On Space and Time

May 26th, 2008 Posted in Family Forms, Space and Time

(By way of explanation of what we are about: “Love in Space” and “On Space and Time” are matched, the one leading to the other, but can be read separately. The first is the more technical and longer. The second is more general and perhaps more entertaining. The dominant theme is man’s social life projected onto and patterned by space. Conspicuously incomplete, a work in process, yet a platform from which to take off for any heading in this direction.)

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The dog barks and the spaceman moves on. Either the dog must shut up or we need a larger universe.

Undaunted by my ignorance I challenge the greatest minds

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At the time of “Love in Space” I had a vastly underdeveloped interest in space and time. Wider implications hardly existed. There was a heavy bias among sociologists then against what was called social physics. Any consideration of space and time immediately called up physical laws and the idea that they could explain man and his works was abhorrent. There was a fear that science would reduce man to an object. There was also a refusal of a social biology least man be reduced to animal. But it should be obvious that we are physical and biological and also full of meaning for ourselves. We are, that is, acculturated as part of our existence in our present form. These identities are not mutually exclusive. It is like telling a man of a certain mass who is falling out of a tree reciting Shakespeare that his destiny at that moment is not governed by gravity.

For sociologists space and time have no materiality, they are simply measures invented by man for his own service. We have several metrics of direction and distance and several of before and after. There is the flat earth with abruptly terminating edges. Earth at the center of the universe surrounded by musical spheres. There is a co-existing spirit world, in fact several: Heaven, Valhalla, Shambhala, Eden, Olympus, Paradise, Hell, among others. Yet without life and objects there is neither time nor space. There is merely an infinitely extending nothingness.

The intervening distances are cluttered with landscapes and seascapes, and upward in the sky are rocks and planets, cosmic particles, suns. There is a topography that resists us, divides us, protects us. We transact. We name, search ways through, over or under. We level, gouge, dig, pile up, excavate. We build, grow crops. Intervening distance is constantly altered. We treat as demonic, as theological, give sacred significance, even ignore. The clutter acquires significance.

Time apportioned in a cycle of holidays, following the moon or the sun or an atomic clock. Day altering with night unless we are in a deep cave or mine or on a trajectory toward Mars. Wet and dry seasons, cycles of fecundity. Clouds of happenings define the intervals. Changes sequenced like the tolls of a bell.

Physicists have nagged us with queer concepts and confusions, giving time and space materiality. Time backward retrieved and space can twist, and the clock governs biological change, and the yardstick causes the child’s growth.

We each encounter the historical result up to our moment and we work on this monument in turn as we decide or are permitted or are able and pass it on again. Planting trees and deforestation. Chemical effluvia. Trash and crap. The thing we affected returning the call. Rolling on. Act on simple act. Then the unanticipated, the serendipitous.

We go from here to there, using our energy to overcome. Any infrastructure or superstructure we pay for in cash. The experience of boarding a medium and allowing oneself to be carted from one place to anther is subjectively inconsequential, a term in limbo, unless it is a new experience. We fall into nap or reverie, contemplate the passing scene and the physical qualities of our fellow passengers. We mainly maintain our personal almost encapsulated space, though we may attempt a communication with another and even find a new acquaintance or friend or lover. Yet in general it is time out time.

A flaw though, a tree across the road or a flat tire wakes us. A glitch, a crisis, a what-is-this? The electricity shuts down and the elevator stops between floors. Another knot in our personal time sequence. Hope it is not a catastrophe.

The clutters of the intervening. The challenges of the storm, the earthquake, volcano, fire, water, poisonous fumes, landslide. Misadventure among strangers. Going out may not be a picnic, though, who knows, one may hope to find a grand vacation if not utopia itself.

A great and enduring line of literature, the travel report or story, allows the busy or the meek to share vicariously the adventure and the fun of the trip toward the unknown and the undiscovered, minimizing the risk. But isolation and passivity do not guarantee against the threat or the hope of the distant. The shadow of the self, the alien from afar, might be, at this very moment, vectoring your way.

The constructs which we have called clutter can in themselves, by their interiority, expand space. The buildings and enclosures we put up divide raw space into rooms and closed off and delimited places. Hallways, stairs, balconies. The maze multiplies. Some would even include bureaus, closets, drawers, tables, furniture. A mincing, going down to pockets and wallets. All new and useful places. The perimeter of the city may remain the same while there is an expansion within.

