Time is a flat circle

Do you remember True Detective? The one with Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey. The one set in the Deep South where Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey were moody and everything was atmospheric and people moved slowly as if the heat was liquid and every scene felt burning and sweaty and uncertain. The one where you felt on edge, not just from the tension of the plot but because everything about the story being told seemed wrong, awry somehow. Do you remember McConaughey as Rust Cohle, blank-eyed and fatalistic, resigned of hope, sat across from police officers we hardly saw yet who were our eyes and ears as they learned about the botched investigation, McConaughey explaining how everything that had happened would happen again, explaining how the characters we were coming to know were doomed to repeat what they’d already lived and resisting with his every fibre the call to retell it because to retell it would be to relive it unnecessarily, painfully, again.

Do you remember time is a flat circle?

It went like this.

I remembered True Detective recently, only I mis-remembered time is a flat circle as something else. My head filled instead with when time becomes a loop, only realising when I googled it that I’d replaced Matthew McConaughey with Orbital, or rather with the voice of Lt Worf from Star Trek, sampled, phased and - of course - looped by Orbital. That goes like this: 

The Orbital sample was a memory from university days, bubbling up, itself looping back from 25 years before. Somehow I’d flattened experience and bridged the gap between a version of me sat on the floor of a campus bedroom aged 19 and me watching a philosophical police procedural in my London home in my late thirties. The two memories fused. When our unconscious does this it feels real, doesn’t it. Images and sounds and ideas bubbling up from the unconscious, transporting us somewhere else, to be someone else, or to be an older version of ourselves again.

Who says time travel isn’t possible. 

The Orbital sample is about time as a Mobius strip, not a flat circle, but it has a similar outcome. McConaughey plays a character called Rust Cohle, and he says: 

Time is a flat circle. Everything we’ve ever done or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again. You are reborn, but into the same life that you’ve always been born into.

This is the idea of reincarnation, but with the soul and body intact, reincarnated together as the same person again, doomed to repeat their lives the same way McConaughey’s and Harrelson’s characters do when we rewatch True Detective. The same things happen, in the same order. It’s an idea that leaves us trapped going around and around. But if we’re the characters, there are also watchers. Cohle imagines a metaphysical perspective from beyond our dimension, which he calls eternity, where time doesn’t exist and so everything ever done by everyone is everywhere all at the same time. To us, on the inside of our dimension, existence is a sphere. From the vantage of eternity, it’s a circle, and it’s flat. 

True Detective is a cold case drama, which means viewers get a sense of all this merely by being viewers. The structure is half flashback, half present day, each time frame unfolding in parallel, we watch the characters painfully living it all again. We become the extra-dimensional watchers Cohle describes. Our own time does not exist for the spacetime of the world within the show, and so their experience is flattened in the metaphysical way Cohle describes. We can replay the box set. For the watcher, time within True Detective really is a flat circle. 

This didn’t come from nowhere. At least half of this is Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence. He asked: if there’s no God, no afterlife, and no soul to be reincarnated - nothing otherworldly and no ‘beyond’ of any kind to believe or trust in - then what would it mean for life to recur on repeat? For Nietzsche, there was no metaphysical dimension, no sense of eternity watching us on repeat. All we see is all there is. And while there is no proof that eternal recurrence occurs, he called the notion ‘the mightiest thought’.  A test. The test is: what does the prospect of eternal recurrence provoke in us? How do we weigh our lives? If we were compelled to live it again, over and over, would we feel condemned, or would we feel rewarded? And how would it affect the way we live? Would we change, or become more of who we are? 

It doesn’t feel too hard to connect with this thought experiment as we sit everyday at our desks and stare at our screens and make our food and tell our children it’s going to be OK. It’s days and weeks and months and not whole lives we’re doomed to repeat but recur is what days and weeks and months tend to do and it’s what they have done and of course they all feel the same. Connected by technology, which traverses time and space, everything is done by everyone all at once. Yet at this remove, nothing changes. Nothing ends.  

