Standing in the midst of an eternity

 THE LIVING PRESENT

When I returned to North America from my travels among traditional peoples in Indonesia and Nepal, I quickly found myself perplexed and confused by many aspects of my own culture. Assumptions that I had previously taken for granted, or that I had since childhood accepted as obvious and unshakable truths, now made little sense to me. The belief, for instance, in an autonomous “past” and “future.” Where were these invisible realms that had so much power over the lives of my family and friends? Everybody that I knew seemed to be expending a great deal of effort thinking about and trying to hold onto the past—obsessively photographing and videotaping events, and continually projecting and fretting about the future—ceaselessly sending out insurance premiums for their homes, for their cars, even for their own bodies. As a result of all these past and future concerns, everyone appeared (to me in my raw and newly returned state) to be strangely unaware of happenings unfolding all around them in the present. They seemed utterly oblivious to all those phenomena to which I had had to sensitize myself in order to communicate with indigenous magicians in the course of my fieldwork: the lives of other animals, the minute gestures of insects and plants, the speech of birds, the tastes in the wind, the flux of sounds and smells.… My family and my old friends all seemed so oblivious to the sensuous presence of the world. The present, for them, seemed nothing more than a point, an infinitesimal now separating “the past” from “the future.” And indeed, the more I entered into conversation with my family and friends, the more readily I, too, felt my consciousness cut off, as though by a sheet of reflective glass, from the life of the land.…

There is a useful exercise that I devised back then to keep myself from falling completely into the civilized oblivion of linear time. You are welcome to try it the next time you are out of doors. I locate myself in a relatively open space—a low hill is particularly good, or a wide field. I relax a bit, take a few breaths, gaze around. Then I close my eyes, and let myself begin to feel the whole bulk of my past—the whole mass of events leading up to this very moment. And I call into awareness, as well, my whole future—all those projects and possibilities that lie waiting to be realized. I imagine this past and this future as two vast balloons of time, separated from each other like the bulbs of an hourglass, yet linked together at the single moment where I stand pondering them. And then, very slowly, I allow both of these immense bulbs of time to begin leaking their substance into this minute moment between them, into the present. Slowly, imperceptibly at first, the present moment begins to grow. Nourished by the leakage from the past and the future, the present moment swells in proportion as those other dimensions shrink. Soon it is very large; and the past and future have dwindled down to mere knots on the edge of this huge expanse. At this point I let the past and the future dissolve entirely. And I open my eyes.…

I FIND MYSELF STANDING IN THE MIDST OF AN ETERNITY, A VAST and inexhaustible present. The whole world rests within itself—the trees at the field’s edge, the hum of crickets in the grass, cirrocumulus clouds rippling like waves across the sky, from horizon to horizon. In the distance I notice the curving dirt road and my rusty car parked at its edge—these, too, seem to have their place in this open moment of vision, this eternal present. And smells—the air is rich with faint whiffs from the forest, the heather, the soil underfoot—so many messages mingling between different elements in the encircling land. The jagged snag of a single withered oak tree standing alone in the field does not, in this eternity, seem really dead. It is surrounded by an admiring clump of low bushes, and a large boulder reposes at the edge of these bushes, dialoguing with the old tree about shadows and sunlight.

Stepping closer, I see that the crumbling bark around the oak’s trunk is crossed by two lines of ants, one moving up the trunk and the other heading down into the soil. From this closer vantage I see, too, that the shadows on the boulder are not really shadows at all, but patches of lichen spreading outward from various points on the rock’s surface, in diverse textures and hues—dull blacks and crinkly grays and powdery, deep reds—as though through them the rock was expressing its inner moods. I scratch my leg. Strangely, the vividness of this world does not dissipate. I stomp on the ground, spin around, even stand on my head. But the open present does not disperse. Several jet black crows race out of the woods, chasing each other in swoops and sudden dives; one of them lands on the crumbling snag. “Kahhr! … Kahr! Kahr!” Now it glides down to the ground just in front of me—“Kahr!”—and stands there looking at me, sideways, through a purple eye. The lids blink swiftly, like shutters. It hops around me and the big beak opens. “Kawhhr!” I try to reply, “Cawr!” and the bird steps forward. Crow does not hop, I see, but walks, clumsily, on this ground. I can see the tiny feathers covering the nostrils on its beak as the breeze picks it up off the ground, feel myself swoop through the swirling breeze toward the forest edge.…

