, and: It has been observed before, of course, how oppressive, and: How instructive, the skull placed among the bric-a-brac, and: Or take, for instance, this still life from a Pompeii wall, and: For weeks now I have been

The tragic undertones that mar our best achievements, and: When you think of the past, what comes to mind is the dead, and: It has been observed before, of course, how oppressive, and: How instructive, the skull placed among the bric-a-brac, and: Or take, for instance, this still life from a Pompeii wall, and: For weeks now I have been meditating on still lifes, and: The apples in the basket, the apples of the mind Morri Creech (bio) The tragic undertones that mar our best achievements The tragic undertones that mar our best achievements,The sense, beneath the languor of afternoon, that thingsCome to an end, that one moment falls into the nextAnd the footsteps of the past fade down the long hallway,Have nothing to do with the pears at rest in their dish.How still they are by the sugar bowl and tablecloth,How poised for a conclusion that never comes, cantedToward the foreground as if they could spill to the floor,Though they never do. They are a trick of perception,Of course, all curve and color, not the solid objectsThat we take them to be. Time, in passing, has givenThem a sense of timelessness. They are lit from within.They appear as pears, these shapes, pears of pure idea. [End Page 107] When you think of the past, what comes to mind is the dead When you think of the past, what comes to mind is the deadPeacock you once saw hanging from the wall in winter,The blood and claws and stiff wings and the dazzling plumage,And later on how your father plucked and gutted it,Rinsed the tender meat, then quartered it in the kitchen.You were the girl in the light of the window who staredAnd thought to herself: nothing has ever looked so still.You were maybe nine or ten. But what you think of now,More than the smells of the kitchen or the blood dryingOn the stones, more than the way your father held the knifeAbove the cutting board, whistling while the tendons snapped,Is how you knew then that you would keep this memoryAs you glimpsed yourself in the gleam of the peacock’s eye. [End Page 108] It has been observed before, of course, how oppressive It has been observed before, of course, how oppressiveIs the stillness of painted plums and jugs and silverTureens to those who are caught in the flux of motion,The failing of flesh into time. About the stasisAnd Keatsian calm one finds in art—the idlenessOf the cat crouched next to the pheasant it cannot reach,The noon sunlight flooding the kitchen window withoutDiminishment—about that semblance of foreverI have nothing to add, standing behind the plush ropesThat keep me on this side of timelessness, the minutesBearing me slowly into a future where jugs breakAnd silver tarnishes, where plums molder in their dish,Where the cat, pheasant caught in its mouth, leaps and is gone. [End Page 109] How instructive, the skull placed among the bric-a-brac How instructive, the skull placed among the bric-a-brac,Among all these objects arranged like a jumble sale:The necklace tossed as an afterthought on the tableWhere the book lies open to a page we cannot seeAnd the fluted glass, the loose change, and the pocket watchGleam in what spare light the painter has afforded us,Saying, how fleeting is time, how futile is desire.Here are plums and quinces, an apple halved on a plate,Caught in their sumptuous tumble to oblivion,And the violin waiting there, lovely but untouched,Since no one comes to this seventeenth-century roomRendered in paint except to examine the riches,While the skull looks back with its air of cool appraisal. [End Page 110] Or take, for instance, this still life from a Pompeii wall Or take, for instance, this still life from a Pompeii wallOf fruits and vases, grapes and cherries and apples heapedHigh in a bowl so clear we can see to the bottom—What astonishes me...

Not All Singing and Dancing: Padstow, Folk Festivals and Belonging

ABSTRACTIt is well established that while folk festivals appear to illustrate an ancient, bucolic past, they are contemporary markers of history and belonging. Cornish folk festivals can provide a valuable illustration of this. The Padstow May Day celebration, the Obby Oss, epitomises this sense of timelessness and spontaneous celebration. It attracts numerous tourists keen to join the spectacle of dancing and singing, and is seen by the Cornish tourist industry as the stellar event of the festival year. In contrast, Padstow's mid-winter Mummers celebration is downplayed by county officials. This event sees participants dance, drum and sing around the town, wearing black face-paint, with a repertoire that includes Minstrel ditties, while critical questions have been asked at regional and national levels. Both raise questions about the ways in which belonging is negotiated as a critical element in the Cornish festival landscape.

“Long Gone Hippies in the Desert”: Counterculture and “Radical Self-Reliance” at Burning Man

“Long Gone Hippies in the Desert”: Counterculture and “Radical Self-Reliance” at Burning Man

Spectacle as spectralization, untimely timelessness: Marcelino pan y vino and mid-1950s' Francoism

This article asserts an intrinsic link between the spectacle and the specter. More precisely, I argue that the spectacularization of some dead bodies spectralizes others and that the spectacle's pursuit of a sense of timelessness necessarily brings about its own shadowy untimeliness. The beloved classic Spanish film Marcelino pan y vino (Ladislao Vajda, 1955), when examined against the backdrop of the Franco regime's official ideology of the mid-1950s, shows how these connections play out in a specific context. The film, based on a popular short story by the militant Falangist José María Sánchez Silva, clearly attempts to promote National-Catholicism and the timelessness of the imagined España eterna characterized by essentialized traditional values exalted at the time by the regime. As we will see, the spectacle of the title character's glorified death in the film resonates with the contemporaneous enshrinement of the “caídos por Dios y España,” that is, the deceased from the winning side of the war. However, Marcelino's death also inevitably evokes the untimely specter of the vencidos, whose experience the regime erased from public discourse. Ostentatious visibility and concealment from sight are thus of a pair both on and off the screen. And disavowed past violence emerges in spectral form through a fraught temporality, an untimeliness that manifests itself in the film at both a thematic and formal level.