What is Research: A Meditation on Time, Part II
an unpublished dusty musing on time and historical research, from 2022
This is part 2 of 2. You can read part 1 here.
Time-consciousness
Looking back, it seems like many variables factor into how time has passed, or has felt, subjectively, at different places at different periods of time. Looking back on when I lived in Korea, I remember a few things about how time had passed, and think about how that memory affects the way I do research now. For three years, the duration of my time frame in Korea had been a crucial event and time period for me, shaping my views of the world by opening my mind up to countless new experiences and encounters. I cast aside my undergraduate experience like a husk. In Korea I found a way I could transform my degree, that certificate, into something useful—into a key that unlocked transnational experience to me, that unlocked the escape hatch from southeastern Pennsylvania, from the jaws of socioeconomic status, from sinking when I knew others had floated on. I used my degree to escape. I turned the key and jumped through the door, eagerly anticipating a world of difference and possibility. For three years, I explored that world, searching, experiencing, “re-searching,” engaging in culture, feeling enthusiasm. At the end of the duration, time spoke to me and said, “time to return, to go back to the source.” I obeyed. With infinite time ahead of me, I was ready to convert my experiences of time-away into time-returning.
Many things have happened between “time-returning” and “now,” though I suppose both terms, like all things past, are never-finished. I suppose there are many time-duration concepts, like “time-researching,” “time-writing,” “time-adapting-to-a-new-place,” and even “time-playing-sport" or “time-cooking-dinner.” Time-away and time-returning seem monumental in meaning, pertaining to how I absorbed new experiences in South Korea, how I translated them back to my source code, how I rendered them to fit my self-apperception1. And all subsequent times-away seem to accumulate. If the past is never-finished, then each subsequent time-away always might be embedded in all preceding times-away, and times-returning; which is to say, possibly, that time-returning might have a hint of illusion to it (in other words, we never truly return from anywhere) given that no one can ever really return if they are always perpetually caught in time, which complicates what we think we might know about ourselves and our stages of life. As Gilbert & Sullivan so elegantly put it: “things are seldom as they seem/skim milk masquerades as cream;” time itself masquerades through its social constructions and conventions and superimposes itself onto space—the space of clocks and maps and digital interfaces—it persists in making you believe it is something that it actually is not (an objective reduction) yet, to some extent, might actually be (an unchangeable, and authoritative, reality).
Time-away might never be reducible or convertible to time-returning. In other words, all experiences are cumulative, and nothing about their accumulation can be negated. With wisdom comes lament2. Time is unforgiving. Time forgives. Time heals, time erodes, time passes, and as it passes it restores some participants to their authentic selves, while other ones decay. “Time will tell, they say.” Time reveals the unvarnished truths, impolite and inconvenient.
Building on Experiences
My subsequent experiences have consistently been shaped by my past experiences. I continue to move through time, unrooted to place but perpetually building, investing, participating, researching. Moving through time, place to place, has distorted my sense of time. Each time I invest myself in a new place, I absorb new things, new frames of reference. For one, there are culturally unique senses of time and memory, rooted in tradition, trauma, social structure, rates of exchange, normative mealtimes, work ethics, etc. Examine the speed of queues among any number of cultures or nations; or examine their respective senses of punctuality; or their regional speeds of speaking; or their respective cultural gestures and bodily reflexes, etc. Your own relative time-instinct will be your constant base-rate for comparison. What hypothesize is that moving to many places without a consistent home base—without a constant—affects how the mover perceives time because of 1) the absorption of new experiences stimulated by novelty and 2) time, as we socially objectify it, is inevitably bound to space and spatial experience, not just the space between numbers on a clock and the linear timelines of history books; but the chronologies of history, spaced out on timelines of subsequent years, related to earthly rotations and revolutions that are severed from experiential lulls and accelerations.
When I relocated to live in Yellowstone for a seasonal summer gig, from March to October 2017, I was able to feel unstuck in time again. No longer did I feel caught in a web of time. Was it because of the limited internet access? Maybe. Was it that restorative space of alien air, or being removed from the monotonous time-binding regularities such as the news cycles, serial entertainment, and many other cultural time stamps? Maybe. Yet I think the power of Yellowstone, with its visceral backcountry wildness, removed from its lodges and bus tours and crowds and touristic trappings, its aliveness and remoteness from civilization, its temporally disjointed and spatially isolated Mission 66 employee lodgings, captured me. It captured me with its own rules of time, its own laws, governed only by its “more-than-human" nature and its time-worn environs (and distantly, park management). I lived amongst a small group of concessionaire employees besides prowling bears, elk, bison, and among a multitude of smaller mammals, like squirrels and jackrabbits, inhibited only by their instincts3. I had been loosened from civilization and its constraints, transplanted to a small community removed from human conventions with more prominent forces to keep us in check, like summer snowfall, road-impeding animals, large omnivore mating seasons, and sporadic power outages. Apart from frustrated visitors from the civilized world, our lives revolved around the sheer vicissitudes of uncivilized nature4. Roads were minimal, buildings austere, human infrastructure and order limited. Human time’s tyranny was reduced to basic expectations such as arriving to work on time, not forgetting to eat, and staying hydrated: be aware of large predators, stay away from crumbling ledges, and approach fumaroles with caution; these rules were always foremost on our minds. The most popular gift store book in the park was Lee Whittlesey’s Death in Yellowstone. In Yellowstone, we were unbound from time’s dictates as much as possible for an extended season. Five months there could have been two years somewhere else. My perception of time broadened, again, as it did in Korea, but not really “again,” because as long as time-returning is not possible, neither is “again;” maybe I aged at a different rate5. My time-sense broadened differently than it had after moving to Korea. Time-sense may not be quantifiable, but rather, a quality, immeasurable, and experientially relative.
