Time Enough For Prayer
Tonight we will have a second discussion session on the topic of time. The Raymond Tallis essay was brief, a well expressed overview of the uses and the limitations of the language of time.
Tallis made reference to the maxim that “time is what prevents everything from happening all at once.” Time and change are inseparable. If everything happened at once, would not chaos, contradiction, the impossibility of agency,– reign? In the words of Raymond Tallis, “I would be simultaneously setting out for and returning from a holiday.”
This snapshot, slice-of-life, prompted me to pause and consider if everything does not in fact happen all at once. Does not my act of boarding a plane as a “leaving” or as a “return” depend solely on who is making the observation/statement, and what form of life the observing/speaking subject happens to inhabit? In terms of family members left behind at home-base, separated by miles and miles……. a family member is removing him or herself from the existential circle of solicitous care. The exact same parameters would be described very differently by the desk manager of the resort hotel where our traveling subject anticipates arrival. Are we talking about a identical event. Yes and No. It is singular in terms of physical-geographical parameters. The event has little in common with respect to the emotional/existential parameters as seen from two different vantage points. It is a description that puts the elements in sequential order.
I recall my reading of Wittgenstein and his insight that language is forged within a particular form of life. Language makes sense, works, only within the context of a form of life shared by the interlocutors, the speaker and the listener. Words work only within a established practice, a culture which is the complex of that and related practices. Language is a living gossamer web of culture, kept alive by voluntary subscription. It is culture that gives rise to words, words which express an ordering of a otherwise chaotic reality.
I briefly looked at the front page of the NY Times this morning. I felt a strange dissonance, the same out-of-time displacement that comes when by special effort I dispense with the linear sequence of meaning by which I ordinarily understand events around me.
The caption says that this is the first US President to pray at the Wailing Wall. WTF could the term “pray” possibly mean in the context of this individual and his way of life? I have no idea.
One thought on “Time Enough For Prayer”
I suppose one can “pray” to the god of one’s own ego, to the center core of the self since, for this particular individual, only the self exists and all else is superfluous. The Western Wall itself is stone, hewn by the hands of believers in a time long gone. When he touches this history, he can feel nothing but his own grandiosity reflected back at him. His very presence at this artifact is a reaffirmation for him that the only god that exists is a god named Trump and nothing else.