That was one of the most beautiful of the ancient wonders, and this is the contemporary wonder, integrating all the others, as though their sum or their synthesis. I will start this book again from its beginning. And try, anew, to go back up from my culture to nature, from the singular to the universal, by the contingent path of time. In the Grand Narrative, whose stages this overview has just gone back over anew but differently, who can conceive of a duration of fifteen billion years? From the accretion of the Earth or from the birth of living things up until this morning, a time stretches out that’s incommensurable with my existence.
The closure of rhythms
At an unavowable age, I am returning from a short trip to the place I was born, two years after the death of my brother. Not a living soul bearing our name lives in the space where fields and roads have taken the place of the worksites traversed, once and formerly, by boats towards the bank and trucks towards the city, whose hellish noise informed everyone of the family business. Could you live there or take the road without us? For thirty kilometres around, the walls rose from the pride of our sand, and the lanes led over the sturdiness of our broken rocks. Silence now for the name, an empty house, tools that have dissolved into the ground and the weeds, did we even live here? Born at the end of the last century, my father risked his life and compromised his health in an appalling war whose stakes we don’t even understand anymore and established a business, which has disappeared without a trace, on the banks of the Garonne; he rests beneath the land he loved in the company of a wife no one remembers anymore. Yet nothing has changed, not the lines of the gentle horizon, nor the paradoxical course of the river, nor the dark colour of the alluvia, nor the pink of the peach trees at the forefront of spring, nor the Gascon man with his brotherly features: despite a long absence, I recognize myself more than ever to have come from here. In this stable constancy, a period is coming to a close which didn’t last.
I knew, as a child, an agriculture, a religiosity, a language: all three dead, and later a navy, a culture, ways of behaving: all three defunct. In sum, the murderous twentieth century went by in a blink of an eye. Farms with roofs caved in here and there, a few closed churches, sentences become incomprehensible, a disbanded family, this is what homecoming shows to melancholy; but elsewhere, the graveyards of rusting boats, the Greek and Latin languages as lost as Occitan, the customs become absurd, one must have lived through the end of certain rhythms to reckon the interval they cadence to be almost nothing. If I add the life of my father to my short life, the unit of a century didn’t last very long.
Measurement kills time
Modern agriculture, modern medicine and the modern recording media for information are closing other eras, thousands of years old for their part. Born in the Neolithic, livestock-farmed sheep and cultivated wheat launched hominization into the furrows and cowsheds the West is abandoning today; in pain ever since earthly paradise, the human body is changing due to effective remedies; the invention of writing already threw us into a virtuality we are inhabiting in our technologies. Genetic engineering is taking the place of the stud farm and the plant nursery; the screen is taking the place of the page. Other multi-millennial intervals are closing, other rhythms not lasting very long. That names and families have disappeared without a trace matters little; but the things themselves (tools, ploughs, boats and yokes), technical vocabularies and bodily gestures, in sum the relation to the world, the set of bonds to others and the deep and secret relationship to oneself have just melted into absence, thousands of years in a blink of an eye.
Since we measure time by recurrences, we only reckon its duration when these periods close. Having arrived there, these periods seem almost empty to us. Here is the sunset: What have I done with the day? The start of the year links up again with the preceding one, so short. At the death of this woman: Did I love her enough? When the final signature at the bottom of the work brings it to a close, at the return to the home town where the farm is crumbling, at the conjoint celebrations of the century and the millennium, before the scattered stones of an erased civilization, when GMOs appear at agriculture’s end: all this ends so quickly.
So briefly that time is called the tick-tock of a clock, beating drums and the motion of the baton pointed by the conductor even though it passes between punctuations from which these muffled blows seem to expel it. Measurement kills time; timetables shorten life; in my empty city, my family has vanished; in the countryside where peach trees with modified genes are blossoming, the Neolithic has been brought to an end. Counting by centuries or millennia exhausts the intervals while only leaving their limits: consequently, I leap over the ladder of a scale I thought was inaccessible.
My perception inhabits the rhythm of the circadian light; my memory haunts the year or the century; then, I think with my neurons and my head. If my knowledge settles into the metabolic equilibrium of nutrition, therefore into the agrarian labours of crossbreeding species, in brief, if I think with my body, then I live at ease in the millennia, and the ruins of my old farm match their debris with the excavation of that Sumer which rose from the agricultural dawn; my muscles work with Gilgamesh, and my heart beats in company with Sarah, the wife of Abraham, the patriarch shepherd.
