A time for the ego
You’re awake, you can hear your steady breath and you can feel the rising and falling of your chest. You open your eyes, the room is flooded with light and you can discern its rounded shape and its sandy walls. In a cocoon of earth, dried grass and dung, you rise from the ground and move towards the door.
You step out, you’re walking. A strong gush of wind rustles through your clothes. Languidly, you meander along a footpath, the soil is shifty beneath your sandals. You strike something hard with your big toe, a small, round stone. You pick it up and toss it in the air and notice the stretch of clear blue above. How vast the sky seems to be. Endless, infinite, far more expansive than you and your pebble.
How does one locate themselves in this vastness? On the timeline of infinity, can you pinpoint your existence and yet each day feels far more real than the sky and all that is beyond it. The experience of the passage of time can be subjective and malleable in memory. In a space devoid of urgency and the standardization of time, man is the centre of the ontology. It is the time experienced by the individual.
A time for the collective
Mosquitoes drone on in the afternoon breeze and there is a lingering smell of dust and grass. Your booming voice pierces through the raucous from the swirling activity around the homestead and we are drawn in by your animated gestures and infectious joy. The light comes and goes, your copper coloured skin looks golden then it slowly changes into a deep darker brown as the overwhelming blackness of the night comes again to engulf the homestead. Lively chitter-chatter dies out and a sombre mood replaces it. The moment has passed, the merriment has faded, alive only in our collective memories.
The experience of time as an individual, ideally is autonomously defined. It would be a time and space that is absolute. This is the space enclosed by the rammed earth and the thatch of a hut or a room. It is finite and tangible with set limits and boundaries. Absolute time consequently, is experienced by the observer in their own reference frame. We can individuate moments, curating them as isolated experiences although every incident in our lives is inherently influenced by outward forces.
The communities we exist in present external values and beliefs that are imposed on the individual. Social structures and hierarchies are introduced through cultural systems and laws, as a result, we find our perception of time adjusting to a relative outlook rather than an absolute cocoon of our own existence.
Time for the collective leads us to think of time relatively. This is the layering and weaving of different absolute timelines to form a broader spatio-temporal framework (comprised of social networks and other relative processes) that represents the collective. Within the limits and rules defined by a community one can begin to discern an order in spatio-temporal rhythms of communal existence.
Relativity of time is more concerned with placing events in chronological order with a perspective that there is no defined, objective zero that is provided as a reference thus any measurement has an element of subjectivity regarding its reference frame. The time to harvest, the time for remembrance, with relative time these are all understood sequentially, in the order they occur.
A time of rationality
In the modern world of empiricism, absolute space and time is associated with Isaac Newton’s Newtonian mechanics and Relative space time is associated with Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Our contemporary day-to-day perception of time is deeply rooted in the absolute concept of time. It is a time that is linear, standard and independent to human activity. Its insidious flow defines our lives, how we plan our days and how long we sleep. Every second and day is accounted for.
Moreover, in this modern world of connectedness, we rely on understanding how things relate to other things. Through uncovering the networks and calculations for relativization, we can deduce certain guidelines and rules required for certain processes and phenomena to exist. Spatio-temporal frameworks provide labyrinths of global processes from spatio-temporalities of financial flows over ecological processes or digital processes and modes of transport. We can discover how one field could relate to another. There are limitations to these explorations, how does one relate fields that are not quantifiable? From economics to happiness, we have grown to be reliant on understanding everything through numbers and graphs.
From the geometric explorations of Einstein, to the sub-cellular science of quantum mechanics, scientists have attempted to uncover an interwoven network of processes in order to discover one formulaic answer to encapsulate, not only space and time but all fundamental laws of the universe. As we scale down to the familial everyday processes we encounter, we can recognize the range, complexity and unquantifiability of these networks. How do we accommodate concepts based on qualitative spatio-temporal frameworks?
A time of perception
During the mid to late 19th century of precolonial Zimbabwe, in the Ndebele culture shortly before harvest, the king’s senior queen (unina), would lead the Ndebele kingdom through an important ceremony called Inxwala. The ceremony was there to celebrate an amalgamated form of religious practice and the existing monarchy. The king (first Mzilikazi kaMatshobana then later his son Lobhengula) would be the intercessor for men to communicate with the ancestral spirits (amadlozi). This ceremony with sociopolitical and religious aspects would occur at an agreed time in a corporeal space. The phantasmal presence of the past (the ancestors) and the abstract fantasies, emotions and psychologies go beyond our materialistic contemplations. They allow us to think of alternative spatio-temporal worlds and dreams.
This ontological approach to understand time leads us down a path to unpack qualitative and more abstract representations of spatio-temporal frameworks. In precolonial, African time, time is “generated” through subjective human experiences. This is time, before it is explored through science. It is taken as something broader, from our contemporary perspective, it penetrates different fields from sociology to divination. It is understood not relative to distance and speed but instead penetrates the most abstract and ethereal of realms.
A time of clairvoyance
How should we frame our perspective? As inherently self centred creatures, should we thrive to decentralize ourselves from our understanding of the world, as scientific discoveries have continued to prove otherwise? Alternatively we could accept a more empirical and universal theory or believe in a central superior consciousness. Regardless abstract constructs such as time are always quite elusive and hard to define. These abstractions reflect the illusive nature of our reality as we drift through surreal realms of consciousness to form subjective conceptions that are often illogical and self-contradictory. Being African, the influence of Western institutions on public thought, the anarchist cell you hung out with at your university, all play a part in determining how you think and perhaps whatever genetic coding that differentiates you from others.
What is time? It is a thing, not a real thing but something like the internet. I’m not too sure how it works but it is this thing you can tweak and probe, bend and stretch, even push and pull. It is a commodity, purchase it for your amusement! It is great fun, make an inflection in it and move back and forth, even up and down. Can you hear that? A soft whimpering sound accompanies the low rumble coming from the machines. Were you not asleep a moment ago? You look at your translucent hands gripping cold steel, the crib is empty. The noise, it is only the steady clanking and ringing of metal. A warmth and softness engulfs you and you find yourself cradled in large steady hands. Your sniveling dies down and you rock back and forth until you reach the abyss of unconsciousness.
Bibliography
· Harvey, David. “Space as a Keyword.” David Harvey, n.d., 70–93. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470773581.ch14.
· Hawkings, Steven. A Brief History of Time. New York: Bantam Books, 1988.
· Clarke, Marieke, and Pathisa Nyathi. Lozikeyi Dlodlo: Queen of the Ndebele: "a Very Dangerous and Intriguing Woman". Bulawayo: Amagugu Publishers, 2018.
· Nyathi, Pathisa. Zimbabwes Cultural Heritage. Ascot, Bulawayo: ʼamaBooks, 2005.
· Hayes, Floyd W. A Turbulent Voyage: Readings in African American Studies. San Diego, CA: Collegiate Press, 2000.
· Smolin, Lee, and Thomas Filk. Warum Gibt Es Die Welt?: Die Evolution Des Kosmos. München: Beck, 1999.
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