A Sideways Look at Time

The Mexican Day of the Dead is a kind of Danse Macabre at full tilt. A funky skeleton dances a fantasy fandango, flowery sprigs on its bones and apples sprouting from its shoulder blades, insects playing in its skull, birds on its fingerbones, ivy on its thighbones and daisies on its toebones—the reductio ad absurdum of a hippy. Nothing so graphically illustrates the chirpy belief in time moving in cycles and in the reincarnations of life cycles; out of death comes life. Some of these skeletons are on bicycles, literally pedaling cycles, time freewheeling through life and death, dem bones dem bones gonna ri-ide away.

Is time an arrow or a bicycle, a straight line or a circle? Once, time was widely seen as cyclical; the Hopi image of time is a self-contained wheel, the Gabra peoples of East Africa have the idea of finn meaning fertility or plenty in the cycles of life, and in Hindu thought, time moves in the unimaginably long cycles of the Kalpas. In the Aions of the ancient Greeks, eternity wheeled round over and over again, while the Stoics believed in the eternal regeneration of the cosmos. Aristotle said “for even time itself is thought to be a circle” and Plato described time as a “moving” or “revolving” image of eternity. Throughout history, time seems to have been thought circular since it could not be separated from the cycling motions of the sun, moon and stars.

This chapter does not offer a “brief history of time.” It doesn’t attempt to state what time is or is not, as religion or philosophy or science might do, but rather looks at how views of time—particularly in religion and science—are part of the whole cultural landscape. Specifically, it argues that, although seldom described as such, time has always been a highly genderized concept; linear time is phallic, male in shape, cyclical time is yonic and female in shape, as women’s bodies have cycles. Further, the way time is pictured, or described, in any age, mirrors remarkably closely the way the feminine is treated then.

It is not easy to gauge whether women had respect, equality and power in the earliest societies which saw time as cyclic; ancient farming societies, for instance, to whom time was the agricultural cycle of seasons, the wheel of life. It is also difficult to say, for example, in India today, that widespread images of time as cyclic parallel respect for women. It is too clumsy to regard the position of women as an index to the subject, since gender in society is a subtle thing, and not necessarily coterminous with women and men. In India, for instance, the whole of society seems more feminine in tone than in Europe. What is far clearer is that with the arrival of linear, masculine time, the position of women is made lowly indeed and things feminine are denigrated.

In contrast to the modern West, which vastly privileges the sun over the moon as primary time-giver, early societies also used the moon, with all its female associations. The moon, lunar lurer of time and tide, draws the floodtides of the sea and the bloodtides of the womb. The two characters of time, illustrated by the moon on the one hand and the sun on the other, are gendered—the moon changes over the course of a month, from full moon to new, corresponding to women’s time experience over a month, while the sun stays the same shape, just as a man’s experience of time does.

Worldwide, the moon is regarded as female and in most societies—though not all—the sun is considered masculine. As matriarchies gave way to patriarchies, so calendars based on moon-time became less important than those based on the sun. Monday gave way to Sunday. Sun-worshipping warriors of invading Indo-European tribes vanquished moon-calendared, earth-centered civilizations, bringing their sky gods, warrior cults and a patriarchal social order. To the Huns, the word Tengri meant both god and sky. So too the word Akuj to the Turkana people of northwest Kenya means god and sky. They were both blue gods and mono-gods. Nomadism, points out George Monbiot, has a lot to do with this—nomads characteristically worship the sky and are monotheistic, the ancient Israelites, for instance, believing in one god living in a sky-blue firmament. Though their own lives were nomadic, their god was fixed and stable. Blue, widely symbolic of eternity, is the color which most represents this changelessness.

Mithras was the “Iron John” of ancient times, bull-slayer and warrior. As Sun-god, Mithras clambered to a sky-high prominence, beaming enormous rays of influence over the Romans—particularly soldiers—of the third century C.E., so the week’s first day ceased to be Saturday but became dies Solis, day of the Sun, Sunday. Sunday was co-opted by early Christians as the day of the Lord, whose halo was the sun’s rays. The Emperor Constantine, who so influentially converted to Christianity, in 321 C.E., called Sunday “the venerable day of the Sun.” In the fourth century, the dating of Christmas on December 25th was dictated by the sun, for that was the date of the sun’s new life after the winter solstice.

