Laurie Anderson: About Time with Tom McCarthy

Tim McHenry:

Do you feel like you’re running out of time? Are you able to stop time? If so, how? Welcome to about time, an audio series from the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art that aims to reframe the concept of time and perhaps our perspective on life. I’m your host, Tim McHenry. Many objects in the Rubin’s collection of Himalayan art reflect the Buddhist concept of the present, highlighting the illusionary nature of the past and future. In this four part series, performance artist, electronic music pioneer, filmmaker, and all around creative genius Laurie Anderson curated a series of conversations to tackle questions about time. Laurie’s guests were poet Jane Hirschfield, novelist Tom McCarthy, philosopher the Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi, and writer Benjamín Labatut. This is a recording of a 2024 in-person program, one of many organized and hosted by me at the Rubin. 

In the episode you’re about to hear, Laurie Anderson and author and artist Tom McCarthy draw upon many inspirations to work out whether time is just a construct of our minds and especially what the role of trauma and memory play in maintaining it. McCarthy reads a compelling passage from his breakout novel, The Remainder as he and Anderson pull in Sigmund Freud, Stéphane Mallarmé, and even the Super Mario staircase sequence to help us figure out whether we are just buffering through life. For someone as productive as Laurie, having time is the ultimate luxury as we will hear. 

Laurie Anderson:

I aspire to have a relationship to time that one of my good friends, and he was a record producer and concert producer named Hal Wilner, one of a great friend of mine and of many people, died very early in the pandemic. Here’s a guy who had all the time in the world, he’d meet you on the street, he’d go, come back to my studio. I want to play you some things, and that would be eight hours later you’d be listening to them. Time is so for him, it was a luxurious thing. He had endless amounts of it, and I really tried to learn that from him to try to have enough time and not just, I’d love to talk to you, but boy, I have a busy life. Just I need to take off the number of things that you’re doing. And it’s like, oh, stop. So I think having enough time to swim in it is the ultimate of all luxuries to have enough time. It’s a crazy question. It’s a tough one. It’s kind of 

Tom McCarthy:

Impossible to answer. It’s like this is water thing, right? I mean, yeah, we swim in it, we’re in it, but I think the idea of wasting time is really undervalued. I think time is there to be wasted. We should waste more time. We should reclaim more time from usefulness, right? I think that’s really important. I think liberating time into uselessness is a noble aspiration, and we should pivot more. 

Laurie Anderson:

With your comments on idling too. A friend of mine in the pandemic lived on the east coast of England, all these cruise ships on the horizon who couldn’t turn their engines off, but we were idling. Also, I want to recommend a book, Tom Hodgkinson, who wrote many books on, one of my favorite is How to Be Idle. You’ve got that really incredible deadline and you’re really going to be messed up if you don’t meet it and you’re just like, you really want to. He said, what you should do, you just put that down, call up your best friend, go down by the river, have a couple of beers, spend the afternoon. And I was like, whoa. Yeah. What are you doing this for? So he’s written a number of those kind of self-help books. 

Tom McCarthy:

Roland Barthes, I think it’s Roland Barthes, he says that the real work of reading starts when you lose track of what you’re reading and just start daydreaming. That’s when the actual thinking starts, right? I was thinking of Pierre Janet, one of the first. He was more or less a contemporary of Bergson, these two great kind of thinkers of time, and Janet says there are three types of time this time as duration, this time as decay and catastrophe and destruction, and then this time as the time of gen creation generation, and the second two of those are kind of violent, right? And it strikes me that especially the symbolic act of terrorism, it reminded me of the French revolutionaries smashing all the clocks. This idea that old time ends now, but this is year zero of the new epoch, and these three types of time, duration, destruction or entropy, and generative productive time can sometimes be very hard to disentangle. Right? 

Laurie Anderson:

You were going to maybe read us a little of Remainder. Would you do that? Okay, so this is the first book of Tom’s that I read. Which part are you going to read? 

