"The Time Is Out of Joint": Notes on Metachrony

Honestly, this exhibition looks like it was probably super cool, and generally relevant to our purposes. Image from here.

It’s 2009. I am living in Salina, Kansas, a benighted city just shy of 50,000 people that is right at the intersection of I-70 and the panamerican highway with few other qualities. I just got off work, closing down the JoAnn’s Fabrics and Crafts that was my first real job, and my ex and I have gone to the Wal-Mart is get some food and stuff before going back to my dorm. It’s the middle of the damn night, and in that one trip, I’ve somehow managed to run into three different people that I know.

I turned to my ex and said, more or less: “How is this functionally different from being a medieval peasant and going to the market and meeting all your friends there? We just have fluorescent lights.”

He shrugged and smiled. We bought our stuff and headed out.

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We’ve discussed metachrony here before, and right now, I want to lay out what exactly we’re talking about. Not to be a huge fucking nerd, but breaking down the etymology, we see, ultimately — a telling slip; I typed “untimely” — the ancient Greek “chronos,” which means time, coupled with “meta,” an also-Greek preposition and prefix, which, like any good Greek preposition, has several meanings: among, between, in the midst of, following. “Meta-” suggests a situation, a position-in-relation-to. When we make use of metachronic imagery, we find ways to situate ourselves in time, in relation to other times.

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Of course we’re getting on to Borges. So let’s get it out of the way: consider his late story, “Shakespeare’s Memory,” and consider especially this passage:

No one may capture in a single instant the fullness of his entire past. That gift was never granted to Shakespeare, so far as I know, much less to me, who is but a partial heir. A man’s memory is not a summation; it is a chaos of vague possibilities. St. Augustine speaks, if I am not mistaken, of the palaces and the caverns of memory. That second metaphor is the more fitting one. It was into those caverns that I descended. — trans. Andrew Hurley, from Collected Fictions

Augustine of Hippo, from a sixth-century fresco in Rome — the earliest known portrait of the man.

What do we remember and how? I’m going to assume we’ve all suspended disbelief at some point; I for one have lost at least one short bus ride to an issue of Gaiman’s Sandman, to say nothing of the hours of my childhood I spent with hobbits and wizards. I can reconstruct what probably happened in that time, but experientially, I do not recall specifics of the external world.

Experienced time is a weird one. Augustine also claimed that the present doesn’t exist, that as soon as a moment is experienced it is memory, and until it happens it is only speculation — about the only claim of his I feel has legs. Or consider this delightful Tumblr post, discussing the way some things feel when you do them — I especially enjoy Tumblr user astraggletag’s addition: “It’s like resting a laundry basket against your hip and suddenly you’re a long-suffering peasant woman, wondering if you’ll survive the winter.”

Experienced time, like I said, is a weird one. When are we? What’s happening?

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How does the future look to you? Statistically, it’s 50/50 whether it looks good at all, even for Americans, who are famously optimistic. Personally, it’s looking a bit bleak to me, but maybe that’s just a personal penchant for the apocalyptic. In any case, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that we live in a particularly disorienting time, and that’s not solely because almost every social media platform has decided that people would rather see things out of chronological order for some fucking reason. We are simultaneously living in an undreamt future — I have a literal fucking Star Trek communicator in my back pocket like 95% of the time — and a shitty redux of some of the worst excesses of industry and corruption. We don’t even get funny hats. Hell, we’re not even dressing like it’s Blade Runner.

We didn’t even do MCR Killjoys looks.

In genre fiction, we increasingly dream of secondary worlds, or of futures so far-flung as to be inconceivable. The closest thing to a popular nearish-future that comes to mind is The Expanse series, and even that’s a couple hundred years out. We cannot imagine the next fifty years, and seem to balk at the attempt. So what are we supposed to do? Drift, Gatsby-style, “back ceaselessly into the past”?

I mean, it’s an option.

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John Cusack, in the iconic scene, embodying the exclusus amator. Image from here.

In ancient Greek and, later, Latin lyric poetry, there’s a genre called the paraklausithyron. The name refers to a type of poem that is framed as an address to the beloved’s locked front door, imploring to be let into the house and, by extension, the beloved’s good graces.

You ever seen Say Anything? Yeah, like that.

