The Time Slides
He was one good looking ghetto boy, from some rural zone, far from the hopeless depths of Hicksville; never had him no college, never paid him no bills his Daily Wage couldn’t provide, one of them, you know the kind, one of them kind.
Hippie got up and walked out on stage, poked his headset, and started up this fake pitchman strut, across to stage right.
He looked more futuristic than the past had ever dreamed, with his gleaming skintight projections, the most expensive and tailored kind, all over his self.
The soundtrack was a deafening blend of symphonic bombast and abstract synth sound waves. He snapped a 180 and strut right back down stage left, making a silent “OWWW!” face at the audience, rock-star style.
The clapping, hooting, and stamping of feet was positively sports-worthy.
He leaned over, butt comically out, and picked up the end of a wheel of ribbon printed with the word TIME, over and over, and he strut back center stage to a sideways golden hoop with the word “NOW” beaming brightly above it.
The tape rolled out as he pulled the ribbon through the “NOW!” hoop. He leaned back on one leg, trunk and legs pivoting on the axis of his waist, and extended the other leg out, far beyond the “NOW!” hoop stand. It was like a crazy backwards curtsy.
Hippie swooped back up forward, levering his extended foot and bringing up the back one, and fell into that infuriating strut again, and then he bent down, butt out again, and wound the TIME ribbon on the wheel opposite.
It was a burlesque in every gesture; lips stuck out, grimacing winks, the near-constant rock- star “OWWW!” face, the high-kneed strut, and all the bending over and sticking out the butt poses, most of all.
He bounced back up, presenting himself splayed out, facing the audience, and held out his hands.
Slide 1:
“Does time exist prior to the present moment, in the future? We don’t know if time begins in the future, and ends in the past; or if it started in the past, and ends in the future.”
Hippie began his pitch:
“You can spend your life reading about the various theories of time, and see the same linguistic errors. Loose definitions.” He made a face of disapproval, lips out, head shaking dismissively.
“The big problem is our definition of time is based on the ridiculous assumption that time begins in the past, and continues into the future, like an arrow that we can measure, by comparing durations between things like the rotation of the earth, the hands of a clock, or the decay of radioactive isotopes,” he said, finger pointed heavenward, looking authoritative and scholarly.
Slide 2:
“Time exists in the past. We only see the near past when we experience the present.”
Illustrated by a brain, connected to an eye, with dotted lines showing the field of vision, and a flower, with 0 at the flower, the duration needed for light to enter the eye under the field of vision, the fraction of a second the brain needs to flip the image and carry it to the brain under the eye, and the fraction of a second the brain takes to recognize the flower under the brain.
“We see what just happened, and by the time we see it, it’s in the past,” he said, moving a pointer from the flower, to the field of vision, to the eye, to the brain.
He paused, looked up at the audience, and fell to his knees, hands clasped, and beseeched the audience piteously:
“Don’t tell me there is no past.”
Hippie gets up to his feet, looking suspiciously at the audience, as if fearing contradiction, and says, slowly and quietly, “The past exists, in physical space, in time and in gravity. The past is indestructibly real, immutable and reliable.”
He stomps a foot.
“We exist in the past, because the past is all we can see.”
Slide 3:
“Which way does time go? From the past into the future, or from the future and into the past?”
Hippie goes over to the opposite wheel and starts it spinning.
“Time is going from one side of this NOW hoop to the other, according to traditional theory.”
He stops the tape, and goes over to the hoop and grabs the TIME tape on each side.
“Which side is past, and which side is future?”
Slide 4:
Diagram of the arrow of time: “>Past>Present>Future>, <Past<Present<Future<”
The crowd goes nuts.
People start screaming “That one’s Past!” “No, that one’s Future!”
People jump up and down, arms bent, swinging them in a frenzy, elbows and knees, disheveled and crazed, mouths agape with thwarted fury.
“Don’t matter,” he says, shaking his head, repeating it a few times until they all calm back down.
“It don’t matter which way it goes because we can’t figure out the Flow of Time,” he says, perfectly reasonable, like he’s talking to a beloved child who ought to know all this.
He pulls the tape to the left, then pulls it to the right.
He does it with the silliest open-mouthed smirk, tongue out one way, then back the other.
“Now which way is the Past if TIME goes this way through the Now?” and he pulled the tape toward the farther wheel again, his left.
He looked sadly down at his right hand, lips pouted out.
Slide 5:
“You can take a photo from the past and see it in the present, but you can’t take a photo from the future and see it in the present.”