After the debasement of the—female—lunar calendar, the whole history of calendar-making became a very male affair and time measurement was harnessed to patriarchal power. It is men who have set the calendar, whether the Roman senate renaming July and August for Julius and Augustus Caesar, or Pope Gregory XIII introducing the Gregorian calendar in 1582. It’s a male thing, this, ancient and modern, from the Pope to the Pirelli calendar and the pinup “flavor of the month.”

Digression: true to the same matrix (or perhaps patrix) of ideas; patriarchy, plus solar calendars plus a warrior society, take a contemporary example. In Russia recently, manufacturers of the MiG jet fighter planes used a Russian calendar-girl (with the nyetscowl that only Russian models would favor). “Our marketing gurus tell us that the sight of a beautiful girl touting jets will boost sales,” says a male representative of the manufacturers, in language that would hardly take a Derrida to deconstruct. “So we made a calendar. Beautiful girls for every month of the year. We also have pocket-size ones.” (I’m sure they do.)

The changeover from ancient, female ideas of time, lunar in calendar, cyclic in nature, to the modern idea of time, more solar in calendar, linear in shape and masculine in character, was heavily influenced by Judeo-Christianity. Matriarchal religions cleaved to the idea of rebirth; early patriarchy, with its successive dynasties and its father-son genealogies (and Salma begat Boaz and Boaz begat Obed and Obed begat Jesse) rules out rebirth, replacing its implied cyclical time with the linear time of linear descent. Patrilineal.

The Mexican Day of the Dead, while paying lip service to Christianity, is actually a survival of pre-Christian belief; time cycles on, one foot pedaling life and one death, in a round of rebirth which, like most cyclical images, has a redemptive swing. Christianity would stop it dead, push a stick in the spokes of the wheel. Like Zoroastrianism and Judaism, in its linear sense of time, early Christianity condemned cyclical time with vigor. St. Augustine, in The City of God, wrote that “The pagan philosophers have introduced cycles of time in which the same things are in the order of nature being restored and repeated, and have asserted that these whirlings of past and future ages will go on unceasingly.” By contrast, he argues, “It is only through the sound doctrine of a rectilinear course that we can escape from I know not what false cycles discovered by false and deceitful sages.” The history of the universe is “single, irreversible, unrepeatable, rectilinear,” unfolding as a “unidimensional movement in time,” from the creation to the life and death of Jesus to the end of the world. The crucifixion, described as a unique, historical event, implied linear time.

Religions which see time as linear—phallic in shape—are those which are patriarchal—phallic in character. Zoroastrians had their male god Mazda, their divine kings and their magi, wise men. The Judeo-Christian Bible is a handbook for patriarchy and much of the New Testament was written by the misogynist Paul. In the Talmud, women, together with children and slaves, are exempt from the time-based “thou shalt” commandments because since they are not free men, their time is not theirs to give.

The figure of Jesus (if indeed he ever existed) as represented in the New Testament has a lovely tilt on him and is the sort of person a woman might want to sit next to at heaven’s trestle table, but he was cut out of the patriarchal planning process. Christianity’s triumvirate (God the Father, the Holy Ghost and St. Paul) is all-male. Its apostles, disciples and priests are male. For born-again Christians today, the masculine rebirth in Christ is more important than your original—female—birth. Even the shape of the cross, Christianity’s most enduring symbol, uses masculine straight lines as opposed to the yonic circles of earth religions. In Somerset, England, a “circle calendar” of standing stones was recently set up by people living on the land, to mark the turning wheel of the year. In fury, nearby Christians set up a cross to “ward off the evil” of the cyclic honoring of “mother earth.”

In Christianity there are profound parallels between the masculinization of time and the church’s suppression of the feminine in the widest sense. The sixth century Rule of Saint Benedict was fundamental in altering perceptions of time. Historian of technology Lewis Mumford writes of it: “under the rule of the order, surprise and doubt and caprice and irregularity were put at bay. Opposed to the erratic fluctuations and pulsations of the worldly life was the iron discipline of the rule.” But Mumford’s point can be taken a (genderized) inch further; the masculine church militated against the very aspects of time which can broadly be described as female, moving in fluctuations: time capricious, elastic and changeful was to be eradicated by rigid, straight—masculine—time.

Both these ideas, the male domination of women and the masculine linearity of time, have become so successful, have so fully penetrated society’s world view, that they can seem inevitable; having the cultural invisibility of taken-for-grantedness. But just as the male oppression of women didn’t happen without a struggle, nor did the linear idea of time so easily overpower the cyclic.