There is a blocking off into public and private spheres. The inaccessibility of the distant place is repeated, perhaps even more decisively, locally. The intrepid explorer tracking the far places does not know parts of his home neighborhood. The private places are apportioned to individuals and groups. The person or group belongs to a place and vice versa, even if only temporarily. Even if it is only a time-share in a hot bed, to each his own. Everyone participates and contributes to the overall effect. Our sense of accessible space is, surprisingly, limited by a taboo-like system of exclusions, bans, refusals, as well as recognized rights.

The distinction is not absolute, the general sharing of the public space angles down toward the private individual through intermediary semi-publics, defined groups and self-discovered groups that share a space and exclude others. For example: the family in residence, the companions of the bed, the students and their teacher, the office workers, the factory floor, the bus driver and his passengers, the physician and his patient. You can sense the emotional identity of an established group in its space by member reaction to the visitor. It is a moment of intrusion that is covered by the forms of greeting or, if these are ignored, by the palpable tension until the newcomer is recognized and explained in some way and then integrated into the group’s experience. Think back over your own experiences in such settings. The visitor greeted and publicly announced and sometimes introduced to each member. The silent visitor. The visitor who whispers with one group member and then leaves. In the first instance there is usually a feeling of goodwill and welcoming generated. In the second instance a nagging mystery that carries over and lingers. An edginess. In the third instant, an agitation, a feeling of dislocation, a buzzing of quick consultation of members. If the stranger does not generate this stir or ripple you are in a truly public place, each person within is anonymous and self-contained. They, altogether, are strangers to each other. It is the same as walking on the well-populated business street of a city.

Some trades and professions have a more general access to private space than the rest of us because of their necessary, recognized, and valued services: Deliverers, repairers, real estate people, medical persons and such. Respect for the other’s privacy is recognized, in the cultures of which I’m aware at least, and the coming in is usually preceded by permission, stated or implied. Certain categories are excepted: Parents against infants and young children—as the child matures this can become an issue. Wardens and guards against prisoners. Police responding to a crime in progress—without an active crime the police, in civilized society, must have a search or arrest warrant issued by a validly appointed judge. The entry into another’s space by stealth is considered bad form and a serious felony. A person’s right to forcefully protect his or her private place is recognized.

Historically we visualize man, that is us, emerging from the miasma of evolutionary process into our present form sometime in the deep past. This very likely happened somewhere in East Africa. And then by trekking and seeking and moseying along, chasing game or hungering for entertainment, we expanded our range and settled, within preliterate time, into just about every crevice and nook in the world covered with the imaginary signs of “available for human habitation”. We have been filling in the details and tidying up the system since, also adding some confusion and dislocation as well.

Right now we have an address system worldwide in scope whose logic varies but is universally understandable with study. In fact our address coordinates are quite numerous: A street address for domicile and work and club and café and other associations. Also a postal address, a phone number(s), e-mail number(s), a birth and death certificate (eventually) with details of time, place and kinship, licenses of various sorts—driving; professional, trade or craft; marriage; divorce; contracts, bank accounts, records of achievement and awards, records of crimes and punishments, medical records and so on, not to mention a latitude and longitude locater through a satellite in outer-space. Also fingerprints, DNA readings.

Withal people drop out willfully, or through inadvertence, misadventure or crime. People change identity, surreptitiously or legally, have multiple identities and appear to become uncoordinated though there is never an escape from the system, merely a shift to a residual category.

Except for the cremated whose ashes are tossed to the wind and water, even the dead have addresses though historically these have been attenuated over the centuries. Except for a few mummies and lost alpine hikers buried in ice and such the mists of tide and time cover all.

Space, which we dice up so finely locally, at its far corners becomes anomalous. For example we are told that the universe is expanding, that matter that at one time filled a delimited area is found to have filled a larger area at another time. At time-one there is a border around the universe beyond which there is nothing. Into what then does this matter expand? Space, obviously, which was out there beyond the limit all along. We could say alternatively that there is nothing beyond the universal border but a potential for measurement. The implication is that there is no limit to space and to time as measures. They expand and contract as we require. When we tally the distance from one material body or speck to another, no matter how far away it may be it can be contained.

It’s the same with time, another human measure of a relationship of relative before and after. No matter how far into the past we go or forward into the future, time will encompass it without limit. Time and space only sensibly exist as relative relationships of material events. Just as it is impossible this side of madness to visualize the null of space and time, that is nothing, it is the same for infinite extent.

But even though, if you grant me this leap, time and space are social constructs empty at the margins, in everyday life and in our local experience they are very concrete and real. In our biological processes and in our physical movements and exertions they exist. We experience our natural limitations as they are tested from without. Time and distance seem to have in this way a consequence for us in our behavior. Part of the patterning of our social life can be laid against these measures.