But maybe that’s for the best. There’s a tunnel under the Thames where the road keeps turning left and right at 45 degree angles so it feels more like a crazy golf course than a road. It was built this way to keep the horses under control. By breaking the full distance of the tunnel into short straights the horses stay calm and focus on the section in front of them. If the entire road was direct and straight the horses would see the light at the end of the tunnel and bolt. I think about this a lot. The light at the end of the tunnel, if it’s too far away, could freak us out. Laying the lockdown road down in stages, in short straights with right and left turns that we think might be the end but aren’t, might actually be the thing that’s keeping us sane. The fact that we think this might be the end but don’t know it for sure is what keeps us focused on where we are and doesn’t make us bolt for the exit. 

Treating these days as the same is actually a sensible thing to do, of course. We were told, weren’t we, that routine helps. Structure helps. But routine is another way to flatten time and to flatten experience and to flatten the memories of how we’ve lived. Difference is what makes memories. Sameness smooths them away. The days blur and the weeks blur and the months we can just about distinguish because we remember that time it was warm or when it was cold or we were watching that or listening to this or the kids were at home or the kids were at school or maybe they weren’t I don’t know. There are no spikes. There is no change. I remember my Dad telling me early on what prisoners say: that the days drag and the months fly by. It made sense then and it makes even more sense now. I wonder what the children will remember.

In The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin writes about life on a planet, Urras, and its moon, Anarres. The inhabitants of Urras, obsessed with material goods and wealth and status, and those who escaped to the collectivist but poor utopia of Anarres rarely deal with each other in person until Shevek, a physicist who’s spent his life trying to define a theory of time, travels from the moon back to his people’s original planet. It’s a story of culture shock and values and how people struggle to understand each other. Midway through the novel, Shevek finds himself at a party, a curiosity to the gathered metropolitan Urrasti elite, and prevailed upon by an overbearing guest to defend the thinking behind what’s known as his Simultaneity Theory. 

The man knew everything, apparently because he had a lot of money. “As I see it,” he informed Shevek, “your Simultaneity Theory simply denies the most obvious fact about time, that time passes.”
“Well, in physics one is careful about what one calls ‘facts’, it is different from business,” Shevek said very mildly and agreeably. “Within the strict terms of Simultaneity theory, succession is not considered as a physically objective phenomenon, but as a subjective one.”
“We think time ‘passes’, flows past us; but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.”
“But the fact is,” said the man, “that we experience the universe as a succession, a flow. In which case, what’s the use of this theory of how on some higher plane it may be all eternally coexistent. Fun for you theorists, maybe, but it has no practical application - no relevance to real life. Unless it means we can build a time machine!” he added with a kind of hard, false joviality.
“But we don’t experience the universe only successively,” Shevek said. “Do you never dream, Mr Dearri?”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“It is only in consciousness, it seems, that we experience time at all. A little baby has no time; he can’t distance himself from the past and understand how it relates to the present, or plan how his present might relate to the future. He does not know time passes; he does not understand death. The unconscious mind of the adult is like that still. In a dream there is no time, and succession is all changed about, and cause and effect are all mixed together. In myth and legend there is no time. What past is it the tale means when it says ‘Once upon a time’? And so, when the mystic makes the reconnection of his reason and his unconscious, he sees all becoming as one being, and understands the eternal return.”

‘Eternal return’. It sounds a lot like eternal recurrence, does it not? And I think Shevek, moon-dwelling oddity that he is, makes a convincing case that this is how we already live, even if we don’t realise it. We live it in our dreams, in our unconscious, where we experience time outside the linear realm of successive events and where memories can bubble up and replay moments we have already lived. Even caught in the recurrence of our time where everything is flat and everything the same we are not bound by the constraints of this time. As Kerouac wrote, “memory and dream are intermixed in this mad universe.” We can remember. We can dream. We can access our unconscious. We can mis-remember quotes and samples and get them mixed up in our heads and find ourselves somewhere new as a result. We can insert ourselves in the stories written by others and let our minds travel through time and space. To the past, where we can relive events in the stifling and uncertain Deep South, and to another world entirely, one not unlike our own, where temporal physicists from the moon echo the same Nietzshean concept as a fatalistic former cop. 