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We didn’t actually coin the word “metachrony.” “Metachronism” is, according to Merriam-Webster, an obsolete term to describe an error in chronology when recounting a series of events, in which something is purported to have happened at the wrong time. Apparently, it was popular in cellular biology in the ‘70s, at least according to Google Ngram data. But that’s not out of keeping with what we’re talking about, or at least, not quite.

The feeling, touched on in the above-referenced Tumblr post, of doing something eternal, or something from the wrong time — that’s a little closer to it.

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The other job I had in 2009 was at GNC, also in the petri dish of a mall that graces the exit for Salina from the various highways that intersect there. In that job, I was frequently alone in the store, surrounded by bottles and boxes of all shapes and sizes, from the very small to the very large, which ostensibly did things in the human body. For the unfamiliar, GNC sells supplements of various kinds: protein, vitamin, mineral, et cetera. People don’t tend to browse GNC; they go in on a mission.

On my stool behind the counter, I passed the slow hours reading, either from books I had chosen or the Big Book of Supplements or whatever the only approved non-company reading material was. When people came in with questions, I did my best to help them, making clear that I was a history major (at the time) and not in any way qualified to give medical advice.

Actual image of me, working at GNC, courtesy the Wellcome collection.

Functionally, I was no different from any bored apothecary at any time since there’s been apothecaries and snake oil to sell. Squint a little bit, and I was a Dutch genre painting.

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I’ll be honest: I am terrible about interacting with observable reality. While I’ve gotten a lot better about this — thank you, years of therapy — I used to be able to send myself into anxiety attacks by reminding myself, “This is real. This is really happening.”

So I did what any sensible nerd would do, and imagined that I was doing something else, that something else was really happening. Like that I was an apothecary.

Back in my days at the Gap, I remember looking at one of my managers, bent over a table and study visual reset guidelines, printed out for ease of use. Her posture, her intensity, the lighting: all she needed was a cape and a helmet, and she could have been a general studying maps of a new territory. And honestly, I’d read that novel.

I’ve asked a number of other people in my various jobs if they also do this — imagine themselves as basically doing something cooler, probably in a world with dragons or FTL travel. The response is often, “I mean, I didn’t, but…”

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Humans generally look for patterns. It’s one of the things we’re good at, as a species: finding patterns in things, even when they’re not there. So it’s not particularly surprising that we look to the past to try to figure out what the fuck is going on: what is the pattern at work here?

It is easy, I think, to feel like there’s no particular pattern for what’s happening now. Part of that I am personally inclined to place at the feet of inadequate education in history. But we are living in the future, and the doors seem to be forever closing in front of us.

We have to make sense of this somehow.

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Here’s a handy Etruscan guide to interpreting sheep livers, in case you’d like to try haruspicy at home and can read Etruscan.

I am not here to talk about prognostication. Leave that for haruspices and economists — it’s a bloody business. I am here to talk about living, and about making art.

It turns out Mark Twain did not, in fact, actually say, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” That’s John Robert Colombo misremembering things. And loth as I am to quote Twain — whose Innocents Abroad set my teeth on edge as an American child living in Europe — the actual near-miss Colombo might have made might be more relevant to our purposes:

History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends. — The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day

There’s also all of this other cool stuff. Image from DriveThruRPG.

As so often happens, I’m back to picking through the trash of things, finding fragments and gluing them together to try to create meaning. Like cyphers in Monte Cook’s Numenera (one of my favorite tabletop role-playing games), whatever use these things are put to is probably not the one they were designed for, but if it works, it works; as the Numenera Technology Compendium has it:

Some [cyphers] are clearly ancient devices that — due to the fantastic materials and construction techniques — still function (at least one more time). Most, however, are bits torn from larger devices by those with an eye for such things.

So here’s what I’m saying. Here’s how to use metachrony for the things I’m talking about. Look back, because the way forward is blocked and we’ll need materials from somewhere. Gather what you can: break it off, if you have to; repurpose it to your own ends. Look at how people have lived, how we keep peopling all over the damn place and at every known time. We can’t rely on the principles and concepts that have hitherto molded our ways of understanding ourselves. As we search for comprehensible ways to think about things, we have to use the tools that we have to build a future we can live with; take them, whenever you find them.

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