Photograph taken 22 December 2024

As a little boy in Buenos Aires, for Christmas, I received important gifts like socks. I had to wait, just like all other Argentine children, for the Epiphany on January 6 that we called “El Día de Los  3 Reyes Magos”. We would put our shoes outside our bedroom door the night before. In the morning they would be surrounded by toys. In 1951, when I was 9, I received a fantastic American Erector Set.

This particular blog is going to be all about my personal concept of time in the years that I have experienced it.

Those days between Christmas Day and the Epiphany never seemed to end. I had no idea of infinity but the wait was certainly one.That was repeated in 1960 when our religion class at St. Edward’s High School in Austin, Texas was before lunch. We would stare at the clock behind Brother Cyriac Haden,C.S.C. The class never seemed to end.

It was in 1962-63 that I studied philosophy with Ramón Xirau at Mexico City College (an American University). Time was often discussed. When he spoke of Heraclitus, who said that you can never touch the same spot on a river, he did tell us that perhaps Heraclitus had never thought of placing a little toy boat, touching it, and then  running down river to touch it again. For Heraclitus time was linear.

We all know of the paradox of Achilles racing with a turtle and the idea that to get from A to B, Achilles has to get halfway, and so on. It defies the fact that we know he will beat the turtle. The paradox prefigured the calculus of Newton and Leibniz. The blog below explores the calculus and Jorge Luís Borges's concept of infinity. And please note that Möbius Strip on the cover of the Borges book!

Infinity (∞), An Insipid Equivalent Of The Unfinished

It was about 25 years ago that I was staring at my Filipino titanium Timex watch bath that I bought around 1988 (it works perfectly today). I noticed, I was taking a hot tub bath, that for a while the second hand was going backwards. Was my Timex a time machine?

My Filipino Timex time machine

All the above is but a preamble to an essay I read in the Styles section of my Sunday New York Times. It is written by an Iranian woman, Ida Momennejad who is a cognitive neuroscientist and A.I. researcher at Microsoft Research NYC. She studies memory and planning in brains and A.I., and models ecological intelligence.

I will place a paywall-free link below. What really hit me hard was this she wrote:

After a few weeks in Teheran, I could no longer bear to stay in my parent’s apartment. It was a monument to my mother’s absence, present in the shade of the walls, in every single piece of furniture, every doily she had placed under a vase.

Ida Momennejad's NYTimes Essay

This fit with my concept of Rosemary’s absent presence that surrounds me all day since she died 9 December 2020. Even (more than even!) looking at my two cats Niño and Niña on my bed, that was once ours, is a reminder.  Momennejad’s essay, about disclosing that at one time, her concept of time was a linear one, did not diminish my grief. But it did help me to understand it as she was writing what has been in my head these last four years.

I have written a few blogs about time. My favourite one is with a quote by Jorge Luís Borges who wrote that “infinity is an insipid equivalent of the unfinished”. The blog link above is about that quote in relation to the infinity symbol sign in my camera's focusing ring. For many years I was obsessed with sharp photographs taken with fast shutter speeds. Of late I have been using long ½ second exposures.

Swirly dance with slow shutters

As for time not being linear, St. Augustine might have disagreed. He wrote that when we listen to music, we hear that first note in the past, a second one in the present and we can predict that third in the immediate future. Had St. Augustine known about of atonal music he would not have written as he did.

After reading Momennejad’s essay I would agree, that as I go back and forth with my memories of 52 years with Rosemary, there is some truth that time is not linear.

When I feed my Niño and Niña their treats on my bed around 8pm I get this nagging feeling that I just did it minutes ago (really the day before). It would seem that I have discovered how to fracture time.

The photograph illustrating this blog is of a small inkjet print of Rosemary and me that I placed in my kitchen sink where I was pouring water. I used my Fuji X-E3 camera