An Exposition on the Nature of Time
Bernie Mojzes
In the face of the myriad epistemological difficulties surrounding any investigation of the so-called “Chaos Clock,” it might be tempting to consign its existence to the realm of myth. Fiction. Fantasy and fabrication. How, in fact, could one hope to detect the alleged influence of such an object, a device purported to possess effects so pernicious as to affect the very flow of time itself?
Should this lecture simply enumerate and describe that which is objectively known about the Chaos Clock, I fear I should have had to stop before I began. In contrast, the acts and attributes spuriously ascribed to this elusive object have grown at a rate so prolific that any attempt to inventory them would be rendered obsolete before the next speaker rises to stand at this podium.
No, we cannot address the question of the Chaos Clock directly. We must, instead, speak around the object of our interest, in hopes that we may catch a glimpse of it from the corner of our eye, so to speak, or of our mind.
The science of timekeeping has seen a great many advances since Christiaan Huygens introduced the pendulum as a measure to affix to time once and for all the nature of discrete, uniform units, and, in the process, profoundly reordering the entirety of Human existence. Under the dictates of Industry, Science, and Capital (or Kapital, as our dear friend Herr Marx would say), Time has been transformed from a qualitative element to a quantitative one: discrete, precise, uniform, measurable, exact, inexorable, and absolute—the concept of time as the medium through which we experience our lives has been supplanted with the concept of time as a unit of measurement. Where once we looked to the heavens to understand our position in the world and the tasks needed to survive within it, we now look to clocks: Mr. Harrison’s marine chronometer has enabled global shipping and transport on a vast scale, whilst the aforementioned Herr Marx correctly notes the decoupling of Time and History, and the wholesale subordination of society to the rigours of the factory floor time clock.
Needless to say, any processes that modify, modulate, lengthen, shorten, omit or insert, loop, or otherwise interfere with the natural flow of time would be undetectable from within the structure of Time Itself, which is to say, the Universe. Likewise, the very machines tasked with the meticulous keeping of time—yes, like your pocket watch, Mr. Danville, please put it away; this lecture is unlikely to be shortened by your incessant consultation of said device—these very machines are singularly incapable of detecting any variation in the flow of time.
Paradoxically, the objective view of the time clock is by its nature subject to the effects of the Chaos Clock and is thus subjective. Logically, then, it is only by resorting to purely subjective means that we might triangulate upon an objective view.
What do I mean by this? Surely, any child who has endured Sunday services can tell you:
Time is not linear.
The incoherent droning of the pastor is interminable.
Sunday
will never
end.
Of course, it eventually does, which demonstrates the power of the human imagination to create its own chronomatological gravity.
One must endeavor, in this case, to undertake a phenomenological investigation of l’artefact qui nous intéresse—the artifact of interest—to observe and analyze through subjective experience that which cannot be objectively scrutinized.
How, though? How does one experience something that is fundamentally unexperienceable?
Here is where I must beg your indulgence as I depart from the traditional format of the scientific lecture and expand upon my own unquantifiable experiences.
Rather than seek the Chaos Clock itself, I would experience the world from the perspective of that obscure object. What I needed to do was experience all times simultaneously. A hopeless task, you have surely already told yourself, even as the words left my lips, but not so: There are precisely two places upon this Earth where one might make a claim to all times, or to be outside time itself—at least in some limited sense.
The choice of north or south pole was no choice at all—after Captain James Cook’s sighting of an ancient city sleeping, perchance to dream, in the depths of the South Pacific, what choice could there be? For what is dream but to be free of the strictures of time? Can it be a coincidence that the ancient city of R’lyeh lies so close to one of the poles?
The challenge remained, of course, as to how to reach the South Pole itself, a feat no man had hitherto accomplished. Men no less accomplished than James Clark Ross and Dumont d’Urville had failed in their efforts, and an overland expedition will not succeed until 1911, some two decades hence. It is incontrovertible that the body you see before you is hardly a fit specimen to be chosen to accompany such arduous ventures, and the intervening twenty years would undoubtedly do little to improve my physique. Should I wish to conquer the southernmost frontier, I would need to find an alternate means of travel.
No, I had no intention of trudging across the ice pack to a nearly certain death. Indeed, a more comfortable means of transport was available to a man of sufficient imagination, and sufficient means. I found my salvation in the genius of the late Dr. Solomon Andrews, and the generous access to his notes and records afforded by his daughter, Harriet Cornelia Hilton, and, of course, in my beloved Annabelle’s family estate, which paid for the research necessary to expand upon Dr. Andrews’ inventions, and to transport the resulting airship to the edge of the Antarctic ice pack.