Tom McCarthy:

There’s been a violent event. This guy has had some kind of accident that can never be narrated. It kind of stands outside the loop of narration. He’s got lots of money. He reconstructs this kind of memory in a house called Madlyn Mansions, but this isn’t enough. He gets a kind of hit of feeling authentically in a moment, but it doesn’t last. It’s like a drug. It wears off. So he has to reenact more and more increasingly violent events, and at this point, he’s become obsessed with a local kind of gangland shooting. Someone has been shot in a street just adjacent to where he lives in London, and he becomes obsessed with the moment of this man’s death is heavily racialized. The narrator is white, the victim is black. There’s something almost kind of vampiric this need to possess. It seems to kind of map onto a certain cultural power dynamic in our culture, but there’s more to it than that. 

Tom McCarthy:

He hires the street, he bribes the police to get the reports. He knows exactly what happened, how the man left the phone box, where the car of where the killers in came, and so he hires the street. It’s almost like a film set, but there’s no film. There’s no movie, and he just reenacts it again and again and again. So this is him reenacting the moment of somebody else’s death: 

I saw the BMW past the phone box on the far side of the street from the corner of my eye and again in the metal of the cabin’s wall reflected. I set the receiver back on its cradle and opened the phone box’s door. I stepped out, turned my bicycle around and swung my right leg across its bar. The two men had backed the car into the space I’d shown them and were getting out. 

They’d parked it just right, exactly where I’d told them to. It was very good. The tingling started in my spine again. I pushed off the pavement with my first and let the bike roll forwards. Its handlebars wobbling. As its front wheel passed, a white foam cup lying on the ground, I looked up and to my left at the two men, they’d taken out their submachine guns and were pointing them at me. The man with the West Indian accent opened fire. His gun made a tremendous noise. The other man opened fire two, not half a second after the first one. The noise of the two guns together was quite deafening. The affable man with the London accent grimaced as he shot, the other man’s face was expressionless, indifferent, the face of an assassin. The tingling grew more intense as I raised my buttocks from the bike seat and started pedaling furiously past the grilled windows of movement cars down the dip into Belinda Road. 

Tom McCarthy:

The two men kept marching on me across Cold Harbour Lane firing as they had advanced. Just in front of a puddle, I turned the bike’s wheel sharply to the right and went over the handlebars as I fell to the ground, a whole tumult of images came at me, the edge of the black bar with no name, a streak of gold, some sky, a lamp post, tarmac, and the colored patterns floating on the puddles surface. After I’d stopped tumbling and become still, the patterns took the form of Greek or Russian letters. I looked away from the puzzle up towards the men. They had stopped firing and were standing still exactly where I’d told them to stand by the hexagon cell patterns in the road. It was all good.

The men were waiting for me to get up again. I pushed myself up with my hands and noticed they were numb. This was good, very, very good. I stood up and felt the tingling rushed to my head. The two men fired again. I turned from them, dropped to my knees and let my upper body sink back down towards the ground until my face lay on the tarmac. I lay there for a few seconds, quite still. Then I rolled over onto my back and stood up again. The two men were getting back into their car. Wait, I shouted at them. They stopped. Wait, I shouted again. You shouldn’t drive off. You shouldn’t even walk back to the car when you’ve stopped shooting at me for the last time. Just turn your backs on me and stop. What should we do when we’ve stopped? The man with the London accent asked. Nothing. I told him, just stop and stand there with your backs to me. Well stop the whole scene there, but hold it for a while in that position, okay? He nodded. I looked at his friend. He nodded too, slowly. Good. I said, let’s do it again. We resumed positions back in the phone box. I looked through the window. The BMW was turning around by the traffic lights. Just over half the crew and backup people had chosen that end of the area to stand out and watch from. Eight or so more were gathered at the far end beneath the bridge, the cabin’s glass was clear. The dull red BMW passed the phone box again. Again, I saw it twice. Once from the corner of my eye and once reflected in the metal of the cabin’s wall. Only it seemed flatter and more elongated this time. When the driver turned the engine off for a half second or so, I could make out the individual firings of the piston as these slowed down and died off. I opened the phone boxe’s door, stepped out and got onto my bicycle. Again, the tingling kicked in as I passed the white foam cup. Again, the two men took their guns out and I pedaled furiously, this time when the bike dipped from the pavement to the road I felt my altitude drop like you do on airplanes when they make their descent. The same tumult of images came to me as I went over the handlebars, a portion of the black bar with no name, a streak of gold, some sky, a lamp post, tarmac, and the puzzle with the Greek or Russian letters floating on its surface. I got up, let them shoot me a second time, went down again and lay with my face on the tarmac, looking at the undercarriage of a parked van at the patterns markings on one of its hubcaps. I lay there longer this time than I had the last. There was no noise behind me, no footsteps. 

