I got got got got no time

I frequently feel like I don’t have enough time to read everything I want to read, or watch all the incredible films I want to see, especially during release-heavy seasons like summer or pre-awards, or learn all the skills I’d like to acquire. And the projects…my god, the projects I’d like to do.

But any time I start to feel overwhelmed, I find that something is waiting around the corner to remind me of my blessings and to give me perspective.

This morning, Guy P linked me to the Longplayer, “a one thousand year long musical composition”:

Longplayer is composed for singing bowls – an ancient type of standing bell – which can be played by both humans and machines, and whose resonances can be very accurately reproduced in recorded form. It is designed to be adaptable to unforeseeable changes in its technological and social environments, and to endure in the long-term as a self-sustaining institution.

Longplayer grew out of a conceptual concern with problems of representing and understanding the fluidity and expansiveness of time. While it found form as a musical composition, it can also be understood as a living, 1000 year long process – an artificial life form programmed to seek its own survival strategies. More than a piece of music, Longplayer is a social organism, depending on people – and the communication between people – for its continuation, and existing as a community of listeners across centuries.

This canny and gorgeous project of course brings to mind Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, with its cloistered monastic communities deliberately living outside the too-rapid ebbs and flows of culture and society.

Anathem was, in turn, inspired by the Clock of the Long Now, “a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium.”

Obviously, no clock can have a guaranteed lifetime of 10,000 years, but some clocks are designed with guaranteed limits. (For example, a clock that shows a four-digit year date will not display the correct year after the year 9999.) With continued care and maintenance the Clock of the Long Now could reasonably be expected to display the correct time for 10,000 years.

Whether a clock would actually receive continued care and maintenance for such a long time is debatable. Hillis chose the 10,000-year goal to be just within the limits of plausibility. There are technological artifacts, such as fragments of pots and baskets, from 10,000 years in the past, so there is some precedent for human artifacts surviving this long, although very few human artifacts have been continuously tended for more than a few centuries.

(There’s even a music project inspired by the musical compositions in the books, a very pleasant merging of the human body and the mathematical concepts Anathem explores. It’s appropriate that it draws upon monastic musical tradition, and the 1,000 year composition is played on Tibetan singing bowls.)

I’m constantly astonished by how much things change in relatively tiny spans of time. Surgical sanitation (ie, the surgeon washing their own hands between patients) really only emerged in the 1840s, about 160 years ago. Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams” hit right at the turn of the century, a mere 100 years past.

We look back on our Victorian and Edwardian ancestors and think of them as awfully quaint. But it’s going to be remarkably similar a hundred years from today. Even yesterday, someone on the radio mentioned that during an artifact recovery in 1997 (for a potential landing spot of Amelia Earhart’s missing plane), they handled items without gloves because even at that point it wasn’t possible to extract DNA from touched items, while it is now. I think the next really big advance will be how we view the human brain and its functions; we can see the mechanics of the body down to tiny levels of detail, but there’s still a lot of mystery about its chemistry.

What a fascinating mystery, though. NPR recently did a story on prayer and meditation and how it affects the brain. In short, meditation is a bodyhack that darkens the area of the brain which perceives one’s sense of self and the passing of time; hence, “oneness” with the universe.

Sitting back in this manner and considering time on a geographical scale instead of a human one really helps me feel less agonized by the day-to-day drudgery I’m dealing with now, as we purge, pack up and prepare to move to our new apartment. There’s enough there for me to discuss to want to craft a separate blog post about the gentle, constant pressure required for personal growth. But for now, I’ll resume the trudge forward to new spaces, physical and mental, with the final result firmly in mind.