Paradox of Historiographical Bias
What does this all have to do with research? I write this essay as a series of anecdotes explaining several events along my timeline that have led me to this point. What is research when a researcher is trying to research something so elusive as time, or time-passed, better known as “history”? How can someone go about that research without prioritizing, or at least confronting, their own experiences ineluctably wrought on them through time, without confronting their own accumulated sense-data and time processing-apparati? This is my historiographical conundrum.
To Each History Writer, Their Own Story
A historian can try to understand things and events that have happened in the past. But, what are “things” and how can events be simplified to a single narrative, or narratives, without imposing assumptions about time which, if we are honest, is something we know and understand very little about? A single one of our life blips in and out of time is insignificant except for our actions, our generations, our impacts on other people. We progenerate, and generations pass, and many lives blip out and pass on patterns and traditions and waves of thought, along with ideas about time, nature, the past, and all their implications. A sole historian flips through the pages of the past and visits an old shrine on a site where once there was war, but the field of the dead is overgrown with a thicket of shrubs, rocks, mosses, fungi and worms. She finds a relic—a spear, let’s say—and its point has been dulled by decades of wind and rain, its inscriptions eroded into hardly legible signs. The historian tries to piece together a puzzle, do her detective-work. She looks through her notes, old journals, passages from literature of the time she is investigating, and finally she writes a hypothesis, a sketch of an idea, with an argument and a narrative about the people and the place that once existed, and how it still exists because, through her, and through her sieving through memory, her work, her time-invested plus time-researching plus time-writing, with all the time she spent (or time that has spent her), a larger group of people, her readers and followers, together participate in this past as it passes through all of them together.
Together the readers of history share with that historian a past that she has given a new shape. She shares her view of time and events-passed with them, through evidence, argument, and some personal anecdote tying her experience to her research. The anecdote matters most of all. What is the historian’s attachment to this event of the past? How has she come to embed this distant frame of time with her own frame of time, her experiences, her own selective decisions of time-invested, time-away, and time-returning? She is a representative, a node of history, but why her? This time-convergence between researcher and thing-researched is most telling, and it is a story that can only be told as a story, which is to say, as a sequence of events framed in time and told, over time, within the rules of format and timing specific to communication, which some people might call narrative. The story can only be told through time—with multiple participants (teller and listener) communicating, sharing a moment in time (in person, through a book, or through some other medium), together with time, synchronized in the art of transmission, and only like that is anything ever communicated about the past. Story precedes all knowledge of what has passed. Thus begs the question with the presence of any historian, anytime, anywhere: what’s your story? What’s generated your interest in this topic, the intersection of your time with this time-passed, now, and why is this particular past passing through you right now, to me?
In other words, we all are, inevitably, products of our time.
“Why is this history, which is to say these things that have happened once before, passing through time right now, through you, to me and us?” Every historian, to be believed, must answer to this question, and make their case.
All of this might imply, whenever someone asks, “Do you have the time?” the best answer always is: “No, I do not. Time has us.”
And this begs the question: how do we, individually and collectively, negotiate with the cruel fact that we all are, inevitably, slaves to time; that we are condemned to participate in time’s unforgiving, reality-shaping game?
Or, in today’s parlance, how do we cope with the trauma that is our collective servitude to time?
Do we detach, or do we try to be punctual? And by going down the rabbit hole of the past, are we leaving the present behind, only to return to the trap of the present?
Perhaps the best mystery to be left alone is how time draws us in. Time draws us in only if we let it, and this is opportunity for growth. We can grow, or we can be absorbed. Addictions can compound, downward spirals spiral, and water whirls down a drain.
Cooperating with time takes a good bit of courage. There’s always a choice we can make: this way or that way, which path into the woods do we take? The red pill or the blue pill—which is which? The road less taken, or the road to nowhere: are they one in the same and if so, which is the better choice?
I began this essay with an autobiographical and anecdotal introduction before I deleted it. That introduction is no longer there and the essay you began reading once began differently. The redaction is in my notes, on a scrap piece of paper that will be lost to time. It is also saved on a drive, with less pen marks, saved on a server somewhere, which will also become lost to time. The website you are reading this on is a projection of light and code, which will also be lost to time.
I write blindly in hope that someone else reading will catch a glimpse of the illusive nature of time, with blind hope that a true idea will spread and that that idea, spreading, can somehow influence a stream of thought somewhere else, at some point in time, so that someone may also feel compelled to write, to be drawn into time.
Like a jackrabbit finds its way into a hole in the ground and calls it home.
Thank you for reading. Happy 2024, see you in 2025.
ARW
From Immanuel Kant’s metaphysics of the self.
From Haruki Murakami. The original line: “with imagination comes responsibility,” The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. What does imagination negate, and create?
One of the first unexpected creatures I saw in Yellowstone, after the spring ride-in views of red dogs with their bison mamas, velvet-antlered elk, and cinnamon black bears jamming traffic, was the jackrabbit with its absurdly oblong ears. It embodied an oddness alone in a clearing of lodgepole pines, alert and anomalous.
Which might include the uninhibited raw emotions of Americans on vacation, unconstrained from the civil norms of regular life.
I began to let stubble grow on my face, like an environmental adaptation.