T-Symmetry and Heartbreak: The Piercing Mystery

Oh the memories. Look at this grand old photo. Once upon a time! Me clutching a baseball glove! Under that sweet baseball cap there was hair all over my head, I can promise you that. I remember it well. Me and Maurice Chevalier. One other thing. “The moments are infinitely precious.” Yeah, I get it. The value of a commodity increases inversely with its supply where demand is constant, making our earthbound collection of infinitely precious moments a treasure chest – one whose value we don’t begin to apprehend until our knees are hidden by a coverlet and all is a piercing memory. 

The seconds fly by like bothersome gnats around a campfire. If you live to be 100 years old, you’ll be working off your allotted 2.8 billion seconds in a preoccupied haze through which you’ll see yourself tying shoes, filling out forms, eating saltines, flinging coffee at mouthy strangers, and otherwise partaking – fairly unconsciously – of Life’s Rich Pageant™. When we notice them at all, we can actually be seen to swat at the fleeting seconds in annoyance “Why is this taking so long!” A more pointed question: what’s your hurry?

Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off

Fact: though each individual second is as pinprick-translucent and transitory as a fluttering midge, in the aggregate these surreptitious seconds are stealth marauders massing their forces, each unchecked Second slipping past the distracted sentry tower to join its gathered fifth column behind the lines. Using this scheme, “Time” constantly startles us from behind. “Where did the time go? Oh, there it is.”

Time may be a “River”; but it pointedly lacks the river’s soporific murmur of water. Time is also an arrow (says science), but one whose direction befuddles quantum physics. The term “Time’s Arrow” describes, in filigreed quantum terms, the strangeness of time passing in only the one direction – forward. Time should naturally flow both ways with organic ease. We should be able to remember the future, and so on. A reminder that Life and nature are utterly mad, as I continually mumble in these patient pages.

A Cup of T-Symmetry

It seems the helpless, headlong, forward-racing direction of time shouldn’t be the rule, however intuitive time’s forward motion is to we prisoners of its effects. Physical phenomena at the atomic scale are thought to exhibit Time Reversal Symmetry, or T-Symmetry. At that scale the physical laws work identically forward and backward in time.

This means that at that scale, the direction of time goes both ways, forward and backwards. But up here at the stick-in-the-mud macroscopic scale (homely and familiar realm of tractors and quiche and unironed shirts), that simply isn’t the case. At the scale of ordinary life, Time only goes forward (to put it as gently as possible). That the merely forward lunge of time is a curiosity may strike some as unusual. “We really have to puzzle over the direction of time?” Yes. As noted by English astrophysicist Arthur Eddington, Time “…has no analog in space.” 

The Heartening Mystery of the Changing Vessel

Meanwhile, all this atomic scale jibber-jabber is overwritten by the daily routine, that linear one-way journey from Birth to the Peppermint Twist (or whatever it’s called). However carefree and flower-bedecked your mortal days and nights, they are underwritten by a stealth melancholy that is itself strangely enlivening. The kids grow up and out and make lives across the seven seas, our parents become bent and faltering versions of the bedrock lovebirds we clutch desperately in dreams, the mirror recklessly describes your neck as increasingly that of barnyard fowl. My uncle Ken – hunchbacked by polio as a child and one of the sweetest, funniest men I’ve known – leaves us in 1972, and I haven’t the wherewithal to console my soft-spoken father, who loved him so very dearly. We remember the past with an acute aching sensation, even, if not especially, it’s happiest moments. 

I have a dreamlike memory, I always consider it my earliest, of riding a hobby horse down a steep staircase and landing like wounded laundry at the bottom, a crash attended by much abstract and imperfectly reconstructed commotion. 

Am I the same person as the plummeting nitwit toddler in that dreamlike memory? Am I the Same Thing? I measure my Self against the scar on my right knee, which I sliced open in 1968, 20 yards off the coast of Treasure Island, Florida. A gentle, tourist-friendly swell in the crystalline Gulf of Mexico nudged me playfully into a breakwater whose barnacles constituted a many-faceted razor, and my knee came open like an unzipped costume. I look closely at my knee and reaffirm my continuum. 

I also have a ragged scar on my left thumb, confirming, as it might the startled pilgrim in a Hitchcock movie, that what I perceive as a shadow-scrap of dream is in fact a totem borne forward from the past; a car door slammed on my own fool toddler thumb, so hurried was I to join a little schoolfriend I’d suddenly spied on the playground. I remember that. My mom shouting at me, a psycho puddle of vivid blood. The scar is the record. I’m looking at it now.

Call it The Happy Mystery of the Changing Vessel. Get as old and eccentric as you want. Skip lithely slowly out of The Home, totally nude but for an oversized cowboy hat, fists on hips and high-kicking like a Rockette. That scar on your left thumb still tells of the time you were a kid, wanting nothing more than to run on your well-oiled kid knees to your little kid friend at the playground. The event seems in remembering to be at the nether end of a shadowy dream, but it’s right next to you in plain sunlight. It’s not that it was you. That is You. 

Cosmic Valentine

Love is a shopworn term that nevertheless begs our brief attention in this context. Your 100-year-long eyeblink should, on balance, be threaded through with the Big L, whatever it is. Love may be as fundamental and omnipresent as hydrogen, the element responsible for starlight. 

Quantum field theory says that even in a complete vacuum at absolute zero degrees Fahrenheit, space is not empty. It hums with zero-point energy – that deepest harmony underpinning the melody of existence itself. I sometimes catch myself thinking this non-ending, tuneless tune is “Love” – stuff more fundamental than matter and possessed of a characteristic that makes it a sort of cosmic corn starch. Time and Love (as Laura Nyro once sang) combine to form the binding property that prevents life from collapsing into noise. Just my intuition.