In the Middle Ages there was a conflict between the cyclic and linear concepts, though the masculinizing of time would slowly win. How long an hour was in, say, the seventh century would depend on the season; an hour was a long, languorous lean in summer, but a short snap in winter. But once time—in Britain at least—had been divided into twenty-four strictly equal hours, the round, variable and stretchy yonic hour was but a nostalgia.

The whole poem offers a breathtakingly sophisticated portrait of time. In the last four stanzas, “time” runs like a litany: “Send us the timely fruit,” “Our tymely ioyes to sing,” “And for short time an endlesse moniment.” The sun’s movement is described and the circle of the year drawn. The twenty-four stanzas represent hours, but, further, the lines can be counted either long or short, long representing the duration of time, short the division of time, while the sum of the long lines is 365, the days in the year. The bride is compared to the (female) time symbol, the moon, while the poet/groom identifies himself with the (male) time symbol, the sun.

It was a marriage on several levels indeed, for Spenser marries time cyclic and time linear. Nature’s cyclic, seasonal time turns like a wheel, while the poem itself represents the linear, for written language is linear, containing the last lines of past time within itself, carving a narrative line out of the wash of experience. (I write this into the future: you read it into the past.)

Spenser’s timing was immaculate, for he wrote of the disappearing world of cyclic time at the advent of classical science’s most rigid, masculine assertions of time’s absolute linearity. It was a metaphoric “marriage” of the two sexes of time, the last marriage before the vicious divorce of Bacon’s ideas, the Cartesian split and the Newtonian separation. The treatment of time and the treatment of the feminine are so culturally connected. Women’s darkest hour at the hands of Christian misogyny: the hatred of women, women’s knowledges, their power, midwifery and cyclical experience of time, came with the violent murderous hatred which lasted between 1484 and 1640 or so—the witch-hunts. Then came the final defeat of cyclical time at the hands of classical science.

Overwhelmingly, the prominent figures associated with chronology and the study of time are men, from John de Dons, master clockmaker of the Middle Ages, who took sixteen years to make one particular astronomical clock (which, after his death, no one could repair), to clockmakers extraordinaire Christiaan Huygens, John Harrison and son, astronomer-timekeepers Cassini; father, son and grandson. Few women make clocks; even fewer make philosophies about them—only recently have women approached the subject of time, such as sociologist Barbara Adam and feminist academics Frieda Forman and Caoran Sowton. Men, though, have always found the subject irresistible, from Aristotle’s “time is the number of motion,” to Einstein; from Augustine’s question “What is time?” to Newton’s absolute certainty of answer; from Kant to Kierkegaard, Spinoza to Leibniz; from Heraclitus to Hegel, Heidegger and Hawking.

But rarely has time been more important to the male mind than in the rise of classical science, an intellectual period which self-consciously genderized itself masculine. A period which saw women’s knowledge as dark and dangerous—the knowledge of the moon—and men’s knowledge as being of the “light,” of the Enlightenment, the knowledge of the sun. A period which dug into the flesh of the human body and found not blood or nature but clockwork. A period which looked at the universe itself and saw a clock.

The sires of science asserted they sought a “masculine” philosophy with “virile” powers, linguistically explicit statements of male domination. Francis Bacon, 1561-1626, scientist and philosopher (and “somewhat worm-eaten personality,” according to humanitarian Albert Schweitzer) spoke viciously of “putting nature on the rack and forcing her to reveal her secrets,” and of science’s capacity to “bind Nature to man’s service and make her his slave,” in his significantly titled book The Masculine Birth of Time (1602). Scientific inventions do not “merely exert a gentle guidance over nature’s course; they have the power to conquer and subdue her, to shake her to her foundations.” The most violent images in the work of Bacon and his contemporaries are from the witch trials: the rack, the torture and the forcing to reveal secrets. In a passing aside in one essay, “Of Marriage and the Single Life,” Bacon writes that “single men . . . are more cruel and hardhearted (good to make severe inquisitors).” Bacon’s oft-repeated authority for his attitudes was the Bible.

Two remarkable features of the thinking of early scientists are their genderized character and their insistence on the image of clockwork for the linearly predictable nature of the universe. The conjunction of these two ideas is highly significant, for just as women and women’s knowledge had been brutally conquered, so cyclical, variable time was conquered and subdued by linear and absolute time. (A residual belief in reincarnation is thought by some commentators to have persisted in Britain until the time of the Malleus Maleficarum:The Hammer of Witches, in 1486.)