The two killers had remembered what I’d told them, and were standing there quite still. I lay there on the tarmac for a long time, tingling, looking at the hubcap. Then I got up and we did it again and again and again. After running through the shooting for the fifth time, I was satisfied we’d got the actions right, the movement, the positions. Now we could begin working on what lay beneath the surfaces of these on what was inside, intimate. Let’s do it at half speed, I said. The black man with the London accent frowned. You mean we should drive slower? he asked. Drive, walk, everything, I said, one of Nassar’s assistants was striving over to us with a clipboard in his hand. I waved him away and continued everything the same as before, but at half speed. Like in an action replay on tv?, he asked. Well, I said, sort of, only don’t do all your movements in slow motion, do them normally, but at half the normal speed or at the normal speed, but take twice as long doing them. They both stood there for a few seconds taking in what I’d said. Then the taller man, the one with the West Indian accent started nodding. I saw that his lips were curled into a smile. You are the boss, he said again. 

And they do it again and again. 

Laurie Anderson:

It struck me in listening to this, how much some things that you were saying about the relationship of looping and duration to trauma. As you were reading, I was thinking of a number of kind of images that involved duration and trauma. I’m thinking particularly of this image of Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece came to mind when she sits on the stage for a very, very long time and with some scissors and people are invited to come up and cut her clothes. And so I’m also thinking of a really wonderful theater piece that I’m not sure actually happened because this was in probably the 80s, late 70s, way up in the balcony in BAM looking Bob Wilson play. And I remember the scene very well. It was an eight hour, 10 hour all night thing. So a number of images are going by super, super, super, super slow. 

This is the king of slow in his theater world. And then I asked Bob later if the scene ever happened. He said, I never did that, but here’s the scene that I remember seeing. So it’s on two sides of the stage as one person on each side and one side, a man, a British man, and a bowler hat with an umbrella. And the other side, a woman in a sari, Indian woman and sari. And they walk very, very, very slowly and as they pass, she falls and he picks her up, says “Madam” picks her up and they pass. Then they turn around, they come and super slow, do it again. She falls again and he picks her up again. They pass, go out, turn around, come back, do it again. She falls again and he’s like, okay, let me pick you up. And this happens again and again and again. 

And each time he picks her up, he’s like, okay, can’t you stop falling, can’t you? And by the end, he’s beating her with his umbrella and I’m thinking, British colonialism in slowmo just I will help you until I’m beating you. So this violence that’s in somehow in very wrapped inside durational things. I also remember seeing some work last year of Marina Abramović’s students. One of them was doing, and these are very long durational pieces. She works with students and one was a guy who was sitting like this with us. He was overdosing, his doctor gave him a shot so that he would overdose and just to the point of dying and people surrounded him. So I understand what you’re talking about when you’re saying there’s something about this slow unraveling. And yet on the other hand, you have master works like The Disintegration Loops, which is one of my favorite pieces of music. Also strangely rooted in violence. 

Tom McCarthy:

What you said about trauma and violence. I think this is really essential. So I mean, Freud I mean his whole conception of memory is trauma is so central to just subjectivity, to consciousness. So trauma is for Freud, it’s generative. I mean it generates the whole of our psychic landscape. And at the same time, it’s the one thing that cannot be retained in memory because memory is just, it’s a weaving machine that puts data into a kind of narrative thread and that’s memory. And when we’ve really big trauma, that machine kind of goes on strike and says, I’m not dealing with that bit. So this loose bit that hasn’t been incorporated, just bubbling around and it keeps coming back. It’s trying to get into that mechanism and be incorporated and the kind of narrative thread is refusing, and that’s where you get… So for Freud trauma also always bequeaths repetition, but repetition, as Deleuze would say, with a difference because it has to keep disguising. So this is what the symptom is. It’s a kind of repetition of an unremembered and yet unforgettable trauma, a trauma that will never name itself. This kind of looping thing. Also, I mean something…

Laurie Anderson:

Did you read Beyond the Pleasure Principle? So did I, but not very well, I guess because I remember something in there about the trauma of jellyfish. 

