Skip Recap

Promised apocalypses, fits of transcendence, and other rebellions against time.

Oct 31, 2025

What time is it? seems like a question we should know the answer to. But in the ways that matter, we don’t. When I was a teenager, someone wrote a bestseller saying we were at the end of history, because most people had gotten their liberal democracy and all the associated rights and freedoms. History said he had another think coming.

The argument rages on. But where are we in the argument? Are we close to the conclusion? Are we gathering evidence? How close are we to agreement? Or, is it too late? This isn’t just politics, but how we talk to our friends, coworkers and family members.

Belated birthday wishes

On a daily basis, I find that tasks often take longer than expected, or nowhere near as long as I’d projected. I feel shame when I’m late, and impatience when I’m early. Time is how I most often get things wrong. I’m not the only one.

One time, while trying to find a greeting card in a Santa Monica CVS, I stumbled on a whole separate stand of Belated Birthday Cards.

As I get older, I’m often surprised how much or how little time passed between one meaningful event and another. The internet doesn’t help. As a medium, it’s constitutionally hostile to history, and to chronology in general. Link-rot and dodgy SEO tactics lead our shared screens prone to conceal anything more than ten years old. To us, it seems to insist that most of what’s ever happened is happening right now, while adding for any potential advertisers, but also forever.

Wrestling stance

Time is the angel with whom I most often wrestle, in whom I’ve received my name, and the one who will one day take that name away. Time catches me wrong-footed. It could be that life is too long. Large-scale farming, electrification and modern medicine leave us with too many hours and years to fill.

Or it could be life’s too short. The world is still bare and wrong and unredeemed in the face of our boundless hopes and desires. There’s so much to experience, and to be. A hundred lifetimes won’t be enough to bring hard material reality into accord with the best aspects of our nature.

A short mystical autobiography

When I was a teenager, I was depressed and wrestling with all kinds of things, and the trinity of Past, then Present, and then Future got busted up like saloon furniture in a brawl (see 2024’s “Incompleteness”). It was a vivid experience of how my own mind worked - namely that consciousness can only be operate in the present, with the past and future playing out as a real-time narrative annotation, in a rather desperate game of catchup.

The perspective shift, like watching a Tromp L’oeil painting while walking past it, made the whole trick of sequential time fall apart. It put past and future on shaky ground - something both freeing and terrifying.

Letting your days go by

This kind vertigo isn’t peculiar to me. It was on the radio and MTV once upon a time, in Talking Heads’ hit “Once in a Lifetime.” The song describes coming to consciousness in a world physically marked by history. It begins with a return to the mind of a child, not yet complicit in the story around them.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife

Then comes the bite of the apple.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

And you may ask yourself, “how did I get here?”

This is where the hook is set, where one seeks mastery of their experience through a story. By the end of the song, one returns to that original, disoriented, Edenic consciousness, but within a world in which one is clearly complicit.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

And you may say yourself “My god, what have I done?”

The past

It took a while for the implications of my own teenage separation from sequential time to have any clear use. It was a deeply destabilizing idea: The past could be anything at all. I could only approach it playfully, within the confines of art, of fiction.

Not long after I moved to New York City at 19, I was sitting in Father Demo Square in the West Village, looking up at a brick apartment building with ornamental window lintels. And it seemed for a moment that the building itself could be the cornerstone of reality. This wasn’t a revelation of some secret truth, but rather of how flexible perception could be.

I started writing a short story about how the entire universe was only a week old, having erupted from a primordial dream that unexpectedly solidified to form the outrageous rides and structures of Coney Island. With each successive night, another borough of New York was added, successively more concrete and detailed. At the end of the week, the great amusement parks of Coney Island burned, and stranded us all here, with only folktales of a long and storied past to console us.

Skids

The past is slippery. And it’s unnerving to feel it slip. In my novel Ms. Never, the main character suffers from a form of depression that can eradicate whole swaths of reality so that they never existed. As a teenager, her depression whittled away at the 10,000-year-old, spacefaring, continent-spanning Empire of Ohio, until it became the middling Midwestern state that we know it as today. But she remembers what it had once been, and knows what she’s done.

Figures in sequence

The only artists equipped to really use time in a satisfactory way are musicians and film makers. But time is a problem for visual artists. On vacation, I was able to take my little girl to see the Sistine Chapel, where a tour guide slowed us down and pointed things out that we would have otherwise missed.

The walls below the famous ceiling feature frescoes by other Renaissance masters about the lives of Jesus and Moses. In each panel, the main character appears several times across the same landscape, to show what they did in a given situation. It’s one way - confusing for the uninitiated - to show a sequence of actions without having to re-paint the background over and over.

The famous ceiling handles time differently. It’s ringed with prophets, alternating the Biblical with the pagan. A prophet is one solution to time, in that they can tell the future. But it’s never a clean solution. They never just tell you. The Biblical ones want you first to understand how badly you’re already fucking up. The pagan ones talk in just enough riddles to get you into even more trouble.

Instantaneity

The other big problem with time is that, taken literally from the beginning to the end, it’s so damn long. By the middle, you can’t recall the beginning.

