The Tyranny of Hours

Aphorisms on History and Eternity

[It is not our intention in what follows to wax oracular; we mean only to provide a record of a flow of diffuse thoughts that arose in the course of a wandering conversation between the two of us, which never reached a final synthesis, and which did not yield a final picture, but which did at least produce a picture-frame. If the form we have adopted, however, still strikes some of you as needlessly portentous (and pretentious), it might soften your verdict to know the occasion of these reflections. On the day following a recent notable political development that, while not unanticipated, was still incredible, one of us (PRH) went to fetch out the two volumes of Guy Debord that the other of us (DBH) had on the shelves of his home office. There seemed no better way to react to the total triumph of political and moral nihilism in this country, the effective end of its republican ideals, and the larger global drift backward toward the ages of robber barons, Great Powers, and the politics of blood and soil than to indulge in a merry season of Marxist ‘Situationism’. The Society of the Spectacle and its later Commentary may seem a bit dated in form and content, but only because of certain intellectual fashions and stylistic mannerisms that the intervening years have rendered quaint; in most important respects the books have proved strikingly prescient. We could claim that the plangent sibylline intonations of Debord’s text woke a kindred vatic fire in our breasts, but that would be only an excuse for our dialectical indolence. Suffice it to say that, to this point, we are only at the beginning of a stream of reflection leading toward a destination we can only hazily discern. To understand all is to forgive all.]

§0 Let us start from the perspective of the Masters of Suspicion (as Paul Ricœur would have it)—Marx, Freud, Nietzsche (and their kith)—though we need not end there:

§1 Humanity’s historical consciousness—which, to employ a useful cliché, is at once a blessing and a curse—is an exile from the Dreaming. As such, it is the source of a ceaseless restlessness and anxiety, and a longing for repose and for a return to the Dreaming, whether in the oblivion of nature or in the oblivion of eternity.

§2 If one is tempted to adopt a Freudian patois, one could call this the organic tension between two irrepressible drives, Eros and Thanatos, love and death, the desire to persist and advance and the longing to lapse back into the perpetual rest of nonbeing. Or, in Bergsonian terms, one could call it the tension between an essential élan vital, organism’s constant intentionality toward the future, and a restive tendency toward material dormancy. Whatever language one uses, however, to be aware of history, as opposed to the mere present of nature’s exigencies and possibilities, is to be aware of death as a defining horizon, at once terrifying and strangely tantalizing.

§3 To speak of the Dreaming, admittedly, is probably to rely upon a fruitful misprision. The notion is putatively drawn from Australian Aboriginal culture, though the very word it is meant to render—Alcheringa—is in all likelihood an accidental invention on the part of anthropologists of an earlier generation, a phrase partially misheard and partially misinterpreted. Even so, the term has been adopted by many contemporary Aboriginal peoples as a felicitous expression of their traditions’ spiritual imagination and genius. It also perfectly captures a certain ineffable apprehension—at once a memory and something impossible to remember—common to all peoples. Something in us, whether the elementary cells composing our bodies or the spirit most deeply hidden in the labyrinths of our unconscious selves, seems to recall a lost paradise of immediacy, either in the unity of organic nature or in the purity of a supernatural eternity. In history we are wanderers, seeking a homeland we feel we have both lost and not yet glimpsed.

§4 Or, to put the matter more simply and even more psychologistically, the birth of historical consciousness was a trauma from which humanity is perpetually seeking to recover, and philosophy and ideology are merely varieties of the ‘talking cure’.

§5 It is religion, however, that is the supreme attempt at therapy for this nameless and constant distress. Humanity has been in flight from history ever since discovering that history was of its essence. What had been lost was the restfulness of an animal consciousness aware only of recurrence: day and night, the seasons, feeding and sleeping, predation and flight. Human religious practice, probably inevitably, took the form of sacrifice and ritual repetition. It was perhaps an attempt to make even death once again not the ominous and mysterious horizon of linear time, but the occasion of return to that interminable repose in nature’s constancies. And maybe a still more original loss, of a spiritual homeland even more deeply concealed within human memory, was the still greater source of this torment. Liturgical time—the regular cyclic reenactment of an eternal origin and destiny in rituals and festivals and fasts—is the periodic attempt at return to that immediacy through the cyclic representations of the gods and spirits and ancestors, and of our reconciliations with them. All of these gestures may ultimately fail, but they do sustain the human resistance to the exile of linear time and historical happenstance.

§6 This, at any rate, conforms well to Mircea Eliade’s notion of archaic religion as embodying the dramaturgy of the ‘eternal return’: the constant aspiration of escape from linear time into the time of myth—the realm of the gods and primal powers eternally present in illo tempore—beyond the flow of history’s incessant loss of the past and irreversible momentum toward death. A flight into the enduring Now of the Dreaming, which has a cyclic structure located before and yet also after and concurrent with the fleeting now of historical time. It is worth noting, incidentally, that Eliade’s view of the matter was inspired principally not by Stoic metaphysics or Nietzsche’s notion of ‘eternal recurrence’, but by Australian Aboriginal myth.