For these diverse rhythms, short or long is of no importance, say nothing about the nature of time but display a few of the units that measure it. We always confuse nature and the measurement of time. From cardiac beating to the length of the day, from my father’s life to the wearing away of the building’s framework, from the conquest of the wheat fields over the forest in the Fertile Crescent to the contemporary ending of this agriculture, I’m changing rhythms, that’s all; but have I perceived the corresponding time? Nothing could be less certain since I force it to enter into periods, whose beginning and death I know, which I therefore dominate, which I master by metricizing and which I nullify in this way. Jumping from era to era or flying over the levels of a scale, I find myself at the beginning of a process of hominization that is coming to a close today.
Rhythmical measurement kills time. The duration separating the recurrence of the intervals lasts hardly the blink of an eye.
Memories and rhythms
And yet what do we remember when we manage to do so? We remember rhythms, for the processual rhesis traverses us and, in passing, surpasses us, without ever returning over itself or over us. This irreversibility doesn’t heap up any treasure; on the contrary, a bank has to exist for this irreversibility to force it into spending. Because it always compels into spending. Only a fortune that has already been amassed can be squandered. Thus, memory can only become attached to the reversible, to the fold formed by these two opposites, face-to-face, loss and return, curr ent and countercurrent, the expansion that flees and the light that returns, like a relic radiation, the colours with different vibrations of light in the spectrum, anticline and syncline, the folds of the proteins, the return of the prodigal son, the repetition, da capo, of our book and our loves, the vibration of singing, the eloquence of words, the secret poetry of prose, cadences. Newton’s pseudo-time, reversible, follows a rhythm; it doesn’t count the duration of a flowing but describes the vibrations of a planetary system which thus puts the brakes on the irreversible. Thus, like planets, the most anxious of us try to defer their fall towards death via a timetable that leaves one gasping for breath.
Memory bends and heaps up numbers and folds, puts treasures on an island and multiplicities in a bank, seeks a pocket, like a chromosome, and fills it with negentropy, draws an island which defends its shores from the mounting entropy, amounts to rhythms, formed from numbers, heaped, folded inside the pocket. All things, vibrating, thus contain memory because they vibrate, like the screw of the celestial vault to which the Ancients and Renaissance figures gave the name Helix, like the double helix of DNA. And, obstinate and relentless, the rhesis or flow spends these treasures, undoes these folds, opens these pockets, eats away at the shores of these islands: entropy wears negentropy away grain by grain.
The rhythms of the metabolism and the arrhythmic genome
When recounting that a sage, in prison for life, finally deciphers, in proximity to death, the message buried in the secret drawing that a jaguar is wearing on its coat, Borges doesn’t go back up duration very far. Caressing the hairs of the fur, at the surface of a phenotype, he doesn’t plunge deeply into its flesh or into the duration of life. Of course, the old man doesn’t merely think with his neurons, he decodes the carnivore’s ocellated coat body to body. I guess the name of this sage: Darwin, the first one to decipher the riddles written on the bones of animals and the expression of their emotions.
But, on the nether side of the selection that gave the jaguar its special finery, we now know that the writing of the god is hidden more deeply, in the folded depths of the genome, whose musical staff we know how to read. We are beginning to take the folded strands of DNA as temporal sounders. Human only for an extremely slight percentage, the genes squeezed into these nuclear pockets combine certain of the genes that made the bonobo and the jaguar, precisely, but also birds and reptiles, in short, Metazoa and, even further back, single-celled organisms; via this list lying in the nuclei of our cells, we enter into the arcana of long time and go back up evolution, all the way back to the birth of the first prokaryote more than four billion years ago.
But what does this word ‘year’ mean, equipped with this laughable annual rhythm, ineffective due to its brevity, almost harmful since it designates a periodic measurement? But the new sounder abandons all rhythm so as to enter arrhythmicity: by means of an alphabet simplified to the extreme, a long message is unfolded by the strands of DNA, a message in which not only is no temporal period shown but into which enter a thousand fragments devoid of any manifest meaning or use. And since I unite a body that lasts the blink of an eye and a sounder-germ which accumulates this colossal time, a short-rhythm phenotype and a genome, part of which goes back to the first bacteria and these latter to the first atoms, a metabolism that beats like a heart and a periodless bank, does my life compose superficial cycles suitable for the rhythmic measurement of time with a stock in which its nature lies?