The image of the universe as mechanical clockwork, the overriding image of the age, is thought to have been first used by Nicholas Oresmus (d. 1382) describing god as a clockmaker—this represented the first depictions of nature as a dead machine. The German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) said “The universe is not similar to a divine living being, but is similar to a clock.” French philosopher and scientist René Descartes (1596-1650) compared a healthy man with a well-made clock. Robert Boyle, scientist of mechanical philosophy (1627-1691), wrote that the universe is “a great piece of clockwork,” and Bacon, in The Masculine Birth of Time, set out the new concept of linear intellectual progress. Time’s linearity was supported by Leibniz, Barrow and Locke.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man.

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in Night
God said, Let Newton be! and All was Light.

—ALEXANDER POPE’S EPITAPH FOR NEWTON

Isaac Newton (1642-1727) said the universe was clockwork. Moreover, he saw time as absolute and uniform: “Absolute, true and mathematical time of itself and by its own nature, flows uniformly without regard to anything external.” Newtonian physics, the science of the mechanical, changed nature’s “mystery” into “machinery,” as Vandana Shiva writes: “The rise of a patriarchal science of nature . . . in Europe during the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries . . . transformed nature from terra mater into a machine.” Previously, as Pope has it, nature was hid in night. That night-time of the moon gave way, absolutely, with Newton, to the time of the sun. Shiva notes how the effects of the witch-hunts which “aimed at annihilating women in Europe as knowers and experts” were compounded by the scientific revolution. As a result “women in Europe were totally excluded from the practice of medicine and healing because ‘wise women’ ran the risk of being declared witches.”

The very word “wise” has a quality of time. Only age can be wise. Youth may be clever, but only age is wise. Newton had his Annus Mirabilis, age twenty-four. Brilliant, absolutely, but wise? As Hegel says, “The Owl of Minerva comes at dusk,” wisdom comes at the end of the day. The whole scientific revolution was a battle over two types of knowledge, the overpowering of female wisdom by male brilliance, women’s mysteries of knowledge, as herbal-ism and midwifery were called, by men’s mechanics of knowledge.

The age of “enlightenment” pitted itself against the dark aspect of the moon, and sought, with the full might of scriptural authority, the light. Light was privileged over dark, the visible over invisible. Female knowledge, irksomely, darkly subjective, was denied: it was implicit, intuitive and interior, while the new science was explicit, experiential, exterior. While the interior is invisible, the exterior is visible. Visibility is a male affair; the cock stands Ecce Homo in the light. The yoni laps itself in the dark.

In the Enlightenment, the darkest sky was made visible by telescopes and the very nature of light was itself examined, by the white light of Newton’s—brilliant—mind, and whose—brilliant—optical experiments made light’s very elements visible. In 1693, the speculum as gynecological instrument first entered medical dictionaries: in name and nature an instrument for looking. The bright light of gynecology as a male science began to shine into that darkest place of all, pitch red and womb-dark, at once the heart of the individual woman’s mystery and the heart of women’s science—midwifery—women’s mystery. And that same bright light still shines on the female face under the cosmetic surgeon’s knife and eyes, making her an object for men’s eyes as much as the Russian nyet-calendar-girl “flashed” at by male cameramen. Women are to be looked at, passively, for to look is the prerogative of men since the Enlightenment. Wise women arraigned in the witch-hunts were in part detested for the “penetrating” quality of their gaze, as Germaine Greer writes in The Change, which, like the penetrating mind, was a privilege reserved for men.

From the Enlightenment on, what is visible has been privileged and science, technology and engineering have promoted “spectacular” erections, be they the Eiffel Tower or Newtonian telescopes. In honor of the phallic, penetrating instruments of looking, in 1750, two constellations were named Telescopium and Microscopium—and in honor of clocks, another constellation was called Horologium. Time itself was—supposedly—made visible by telescopes and made manifest in clocks, from sundials onwards, with the gnomon penetrating the round circle of time on the dial and the invisible hours of night becoming visible in twenty-four-hour clocks. The fascination with the visible meant that the clock, objective and visible machine of measurement, became privileged over the subjective invisible mystery of time itself—just as it is today. Time mechanical, linear and phallic won the battle and clock-time (visible and spectacular) was considered the time. True to that set of ideas, a “spectacular erection” was built in 1675 to mark men’s time measurement, in its most visible, most observable sense, a palace to patriarchy: the Greenwich Observatory.