My darling wife raised no objections regarding my purchase of the assets of Andrews’ bankrupt Aerial Navigation Company, deeming it a harmless past-time that would distract me from what Annabelle contemptuously called my “l’obsession petite.” Little did she know that my interests in uncovering the undiscoverable truths of the Chaos Clock were hardly petite, both preceding and exceeding my interests in her, and that my every move was made in service to said “obsession.”
Utilizing fluctuations in buoyancy to generate forward momentum, Mr. Andrews’ Aereon was itself an ingenious invention for its time, but it would not suffice for the journey I envisioned. However, the value of powerless propulsion was undeniable for a trip of indeterminate duration. Used in combination with steam-powered propellers, it would increase our speed, extend our range, and reduce the weight of our coal stores.
Annabelle believed my aerial ventures to be of a practical—by which she meant “commercial”—nature, though likely misguided, and was delighted to humor her eccentric husband. Several iterations demonstrated the promise of the technology, but the Aereon V was to be the airship finally worthy of reaching the South Pole. Nearly five times the length of Mr. Andrews’ original flying machine, its five hydrogen-filled balloons supported an enclosed gondola capable of carrying a crew of five and a score of passengers from London to Paris in half a day, at an extraordinary cost. Perhaps a viable business might have been made of it, had I the inclination.
A most infuriating woman, my Annabelle. Stunningly brilliant, she had a head for both science and letters, and business acumen sufficient to maintain her family’s fortune despite my excesses. However, while her hunger for knowledge took her to any lecture hall willing to seat a woman, whatever the subject, she had no patience for the most important question of the age.
No. No, when the woman discovered that I used the money she had provided to build berthing towers across Europe to instead purchase and refit the Patria, a whaling vessel originally of Belgium, capable of withstanding the harsh southern seas, and large enough to carry the disassembled airship in her hold, both her suspicions and her ire were aroused.
Once those unpleasantries were agreeably resolved, we departed Antwerp in March of 1890 with the intention of reaching the Antarctic circle in the dead of winter, which even the dimmest amongst you understand, in the southern hemisphere, is the height of the summer months. Due to circumstances beyond my control, we did not arrive until March the following year. I shall not bore you with the tedium that is life upon a sea-bound vessel. There were hardly enough books to consume a month, much less a year, and no useful improvements could be made to the airship at this point. Even Annabelle had ceased to provide amusement. She had grown sullen and uncommunicative, locked in her cabin, while the ship’s crew paradoxically considered her very presence aboard ship unlucky yet made every attempt to put themselves in her company. I was obliged to shoot Mr. Henry, the boatswain, who thought to avail himself of her attentions after prying open her cabin door.
Idiot. She might have escaped.
How, then, could I have proved to her the reality of the Chaos Clock? I could not have revealed to her its hidden truths, as I shall shortly—Ahem. Miss Harcourt, whilst I am certain the contents of your glowing tablet are far more interesting than your professor’s incoherent ramblings, our discussions here are of greater import than the images of cats currently dancing upon your tablet and reflected in your spectacles, or any of the other images you may have been previously perusing. Please, return to your seat and restrain your invective. There is nowhere else to go. It doesn’t matter what class you thought you were attending, or even what college. You are here now.
Whatever “now” means anymore.
All of you. Sit, and be quiet. None of you are here because you are good students—you are all far too clever for that—and I should know better than to expect a well-behaved lecture hall; nevertheless, please take this opportunity to shut up and listen. Take notes on whatever it is you have at hand, pen and ink, pencil, quill and parchment, stylus and clay tablet, or glass tablet, like Miss Harcourt’s. It matters not the medium; what matters is that you reinforce the memory of this time. Of this event. That is how we ensure it remains real.
Where was I? Ah yes.
At last we had reached the limits of the Patria’s usefulness. Over the next three weeks, we laboriously unloaded the Patria’s hold onto the ice and assembled the airship. One by one, the four-hundred-foot long balloons took form, their cigar-shaped bodies lashed one to another and fitted with the cables that would reshape the gas-bags to shift the buoyancy forward and aft to generate forward motion. Though the Aereon V could be piloted by a single person for a short time, I would take a crew of three with me, and, of course, Annabelle.
Do I need to tell you of the bitter cold that frosted our beards and encrusted our gloves and boots? Of the frigid wind that cut through our coats, piercing us to the bone? No need, I think, if your misted breath is any indication. Rub some warmth into your fingers and let us continue.
I cannot adequately describe the feeling when the ropes are released, and one is lifted aloft, free of the Earth and the Earth’s grip. The motto of the Aerial Navigation Company, penned by Mr. Andrews himself, seemed most apt: Tempus Fugit; Tempore Fugit Homo. Time flies; Now man flies. As if he understood the true purpose of his life’s work. As if he understood the essential equivalency of time and consciousness. Perhaps some of you have known what it means to fly, the illusion of freedom those first few moments as the world drops away. The stomach-dropping elation, lingering timeless and immortal in memory, before the cold, and the wind, and the tedium set in.