Chromosomes, chrono-sums?
Formed from a string of notes seemingly drawn at random, our genome, aperiodic, therefore appears to pile up either into a specific and individual summary or into one of those profiles I called scenographic above, the geometral scale of living things. Thus, through the orchestral music expressed by all the particular staffs of our genes, I silently participate in the beings surrounding me, peasant women from my city, masons and fraternal long-distance truck drivers, the bulls of the cowshed and ducks of the farmyard, shad from Garonne, the pink peach trees of the plain, wheat, corn, tomatoes and kiwi, playing their singular instruments in unequal rhythm. All together and without any measure, we plunge into the same time.
Essential to life, this aperiodicity implicates 1 several of its properties: the specificity of each text combines, in a single interlacing, the originality of life itself, plus the originality of the species, lastly the originality of the individual; in addition, the instability implicated by the rupture of all symmetry launches a divergence from equilibrium, the very time of existence. For, conversely, period and symmetry contract duration by in the end erasing what they began; stabilizing its flowing, they dissolve it. Therefore if measuring time by rhythms consists in doing away with it, breaking them, on the contrary, launches it. We then find ourselves all together thrown into the adventure of time. I am entering here into a second memory, mysterious and almost contradictory, which no longer relies on recurrences. Aperiodic therefore and universal, the genetic code adds up, sums up, totalizes the time of the biota and makes the time of each of us appear. Banks or chronic sums, will we have to call chromosomes chrono-sums? Thus, our genome contains part of evolution, the well enveloped by a part of its unfolding, from which the community of everyone and the singularity of each of us emerge. We are beginning to understand the link that unites duration deeply with individuation, myself and this colossal flow I thought I would never be able to grasp.
Combinatorics contains the secret of irreversibility
Better, the place in which this long duration is implicated, dense and motionless, combines certain elements. If measuring time requires a rhythmics, does the nature of time lie in combinatorics?
I think so, for measurement always beats a reversible time, capable, at least formally, of returning over itself. The planets revolve around the Sun, as do the hands around the circumference of a watch; the heart pounds according to regular sine waves; I count the years, centuries and millennia on side-by-side wheels: without any notable change, all this can roll backwards. But if I arrange a large number of elements together, the probability that I will soon produce the same combination as before lowers to the vicinity of zero. The sequence of these states of affairs will only return over itself at the end of an unimaginable time. With each interlacement, an originality arises. Nothing beats or revolves anymore; everything becomes other and therefore changes and transforms: so the sequence of counts and time flees, irreversible. Combinatorics thus produces an arrow: the genome contains time, endowed with its direction.
When I think or remember with my brain, I blink in fast rhythms; when I think and remember with my body, this latter slows them down; but in both cases, I do so within the very inside of periods and therefore can only attain a measurement, as in the sciences an d sometimes with philosophers: all these measurements, periods or rhythms remain reversible, independent of direction, invariant if it goes in the opposite direction. But if I think in and by chromosomes, genes and DNA, I discover not a chronometer – this tool would still be used for a metrics and reversibility – but the good sounder by which I penetrate into the very nature of time, into its irreversibility, the one we always forget about.
So I rebound onto another scale. Cut up into atomic elements, dating from the formation of the world, from the big bang if it ever existed, my genome’s staff combines, associates and weaves them together so as to launch other individuals locally, as unforeseeable as I am. Via these elementary notes, the musical notation of every score, I silently participate in the water of the oceans we left in an archaic form, in Garonne’s currents from which I emerged long ago – when my mother was pregnant with me, she was saved from a spring flood by my bargeman father’s boat – in the breaths of air I inhale, in the land that nourishes the irritable bulls and the pink peach trees, in the sand and gravel stemming from the family business and the Paleozoic Era, in the very hydrogen of the Universe, in matter, in light, in the initial fire. All of them compounds that sing, together and without any measure, disharmony and the forgetfulnesses of the world.