Tom McCarthy:

And the notes on the mystic writing pad, which is kind of written just after that he’s seeing not just human psychic life, but also all biological life on the planet as a traumatic structure. So jellyfish are just reenacting endlessly the original trauma of photosynthesis and this pulsing pulsing kind of way. We are just all repetition machines. And it’s very interesting that he uses this as model, a gelatinous writing pad. That’s this model for where you strip the first bit away, but the under bit is still there, this deep time kind of retention. But then another figure, another kind of philosopher that I was, I actually hadn’t hardly read him at all when I wrote Remainder, but I read him afterwards in an addition introduced by Simon Critchley, Emmanuel Levinas. For him trauma is central to what it is to think thinking begins with trauma. His family, most of them died in the Holocaust. 

He’s of that generation. Trauma is absolutely constitutive, but it’s also the field in which ethics becomes possible. I think this is really important. So my guy reenacting the other stuff, I don’t think he’s just vampirically exploiting the pain of the racialized underclass. I think there’s an ethical relation to the other. Levinas writes that time is the field of ethics and he contrasts the kind of synchronizing tendency of rationalism and capitalism and everything on the one hand. And on the other hand, the disrupting anachronistic time where the past interrupts and enters the present and blows it open. And that’s when ethics become possible. So if we want to find a good example of that in literature, think of Hamlet. I mean Claudius is trying to synchronize everything and say, look, that was the past. This is the future. Let’s all move forwards together. And Hamlet is like, no. And he reenacts his father’s death in front of the whole court. He refuses to, without naming it as such, it’s thinly disguised in his play within the play. And that’s what breaks down the whole political order. It’s incredibly suggestive.

Laurie Anderson:

Back to this idea of morality because when you read that passage and you said the word “good” and he’s like, you did it. It was good. It didn’t seem like a morally good thing, but it was as expected, you did something that was expected. And can you break that apart a little bit? 

Tom McCarthy:

Yeah. He’s not morally good. He’s a bad man. He’s not a good person. And yet I think he’s a subject of ethics in a very traumatic way. Through these repetitions, there is a relation to the world. I mean, Levinas writes, he says, the other is that sickness within me, which is also love, which is also diachronic time. And I think in that sense he’s subject to some kind of deep ethics, which involves a relation to a temporality of anachronistic repetition or reenactment. I mean, the other figure I was thinking of talking of loops was Vico, right? The 18th century philosopher who had such a big influence on Yeats and Joyce and Beckett, and his conception of history is that instead of moving in that kind of enlightenment line of progress, it moves not exactly in a repetition circle, but in a reenactment bed springing what Yeats calls a gyre. So you go over first there’s corso, or flow, then there’s recorso, which is like reflow. You go over the same ground, but you know that you’re going over the same ground. It has a legalistic sense of a retrial, like a recourse. And so history is a set of conscious, ever more conscious repetitions. 

Laurie Anderson:

I was really happy that you pointed out the falcon, my favorite part of that poem, the falcon… 

Tom McCarthy:

The widening gyre. 

Laurie Anderson:

…cannot hear the falconer. And I was like, I love that image. And you pointed out, which I think you should say the direction of the bird. 

Tom McCarthy:

It’s a gyre turning and turning in the widening gyre. I mean that’s straight from Vico as you say, everything 

Laurie Anderson:

It goes up and then circles around. 

Tom McCarthy:

Yeah, the falcon

Laurie Anderson:

Ever widening thing 

Tom McCarthy:

Yeah, the air traffic controller has lost control of that. And this is our moment in history. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. It’s a destructive moment. But then the end of the poem, he says, now I know that 20 centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle. And what rough beast, it’s our come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born. So there’s a bow. 