The scientists of the Enlightenment saw themselves as objective spectators. But what you see depends on how you look, as any quantum theory professor or student of human nature will tell you. No science has ever been truly objective and when classical physicists viewed time, they saw it in the image of their—male—minds, as linear, phallic, rigid and absolute. But others, looking differently, have seen otherwise. Mayan astronomers dug deep, dark pits or holes in the “mother earth” like an inverted telescope to look at the night sky. And as the Enlightenment telescopes were phallic, and saw phallic, linear time, could you not argue that that is why the Mayans saw cyclic time through their deep-dug holes, truly telescopes of the cunt?

Time to scientists during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was absolute and deterministic. In the wider world, the increasing precision of clockwork (coupled with the increasing number of clocks and watches) meant time was chiseled to fit snug to the clock—the last seconds of inaccuracy planed away to a tiny, curly shaving. Time must be predictable, knowable and visible—and, most important, time was considered synonymous with clockwork—as, all too often, it sadly still is.

As a result of all these things, time was stripped of its female nature—most obviously in the antipathy to cycles of time, but also in the tricksier characteristics of time as a thing of chance, caprice and unpredictability—all things which, for good and for bad, have been associated with the female. My 1991 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary glosses “woman” thus: “With allusion to qualities conventionally attributed to the female sex, as mutability, capriciousness . . .” Aristotle used the terms “male” and “female” to describe differing understandings of time in the cosmos, calling the heavens male because he considered them eternal and immutable, while calling the earth female because it was changeable. “Varium et mutabile semper femina,” according to Virgil (Women were ever things of many changing moods). Saint Augustine wrote that “Woman is a creature neither decisive nor constant.” “She is all wavering and hesitation: in short, she is a woman,” according to Jean Racine in Athalie. “A constant woman—the greatest impossibility!” according to Tirso de Molina. And when a friend’s Sardinian father wishes gently to tease his wife, he softly whistles the famous tune from Verdi’s Rigoletto: La donna e mobile.

“Entirely up to you,” replies the sphinx, as particle. “I see! You are a particle!” cries the scientist. “What you see depends on how you look,” murmurs the sphinx as wave. The scientist rubs his eyes and, yes, as if by some mysterious magic, the sphinx is a wave again, a mock-a-minute to stun the three-hundred-year-old certainty of science.

Science, during this century, has bewitchingly metamorphosed into something richer, stranger and more tender than the rigid mechanistic science of classical physics. The very style of scientific terminology—the watchwords—have changed. Newton’s “Absolute Time” becomes Einstein’s “Relativity.” Bacon’s utter self-assurance and “certainty” becomes Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty.” Classical “determinism” becomes twentieth-century “chaos.” “Necessity” gives way to “Chance.” Where Kepler insisted that the universe is “not similar to a divine living being, but is similar to a clock,” Gaia theory has gone to the heart of what it means that our earth is alive—its warm and moist life-giving properties. Disciplines which were self-consciously masculine are now shyly embracing the feminine. The stance of Bacon’s coercive, violent torturer-scientist becomes that of more tentative sensitivity. Theoretical physics shows a greater humility in the face of all that is not known, as what, anciently, was mystery and became machinery, now admits of mystery again; the awe and the knowing no longer in opposition. It has been a history, if you like, of the “feminizing” of science.

A big disclaimer is needed here; I don’t regard masculine and feminine as necessarily qualities of men and women respectively. They operate as cultural shorthand for broad accretions of ideas. For their non-alignment even within science, take, for example, two scientists, one sensitive, complex, holistic, ecological and deeply influenced by the feminine—Fritjof Capra. The other rigid, patriarchal, cruel, hierarchical, war-mongering and masculine—Margaret Thatcher. “Masculine” and “feminine” are a quick notation for a whole matrix of tendencies, like yin and yang in Chinese philosophy. (The yin/yang sign was the coat-of-arms of the Danish theoretical physicist Niels Bohr, with his motto of complementary opposites.)