Things are different in this world without “the past” and “the future,” my body quivering in this space like an animal. I know well that, in some time out of this time, I must return to my house and my books. But here, too, is home. For my body is at home, in this open present, with its mind. And this is no mere illusion, no hallucination, this eternity—there is something too persistent, too stable, too unshakable about this experience for it to be merely a mirage.…

THE UNSHAKABLE SOLIDITY OF THIS EXPERIENCE IS CURIOUS indeed. It seems to have something to do with the remarkable affinity between this temporal notion that we term “the present” and the spatial landscape in which we are embedded. When I allow the past and the future to dissolve, imaginatively, into the immediacy of the present moment, then the “present” itself expands to become an enveloping field of presence. And this presence, vibrant and alive, spontaneously assumes the precise shape and contour of the enveloping sensory landscape, as though this were its native shape! It is this remarkable fit between temporal concept (the “present”) and spatial percept (the enveloping presence of the land) that accounts, I believe, for the relatively stable and solid nature of this experience, and that prompts me to wonder whether “time” and “space” are really as distinct as I was taught to believe. There is no aspect of this realm that is strictly temporal—for it is composed of spatial things that have density and weight, and is spatially extended around me on all sides, from the near trees to the distant clouds. And yet there is no aspect, either, that is strictly spatial or static—for every perceivable being, from the stones to the breeze to my car in the distance, seems to vibrate with life and sensation. In this open present, I am unable to isolate space from time, or vice versa. I am immersed in the world.

(...)

It was only toward the end of his investigations regarding the phenomenology of “time consciousness” that Edmund Husserl was led to suggest that the experience of time is rooted in a deeper dimension of experience that is not, in itself, strictly temporal.28

Husserl’s assistant, the German phenomenologist Martin Heidegger, returned again and again to the analysis of temporal experience. In his massive and influential work Being and Time, Heidegger disclosed, underneath the commonplace Aristotelian idea of time as an infinite sequence of “now points,” a forgotten sense of time as the very mystery of Being, as that strange power—essentially resistant to all objectification or representation—that nevertheless structures and makes possible all our relations to each other and to the world. This mystery cannot be represented, precisely because it is never identical to itself; primordial time, for Heidegger, is from the first outside-of-itself, or “ecstatic.” Indeed, the past, the present, and the future are here described by Heidegger as the three “ecstasies” of time, the three ways in which the irreducible dynamism of existence opens us to what is outside ourselves, to that which is other.29Yet Heidegger gradually came to suspect that this implicit, preconceptual sense of time could not be held apart from our preconceptual experience of space. Hence, in an important essay written late in his career, Heidegger alludes to a still more primordial dimension, which he calls “time-space”—a realm neither wholly temporal nor wholly spatial, from whence “time” and “space” have been artificially derived by a process of abstraction.30

Meanwhile, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, continually deepening his own investigations of perceptual experience, also came, in his final work, to assert an experiential realm more originary than space and time, from which these two dimensions have been derived. In the working notes to The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty writes of “this very time that is space, this very space that is time, which I will have rediscovered by my analysis of the visible and the flesh.”31 Yet this analysis was cut short by his sudden death in 1961.

So all three phenomenologists—Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty—came independently, in the course of their separate investigations, to suspect that the conventional distinction between space and time was untenable from the standpoint of direct, preconceptual experience. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty were both striving, toward the end of their lives, to articulate a more immediate modality of awareness, a more primordial dimension whose characteristics are neither strictly spatial nor strictly temporal, but are rather—somehow—both at once.