There is a camera snapping a a photo of a flower, an arrow going to a photo of the flower as it was with the same flower, young and fresh, and an arrow going to the photo with the flower wilted and drooping down one side of the dry vase.
Hippie points up at the camera taking the photo. “Past.”
Then at the photo with the flower it captured in the past next to it. “Present.”
Then at the last photo, of the same flower wilted, and the photo. “Future.”
“So time starts in the Past, and goes into the Future, right?”
He points up at the wilted flower, and points at each image backwards.
“Is this the Future on this side, headed toward the Now, and going through it into the past? Is that the kind of thing that makes sense to you, future into past? Of course not. This is the Past, headed toward the Now, going into the future, right?”
“Or maybe not,” he says, confused. “The past is in the past, the Now is where we are, and the future is yet to be.”
Hippie hung four numbers on the Past side of the Time line, 1, 2, 3, 4.
“If time moves from the Past into the Future, we get this,” he cranked on the wheel marked FUTURE, and the ribbon of time moved from the past wheel onto the FUTURE wheel, through the NOW hoop.
“Say it with me as each number goes through the Now hoop from the future into the past!”
“Four,” he says, and hardly anybody pipes up, “Three,” he says, and a couple of the more excitable in the audience help a little, “Two,” and a few more draw out the number with him.
“Looks like time moves from the past into the future this way,” he said, grinning widely and leaning back a few inches farther than necessary, his fists on his hips.
He turns the wheel, muttering, “Four, three, two, one, no, that’s backwards.”
“That ain’t right,” he said, sticking out his lower lip and frowning darkly at the ribbon of time.
“Can’t be right. If that were so, things that just happened would happen again in the future, and we never know exactly what will happen in the future. We know what will probably happen, but we can’t never ever really know exactly what will happen. Stuff that already happened never happens again backwards. Never.”
“Ok, but something is moving, isn’t it?” he asked, after a short pause.
“Maybe the future is moving into the past.”
Hippie rolls time from the future into the past, and everyone chants, “One! Two! Three! Four!”
Slide 6:
“Time begins in the future and becomes the past.”
With a drawing of a man from thirty years before, another man from sixty years ago, and another from ninety years ago, cunningly styled to relate to the laughable fashion cliches of their time.
Hippie cranked the TIME ribbon back through the Now and toward the past.
“This feels more like time to me, I don’t know about you all,” he said, cranking slowly away.
“This way, the unknown future moves into the Now, where we see it, and then past us, where we are certain it goes, because we see traces of it going back to the origins of the universe, the Big Bang, all that.”
The crowd is very happy with this confirmation of known properties of time, yells, hollers, whoops, yeses, fists in the air, and some rhythmic hooting.
“My daddy is back up in there,” he yells over the crowd, pointing at the past, which is getting more and more full, increasing the screams of the crowd, adding to the excitement.
“My grandaddy is back up in there before him. And his daddy, and his granddaddy, and all y’alls grandaddies is laying up in there somewhere where we can’t see them, except for the fossils or photographs they left behind them that persist.”
The crowd gets wound up at the thought of all their ancient daddies up in there.
Hippie holds up his hands for quiet and waits until it dies down enough to be heard.
“Why is it now,” he says, and the crowd keeps going while he repeats it once or twice, until they finally compose themselves, “Why is it that we can’t directly see our great-great-great grandaddies going about their business populating the world with their future progeny?”
He looks around, belligerent eyes popping, eyebrows cocked.
“We know they was there,” he said, and he pulls out a printed photo of the oldest guy on the slide. “We’ve seen the pictures, but we can’t see nothing directly. We can’t see nothing that isn’t right here with us in the NOW hoop.”
Hippie passes the photo through the NOW hoop, it catches fire, and the ashes all fall to the ground on the past side.
“Here’s where all this linear TIME ribbon-type thinking falls apart,” he said, toeing the ashes and pointing at the flying flakes.
“It’s all about observation, isn’t it now? It’s all about what we actually see, and what we record, and what we recorded that persists in the past, in the now, and hopefully into the future.”
He pulls out another photo and pushes it through the NOW hoop into the future.
“That’s what we all want,” he says, with fatuous satisfaction, his chin sunk into his neck, “That’s what we are all working for every damn day. We do nothing, if not try to drag ourselves and everything we love from the past, where we learned to love it, to take care of it, earn money for it, feed it and cure all it’s ills, take all of that and push it into the future. So now which way is time going?”
Hippie looks around, challenging all the bold and thoughtless shouters to yell something stupid, but the crowd is now quiet.