‘Cartographie [La Roue du Temps]’-2018, starmaps, board, perforated galvanized iron, 83 x 65,5 x 14 cm (board size : 33,1 x 50,1 cm).

 

 

‘Cartographie [La Roue du Temps]’-2018, starmaps, board, perforated galvanized iron, 83 x 65,5 x 14 cm (board size : 33,1 x 50,1 cm).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Cartographie [La Roue du Temps]’-2018, starmaps, board, perforated galvanized iron, 83 x 65,5 x 14 cm (board size : 33,1 x 50,1 cm).

 

 

 

Once, I slipped off a ladder and what looked like a salto mortale turned out to be an eternal moment, finding myself ‘thrown out’ of time-space. There was no time at all within a circumpolar view of 360⁰ around me in which everything appeared frozen, including my own body… suspended in air for an immeasurable eternal moment before the brutal dropp-down. There is nothing exceptional in this, for it is part of wide spread common experience.

If time can slow down, accelerate or even come to an ‘end’, it seems just to presume that time is powered by an energy, which varies from place to place, instead of simply ‘counting the clock’ as if time happens on its own, by magic. Time may very well have cyclical effects. Time cycles, such as the 25920-year cycle of precession and the actual dvâparayuga, or even the cycle of the Sun which revolves around the centre of the galaxy in about 250 million years, and so on, moving towards the ‘Great Attractor’ – a giant zone of gravitational pull in the universe – or, on an infinitesimal smaller scale, various sorts of biological cycles; all time seems to have structure in it and shapes our lives. Is time-space a kind of fluid primordial ‘material’: Consciousness itself manifested, shaping all sorts of ‘realities’?

Many indigenous people don’t know their age, for they do not count time. Modern man however seems to be more and more psychologically determined by space-time merely as a quantity of ‘pixels and intervals’, forgetting the ancient knowledge that numbers are actual energies, representing qualities. Similar to how we create space (see discourse on page ‘Spatium et Extensio’) our conception of time can equally be considered as a construction. Counting the days and hours up to even nanoseconds alienates us from the primordial quality of each Time Flow as an expression of Life. Likewise the word calendar is derived from calculus, calculating time runs out the real significance of eternity as something merely ‘infinitely long’. But this is not eternity, for eternity can only be experienced in the now, when time comes to an ‘end’. Strictly seen, counting time eliminates the one and only reality we call ‘now’.

 

 

Jantar Mantar, Jaipur, India. (Late 18th century astronomical observatory built by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II)

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