But this shaky harmony unfolds according to individuated combinations that are always different and therefore launches a global contingency. What is contingency? This unfolding of the irreversible, this production of singularities by the combinatory bank of time. Long ago Leibniz staged the understanding of God before the creation of the world. This strange ‘organ’ also contained possibilities in the form of elements. So, from time immemorial, God calculated: He combined these sorts of atoms. From each operation a world emerged. All of them were different from each other since one of these arrangements can only be repeated with an infinitely small probability. Among them, He chose the best. No, the inspired philosopher didn’t claim to have slipped into the Creator’s deliberations before the fiat that gave existence to beings and things; he merely anticipated the combinatory operations whose laws he had discovered and whose detail we are deciphering today in the nuclei of cells. What’s more, by combining atoms and worlds, God created time, singularity by singularity. He created it contingently since another world could have been chosen. How can contingency and creation be brought into opposition today, two ideas that presuppose one another? Likewise, from the random arrangement of the molecular alphabet contained in DNA are born, with as many restrictions as you might like, organisms that are so diverse that their sequence follows an irreversible time; from this bank, singular times emerge by free association of elements. The old Leibnizian operation remains true for the Universe as well as for every living thing. The irreversibility of individual existence and the contingency of evolutionary time are born of combinatorics. Whose algebra or topology undoes or constructs, in effect, singularities by numbers and folds, resolving the secret that complexity, a simple word repeating folds and numbers, seems to contain. Elements and permutations form the well, the bank, the stock where time accumulates in irreversible sequences from which sometimes unfold, according to such-and-such arrangements, permutations, combinations, diverse states of affairs, always different: the physics and chemistry of the world and life.
Life links the reversibility and the irreversibility of time
Composed therefore of bodies and germs, the living thing unites the diverse phenotypic, metabolic and organic rhythms which measure time and the folded or piled aperiodic combinations hiding and unveiling its nature: rhythms plus duration, periods plus processual, reversibility plus irreversibility, measurement plus nature, memory plus forgetfulness. Again a white map on top of another – mixed – one.
What is life? The unification of a universal bank of time and the diverse reversibilities that spend its small change. By flashes and occultations, the bank of issue, microscopic and colossal, launches these strange masses into the visible, masses that burn a time which their diverse rhythms empty and destroy while the same bank jealously guards this time, a bank reproduced in its dense folds and sliding from rhythm to rhythm, silently. The nature of time produces its rhythms, therefore its measurement, therefore its spending and nullification. Through this process, our existences enter into constricted pockets in which the birth and death of the individual, the family, the city, the millennial era, the million-year-old species succeed one another in the appearance of an almost infinitely brief flash. What we take to be time and remember – work hours, the years of schooling, fleeting life and its tendernesses without hope, the short centuries and rapid civilizations, all periods during which certain states of affairs, a hidden thought, a secret love, a humble work, a visible feat, a bloody empire, traditional agriculture, ocellated fur, life and the Earth are invented, flourish and die – amounts, on the contrary, to appearances in space of a few brief symmetrical equilibria, of a few fulgurant reversibilities.
Yes, life suddenly leaves – why? sometimes out of love – the hidden sequence in which time is coiled up and launches a measurable avatar of it into the deadly entropic fall; in that case, circular beatings, periods, measurements and cycles try to slow this descent towards pure disorder as much as possible; thus strings of eddies return over themselves and create virtually stable forms across the flaming current, behind the bridge support, as though the water was delaying its course, as though the turbulence was putting off the inevitable; thus, the clinamen appears in the atomic rain and generates rhythms, still falling, but less so. These spirals, the measurement of time, the rhythms of music and language delay death. The time of life, the time that is forgotten in the interval of returns and cycles, slows, checks, hinders, brakes, decelerates, diverts, shifts back the entropy debacle. We stand about, procrastinate, ask for a delay while zigzagging like a ball alternately hitting two walls facing each other, two days, two years or two billion, two heartbeats or bats of an eyelash, descending to the valley, alternately grabbing handholds and footholds. Life gives alternating support in a dihedral with two facing sides thanks to which we defer falling. This rhythmic constriction delays our death. Thus timetables lengthen life as much as they ravage it. Slow it while destroying it.