In every culture, there is both “male” and “female”; in modern society, though, the male side has been too privileged for too long. Chinese philosophy teaches that whenever one tendency overreaches itself, it contains the seeds of its opposite tendency within it; just when “male” science reaches its apotheosis in erections of rockets, bombs, biotechnology and dam-building, so physics is also producing “feminized” science: the work of Capra; James Lovelock’s and Lynn Margulis’s Gaia theory; Ilya Prigogine’s work on time.

In no subject was this “feminization” of science more intriguing than in the subject of time. When Ilya Prigogine surveys twentieth-century physics—relativity, quantum mechanics, evolutionary cosmology, non-equilibrium structures and deterministic chaos—he writes: “a remarkable point is that all this emphasizes the role of time.” Much of Prigogine’s own breakthrough work was being done during the 1970s. That period was also the decade non pareil for the feminist texts of the women’s movement: The Female Eunuch setting the pace in 1970. And right in the middle of that decade, in 1975, two classic texts were published. One, by Capra, was The Tao of Physics. The other, by linguistic scientist George Steiner, was After Babel.

These two powerful minds, at work on subjects a world apart, nevertheless reveal something very similar. Capra writes of quantum theory: “At the sub-atomic level, matter does not exist with certainty at definite places, but rather shows ‘tendencies to exist,’ and atomic events do not occur with certainty at definite times and in definite ways, but rather show ‘tendencies to occur.’ ”

Compare that with Steiner, writing of time in women’s language: “At a rough guess, women’s speech is richer than men’s in those shadings of desire and futurity known in Greek and Sanskrit as optative; women seem to verbalize a wider range of qualified resolve and masked promise.” (Compare that also to the Hopi view of time where time is divided into the “manifest,” curving to the past, and the “about-to-become-manifest,” with its list into future.)

The picture of time which Capra’s physics and Steiner’s linguistics each reveal could not be more different from Newtonian rigid, absolute time and what is revealed is female in character. It is the curved slant of the glancingly evanescent; like an invisible net of silk streeling away, cast from the hand of now into the unreached water of future-potential, and watching its arc wait on the rise of a moment, you can almost hear time—subtle time—breathe in.

Patriarchal thinking, from its sun-worshipping warriors of Dies Solis, reaches a pinnacle in today’s over-solar Dies Irae, the brightest, ferocious white light of atomic warfare outshining the sun. The worst of masculine science has betrayed the world in its deadly refusal to be socially responsible; in its bombs and biotechnology, its phallic rockets blasting the planets’ eternal cycles. The best of science, though, is a passion for life. Gaia theory expresses the gorgeous vitality, the “exuberant disequilibrium of the Earth” as Lovelock says. The term “life” runs through Lovelock’s work like a jazz riff: life, lif, alive, life, anima, life-alive.

The life sciences, as Lovelock demonstrates, are overwhelmingly important both as disciplines and as politics; he includes passionate environmentalist pleas in his books. There is a detectable tendency—albeit still in a minority of scientists—to use multi-disciplinary thought that is not shy of values and politics. In The Web of Life Capra writes: “The new concepts in physics have brought about a profound change in our worldview; from the mechanistic worldview of Descartes and Newton to a holistic, ecological view.” Sociologist Barbara Adam and anthropologist Alan Tormaid Campbell are ahead of their disciplines in taking a moral stance in their work. Science for the Earth, edited by Tom Wakeford and Martin Walters, is a compendium of broad scientific thinkers, looking at the world with sidesight (wiser than hindsight), those who connect, who think with “all” halves of the mind and who consider it a duty that scientists should “make the world a better place,” as the subtitle has it.

Thanks to feminism, there is also a new-but-very-old understanding that knowledge can be rooted in the body—that the personal is not only political but intellectual—and the body is not the opposite of the mind, but is itself a way of knowing. Danah Zohar, mother, physicist and author of Through the Time Barrier, discussing her experience of motherhood and comparing it to time in quantum physics, says: “These experiences of time—in dreaming, reflecting, being a mother, are not easily given to structure. When I was pregnant, schedules didn’t sit well with me at all. Trying to structure the flow of experience into Newtonian sequential time gave me a headache.”

In the best science today, there is a surge of thinking, half exasperated with the carpeted chuckles of single-discipline academia and half exuberant with the elation of thinking widely. Scientist Friedensreich Hundertwasser writes this wonderful long-jump of thought, leaping from the scientific concept “straight line” to its social effect. “The straight line leads to the downfall of mankind . . . It has become an absolute tyranny . . . something cowardly drawn with a rule, without thought or feeling; it is the line which does not exist in nature. And that line is the rotten line of our doomed civilization. . . .” Opposed to that straight line is the circle principle, of a worldview in which ecology and feminism link up: ecofeminists show how the treatment of nature has mirrored that of women—noting in passing how patriarchal capitalism has sulkily hated the very concept of recycling with all its female overtones.

