Time’s Breakdown
“… even if we can break down time into component Walsh functions, what would it achieve?”
— The Professor, in “Passing in Silence,”
by Oliver Humpage
“Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillness blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave.”
— Gösta Kraken, Perception Perceived: an Unfinished Memoir (p. 9 in Fremder, a novel by Russell Hoban)
“The Underground’s ‘flicker’ is a mechanical reconciliation of light and darkness, the two alternately exhibited very rapidly.”
— Hugh Kenner on T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” in Four Quartets
From last year’s entries:
ART WARS September 12, 2002
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Artist Ben Shahn was born on this date in 1898. |
For some further reflections on flickering time,
see an essay by Nicholson Baker on
the Geneva mechanism
in movie projectors.
“At three o’clock in the morning
Eurydice is bound to come into it.”
—Russell Hoban,
The Medusa Frequency
For June Carter Cash as Eurydice,
see The Circle is Unbroken.
Let us pray that Jesus College
will help this production,
with Johnny Cash as Orpheus,
to have a happy ending.