Timeship

The earth is a time machine; a machine that converts motion into space into recurrence by bringing it back around on itself as in an ellipse. It returns to its past place; it beholds it in its future. Back around to its future it goes, and the heavens do watch and wonder with eyes of faraway suns. It is a machine that makes days, seasons, and years, and just because we have discovered other time machines that we use to keep our time, hidden deep inside the smallness of things, does not mean that it, too, is not a time machine and one with whom human have sojourned in light of for much longer than the atoms in our clocks.

The earth is a time machine, not a spaceship. This spaceship earth would be a crummy spaceship--it only goes back to where its already been around the sun; and it might as well not go at all if there is some destination planned, because all we're going to meet again out there, other than empty space, is some disastrous asteroid--and if that all that awaits our spaceship we might not want to go at all. The earth, rather, crafts times out of this same space, and who would know time without this?

But like any time traveler, we of the earth, together, change ourselves and all things in our travels; going back from winter to summer again yields changes in the summer before us, and events are always metaphorically "killing their own grandfather." The earth, our native home from which we embark on the adventure of time, is now constantly betrayed in its origin by its loops, and time is always as going back to the causes of one essence and changing them. The present moment always erases what was needed for it to born, and what survives in essence is what finds in the future that same place from which it came; but which changes its birth into something different fitting it into new surrounds and, in becoming, to become as that same something else.

We come to spring, but not the same spring. Summer, but not to the same summer. The sun, an engine of this time machine,sends us around in motion and stirs the skies with heat and pull. Weather itself has been wound up over thousands of years with scant heat, but held close. Life lives in this time, being excited to motion with change and season, finding power from the sun to multiply our times. Making time frames that interpenetrate.

In stories, a time machine is that which changes at a rate out of step with its surroundings. The time traveler reaches down to light his pipe, and empires crumble. He travels in a way that is impervious to this stream of phenomena in which humans live and see--but there are many other speeds, and if we do not own all feeling for ourselves, these speeds can watch us at their own pace, and with a seeing their own, coming out of their own time. Dwelling in empires lasting days and within the size of a petri dish; or the fungal networks with a rhythm of ice ages. Or the time of genes, of neuron networks.

There is no one time here, but times that enter into and exit one another. The engine of life and its whole history must move with the smallest of parts, and it opens up all levels, including our phenomenal, by which it can even be moved. And life, breath of life, both lives and does not live in this current moment. The time of times on this earth, the earth itself, does not stretch out in many times which we could access if only in fiction; but it is at a moment, bearing all the time frames not as its own frame, but as the moment of the earth which gives to the enframing.

The divinities watch and know out of many times, humans keep watch for the traces, and all is given out of the light.