And what of Time? Classical physics saw time as a separate dimension, absolute and independent of the material world; Einstein recognized that it was relative and dependent on the observer. Space and time seemed entirely disconnected in classical physics; in relativistic physics, they were unified. As the best science has been “feminized” in the twentieth century, the tendency has never been truer than in the subject of time. The force of gravity, according to Einstein’s relativity theory, has the effect of “curving” space and time: Stephen Hawking’s work showed the strong “curvature” of space-time around black holes and the infinite stretch of time over the event horizon. Time, instead of being rigid, linear and strict, began to be seen as elastic, stretchy and curved. Thinking itself had to reflect it; not for nothing are these ideas called mind bending, for they curve the brain and crescent it. Time, once stiff with the phallic principle, began in the twentieth century to curl into the yonic principle.

And then there are nonlinear equations. British mathematician Ian Stewart writes: “As the world was a clockwork for the eighteenth century, it was a linear world for the nineteenth and most of the twentieth,” but a decisive change has come about now in seeing that nature is “relentlessly nonlinear.” With chaos theory, the universe is shown to be a long way from clockwork, a chancey thing, dynamical chaos laughing like a hyena at Newton and classical physics’s time-symmetric determinism and predictability. Chaos is the rule not the exception. Chaos Rules, O.Kaos. F. David Peat, an expert in the science of Native American cultures, says: “Now scientists are discovering what Indigenous science has long taught: that the norm is not order but chaos.” Eighteenth-century mechanics considered time as reversible and, though common sense suggests otherwise, no model could be found to illustrate its irreversibility. Further, it couldn’t countenance anything containing both movement and motionlessness in time. But in the 1970s and 1980s, Ilya Prigogine did an Archimedes with whirlpools and eddies and had his eureka moment. Whirlpools, eddies and candle flames were, he argued, examples of things which contained both a structure and a flow. He coined the term “dissipative structures” to describe the presence of both ideas, shape and flux—which had seemed inherently contradictory opposites. The result of Prigogine’s work with Isabelle Stengers was that finally you could see how in living systems, irreversibility ruled; it was the mechanism that brought order out of chaos and you had an image of time which included both stillness and motion, time arrested and time passing. Life itself is an example of dissipative structures.

The key to understanding dissipative structures is to realize that they maintain themselves in a stable state far from equilibrium. This situation is so different from the phenomena described by classical science that we run into difficulties with conventional language. Dictionary definitions of the word “stable” include “fixed,” “not fluctuating,” and “unvarying,” all of which are inaccurate to describe dissipative structures.

Classical physics wasn’t fond of flux. Arguably, this was part of the stone-blindness of classical scientists to all that is “female,” especially in the shadings of time. No science is free of cultural conditioning, and hard-line classical physics combined with some hard-core classic misogyny to detest the very thought of flux. The period which saw the rise to power of classical physics also saw a spectacular hatred of menstruation—the individual woman’s flux. In nineteenth-century fashion, a woman’s exterior physical movement was hobbled in “hobble skirts,” and even her interior movement was dammed: stays, laced too tight, as they often were, could literally stay—impede—the flow of a woman’s courses—her menstruation. Well into this century, the hatred of women’s flow is still apparent in the silence and shame with which the subject is treated. In the U.K., advertisements for sanitary pads, designed to illustrate the absorbency of materials, are not allowed to represent blood by a red liquid. They have to use its opposite color—blue. Red is the color of life in flow. Blue is the color of stasis, of motionless structure—blue as the sky habitation of the patriarchal god of the ancient Israelites, blue as the god of the Huns. Arguably, this explains why the Catholic church dressed the static iconic Madonna in blue—not for her the menstruating power of womanhood in red, red flow.

