A few interesting conversations and a lot of rain (Santiago de Compostela, Spain)

I’ve been in Santiago since yesterday afternoon, and so has the rain! Usually I don’t mind getting a bit wet if it means exploring a new city, but the amount of water falling from the sky makes it necessary to put my rain hood up, which gives me about the same scope of vision as a horse with blinders – so I am sad to say that I have only seen about half of the old city, the glorious cathedral, an exhibit on photography of the easternmost parts of India, a Bach concert in a church, and a Cuban and Brazilian music and dance party in a tent in a park.

In list form, it looks like a lot of doing, but most of the past day and a half has really been taken up by conversing – with Fabio, with whom I stayed last night, and with Marcos, my host for tonight, and Shey, an American visitor who is also staying with Marcos and who just spent a month walking along the Camino de Santiago. Some of these conversations have been about time! And they have been very interesting! I also had a chance to interrogate Manel and Zoraya while we were hiking up Monte Pindo on Saturday, and I will (roughly and in a disorganized manner) summarize what they, Marcos, and Shey have told me:

Manel:
The first thing that he told me was that the future does not exist. What matters is the present moment, although the past is also important, because it gives the present form. I asked if the past existed still, as a reality, or if it existed in our memories, and he leaned towards the latter option, although he also mentioned that, with things like photographs and video cameras, we have evidence of the reality of the past. Continuing in this vein, he told me about his memories of childhood, when his grandparents told him stories of their own childhoods – this was how he knew about the past before photographs and video cameras. He said that there was a rich story-telling tradition in Galicia, and many myths and legends were told to the younger generations as a way of preserving the past and keeping it a part of the present. And the present is all that one can know; the future is unpredictable and uncontrollable (chaotic might be an appropriate term), a result of every present moment, but not “real” because “the future” doesn’t ever exist.

Zoraya:
Zoraya was very thoughtful and careful in her response, and distinguished between two kinds of time: “real” or “absolute” and “psychological”. The psychological perception of time, she said, was simply the sense that time can go faster or slower depending on the activity -- time flies when you’re having fun, right? And absolute time was measured entirely by cycles of varying scales. All things are part of small and large cycles, and repetition is the key to the universe. As an example, she mentioned the seasons, and said that she felt very much in tune with their passing. When she looked at a tree, she saw its buds, and its leaves, and then the leaves falling, and then the branches covered with water or ice, and then the whole show all over again. She also imagined other trees taking the place of her aging tree – multiple cycles of different scales (the yearly cycle of the individual tree and the cycle of the lives of all of the trees in the forest). I asked if there was a basic cycle, one against which all other cycles could be measured, or if the cycles were just relative to each other, and she said that, as far as she was concerned, we couldn’t really care about anything more than the galactic rotation as a cycle. Everything else is too big and doesn’t connect in a real way to the cycles that most define our activities.

Marcos:
Marcos also immediately resorted to cycles to explain his perception of time, and particularly the seasons. He said that he could never live anywhere without seasons, because he needs them to know how to feel throughout the year – he described, in beautiful poetic language, the opening of buds on trees in the springtime, the rain in the winter, and how these affect his mood and relation to the outside. He also said that culture and customs, like food, are dictated by these cycles. He had the idea several years ago to photograph, over the course of the year, the vendors at Santiago’s open-air market; he only did it for a week (and hopes to start it up again), but explained that, over that week, he felt connected to the cycles of the market (or more aware of them during the year). He knew when mushrooms would appear, and chestnuts, and he felt that he could see the cycle of life in the aging faces of the women selling them. He also mentioned natural cycles in relation to religious festivities – for instance, and one that I myself experienced, the sardine’s role in the Noche de San Juan. It’s an inextricable part of the celebration, which takes place at a time when the sardine has the perfect (for the taste buds) amount of fat in its body. No coincidence! Marcos found it very difficult to use words to describe time (one of my mean questions is: “How would you describe time, using words, to somebody who didn’t know what it is?”), and said that he felt it much better than he thought about it.

Shey:
Shey told me that time was a river, and with elaborate detail explained what each physical aspect of the river corresponds to. The river of time has many passengers, each of whom travels at his or her own velocity, and each of whom is subject to its currents and turns. She said that, when one is in the river, its motion is impossible to perceive – one could only do that by removing oneself from the river and looking at it “from above”. However, one has a certain agency in that one can predict or avoid certain consequences. She described large events in history as boulders; one can look at boulders that lie ahead and, based on past experience, maneuver around them differently. This is an interesting mix of inevitability (the boulder is THERE) and free will (you can still choose to move around it). Also, history is created by the river of time in that every ripple can affect the water far away. If there is a rapid, the course of the water changes – repercussions are long-term and whole-river. The control aspect of her description also went even further, because she said that she had purposely chosen a difficult-looking river for her life (so there are multiple rivers of time?). She picked the one that looked like it had the most rapids, and, as a result, feels older than her thirty years, because she has already had to navigate (metaphorically) so much all of the time.

Shey also spoke to me about the psychological effects of participating in different activities over given periods of time. She is very active, and said that when she did a lot of things in a row, she was surprised that any time had gone by at all – she loses sense of time when she is always on the move. Seemingly contradictorily, though, she was always surprised to discover that she’d managed to do so much in so little time (i.e. it felt like it should have taken a lot of time). Shey also told me that, without motion or some sort of event, there is no proof of time. If you are looking at a box, and nothing happens inside the box (absolutely nothing – no molecules collide, no neutrinos travel through), you can’t prove that time is passing or exists. Time depends on change, on motion, so it is inextricably linked to space, where events can physically take place. A more human example she gave was that of solitary confinement: people who have been in solitary confinement for long periods of time, in windowless rooms where nothing happens, forget how long certain activities take. When they return to society, they don’t remember the pace of things – how long is a meal? How long is a waking day? Without events by which to set their time scale, they lose the sense of time that the rest of the people outside maintain.


I also have a notebook in which I ask people to draw time (“How would you describe time, using pictures, to somebody who didn’t know what it is?”), and, interestingly, every picture has been different so far! Granted, there are very few pictures (I have drawn more than everybody else combined), but I’m excited by how differently people visualize time and what aspects of it they find most important to communicate (aging, a person’s agency, time’s essence, etc.).

I’m reading a book on the biological structures of memory – and this is related to time, too! But I don’t know enough yet to report. My favorite thought for now is that I can make my synapses fire by thinking about my synapses firing. I’m doing it right now!