Time, and other illusions

It’s Time. One of the briefest, most potent slogans in political history. But what is time? Does it even exist? Rather than being an arrow heading in one irreversible direction, there’s an argument that we should conceive time as a map on which all time is spread out. Co-existing, not sequential.

Exhibit A, the physicists. That bright young bloke from the Swiss patent office, Albert Einstein, would insist that “the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion”. Similarly, Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli posits in The Order of Time that reality is a complex set of events that we, in our ignorance, see as sequential.

Thus thought my dear friend Joan Hanging Rock Lindsay, who was kind enough to reveal, over discussions in both my home and hers, the mystery of her eternal Picnic. It came in hints. First of all Joan nudge-nudge-wink-winked that her fictionalised biography was called Time Without Clocks, that there were no timepieces in Mulberry Hill, that she wore no watch. “No point. It would stop.”

A very big hint. Remember how, in the 1967 novel, the watch belonging to the driver of the picnickers’ horse-drawn carriage suddenly stopped as it neared the Rock? I’ve shared Joan’s other hints in previous columns – revealing that Miranda and her friends are not lost in physical space but, yes, in time. Joan’s masterpiece is science fiction in white frocks with parasols. Like the hundreds of missing people who reappear at the end of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Joan Lindsay’s young ladies may return any day. Today. Tomorrow. Did anyone check yesterday?

I’m not au fait with the Who’s Who of Doctor Whos who travel through time. Missed all the series. But I know they travelled not in an H.G. Wells time machine but in a police phone box, aka the Tardis. There’s a replica in the foyer of ABC HQ, but I keep a safe distance. For my mode of time transport is the somewhat battered DeLorean sports saloon I park downstairs. More of that later, if we have the time.

Like Arnie Schwarzenegger – who wanders backwards and forwards in time to fiddle with history in the Terminator movies – I am busy trying desperately to intervene in your human affairs. According to the calendar (a form of accounting that has more holes than a colander), I am 82. This makes me a relic of the past – whereas I am in fact a relic of the future.

My task here is to save humanity from itself and this recent trip to your planet has been a very busy one. Lacking the musculature of Herr Schwarzenegger, I failed to alert you to the dangers of Covid-19. I tried and tried but would you listen? Nein. Any more than you took my advice regarding ever-worsening droughts and bushfires. Sometimes I feel like I’m wasting my time.

My principal reason for DeLoreanning here is, of course, to warn about the greatest threat that awaits you in the persistent illusion of yesterday/today/tomorrow. And that is climate change. Continue to ignore the evidence at your peril.

I am, of course, above temporal and temporary politics, but your Prime Minister is about to call his infection-injection-election. Perhaps It’s Time to vote out a flat-earthbound government of denialists? Sorry. I have to clock out.