In Search of the Poetry of Life in the Experience and Perception of Time
The “Time” is defined as the part of existence that is measured in minutes, days, years, etc., or this process considered as a whole. This is a well-known object fact in the field of physics. However, there exists an extensive discussion in terms of time in a more psychological and philosophical way among philosophers, poets, writers and artists. Based on the notable debate in 1922 between Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson, which is considered a foundation that ‘shaped our experience of time’, Virginia Woolf pointed out (2015, p.59), “an hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second.” to show her radical reflections about how time can be experienced in this romantic way. Also, a few decades later, Hannah Arendt argues that (1971, p.203), “It is the insertion of man with his limited life span that transforms the continuously flowing stream of sheer change … into time as we know it” in her exploration of the interaction between time and humans’ perception. All those impressive reflections mainly depend on the individual cognition of the experience and perception of time, which has shown a variety of dialogues with time where people can hear a certain kind of resonant voice across different ages and cultures. Also, the notion of time-related to human’s mental development becomes a more and more important research question in art. Many artists put the theory and their specific experience of time perception into their art practice, aiming to present individual realisation from their ‘insertion’ in the stream of time and life. This essay will first depict the possible relationship between time condition and the phenomenological experience from an individual perspective, in which people might be able to learn a kind of poetry of life and extract some understandings from the time-loop of life and death, followed by a demonstration of the importance and of the stillness in terms of the way we experience time and how to possibly understand the stillness appears at times in a certain life occasion.
Time can be regarded as a series of successive moments, which indicates that in every single moment, a man is experiencing it. Human time, as we know, is to describe how we reside in time and also refer to the way we anticipate in time with phenomenological experience. As a great poet and key figure of the exploration of the mystery and uncertainty about the nature of life in time, Jorge Luis Borges contemplates his existence, personal identity concerning time and shares his sheer joy and attainments of profound ideas, which are anchored in his magical world of creativity, in a few select verses: (Borges, 1964, p.233) “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.” From Borges’ point of view, the experience of time seems to be often paradoxical. He tends to emphasize the importance of individuals’ self-consciousness in experiencing and perceiving time. Even if sometimes some contradictory outcomes occur, but in his magical reality world, all becomes marvellously reasonable and contain a quality of philosophical poetry. In Borges’ maze of time, it provides viewers with a narrative that human is always lost in time as “a tireless labyrinth, a chaos, a dream” (ibid.). There is another distinguished poet from different culture background, Dylan Thomas, can be regarded as a good example of an enquirer of the meaning of time, the past and death. His father’s death made him directly encounter the demise of a beloved one. Thomas wrote down his most representative verses (1966, p.116), “Do not go gentle into that good night … Rage, rage against the dying of the light”, in front of his dying father’s bed. This poem has encouraged a quality of human spirit in which people can actively experience time with their own perspectives. As a matter of fact, the understanding of time is subjective, unique and personal in different people’s eyes. The subjectivity and understanding of time depend on individual experience which means how everyone sees it. If in every second we interact with time by simply living or somehow consuming our life and those activities are based on our body, flesh and blood, we only see the time as a mechanical fact and people are in a passive place to see this truth.
So, when we can certainly tell the passage of time? Maybe it is the moment we see birth or death, we may know that we have been through birth and are going to experience death one day with no doubt. Even though there is a rare possibility that someone has any memory about his birth and there is no chance to tell anyone how death experience looks like, but our body and senses are always the common things we all have. We can feel it in each moment. Apart from birth and death, we can share those moments we call highlights or milestones of a lifetime, like the first time to hold a pet in arms, the first teen crush and kiss, the first time to see snow, the first graduation, the first pregnancy. We also have those similar moments called poignancy or rock bottom, such as seeing a bird died in front of us, breaking up with someone we care about, to hold a hand of a dying family member we love. Due to those moments, we can share our joy and happiness or our empathy and pain. So I believe we all own a similar perception of time as long as we live life. In this case, I would say this is an active place where we see the time.