We have seen that such a mode of experience is commonplace for indigenous, oral peoples, for whom time and space have never been sundered. The tradition of phenomenology, it would seem, has been striving to recover such an experience from within literate awareness itself—straining to remember, in the very depths of reflective thought, the silent reciprocity wherein such reflection is born. No single one of these thinkers was entirely successful in reconciling time and space. Yet their later writings provide tantalizing clues, talismans for those who are struggling today to bring their minds and their bodies back together, and so to regain a full-blooded awareness of the present.

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It is this strange asymmetry of past and future in relation to the present that Heidegger describes in his late essay “Time and Being.” While in Being and Time Heidegger wrote of the centrifugal, ecstatic character of time—of time as that which draws us outside of ourselves, opening us to what is other—in this later essay he stresses the centripetal, inward-extending nature of time, describing time as a mystery that continually approaches us from beyond, extending and offering the gift of presence while nevertheless withdrawing behind the event of this offering. Such descriptions may sound strange, even uncanny, to our ears, and yet we should listen to them closely. For as Heidegger’s thought matured, he increasingly sought to loosen human awareness from the bondage of outworn assumptions, precisely by wielding common words in highly unusual ways, shaking terms free from their conventional usages. Thus past and future are here articulated as hidden powers that approach us, offering and opening the present while nevertheless remaining withdrawn, concealed from the very present that they make possible. In Heidegger’s description, both the past and the future remain hidden from the open presence that they mutually bring about.39 And yet the way the future conceals itself in its offering is quite different from the manner in which the past is concealed in its giving. Specifically, the future, or that which is to come, withholds its presence, while the past, or that which has been, refuses its presence.40 The future withholds, while the past refuses. In his most complete description of the vicissitudes of time, Heidegger puts the matter thus:

What has been, which, by refusing the present, lets that become present which is no longer present; and the coming toward us of what is to come, which, by withholding the present, lets that be present which is not yet present—both [make] manifest the manner of an extending opening up which gives all presencing into the open.41

The strange character of Heidegger’s language here is part of his project: he is trying to avoid the use of nouns, of nominative forms that would freeze the temporal flux. It is precisely this strangeness that enables his words to approach, and to open us onto, the silent structuration of this mystery we call time. If we ponder these words from within the open presence of the land around us, we are led to ask: Where can we perceive this withholding and this refusal of which Heidegger speaks? Where can we glimpse this refusal and this withholding that open and make possible the sensuous presence of the world around us?

We have already noticed the magic by which the horizon encloses and yet holds open the visible landscape: precisely by concealing, or better, withholding, that which lies beyond it. Thus, the horizon may indeed be felt as a withholding. But it is hardly a refusal. The horizon’s lips of earth and sky may touch one another, but they are never sealed; and we know that if we journey toward that horizon, it will gradually disclose to us that which it now withholds.

Where, then, can we locate the refusal to which Heidegger alludes? Do we perceive such a refusal anywhere around us? More important: how do we even know what we are looking for? Here again, Heidegger provides a clue. In “Time and Being,” he writes of the past and of the future as absences that by their very absence concern us, and so make themselves felt within the present.42 This description aids us a great deal. Now at least we can say what we are searching for in our attempt to locate, or place, the past and the future. We are hunting for modes of absence which, by their very way of being absent, make themselves felt within the sensuous presence of the open landscape. Or in Merleau-Ponty’s terminology (the terminology of The Visible and the Invisible) we could say we are searching for certain invisible aspects of the visible environment, certain unseen regions whose very hiddenness somehow enables or makes possible the open visibility of the land around us. The beyond-the-horizon is just such an absent or unseen realm.

And so we must now ask: Is there another unseen aspect, another absent region whose very concealment is somehow necessary to the open presence of the landscape?

Of course, there are those facets that I cannot see of the things or bodies that surround me—the sides of the trees that are facing away from me, or the other side of that lichen-covered rock. Yet these concealments are all analogous, in a sense, to that which lies hidden beyond the horizon. The other side of that rock, for instance, is withheld from my gaze, but it is not refused, for I can disclose it by walking over there, just as I can disclose what lies beyond the horizon by making a longer journey.