How long we travelled I cannot say. I knew better than to trust any timepiece in our possession and cast all of them over the side shortly after we set out. They would do nothing for us but lie. The days grew short, and the sun abandoned us entirely. We had filled our hold with fuel and food and flew low enough that we could lower buckets at the nadir of our trajectory to scoop up snow to feed the boiler and wet our lips.
Despite the engineers’ best efforts to insulate the gondola, the cold crept in; ice frosted the windows and encroached along the outer walls, and any warmth provided by the engines was lost whenever anyone ventured to restock our water supply.
There were storms in which we were tossed mercilessly until we were able to rise above the clouds, or once, when we were driven down into the snow. The expedition was almost lost, then. We vented as much hydrogen as we dared to reduce the internal pressure of the balloons and minimize the likelihood of them rupturing, knowing that if we lost too much, we would never have sufficient lift to become airborne again. We lost only one of the balloons that day, irreparably torn on a jagged outcropping of ice, and when the storm eased, we were forced to reconfigure the craft to rebalance with only four balloons.
Even so, our buoyancy was so degraded, our airworthiness would have been in doubt had something hidden in the barren ice—drawn perhaps to the heat of the fire we had built of our supply crates—not eaten Ellsworth and Jones, thus reducing our ballast by a couple hundred kilograms. We took to the air once again with some haste, Mr. Donovan and I taking turns manning the billows and piloting the ship and hacking with axes at the limbs that clutched at the hull. Nubilous as frozen milk, the massive, rope-like appendages assailed us, dragging us earthward. Even Annabelle roused herself from her catatonia to assault the pythonic beast, and at last, we wrested free of the leviathan’s cnidarian appendages and lurched into the sky.
The severed limbs continued to twitch, so we threw them overboard, all but for one, that Annabelle wished to study; however, in the relative heat of the cabin, it quickly grew fruiting bodies, and we hastily disposed of it before it could disperse spores.
Released from the insensibility of her earlier melancholy, Annabelle wasted no time working her charms upon the hapless Mr. Donovan, who, having survived an assault by an unutterably foul eldritch creature, fell victim to something far more dangerous: my wife. Had I not already known the depths of her infidelity—even one so disinterested as I could not but be scandalized by the variety of women drawn into her bedchambers—I would have been more surprised. Her customary loquaciousness returned, she implored the man to join with her to turn the ship away from what she called “this madman’s errand” and “certain death,” and return to “safe harbor.” Sadly, her words found purchase, and we were forced to continue without Mr. Donovan’s further assistance.
Never mind, it only hastened the inevitable. These men were strong and capable, certainly, with invaluable and indispensable skills necessary to get us this far, but nevertheless remained unimaginative dullards. I had no intention of allowing their perspectives any influence on what I was certain we would discover.
Unfortunately, I could not count on dear Annabelle’s assistance in piloting the craft, nor trust that her promises not to interfere were made in good faith. Even in her apparent catatonia, she had been carefully watching the crew as they worked and was easily as clever and capable as all of them combined. I had no doubt that given liberty, she could handily manage the airship on her own, at least for a short time. I bound her into the co-pilot’s chair, where I could keep her in clear sight as we proceeded southward toward our final destination.
Our progress was hampered by certain practicalities. Unwilling to trust Annabelle, I was now solely responsible for piloting the craft, maintaining the engines, shoveling the coal, and fetching snow to feed into the boiler, and I dared not take more than a few moments of sleep at a time, lest the furnace die down, and the pipes freeze—a more significant risk than I had anticipated, especially after the monster’s attack broke many of the windows. Even with doors closed to unused cabins and cracked windows boarded over as best we could with whatever little scraps remained of our supply crates, icy drafts cut to the bone, and froze any water that leaked from the pipes before it could reach the floor.
With Mr. Donovan gone, another task fell to me—to periodically climb outside the gondola and, with a pickaxe and my mittened hands, clear the steam engine’s exhaust of ice. Perilous and harrowing, I was amazed I survived the first time, and came to have an appreciation for the former crew’s arguments over this duty. I returned from these forays stiff with cold and nearly unable to move until I had thawed by the furnace for a time.
As at last our destination was nearly in sight, a violent storm arose, the fierce wind driving northward against us. I topped the boiler—I needed only to gather the snow that accumulated on the gondola—and filled the furnace with as much coal as it would hold, but our headway failed, and we were driven backward.
No, we were too close to our goal to retreat now. Ignoring Annabelle’s cries, I vented the balloons and dropped us into the snow.
Until this point, Annabelle had held some hope that we could, in the end, return to the Patria and, ultimately, home. Disabused of this fallacy, she raged at me for some time, but when her fury eased, her natural inquisitiveness re-emerged.
