“Time”, apparently, is the most commonly used noun in the English language – at least that’s what the Irish theorist, Ciarán Benson, reports having heard on SBS News. It may be so – nevertheless, for all its ubiquity, I simply can’t get my head around it. Physicists assure us that space and time enfold each other; that without one there cannot be the other. Indeed, before the Big Bang, there was no space and no time – or, rather there was no space-time. There was nothing. I’m pleased that this presents no conceptual difficulty for those large-brained scientists, because it certainly does for me. My brain simply refuses to conceive of a pre-universal “nothing”.
The most tangible “thing” in this essay is Port Arthur, but you’ll have to wait for me to take you there, because I’m going to stay, for the moment, with the physics of time.
I’ve been reading Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time, and in that book Rovelli argues that there actually is no such entity as time. There is no past, no present, no future – no then, no now, nothing forthcoming. There is no inexorable flow of time, no passage of time. This is what Rovelli has to say in The Order of Time:
“What is the ‘present’? We say that only the things of the present exist: the past no longer exists and the future doesn’t exist yet. But … compare ‘now’ with ‘here’. ‘Here’ designates the place where the speaker is: for two different people ‘here’ points to two different places … ’Now’ also points to the instant in which the word is uttered … But no one would dream of saying that things ‘here’ exist, whereas things that are not ‘here’ do not exist. So then why do we say that things that are ‘now’ exist and that everything else doesn’t?”
Thus, “the present” does not exist in any invariant sense any more than “here” is invariant. In a review of Rovelli’s work, Andrew Jaffe, in Nature, sums the central idea in this way: “Reality is just a complex network of events onto which we project sequences of past, present and future … “
Most probably this is so, and my notion of time and its implacable linearity is profoundly mistaken. But I can’t help this, and I doubt many of us can. Our sensual experience of time is of a continuum – an unfolding, measured in terms of this-then-that events. It is fixed, sequential and measurable by the instruments we call clocks. The time that we feel ourselves inhabiting is a snapshot – an instant point in a place’s evolution (and a culture’s, and a social mix, and a technological configuration). This is our present, the point we inhabit within the “flow of time”.
It makes more sense to me to posit two intersecting axes: a horizontal axis of space (call it the geography axis) and a vertical axis of time (call it the history axis). The point at which the axes intersect is the point at which the shifting “now” of place exists. Call it the place-time (not space-time) of our particular present. And we cannot inhabit any other point on the intersection of time and place. Not a month ago. Not a year ago. Not 180 years ago.
Which brings me to Port Arthur.
. . .
My great-grandmother married the son of a Point Puer boy convict. She lived into the 1950s. Had she the interest she could have acquired a detailed account, at only one remove, of life in Australia’s best-known penal colony. And she could have passed those remembrances on to me – had I the interest. I didn’t, of course, and I doubt my wizened and black-swaddled little great-grandmother had it either. But the point remains that, in terms of the “passage of time”, Port Arthur was almost as recent, in the larger scheme of things, as yesterday.
And yet … I go to Port Arthur and it all seems so remote, so long ago, and I am lost. I can’t inhabit the place-time of the Port Arthur Penal Station, a place-time that is so utterly alien from my own that it seems lost in an unattainable past. We – “we” because I’m sure I’m not alone in this – have to supply with imagination what we can’t experientially know, because we can’t occupy the detailed cultural weave of that time. In this way the past is continually being recreated, re-imagined; perhaps even moving away from what can be posited as a mesh of fact – albeit contestable fact, and fact that, even then was never acceded to by all.
If I visit Europe, I encounter the remote past. There it is in the stone circles, the dolmens, the megaliths, Stonehenge, Carnac, Skara Brae, Mycenae. Perhaps, though, I might choose to drive into the English countryside, there to marvel at those beautiful villages, with their crooked, half-timbered high streets and their tiny cottages roofed in thatch. Charming, beautiful – but, curiously, not really old. Skara Brae is old. Tudor thatch is not. Even though those villages, most of them, pre-date Port Arthur by 200 to 300 years.
So it is that I must conclude that time is relative; that it is not fixed and rigid – at least in the way we perceive it. Geologists with a sensibility created by notions of deep time, and physicists of course, will have quite a different perception of “old” than we common folk with our ordinary sense of time and its passing. They are unlikely to see anything old in Port Artur, or any other local European artefact. So, too, with members of the Aboriginal community whose indigenous sensibility places them within a lineage that extends far back and beyond the calamitous arrival of the num on these shores. And even those of us who owe our existence here to the uninvited advent of those num can have our sense of historical age shaken when we encounter the botanical legacy of the Gondwana forests.
So it is for me. But still, when I visit Port Arthur, I view those crumbling relics through a grey, unfathomable mist of vast time.
. . .
A couple of other factors bear upon this. Some decades ago (here I go again, measuring time in the conventional way), the nominally English writer, Lawrence Durrell, argued that the artist is outside (or, perhaps, inside) time – the artist disappears into a sealed imagination, a “heraldic universe”, and in the doing she/he “destroys” time. Within the thriving intellectual world of Durrell scholarship, this is much discussed – though, of course, most people do not live within such a “heraldic universe”.
Durrell also argues for the abolition of time on islands – specifically on islands – and this idea might have more general cachet and particular applicability to Tasmania. Ciarán Benson, the writer with whom I began this essay, explains it thus: “The island [is] imagined as a place out of time, as a place where time slows down to timelessness.”
To conclude: we mere mortals do not see time in the way that physicists see time, then. For us, time is linear; remorselessly sequential. We are, nevertheless, adrift, because none of us sees that linear unfolding in the same way.
Benson explains it thus: “Some events matter to us in our world and others don’t. We are deeply attached, whether positively or negatively, to certain players and events in our lives, but not to others. Part of each of our uniqueness resides in what one might call the emotional economics of our unique personal memories, the sequence of events that make our lives.”
I go to Port Arthur, then, and I try to imagine a place-time in which the irascible boy who was my great-great-grandfather found a means of getting by. Growing up on the Tasmanian north-west coast I knew nothing of him: all I know is what I can find in archival records. But it is he to whom I am “deeply attached”, back there in what seems to be a remote, unattainable past. He and the unreachable events that constitute his place-time prominently configure the “emotional economics” of my life – certainly not the awful events perpetrated at Port Arthur by Martin Bryant in the reachable present.
It may be that theoretical physics will have none of it, but I can’t help noticing how time flies.
Pete Hay grew up on the north-west Coast of Tasmania, and has worked as schoolteacher, storeman, truckie’s offsider, youth worker and political adviser at both state and federal tiers of government. But it was as an academic in Victoria and Tasmania that he has spent most of his waged life. He retired as Reader in Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Tasmania at the end of 2008, and turned his focus to creative writing. He has published multiple volumes of poetry and personal essays, and has twice been shortlisted for the Tasmanian Book of the Year. His book of essays, Forgotten Corners: Essays in Search of an Island’s Soul, was named the Small Press Network 2020 Book of the Year.