Perhaps it took not only the “feminizing” of science, but the whole cultural resurgence of the female during the twentieth century, most evident in the women’s movement (another flow), to enable scientific breakthroughs such as Prigogine’s, to see time once more as both flow and structure. Capra writes that the radical character of Prigogine’s work was:

apparent from the fact that these fundamental ideas were rarely addressed in traditional science and were often given negative connotations. This is evident in the very language used to express them. Nonequilibrium, nonlinearity, instability, indeterminacy, etc., are all negative formulations . . . Many of the key characteristics of dissipative structures—the sensitivity to small changes in the environment, the relevance of previous history at critical points of choice, the uncertainty and unpredictability of the future—are revolutionary new concepts from the point of view of classical science, but are an integral part of human experience. Since dissipative structures are the basic structures of all living systems, including human beings, this should perhaps not come as a great surprise. Instead of being a machine, nature at large turns out to be more like human nature—unpredictable, sensitive to the surrounding world, influenced by small fluctuations.

But I would take this observation one step further, not entirely capriciously; the shades of time’s character, as revealed in the model of dissipative structures, have all the qualities which patriarchy has attributed to women, and has therefore devalued for so long. It is female human nature which has long been expressed only negatively, so where Capra cites “nonequilibrium,” the cultural dictionary might say women are unbalanced. For “nonlinearity,” the cultural lexicon might offer the idea that women are illogical; for “instability,” substitute women’s famous unstable natures; and for “indeterminacy,” would it be accurate to say that women are indecisive? I dunno. Can’t decide.

Certain aspects of time—like “chance”—have lately been given new status, and the intriguing thing is that all these newly respected new found shadings of time’s character are those considered female. Chance has always been ascribed a female nature; Fortuna, Lady Luck. Fickleness is what women do best. Caprice is female, as Predictability is male. (And, oh exuberant disequilibrium, how I know you.)

Last night I dreamt of dissipative structures. When I woke, I was thinking about what they call the bifurcation point. (Horrible word that, all buck teeth and spit. Sorry.) The bifurcation point of a dissipative structure is “a threshold of stability at which the dissipative structure may either break down or break through to one of several new states of order,” in the words of Capra.

Capra again: “At the bifurcation point, the dissipative structure also shows an extraordinary sensitivity to small fluctuations in its environment. A tiny random fluctuation, often called ‘noise,’ can induce the choice of path.” At this point, far from equilibrium, chance dances with necessity, fluctuation waltzes with determinism. You are a dissipative structure. So am I.

To recap a little, dissipative structures reveal a renewed status for “female” aspects of time. At the bifurcation point, these “female” characteristics are at their maximum. And what of women? At the points of maximum femaleness, such as menstruation, the dissipative structure which is me or you is at its bifurcation point. “Sensitivity to small changes in the environment,” “unpredictability,” and “influenced by small fluctuations” are phrases used by scientists to describe this point for dissipative structures. Remind you of anything? Being “open and far from equilibrium?” This sense of being at a critical time—painfully sensitive, capricious, changeful, unstable, powerful, chancey, fluky, fluctuating, unpredictable and all—is exactly what it feels like to be acutely premenstrual, far from equilibrium indeed—chaos theory in motion. When the social equivalent of a butterfly flapping its wings just one time too damn many will cause the emotional equivalent of an erupting volcano. When one fraction of a temperature alteration will cause a flood of hot flushing way out of control. And, true to chaos theory, it is out of the utterly chaotic turbulence itself, the flow of “courses,” of course, that a new order—post-menstrual self-collectedness—reestablishes itself.

For we are linear, and we are cyclic. Our lives move like a line: child, girl, maiden, mother, crone. Yet for much of our lives, time moves within us like a circle. State-of-the-art science now provides a model of time which matches this very female experience. Coveney and Highfield sum up their meticulous book The Arrow of Time thus: “What has emerged from non-linear dynamics and non-equilibrium thermodynamics . . . offers a sophisticated reassessment of time. Non-linear equations show us that thermodynamics can account for both linear and cyclical time.”

Spenser, in his “Epithalamion,” wrote:

Ah, when will this long weary day have end,
And lend me leave to come unto my love?

It is a lover’s question for his beloved and a question of one aspect of time for its complementary opposite. For time, forced for a day that lasted three hundred years to walk in line in strict steps along a cold stone corridor of too masculine a thought, has all the while longed for its complementary opposite—cyclic time, shunned and vilified, waiting outside in the half-light of the moon. Modern science has just now allowed their meeting at twilight, the trysting hour, the cockshut hour, in a dusk which holds both night and day, for the model of time science now gives us is one of time united, male with female, linear and cyclic, a fulfillment of the deep erotic principle at the very heart of time.