What is life? These rhythmic measurements emanating from an ever-present well from which an aperiodic painting stripped of all meaning springs up. What is my life? A meaningful text, formed of books, sentences and words that, all three, begin and end, but are all three constructed from an alphabet thrown into disorder in this well. Yes, these very lines you are reading, reader, this little bit of music you will forget; this thought that seizes me upon my homecoming and will leave me. Who are we? What is our life? A rare music heading towards silence but which rises, irresistible, rhythmical, cantabile, allegro, presto, lento, triste, over an irrepressible background noise.
So eternity appears, fragile and stable, in a fulgurant ph enomenal brilliance, a point held like a song – your beauty, the intuition of this dawn, luminous all three of them, the bull and the jaguar, the rooster and the pink peach trees, the granite rocks rolled in the turbulent tumult of the River Garonne and which I knew how to break in the past, these few scattered sentences, individuals, varieties, thrown into the stance, the minute, day, year, century or eras – whereas time sleeps, rolled up, folded, in a pile, as though embryonated in aperiodic sets of elements, genes and atoms deep within our bodies. Neglecting this piled-up time, kept in secrecy in these banks, we frugally live an eternity that we experience, joyful, dancing, playing according to rhythms and measures, in the brief equilibrium of our hearts, of our flesh and of the world and sometimes in the symmetry of a palindromic name.
A combiner, God plays contingent time with numbered dice. Sparkling with eternity, laughing, we shake these dice in our pockets, in cadence.
Once again, the Grand Narrative
Da capo: therefore ever since the big bang, for its part again, if it ever existed, began to construct the first atoms inert and living things are composed of; ever since the planets cooled and our Earth became a reservoir of the material, heavier still, from which our tissues and bones are formed; ever since a strange acid molecule began, four billion years ago, to replicate itself as it was, then to change by mutating; ever since the first living things began to colonize the face of the Earth by constantly evolving, leaving behind them more extinct species than we will ever know of contemporary ones; ever since a young girl, called Lucy, started to stand up in the savannah of East Africa, promising without realizing it the explosive journeys of the coming humanity into the totality of the emerged continents, into contingent and divergent cultures and languages; ever since a few tribes from South America and the Middle East invented the cultivation of corn or wheat, not to forget the worthy patriarch who planted the grapevine or the Indian hero who brewed beer, thus domesticating for the first time living things as tiny as yeast; ever since writing was in its infancy and certain tribes began to write verse in the Greek or Italic languages, then the common trunk of the grandest narrative began to grow, before our eyes, so as to give an unexpected, real and common, chronic thickness to a humanism finally worthy of the name since precisely all the languages and cultures that came from it can finally participate in it, a humanism that’s single and universal since written in the encyclopedic language of all the sciences and since it can be translated into every vernacular, without particularism or imperialism.
The mosaic of cultures
But I understand you: nothing in this long epic consoles us or will protect us from not understanding one another because we don’t speak the same languages, from hating one another because we don’t practise the same religions, from exploiting one another so that those who don’t live at the same economic levels lack defence, from persecuting one another because we don’t have the same forms of government … Thus nothing can prevent us from murdering one another for all these reasons. I understand you, and you are right. Even worse, the old culture, which certain people mourn, yet founded on the horror of the Trojan War or the ban on human sacrifice under the fist of Abraham, the father of the monotheisms, has never freed us from such hellish violence, a daily occurrence in history, nor from the massacres of Gauls, Indians, Cathars or Aborigines, nor from Auschwitz or Hiroshima. With the sciences not saying the meaning, only cultures can evoke it.
We writers, sometimes humanist in every sense, have no political power or armed forces or money, and fortunately. We wouldn’t make any better use of them than anyone else; we have, alas, shown this ten times over. How few men said to be of culture know that true culture, universal, would be recognized by the fact that it would allow a man of culture not to crush anyone under the weight of his culture? So we only have at our disposal language and sometimes education. So we can only work in the long term. Exactly in the long term of the Grand Narrative. How then should we answer, with our specific means, these distressing, ever-repeated questions of the problem of evil, about which we remain disconsolate? How should we work for peace, the highest of all collective goods? How should we invent another culture? Not thinking about it, not talking about it, not organizing ever useless colloquia, but really contributing to it?
I propose an appropriate action – here it is – drawn once again from the Grand Narrative.