Bonjour les amis,
I went to see the new Vittorio Rossi play the other night... an autobiographical melodrama about his father dying from Alzheimer’s. For me, the most interesting aspect of the play was the portrayal of the dissolution of the linkages of memory. As memories went off-line, from the latest to the earliest, the present refused to come to be because that which allows linkage to the past is no longer there. How can I walk forward if there is no back-there left to walk from? As time moves on, the gap between the actual present and the front edge of the past gets wider and wider to the point where there's no past, just a perpetual unfolding of present without future. Without the immediate past, the immediate future (read present) cannot take form; without a succession of immediate pasts there can be no actualizations of presents (perpetual becomings).
This brought me to think of Deleuze’s peaks of present and how to visualize them. The past can never become the present in the same way that the future can never be the present; in this conception/presentation, past and future become present at infinity and for zero duration. In considering the present in an asymptotic relationship to the past/future, I feel like I can see the linkage between the paradoxes of Zeno, ideas about constant movement and change, the intensity in touch, Deleuze’s formulation of past/future and the present, etc. I came up with the following figure in trying to make sense of the cone image and it started making sense.
infinity
The vertical is a measure of present-ness (i.e. the quality of an instant of time to be the present) that continually “scrubs” the horizontal line that denotes time passage-ness—like working the cursor on an Avid timeline. The left of the ordinate “quantifies” past-ness and the right, future-ness. As the circle (denoting any present whatever) scrubs left or right, the past-ness and present-ness keep moving alongside to keep up, but the curves depicting present-ness as a function of past-ness or future-ness will never touch at a static definite present; past-ness and future-ness could fuse into a present in infinity but infinity does not happen, so neither does the present. The present exists as a discontinuity within the continuum of past and future; the present is an ever-becoming peak that never actually happens. The present cannot be reconstituted with immobile sections because it is never static—as a continuous succession of events of zero duration it is always in the process of becoming or un-becoming, always moving without ever having become, except at a dsicontinuity called infinity.
The theme of movement seems to recur under different guises in the readings and I thought the drawing useful, but for all I know, it could be way off base. Feel free to comment.
Regards,
Felix
1 comment:
Great comment, Felix. I like how you put, "without a succession of immediate pasts there can be no actualizations of presents."
I wonder, too, though, about how so much of our currency, cultural, political, and social is built increasingly on the ability to preserve linkages with great and great quantity of moments in the past. Like some weird reptile creature with its tongue(s) stuck in this frame or that from from "before." Speaking of which, Félix, have you ever seen Roman Polanksi's the tenant? I am particularly think of that moment when the protanist, in bandages, sees himself, again and again, in bandages, and sees himself, with the supposed victim's friend, looking at the man (really him) whose body is completely wrapped in bandages.
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