Laurie Anderson:

It was the theme song of the pandemic. Everybody, A center cannot hold. That was our favorite poem I would say during that time. 

Tom McCarthy:

But it’s a kind of year zero as well. It’s a creative moment. It’s generative, something new to be born, right?

Laurie Anderson:

I need to hear more about the ethics of duration because that’s not, I’m quite sure of what love has to do with that, I mean, although if I’m in a loop of any kind, I do become conscious of seeing what’s going on. If I’m in a spiral like that, you see on a weird rollercoaster yourself going through it and this sort of self-awareness, I would say, I’m not sure it’s generative of love, but it feels like an understanding of time in a way that can seem really profound in the way that meditation can feel that you understand a little bit more about the present. Is that what you mean? 

Tom McCarthy:

I mean, haven’t got this stuff worked out. I just kind of read the books and they suggest scenes that themselves are not resolved. But this self-awareness, I think that’s really, there’s a piece by Baudelaire called, on laughter, and 1855, and he talks about the fall. He says comedy, it’s about comedy. He says to have comedy, it’s really simple. You need one man to trip and fall and another man to watch him and laugh, ha ha, that’s comedy. But then he says, there’s a special kind of breed of men, poets or philosophers who can be both. They can be the man who falls and the man who laughs at himself falling. Only poets or philosophers can do this. And he calls this doublement, it’s a doubling. And that moment of doubling is the moment of the possibility of consciousness and thinking, but only when we’re doubled can we have contemplation of, an awareness of our moment, which can never be an integrated moment. It has to be split. If you’re doubled, you can’t be authentic and unified. 

Laurie Anderson:

And then the next step is realizing that neither the person who’s tripping or the person who’s laughing are they’re actually there at all. Back to music, I think that this repetition and this kind of thing can be a very deep spiritual experience that you could describe as love. Why not? Or something like that. It could also be easily anxiety so that if you have the Super Mario theme song of the shepard tone, he’s running up the stairs and he never gets anywhere because of these three tones that are mounting. There’s also a Japanese composer, and maybe some of you know who I’ve been trying to think of who this is. Someone from the sixties, I think he was a very advanced kind of experimental composer, and he stripped all the harmonics off a tone so that it would sound like it was endlessly falling…but endlessly. 

And this was extremely anxiety producing as you began to hear it. And then gradually as you move through the fear part of it and into the musical part of it, and some people use durational things going the opposite way. Like Ragnar Kjartansson, I dunno if you saw his work called The Visitors, for example, and people in a room are playing a song. It’s an installation. So each person has an instrument, one guy’s playing in a bathtub and one is playing out on the lawn, the same song and it’s synced up. So they’re all playing the same song for about three weeks, and it’s an amazing experience to walk through the house and hear those elements of the song and then be able to put the song together. And it is, after a while, extremely kind of hallucinogenic, you begin to think what is music and how you can put it together like that and your position as a listener, which is always shifting in really interesting ways, but it is one of those durational things that I think. 

Can we hear another reading from you? I think maybe Satin Island. 

Tom McCarthy:

Yeah, yeah. When you were saying what is the ethics of it, I was thinking, okay, I can’t answer that, but this is, here’s the metaphysics of looping. So this is the narrator of Satin Island. It’s called U, U the letter, and he’s a corporate anthropologist. He writes dossiers, he uses anthropology to provide reports to think tanks and corporations, and I didn’t make this up. Most anthropology graduates, this is what they do, work for the machine and the whole thing is written in numbered paragraphs, right? So 7.6:

Back in the office, as our work on the Koob-Sassen Project kicked in and the general traffic-levels edged up, we started experiencing problems with our bandwidth. There was too much information, I guess, shuttling through the servers, down the cables, through the air. My computer, like those of all my colleagues, was afflicted by frequent bouts of buffering. I’d hear Daniel swearing in the next room and others shouting the same thing upstairs, their voices funneled to me by the ventilation system. The buffering didn’t bother me, though; I’d spend long stretches staring at the little spinning circle on my screen, losing myself in it. Behind it, I pictured hordes of bits and bytes and megabytes, all beavering away to get the requisite data to me; behind them, I pictured a giant über-server, housed somewhere in Finland or Nevada or Uzbekistan: stacks of memory banks, satellite dishes sprouting all around them, pumping out information non-stop, more of it than any single person would need in their lifetime, pumping it all my way in an endless, unconditional and grace-conferring act of generosity. Datum est: it is given. It was this gift, I told myself, this bottomless and inexhaustible torrent of giving, that made the circle spin: the data itself, its pure, unfiltered content as it rushed into my system, which, in turn, whirred into streamlined action as it started to reorganize it into legible form. The thought was almost sublimely reassuring.

