On Linear Time

The cycle isn't a circle its a wave; the solstices and equinoxes mark zeniths and nadirs of a sine wave for the intensity of sunlight (this does not apply to equatorial peoples) that never ends, but is not a loop back on itself. However, the imposition of a circle on the wave is the first step in linear time. The year starts at the point between the zenith and nadirs of the wave--it cuts across them, and returns back on itself to form a circle. One year's cycle--and then two, three, four and five. I was worried about how to explain this particular point, but o my surprise, after writing out this post in rough form I discovered an animation on Wikipedia's entry for sine waves that exactly represented what I'm saying here:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/ComplexSinInATimeAxe.gif

But what behaves like this or could supply a raw, natural example? Circles and spheres are rare on earth--but from earth we see stars in a sky that, except for the wandering planets and the sun, seems to rotate perfectly in a circle. And since they moved uniformly, the impression is irresistible that there is a sky that moves, and that the stars move with it, or are in lock-step with it; or that it, while immobile, moves space by its sheer curvature in a way as to give these stars their special nature against the fall of gravity towards the phenomenological center of the universe. It was not until Newton that this bifurcation of the universe into two types of movement was fully resolved into just two sorts of falling that are differentiated only by velocity.

Astronomical observation produced a consciousness of a circle; rather than peaks and troughs we had a circle that the sun went around for one year. Specifically, it is in calling the arbitrary point in which the stars pass over into a new cycle "the same" (as in "eternal return of the same") that creates a historical conscious; the consciousness of enclosure. We first create the celestial sphere, the rather than the extremity of a sine wave, but stitching together the two nearest waves into a circle, at their extremity. Then we do more and more and more stitching to get greater cycles until we get--the horror. The totality as cycle. The eternal return of the same. Linear temporality is the repression of the horror of circular cycles in time.

Let me recommend a thought experiment: is there anything horrible in saying "I am the high tide of a wave that ever washes over the beach of the world. this tide will go out into the ocean and then back in again. So it must be." there is no horror in that at all! but there is infinite horror in the circle, because it annihilates everything, as I've often discussed. So we say: there is no circle of circles--thus making the circle of circles a repressed unconscious the secret history of our religion and philosophy, according to Nietzsche. We constructed a fact about the world that was unbearable and had to be repressed. But the repression of this content marries it to bodily cycles. there is the firmament of air and the breath of air. This firmament is permeable to infinite beyond. But there is also the enclosed firmament; the infinite as firmament. The cycle of everything. The world brain.

The sky, being empty, becomes the world brain--but that's not all: the earth, too is bounded; and the living earth, as is well known, eats itself and this is life and this is death. But with the bounded under-firmament (and there is such a thing, as is represented for instance in the Greek Hades) we have the repressed circle assimilating itself to the concepts of consumption and digestion, in order to form the image of hell, or: the monster that eats its own shit. It is not unimaginable that these two most primitive functions in human experience--constituting much of our world in our first chaos of experience--would strive to become linked, and would find in the finding of a sublimated astronomical horror the proper logic in which to become one dreadful but powerful system.

The earth becomes dirt. Filth. Fount of hell. And all the mythic associations--earth-moon-snake-woman--become likewise tainted. The horror of the living sui generis is that it becomes "the business that doesn't cover its costs": with each generation of self-consumption some is lost--annihilated--and we have the endless, hellish cycle where death is the infinite reduction of life through self-consumption, that eats and eats but never eats itself up. Nietzsche identifies this repressed content in the black snake of nihilism, which gets lodged down our throat. Also, the Oroboros, which is perhaps the origin of Schopenhauer/Nietzscheanism. The Oroboros is a shit eater (think about it.) and hence a shit worm. What Jesus calls the worm that never dies, the fire that is never quenched.

Linear time is the repression of the eternal return, but like any repression, it is also the secret desire to accomplish the repressed. What this amounts to, is to make it so everything's already happened--annihilation. As I wrote to Ray, linear time says that the moment is any length of time other than the whole of time--that is, cyclic temporality, transformed under the auspices of the circle, is denied the totality through repression. How is the moment cyclical time bounded by repression? How is a moment a cycle as in a circle? it is self-contained and timeless, like a slide in a movie. is fractal--but discrete. it has a border that connects its beginning to its end, and this border cannot exist in time at all, but must just be the form of time. I've wrote and discussed this many times in connection with the eternal return.

But where does the line come in, in the midst of this repressed extrapolation of astronomical cycles unto infinity? Well, a finite line is quite the same horror. But an infinite line means that events will not recur, and hence is not the always-already annihilated; however, it provokes a new terror in our self understanding: that we will disappear and be gone; the monster of nothing is the yawning mouth of the gone past. And this provokes the very greed for control that I've talked about, and which has its secret end in death or the accomplishing of nothing in the course of non-recurring time.