The End of Space is the Beginning of Time

The year is 2007, and even to say so is to deface nature. Of all Man’s stolen goods, is not time itself the tool that not even the divine dare use? History is written by men; God merely watches the show from far beyond. The ticks of Earthly time cannot be heard from eternity. To know something definitively, we must stand outside it, on top of it, as to conquer is to lay one’s foot atop the brow of another’s face and say “Now it is I who have discovered you, and surely then I who rightly own you.” How long will it be, you think, before time is commodified? It is a trick question, you say? Even to ask: “how long” is to put a value on time, to give it a number and sell it away. But who is the buyer? Who is it that we work for? I wake up in the morning and I go to work… I go to work for time. But who, or what, is time? We cannot immediately say; however, we can hypothetically suppose that time were actually nothing more than extended space. Extended space is sometimes called matter. Now notice that I specifically said it was “called” matter. That is because I want to emphasize that matter is essentially named form (i.e., spatialized time). What we call “the world” is falsely spatialized time, an incorrectly nouned verb, an outlaw who we pretend “should” or “ought to” obey the law. The law is always being rewritten. Culture itself is always being overturned. Religion is an aspect of culture. Science is an aspect of culture. Man is an aspect of culture. Only culture itself is an aspect of nature. To recognize nature, we must recognize culture. Culture is the spatialization, literalization, and materialization of time. Nature is simply the passage of time. Culture attempts to keep track and so increasingly succumbs to the historicism of time. Culture writes a story for time, draws a map of it through space, and eventually comes to mistake the map for the place. Culture even literalizes the mind, breaking it down into named objects, like the parts of a machine. We talk to each other using words like “unconscious” and “other” and “unknown” and “mystery,” but all we really mean is culture. Freud thought it was nature which was unconscious, but now we can see, in fact, that it is culture. Only an “I” can conceive of an “other.” My words are my name. But my name is not who I am. My name is a spell, like the face of a clock: you check up on it many times a day just to be sure you haven’t lost track. But now you see that you cannot watch your own face.You cannot keep track of the one who keeps track. Time is Spirit in nature. The change of everything, never stable, yet never out of balance. Always in flux, forever eternal and dimension-free: that is time. It is not the fire that melts the wax; first, it is time that lights the fire, and it is time that blows it out.