An introduction (Madrid, Spain)

Greetings, amoebos and amoebas! And a hearty welcome to this blog, which I will be keeping all of this year while I travel to and through Spain, Mexico, Norway and Chile with a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. Since this is the first entry, I should explain what I'm doing in all of those different places. (People always ask: “Hmm . . .which country doesn't belong?” Poor Norway. But the joke is on the other three, because the fact that they are Spanish-speaking countries is only part of the reason that I'm visiting them.) My project has to do with time – specifically, concepts of time in different natural environments and cultures. Where we grow up, and in what culture, deeply affects our lifestyles, our livelihoods, and our philosophies. I grew up in the United States, where clocks reign supreme and faster is better. I quickly learned to arrive promptly to appointments and turn assignments in by their deadlines. So far, my life has been a series of steps, a cause-and-effect chain, if you will, leading me to the next goal – linear progress – and the steps are a direct result of my doings and the doings of everyone else around me. All of the events that will take place in the next hour will be the result of the events that take place in this hour, a complex, chaotic system, but one with some sort of direction. Things don't just change; they develop. This is, at least, my very western view of things. I am also aware, though, of another pattern, one that shows up at many different scales, namely, the cyclical nature of events. This seems not only to be the rule of the universe – things revolve around other things and rotate about their own axes continuously, so that on the surface of our planet we have cycles like the day and the seasons – but also the rule of life. Individual beings are born, procreate, and die, over and over again (well, not the same ones over and over again); looking at the larger picture, there appear also to be waves of lifeforms (species are born, procreate, and die, over and over again); and even the planet undergoes continuous “birth” and “death” through processes like erosion and uplift. I'm not sure what my place is in each of these cycles, but they have certainly all shaped my existence somehow.

So why, then, am I going to Spain, Mexico, Norway and Chile? Each of these places is home to a different kind of natural cycle with which human beings directly interact. In Galicia, Spain, fishing has been the most important industry for centuries. I will visit several Galician fishing villages and cities ranging in size to explore the extent to which commercialization affects how daily routine is governed by the tides and movement patterns of the fish. In late September I'll travel to the state of Michoacán in Mexico to witness the arrival of the monarch butterflies to their winter grounds after a trip of thousands of miles. Indigenous farmers have used this annual event to plan their planting and harvest schedules for centuries, and more recently, tourism has become a strong source of income for the region. I'm interested to learn about the folklore surrounding the butterflies and see how tourism has changed their significance in the local community. I'll be in Norway during the polar night, when the sun doesn't rise above the horizon. After overcoming my deep SAD-induced depression, I hope to figure out how people measure time and organize their lives in the absence of the planet's most basic natural cycle. My final stop is Chile, where different volcanoes have erupted with different frequencies – some dozens of times in the past few centuries and others only once in 10,000 years. This range of historical precedent makes for the perfect environment in which to study time's effect on individual and group memory, and also to test the possibility of awareness of geologic time. That's a very brief overview of my proposed project. Here are some topics that I find particularly interesting:

- Cycles vs. lines vs. a combination thereof vs. what else?
What role does religion play in this? The Bible is a very linear text, a narrative, and the basis of western time thought. How do people with kinds of religious texts approach time and their part in the greater whole? What does belief in an afterlife imply? Reincarnation?
- Scales of time – how short and how long makes sense to us (we who live mere centuries to the Earth's billions of years)?
How does proximity to active geological changes, like volcanoes, affect our understanding of geological timescales?
Cosmology – how old do people think the universe is? Does it have a beginning or an end? Is it one of many?
What's the smallest significant unit of time? At what scales do people think different (fast) processes occur?
- How do people visualize time? (And how else can we communicate thoughts about time other than with words?)
Spatial paradigms (rivers flowing past, a fourth dimension, etc.)
Counting – ribbons of numbers? Is time discrete?
- Memory (collective and individual)
How do groups of people remember catastrophes?
What folklore and myths are passed on from generation to generation? What effect do they have on people's current lifestyles?
- Physical perception of time
Do we have an “internal clock”? What is counting in our heads? Do we all do it at the same rate? If not, what affects how we do it? A while ago I read a short essay by Richard Feynman in which he times himself counting to sixty while partaking in a number of different activities – walking up and down the stairs, reading, writing . . . singing? Well, I've forgotten exactly what he does, but he consistently counts to sixty in the same amount of time regardless of what else he's doing.

I should explain the url of this blog! Why am I traveling a la Billy Pilgrim? Who is that? WELL. Billy Pilgrim is the main character in Kurt Vonnegut's book “Slaughterhouse Five,” in which the concept of time features prominently. Billy Pilgrim is a more or less ordinary man who not only travels through time (involuntarily and unexpectedly), but is also abducted by a species of alien, the Tralfamadorians, that perceives time completely differently from us humans. In the spaceship, the following exchange takes place:

Billy licked his lips, thought a while, inquired at last: "Why me?"
"That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?"
"Yes." Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded in it.
"Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why."

Tralfamadorians not only know that the circumstances of the universe are set; they can see time like we humans see mountain ranges. When they look around, they see not only different spaces, but different times, and they can choose not to look at the unpleasant ones. Billy Pilgrim finds this unsettling; the Tralfamadorians have wars just as terrible as our WWII, in which Billy Pilgrim has fought (will fight, is always fighting?), but they simply ignore them. Instead of concerning themselves with the unpreventable, they erase it from their minds. They are apathetic to an extreme. There is a beautiful side to the Tralfamadorians' experience, too:

Billy Pilgrim says that the Universe does not look like a lot of bright little dots to the creatures from Tralfamadore. The creatures can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti. And Tralfamadorians don't see human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them as great millipedes -- "with babies' legs at one end and old people's legs at the other," says Billy Pilgrim.

The book is excellent, and I highly recommend it. But back to my blog – get it?! I am traveling through time, too!

And speaking of traveling: So far the trip has gone well! I'm typing these words in the Madrid airport; lightning delayed my flight from Philadelphia and I missed my connection to A Corunha, where my journey begins. The man sitting next to me on the plane was a lesson in character building (sent by the travel gods, I'm sure, who are in charge of my education for the next year). He sang to himself, drummed on the armrests and used the metal of his spiral notebook as a percussion instrument, and danced. He also talked incessantly. When he curled up into a ball to sleep he took up more space than he did when he was awake (how?). But I have learned: 1. Deal with cramped quarters or be miserable. 2. “Obnoxious” is another word for “amusing.” I'm ready for anything.

I have to board my flight!