Time and Light

Time, in abstraction, “appears” as if a visible event. Time as Light constitutes the rate of the propagation of an event. In this respect, even visualizing the past (as with time travel to a distant past) would be mere visualization, mere envisioning, and not per se ‘recovering the event in its originary passage of coming to be’. Time travel today, as fiction, envisions the technology, but does not understand the phenomenon well, and so devolves instead into hocus pocus, technological and narrative slight of hand. Serious consideration of the very meaning of temporality given in terms of its conceptual structure for this reason does not easily arise, and certainly not without the right sort of preparatory exercises. 

We can analyze time horologically, as with our attempts to keep track of it via natural and mechanical clocks and calendars. Such analysis affords us a view of Time, a way of seeing it. But there are other analytical approaches which prove to be meaningful approaches to an understanding of Time. Perhaps if we are to first have an understanding of Time which might finally be regarded as comprehensive in its formalities, if not yet finished in its historical overtures—so that every generation will have a view of Time for a while, and then pass on in the face of a yet newer generation—we should aim at an understanding of the Being for whom the question of the meaning and nature of Time is at issue.
Time, in this respect, refers to Dasein’s finitude, and the urgency which this produces alongside the angst felt in thinking of death. Time is as if saturated by a sort of meaningfulness in this urgency which it presses upon Dasein to seek after. Dasein seeking to restore its past, seeking to reverse the flow of events, to invert as it were the arrow of entropy and tragedy, and so to cast itself back. What direction is this backward leading event? Is it even realizable in terms of our current physical ontologies which preference that of what is, what exists and can thus be seen, in opposition to that which is not, is no more? Or would we need first to learn a new language, one with newer grammatical rules and newer terms, a language which allowed for discourse on this redisclosure of events past? And how else would we expect to disclose a thing so illusive as time reversal?

We might at least imagine such a machine as would naturally arise from such a serious conversation;  and imagination here is at least somewhat important, since it evokes the visual element of Time. What does the person outside the machine witness when witnessing this event of time-reversal? What does the person within this field opened up by the machine witness looking outward at her audience?

Interstellar makes a state-of-the-art styled attempt at visualizing the current best modeling of the sorts of dynamics at play in such an event. The leap across space leads to a leap across Time, one which suggests a general angular function to Time, if not one that reverses events (though in the event of passing through the portal there arises a moment of such, two time-travellers cross paths while passing in opposite directions). In this film, there is a tacit need for visualizing, and hence a seduction into avoiding the deeper difficulties of conceiving Time travel. 

The passenger plays a role in opening up such a direction, such a field, if only as its passive witness. Would such a removal from the forward flow of Time appear to the passenger as a visual movement? Or would such eyes as we possess not be able to process higher dimensional structures? Would we not go blind to the passage between worlds? Wouldn't this be a dark moment, a moment without vision? 

If we have truly been dispossessed of a visual, it is perhaps because we have this instinct for the identity of Time and Light. 

Time is first of all an opening in the World, a Space, wherein events inspire and expire; history rolls itself underfoot by the inspiration of the novel, and the expiration of the institution. This opening is held together in unity by the passage of light from one event to another; seeing. It is being held open by a form of Time known as Dasein, as life. It is such an abstraction which thus opens the way for the easy envisioning of consciousness as light. But then we can see the difficulty, caught as we are by the seductions of envisioning everything, not allowing for thought of the blind moments, the moments when the eyes and all of our other instruments fail us as when we cannot see beyond the event horizon of the reversal. Opening up this particular sort of field doubtlessly produces such an event horizon. But what does that even look like? 

Would one see a hole, whereupon the other side showed some time in the deep past, as with Star Trek’s famous episode, The City on the Edge of Forever. Or would space simply warp the image of the other side from view? Would the vehicle appear to shrink from our eyes? Would it simply fade, as the good Doctor’s Tardis? Would there simply be a hole torn in spacetime, which some eyes could see and some not? Would the sudden loss of local mass impact and destroy the local spatial environment, witnesses included? Would we not have to witness from afar, through instruments? Would the hole simply close back up, or would a crack, an unalterable opening protrude into our local spacetime? Would the vision of us as we moved through this portal appear as if a redshifting movement, of a thing no longer but not yet gone from sight? Would each passing vision blockade and disrupt the motion of the next traveller? or would the visions merge as each new passenger entered, slowly fading over time? Would one be able to “set up shop” in this new environment, carved out of space and time, this crack as a new world to explore? 

So many questions await our response. Perhaps it is enough for the Time being that we let fiction tell us more about this event through the collective imagining of it. But at least we ought to know the questions we want fiction to put to the test.