Flicker Book

There was a time when you had all the answers. You’d spent decades searching for that page of your life, that moment – that elusive, faintest sliver of “now”. After its arrival and its passing, you spent the following decades trying to touch it again.

It was a moment both beautiful and terrifying.

A small town in the South of France. You don’t even remember its name. A street half in sun, half in shade. You’d been travelling long and hard, sleeping rough, fancying yourself as some kind of mystic on the fruit-picking trails of Europe.

You walk a line down the middle of this empty, silent street. Hot and tired. Your tongue dry in your mouth. Your broken boots raising dust from the stony road. Curb-side planters are crammed with lavender, and you can smell its herbal, woody notes. To your left, the siesta-shuttered facades of the terraced cottages are pale and dazzling; to your right, everything is cloaked in cool dark shadow.

It could be a day like any other, or it could be the day that wakes you from your soporific slumber. Because in this moment, a figure appears before you. A silhouette. No features can be discerned. Even as the figure turns this way and that – perhaps deliberately, so as to taunt you – all you see is a profile, a 2D form that absorbs any light falling upon it.

You’re young – barely twenty-two – but you’re old as well; your brow is thundery with philosophical angst. What’s it all about? Why are we here? What is time? Wasn’t it Einstein who said something like the only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once? But what if everything is happening at once? What if we do not see “everything everywhere all at once” because if we did, then we’d have no handle on a meaningful reality that we could function in?

What if the trillions of past moments are not gone at all? And what if the trillions of moments of future time are already here?

Why even stop at trillions? What is a moment? Is there really some limit on how far we can slice up time? Is there a sliver we could divide off and say, “There, this is the smallest unit of time”?

Maybe.

Blocking your path, the silhouetted figure puts its hands on its hips.

A photograph is a 2D image. If we think of life as a series of 2D still-images stacked in a deck that stretches forwards into the future and backwards into the past, what do we have?

A flicker-book.

Movie frames would work as a metaphor, too, but you prefer the stacked stills of a flicker-book. A flicker-book is more in keeping with the innocent wisdom of childhood.

A unit of time is exactly what photos are. They’re a capture of light. They’re 2D and therefore have no thickness. A hard-copy photo has thickness but a hard copy is a product. A photo in its purest form, at the instant it is taken, is something else altogether. It’s a trick of air and light. Without weight or dimensions or physicality.

The Vanta black figure hears your thoughts. It nods its head when it approves, tilts its head when disapproving.

As parched as the surface of the road looks, you see heatwaves lifting upward. Added to the scent of lavender is something like woodsmoke or smouldering charcoal. In the arrested afternoon, the world presumably still spins.

The flicker-book pages of our lives keep turning. From the vantage point of our perceived now, there is a past and a future. Or are they illusory?

The figure nods.

Then there is the “arrow of time” posited by the second law of thermodynamics.

The figure tilts its head.

The arrow of time – and the onslaught of entropy – are compelling concepts, but you wonder if they are true. The grandest theories of “natural philosophy” are cooked up inside the minds of geniuses who are still constrained within human-centric structures of thinking.

The figure nods.

What would everything look like if it could be viewed objectively, from an uber-liminal space outside of time and mind?

Let’s say that the arrow of time is correct.

The figure tilts its head and makes a sound – a sigh or a tut, you’re not sure which.

I know, you think. I know. But hear me out. Let’s say it’s correct. There seems to be agreement among most thinkers that time is on an axis that runs in one direction. Let’s say we are all prisoners of this construct. We agree that now is real; then is the past; and maybe is the future.

If this is so, we rarely act as if it’s so. We rarely live in the now. Mostly, we inhabit memories of the past or inhabit wishful fantasies of the future.

Before you took to the roads, you were stuck in an engineering job, hating it, thinking about getting out, getting away. It was 1980, and the soundtrack to your life was the song ‘Echo Beach’ by the New York band Martha & the Muffins.

The lyrics were simple but they affected you deeply. The narrative voice of ‘Echo Beach’ is that of a person trapped in the daily grind of clerical work in an office. It’s a life that’s boring and menial. It sucks. And she dreams about being back on Echo Beach. Back – so we know she’s been there before, and we know she covets returning.

Now those song lyrics follow you around Europe as you labour in olive groves or sleep in corn fields; as you hitch a ride, or wash yourself in a stream – hard travelling, but through the veil of time it seems to you that it was idyllic, poetic.

We mourn the loss of the past, or we imagine ourselves at some future place of happiness – at least, that’s usually the way the fantasy plays out. “If I give up this job, this relationship, these circumstances – and be there instead – then everything will be paradise.” And these memories and fantasies are so alluring, so sweet … yet they can’t be touched.

The silhouette figure does a face-palm gesture.

We all want to be on Echo Beach. But this longing for some imaginary perfect elsewhere is a trade-off with the only thing that may be real.

The time is now … and now … and now.

And it’s ticking.

What if now is as real as Echo Beach gets?

And there is a moment of balance that washes over you, a moment in which you feel light and happy and weightless, part of the universal fabric.

The figure bows its head and walks straight through you.

The moment is gone. Maybe forever. But does a clue remain? A clue in its original sense – a ball of thread, which might be followed back to the moment, to the core of your knowing? Do you still carry this clue within you now? Do you? Could you ever follow the thread back into the labyrinth? And not find a dead minotaur, but instead find an alive and vibrant self?

You turn to watch the departing figure, expecting it to merge with the deep shadows, but it crosses to the other side of the street, the sunlit side, and dissolves like a ghost anyway.

You? You make an about-turn and walk on, down the middle of the road, your dusty boots treading the dividing line between light and shade.