Antony Gormley once stated that (2013, p.73), “the idea of resistance and just being has, for me, become more important” when Michael Newman asked him why it is important to emphasize stillness in relation to the way we experience time. And that is why Gormley ‘s sculptures are often demanding people stop and that could help the viewers begin to look at their environment. So, maybe if we try to start to realise or understand something, we might need to begin with slowing down. Like Gormley says (ibid., p.74), “it provoked people to stop in their tracks and re-examine their context.” The stillness of time or slowing down a bit from time to time is somehow necessary for contemplating and realizing our environment. Similarly, Walter Benjamin has depicted how we can see a certain kind of ‘aura’ in our daily life, a moment, a specific life occasion. special and unique as they all have meanings from different people’s perspective. To him, the 'aura' of life can be defined as “a unique manifestation of a remoteness, however close it may be.” (2008, p.9) To be more specific, “Lying back on a summer's afternoon, gazing at a mountain range on the horizon or watching a branch as it casts its shadow over our reclining limbs, we speak of breathing in the aura of those mountains or that branch.” (ibid.) A stillness or a bit slowing down our pace allows us to see more closely in every moment where it has the meaning of “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” (ibid., p.12) What I might be able to interpret is that perhaps Benjamin was trying to tell us, we should pay more attention to our daily life, to seize every moment and hour, to capture the living beauty, vitality and poetry just spread in front of us. As if these moments are some verses written by the time, what they try to tell us is to see and give it our sincere appreciation.
Cerith Wyn Evans, in my opinion, can be regarded as an artist often emphasizes the stillness and blankness in his sculptures, installations and site-specific intervention which are characterized by the use of ephemeral elements such as light and sound. And the core notion of which I can see is an experience of temporal duration of the space and time. The use of light, given that film itself is a strip of light-sensitive material. There is a sense of movement and certainly the sense of time as well as the idea of expressing a work in time and through time. With a colour tone of simplicity and purity given by the white neo light, the quirky soundtracks along with the massive out-of-order neo light perhaps refer lasting white noise on a snow screen, a long time blankness. I also believe that the negative space or shape of the work is as important as the work itself. This reminds me of the “Liu Bai” in Chinese painting, a skill of painting composition or line drawing by leaving blankness or emphasizing the negative shape to allow more imagination in simplicities. The artist seems to intentionally emphasize the blankness in his work by using sound and light filling the gallery space. So, something beyond or above those purely simple substance objects can be somehow more easily perceived by the viewers when they immerse themselves in the space. This experience of the stillness and blankness of time can be drawn an analogy with the 'imagination space' in Chinese ink painting, like a kind of poetic-aesthetic sense, only can be perceived but cannot be described in words. Also, it can be resonant to what Benjamin expresses (ibid.) “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be”, providing the connectivity allows viewers to see themselves at the place where they see, experience and perceive the existence in such a certain life occasion.
“What is time?” the protagonist of the film Eternity and a Day, directed by Theodoros Angelopoulos, asked his friend. “My grandpa said, time is a kid, playing sand at the beach”, his little friend answered by persuading him to go to the beach without his mother’s permission. At the end of this film, Alexandre, the protagonist, asked his departed wife, “what is tomorrow?” His wife responded, “tomorrow will last eternity and a day.” A series of pictures of a sense of everlasting nostalgia, a long search of memory and past romance, a fear of uncertain future and death, constitute an enigmatic universal theme about time in this film – to search for the existence and identity, in a very poetic means. The innocent kid pictures time as a place where they can have fun. The past wife can certainly tell that time is what she believes it is. Only the man, in an ambiguous situation, where he knows that the beauty of his past and the limited days in the future, has no idea what time could be, as time is almost running out. He seems to get lost in a labyrinth, like the poem that he has been working on for his lifetime remained unfinished, everything in life is open-ended. From this long journey of the last day of a man’s life, Angelopoulos demands the viewers’ high patience to get in and out of the fluidity of time from the past, memory and poetic fantasy, and in and out of a sense of blankness in this only life occasion. He might try to use Alexandre’s point of view to convey that time can be always a central concern in every day, depicting that time could be a long open-ended poem to everyone.