Who says time travel isn’t possible. 

The conversation in The Dispossessed continues to unfold and it unfolds in just the way you’d imagine. The one thing that the man who knows everything doesn’t want to know is that he’s wrong and so, of course, he fights on, advocating for the idea he has decided is correct, the more easily accepted ‘Sequency Theory’ - an idea of time as something that passes. Shevek continues to explain:

“Maybe you could see it,” he said, “as an effort to strike a balance. You see, Sequency explains beautifully our sense of linear time, and the evidence of evolution. It includes creation, and mortality. But there it stops. It deals with all that changes but it cannot explain why things also endure. It speaks only of the arrow of time - never the circle of time.”
“The circle?”
“Time goes in cycles, as well as in a line. A planet revolving: you see? One cycle, one orbit around the sun, is a year, isn’t it? And two orbits, two years: and so on, one can count the orbits endlessly - an observer can. Indeed such a system is how we count time - it constitutes the time-teller, the clock. But within that system, the cycle, where is time? Where is the beginning or end? Infinite repetition is a temporal process. It must be compared, referred to some other cyclic or non-cyclic process, to be seen as temporal. Well, this is very queer and interesting, you see. The atoms, you know, have a cyclic motion. In fact, it is the tiny time-reversible cycles of the atom that give matter enough permanence that evolution is possible. The little timelessnesses added together make up time. And then on the big scale, the cosmos: well, you know we think that the whole universe is a cyclic process, an oscillation of expansion and contraction, without any before or after. Only within each of the great cycles, where we live, only there is linear time, evolution, change. So then time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.”

I happen to like clocks and seasons and promises and I’m willing to bet you are too. Shevek makes us realise we already conceive of time as a circle, as a cycle, and so maybe our repetitive loop is simply part of a more natural order than we realise. It’s easy to feel, as we look back over a year of all this sameness, and culture commemorates an anniversary which seals in our mind what was fluid and marks the passing of time, of time as a river, that too much water has passed without us being able to step in it. There’s too much we’ve missed. Too many moments, too many birthdays, too many friends, too many family gatherings, too many meals, too many hugs, too many gigs, too many serendipitous connections, too many chances to dance, too many communal memories. Too much that we won’t ever get to do again, because we can never step in the same river twice, for the river is not the same and we are not the same person. Yet time is also a cycle; we’re marking a single orbit around the sun. 

The Dispossessed follows a similar structure to True Detective. Half flashback, half present day. Only in the novel, the flashback half by the end has caught up with where the present day began at the start of the book. The timelines converge. The reader could just as easily go back to the first page to see Shevek’s present day journey in a new light. The novel is itself a cycle, a loop. 

So it’s no accident that Shevek talks of promises along with seasons. The book is a cycle because time is a cycle, and time is a cycle because the promises we make come back to us. Our commitments to each other and to our future selves make time itself an ethical dimension. It’s what Nietzsche wanted us to think all along: our conception of the time we are given and what we choose to do with it are one and the same thing. 

Shevek concludes:

“It’s true, chronosophy does involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The baby, again, the animal, they don’t see the difference between what they do now and what will happen because of it. They can’t make a pulley, or a promise. We can. Seeing the difference between now and not now, we can make the connection. And there morality enters in. Responsibility. To say that a good end will follow from a bad means, is just like saying that if I pull a rope on this pulley it will lift the weight on that one. To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future. If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly.”

We are creatures of time. Orbital beings. Nietzsche’s thought experiment is not an experiment at all. It is a template for living. The atoms continue to rotate and the cosmos continues to expand and retract and as we mark the anniversary of this thing perhaps the universe is giving us the chance to try again. To live responsibly. More consciously. To see both the atom and the cosmos. To notice the small things and remember they’re really the big things. To embrace the cause and effect of our actions on those around us and to make a promise to ourselves and others that we’ll when this is all over, when we’re reborn once more into our old lives just like Matthew McConaughey’s character says, we’ll try and live them better this time.