The Sistine Chapel ceiling offers the viewer the whole story from the creation of the universe, up to Noah getting wasted after a long boat trip, in a single eyeful. It’s an attempt to make history physically instantaneous. Of course it asks the viewer for what probably no viewer can give. Seeing doesn’t really work like that, and the viewer must squint and focus to take in each of the hundreds of individual elements.

Revelation

The Sistine ceiling does more than just summarize, and it does more than just dazzle. There’s something about seeing so much all at once that makes it seem less like a history of the world and more like the story of a single human life: It begins dewy and undifferentiated, then stretches into elemental forms, then twists into familiar figures and faces. Then a series of perverse treacheries that seem like a good idea at the time introduce a profound strangeness, like the strangeness of our own appetites and habits. It leaves us drunk, old and undressed, laughed at by our kids.

Confused, we look back to how we got here, past the twisting torso of G-d and the fish coughing on the thigh of Jonah, to the Last Judgment that Michelangelo later painted on the wall over the altar. That mural is nearly as demanding on the eye as the ceiling, and grimmer. It vaults us to a suddenly inevitable judgment, full of agony and bitter regret. In a single eyeful, we behold too much of seems to await us in death, where an agonizing, long-suspected truth betrays half of everything we knew to be true.

People who will not taste death

The biblical last judgment has always struck me as genuinely strange, even when you leave out the beast with ten heads and seven horns.

What’s strange is that there’s a book in which several of the authors and the main character all swear up and down that some of the people they’re talking to will not die before the Kingdom of G-d physically appears. Now, this book is two thousand years old, and there’s very little evidence that the Kingdom has arrived. But hundreds of millions of people not only insist that it’s true, but sit down and recite this book to one another with a straight face at least once a week. The paradox has a propulsive quality to it.

VALIS

This intense contradiction was like a slingshot to Philip K. Dick. He wrote a book called VALIS, a difficult, confessional work of science fiction that has the effect of an initiation on the reader - not so much a step out of reality as a step into a deeper reality. One time, while working an insurance job in Jersey City, I happened into a cafe where the guy at the counter had a VALIS tattoo. We got to talking, and while we never became great friends, he did the cover art for a collection of my poems, Spokes of an Uneven Wheel.

In VALIS, the narrator comes to realize that the world of California in the 1970s is essentially a projection of the Roman Empire, and a prison where the inmates are prevented from moving forward in actual time. Dick discussed something he called orthogonal time in a famous 1977 speech. The idea is that people, while moving through sequential time of causes and effects, can sometimes move at a right angle to time, into analogous realities. Just as time defines the relationship between past and future realities, a moral or spiritual element defines the relationship - and distance between - these other realities.

9025 AD

For Dick, the idea of orthogonal time is how he resolved deeply uneasy relationship between the heartfelt promises of the gospel writers that the Kingdom of G-d would physically arrive in their lifetimes, the embarrassing repetition of those promises into our day, and the apparent reality that nothing of that sort had ever happened.

According to Dick, it had indeed happened. Eternity had broken through and redeemed the corrupt world. Just not this world. There was nonetheless a divine imperative that kept the message alive even where the event had not occurred. So if you’re reading this in the year 9025 AD, just hang in there.

The title of Dick’s famous speech is “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others.”

Time and morality

In the academy and the library, time and morality are rarely discussed on the same floor. But Isaac Bashevis Singer connected them in a short story where a devil is taking a wicked woman out of this world. And along the way, they pass the great and famous sins - the eating of the Fruit of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the murder of Cain, the betrayal of Uriah, and so on.

These sins are landmarks. From the moment they were committed, they continued to be committed forever. They are the mountain ranges, rivers and seas that shape the landscape that humans actually inhabit. In the story, the moral universe isn’t a figure of speech.

Now face to face

Something haunts me from those moments I spent outside of time, with my full attention on the place and time I was in, on the thing that I was, undistracted by a nattering narrative. It was a certainty of being in a state where nothing stands in the way.

The curtain that separated me from all of reality - the story of my life, and of all time - may remain. But it’s irrelevant, except as a comic reminder that nothing has ever stood in the way.

This state is a hard place to bring anything back from. To give it a shorthand is to give it too short of a shrift. To progress from that ever-present kingdom is to recede from it.

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

So what time is it? Where are we in the story? You could say 2025 Anno Domini, or in the year of our lord. These appellations always bugged me, less for the atheist reason that we shouldn’t use religious terminology for secular matters than because I was raised in America, where we’d rather not call anyone lord, or at least that used to be the case.

The Common Era, I also hate - so mealy-mouthed and lazy. It seems to promise what it too often delivers of our lives and our history - something that very much feels common and unsurprising.

But the year - now 2025, soon 2026 - is always there, in our faces, on my phone, and in the corner of my computer monitor right now. It’s relentlessly present. Perhaps it’s like one of Philip K. Dick’s ironic hints from a loving but exasperated divinity, saying colder, colder, colder, with each degree we move away from 0 AD, the 0 CE. Maybe these aren’t years at all, but the distance we’ve travelled from where we belong.