Human body can be seen as an archive of time, with no doubt, implying the continuous trace of time on appearance and also on the aspect how to sense it. Although how to experience and perceive time is only a way to sense time and the phenomenological varies from different personal perspectives, people still can exchange their feeling in a moment or a specific life occasion. This is a certain kind of realisation, poetry of life. “In these things there lies a deep meaning; Yet when we would express it, words suddenly fail us.” Just as Tao Yuanming, a Chinese ancient poet, said in his Drinking series so wisely. Only the past is certain, we are for sure always live in the present. I think people are always forgetting to slow the pace down and just enjoy the present moment. During this special period of a worldwide pandemic, everyone is forced to stay longer at home. It seems that time has been stretched to two times or even more, which means everybody has more spare time to see the blankness and stillness of time. We could just spend an afternoon lying back, gazing at the sky or a branch of a tree outside the window, to breathe the aura in this unusual time, to cherish it, as it can be the moment of a precious life occasion, of hard-won peace.
Reference:
Arendt, H. (1971) The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt. p.203
Borges, J. L. (1964) A New Refutation of Time in D. A. Yates and J. E. Irby (eds) Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. New York: New Direction. p.233
Benjamin, W. (2008) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin. p.9
Gormley, A. (2013) Still Being: A Conversation about Time in Art in A. Groom (eds) Time. Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery. pp.73-74
Thomas, D. (1966) Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems 1934-1952. London: Dent. p.116
Tao, Y. (2000) Chinese Poems. New York: Dover Publications p.105
Woolf, V. (2015) Orlando: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p.59
Illustrations:
fig.1 Antony Gormley. 2007. Event Horizon. Fibreglass and cast iron. London Hayward Gallery. Photo by Gautier Deblonde.
fig.2 Antony Gormley. 2007. Event Horizon. Fibreglass and cast iron. London Hayward Gallery. Photo by Phil Stapleton
fig.3 Cerith Wyn Evans. 2017. Forms in Space… by Light (in Time). White neon. Courtesy White Cube. Photo in exhibition “…the illuminating Gas” Milan Pirelli angarBicocca
fig.4 Cerith Wyn Evans. 2017. Composition for 37 Flutes (in two parts), 2018. White neon. 37 crystal glass flutes, breathing unit and valve system, plastic tubes. 477 x 355 x 300 cm Courtesy White Cube
Fig.5 Wu Guanzhong. 1996. Reminiscence of Jiangnan. Ink on paper. 137.8 x 68.5 cm. Refer to ‘Liu Bai’ in Chinese ink painting. Hong Kong Museum of Art
Fig.6 Theo Angelopoulos. 1998. Eternity and a Day. at 00:04:28/132 mins
Fig.7 Theo Angelopoulos. 1998. Eternity and a Day. at 02:01:24/132 mins
Bibliography:
Books:
Arendt, H. (1971) The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt.
Borges, J. L. (1964) Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. New York: New Direction.
Benjamin, W. (2008) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin.
Groom, A. (editor) (2013) Time in Documents of Contemporary Art. Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery and Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Johnstone, S. (editor) (2008) The Everyday in Documents of Contemporary Art. Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery and Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Thomas, D. (1966) Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems 1934-1952. London: Dent.
Tao, Y. (2000) Chinese Poems. New York: Dover Publications.
Woolf, V. (2015) Orlando: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rankine, C. (2017) Don’t Let Me Be Lonely London: Penguin Books.
Exhibitions:
Argianas, A. (2020) “Hollowed Water” London: Camden Art Centre.
Evans. C. W. (2017) “…the illuminating Gas” Milan: Pirelli angarBicocca.
Evans. C. W. (2020) “No realm of thought… No field of vision” London: White Cube Bermondsey.
Rico, G. (2018) “One Law for The Lion & Ox is Oppression”, New York: Galerie Perrotin.
Rico, G. (2019) “The Discipline of the Cave”, Colorado: Aspen Art Museum
Films:
Eternity and a Day (1998) Directed by Theodoros Angelopoulos, Greece, Produced by Theo Angelopoulos, Eric Heumann, Giorgio Silvagni, 132 mins, [DVD]
Landscape in the Mist (1988) Directed by Theodoros Angelopoulos, Paris, Paradis Films, 126 mins, [DVD]