What of my own body? Well, most of my body is present to my awareness, and visible to my gaze. I can see my limbs, my torso, and even my nose, although my back, of course, is hidden beyond the horizon of my shoulders. The back of my body is inaccessible to my vision, and yet I know that it exists, that it is visible to the crows perched behind me in the trees, as I know that the fields and forests hidden beyond the horizon are yet visible and present to those who dwell there.

Yet while pondering the unseen aspect of my body, I soon notice another unseen region: that of the whole inside of my body. The inside of my body is not, of course, entirely absent; but it is hidden from visibility in a manner very different from the concealment of my back, or of that which lies beyond the horizon. It is an instance, I suddenly realize, of a vast mode of absence or invisibility entirely proper to the present landscape—an absence I had almost entirely forgotten. It is the absence of what is under the ground.

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MARTIN HEIDEGGER, WHOSE CAREFUL DESCRIPTIONS OF THE PAST and the future have helped us to recognize these realms as actual dimensions of the perceptual field, did not write of only two temporal dimensions, however, but of three, including that of the present. In Being and Time, Heidegger asserts that the present has its own ecstasy, its own proper transcendence, its own “ ‘whither’ to which one is carried away.”54 The implication is that phenomena can be hidden not just within the past or the future, but also within the very thickness of the present, itself—that there is an enigmatic, hidden dimension at the very heart of the sensible present, into which phenomena may withdraw and out of which they continually emerge. Thus in “Time and Being,” Heidegger writes that “even in the present itself, there always plays a kind of approach and bringing about, that is, a kind of presencing.”55 As though, paradoxically, there is a modality of absence entirely native to the present, out of which the present, itself, comes to presence: “In the present, too, presencing is given.”56Is there, then, yet another mode of absence or invisibility entirely endemic to the open landscape? I have already noticed, here within the perceivable present, the hidden nature of what lies behind the tree trunks and stones that surround me, which corresponds to the unseen character of that which lies on the other side of these nearby hills, and ultimately to those lands entirely beyond the horizon of the perceivable present, from whence numerous entities enter the visible terrain and into which various phenomena withdraw, recede, and finally vanish from view. I have acknowledged as well the concealed character of that which rests inside the trunks of these trees, inside the stones and the hills, which corresponds, ultimately, to the unseen nature of the under-the-ground, from whence beings sprout and unfurl, and into which they also crumble, decompose, and are submerged. Is there some other obvious style of absence, in the very thickness of the present, that is unique to itself, and not a mere modification of the under-the-ground or the beyond-the-horizon? Some mode of concealment that is, paradoxically, already out in the open, from whence the visible landscape itself continually comes to presence?

Perhaps I am pushing my method too far, here, in trying to place not only the withholding of presence by the future and the refusal of presence by the past, but also this concealment of presence from within the present itself. For now, more than ever, I feel confused,—unable to grasp, or to conceive of, what it is that I am searching for. Even as I gaze out across the wooded hills, my mind seems muddled by these questions, by ideas and associations that keep me from directly sensing and responding to the animate earth around me. I try to relax, and so begin to breathe more deeply, enjoying the coolness of the breeze as it floods in at my nostrils, feeling my chest and abdomen slowly expand and contract. My thinking begins to ease, the internal chatter gradually taking on the rhythm of the in-breath and the out-breath, the words themselves beginning to dissolve, flowing out with each exhalation to merge with the silent breathing of the land. The interior monologue dissipates, slowly, into the rustle of pine needles and the stately gait of the clouds.

A butterfly glides by, golden wings navigating delicate air currents with a few momentary flutters before they settle on a white flower. The seedstalks of the grasses bounce in the breeze, while clustered wildflowers tremble on their stems, awaiting the humming insects that motor haphazardly from one to the other. Fragrant whiffs from new blossoms in the overgrown orchard by the creek stir not only the winged beings, but my own flaring nostrils as they reach me from afar, drifting like spiderwebs on the faint winds. My sensing body now vividly awake to the world, I gradually become conscious of a third mode of invisibility, of an unseen dimension in which I am so thoroughly and deeply immersed that even now I can hardly bring it to full awareness.…

It is the invisibility of the air.

The Spell of the Sensuous

David Abram