“If my bones are destined to adorn this horrid winter world for all time,” she said, “let them not say I fell short.”
No, you are correct, Miss Harcourt. Her actual words were less composed, but there is no call to repeat such vulgarity in polite company, nor in your own, Miss Harcourt. Regardless, the true offense was not her language, but her intention to take my achievement for her own, clearly impossible, since she still loudly proclaimed the Chaos Clock a hoax. Laughably, my darling wife appeared to believe that being the first to reach the South Pole was a laudable goal in itself. Never mind. As long as it got her there.
When the storm passed, we equipped ourselves as best we could—Mr. Ellsworth’s spare coat required the fewest alterations to fit Annabelle’s frame—and set out on foot. Or rather, on snowshoe. Annabelle had to teach me how to walk with the things. Most humiliating.
But she has always been the smartest person I’ve known—with the glaring exception of her refusal to take the Chaos Clock seriously—and the most capable. Surely when the evidence was laid before her, she would accept the truth, and turn that beautiful, brilliant mind to the intractable problem of the Chaos Clock.
I believe I would not have achieved the South Pole without Annabelle’s assistance. When my hands and feet had gone numb and the frigid air burned my lungs, when my eyes froze shut and I fell to my knees in surrender, it was Annabelle who brought me back to my feet.
“You don’t get to give up,” she said. “I want you to witness me reach your goal before you.”
Of course, that would not do. I lumbered to my feet and stumbled after her.
You may wonder how we knew where the South Pole was. I cannot tell you. We did not use instruments or measurements. We could not study the path of the sun, for there was no sun. We did not bother with the stars, for they had ceased making any rational sense, unfamiliar and ever-changing constellations that moved haphazardly across the sky. Some force tugged at our feet, drawing us onward, inexorably. We simply knew, and neither of us questioned it.
For a time we pushed through the snow together, supporting each other against the numbing cold and the biting wind, picking each other up when we fell, closer now, here, at the literal ends of the Earth, at the ends of Time, than ever through the course of our courtship and marriage. I had always found her an admirable creature and was happy to allow her to use the sham of our marriage to further her place in the world and shield her from the scandals that would have otherwise driven her from polite society, to be the person who created the conditions to realize her dreams, just as she provided the means for me to bring my own goals to fruition. Something warm stirred in me, in my stomach and in my heart, and when next we stumbled into each other’s arms, my heart skipped, and my face flushed. Was this love? Was this how it felt?
Ah, Annabelle, could you not feel it as well?
We were close. Fifty meters, perhaps. Annabelle broke away from me, pushing forward across the snow.
I called to her, but she ignored me. Perhaps the wind whipped my words away.
She could not reach the South Pole before me. It would ruin everything. I called again.
I could not feel the pistol in my frozen hand, finding my grip by sight alone. When I pulled the trigger, the pain was like fire driven from the palm of my hand up into my shoulder.
The winds raised swirls of snow around her silhouette as she continued moving away from me.
I picked the gun up from where it had fallen and fired again.
If the nature of clock time is contiguous and discrete, a tyranny of uninterrupted series of infinitely divisible, identical increments, it must be understood that the Chaos Clock maintains much of this conceit: that of time as discrete, infinitely divisible increments. Where it differs is that the increments are both non-contiguous and non-identical.
Was this what made my heart skip a beat?
Is a world in which we can never know endurable?
Can the tyranny of the clock be overcome?
Imagine, if you will, time experienced in the absence of the clock, of time experienced not as an increment, divisible, but as a duration, a continuous motion—yes, Mr. Filbertson, qualitative rather than quantitative, continuously interpenetrating itself. You have read the works of Henri Bergson. No? Deleuze? I am not familiar, but perhaps he has not been born yet.
My interest is piqued, Mr. Filbertson, but it grows darker, and the cold is seeping in. Let us press on.
Ah, Miss Harcourt, if only you could have heard my dear wife, whose vocabulary far surpasses your own, as I dragged her through the snow. The bullet that shattered her hip did little to incapacitate her tongue, which she turned against me most unfairly. Did she still not understand? I needed to be the first at the pole. Alone in the entire world, only I had the singular will and unrelenting fortitude—l’obsession énorme—to find the Chaos Clock in this barren place and hold it here long enough for other, more robust and imaginative minds to intercede.
No, I shall not repeat her words, but you can hear them yourselves, I think, if you listen carefully to the wind.
For she is still here, with me, with us, so much stronger than I, even as her blood stains the snow. Strong enough to imagine all of you here with us—you dreamers and doodlers, you who scribble in the margins, you who do not march to a different drummer but flutter to a distant piccolo. You who could have been straight A students if only you would apply yourselves.
So that together, you can imagine for us, and for all the world, a means to subvert the tyranny of the clock. So that you can imagine for us all a world that is finally free.