7.7:

But on this thought’s outer reaches lay a much less reassuring counter-thought: what if it were just a circle, spinning on my screen, and nothing else? What if the supply-chain, its great bounty, had dried up, or been cut off, or never been connected in the first place? Each time that I allowed this possibility to take hold of my mind, the sense of bliss gave over to a kind of dread. If it was a video-file that I was trying to watch, then at the bottom of the screen there’d be that line, that bar that slowly fills itself in — twice: once in bold red and, at the same time, running ahead of that, in fainter grey; the fainter section, of course, has to remain in advance of the bold section, and of the cursor showing which part of the video you’re actually watching at a given moment; if the cursor and red section catch up, then buffering sets in again. Staring at this bar, losing myself in it just as with the circle, I was granted a small revelation.

It dawned on me that what I was actually watching was nothing less than the skeleton, laid bare, of time or memory itself. Not our computers’ time and memory, but our own. This was its structure. We require experience to stay ahead, if only by a nose, of our consciousness of experience — if for no other reason than that the latter needs to make sense of the former, to (as Peyman would say) narrate it both to others and ourselves, and, for this purpose, has to be fed with a constant, unsorted supply of fresh sensations and events. But when the narrating cursor catches right up with the rendering one, when occurrences and situations don’t replenish themselves quickly enough for the awareness they sustain, when, no matter how fast they regenerate, they’re instantly devoured by a mouth too voracious to let anything gather or accrue unconsumed before it, then we find ourselves jammed, stuck in limbo: we can enjoy neither experience nor consciousness of it. Everything becomes buffering, and buffering becomes everything. The revelation pleased me. I decided I would start a dossier on buffering.

He never does. He never writes that dossier. He never does anything. 

Laurie Anderson:

This is such a wonderful way to slice things up because you have these just incremental little things between the thing that’s happening and the things and the recognizing part, which is what we’ve all experienced with déjà vu, which is basically a shortage of norepinephrine so that it’s not really, you are remembering something in the past, but it’s not from your past life. It’s from something like 0.001 seconds ago when the part of your mind that experiences things is slightly out of whack with a pirate that recognizes that you’re having the experience. So this little slice and then also expanding this waiting time of buffering. I mean, we’ve all sat watching the beach ball and where does your mind go? Mine does not go to the satellites. It just goes into a loop of worrying about things. 

Tom McCarthy:

Anything is possible. There’s a great piece by a British artist called John Smith where he’s in a hotel room and his TV starts buffering. The whole piece is just him there with his mobile phone going, what has happened? Has a nuclear bomb dropped? Has there been a terrorist attack on the studio? Has there been a revolution or is my plug not working? Yeah, but 

Laurie Anderson:

It’s a loop. It’s a loop. It’s not progressive thinking, it’s like watching a barber pole. Is it going up or down? It’s the same as watching that circle. You’re in just a loop that you, it’s very hard to get out of that, out of buffering. How do you define that compared to a glitch? 

Tom McCarthy:

Yeah, it’s a really good question. I mean, buffering is a kind of glitch. I mean, glitch is an old Yiddish word. I think that just means like slide, glitch and glitch, like a skate on the ice a little sideways. So it’s not exactly the same. I mean I’m really, another big theme in Satin Island is the bug in all its senses as an insect, but also the bug in the system, in the code. Something that glitches and catches and like a symptom in psychoanalysis. I mean, what would you call it? Epigraph of this book is from Mallarmé who was very close to the 1890s terrorists, although he never threw any bombs himself, but he inspired them and he’s obsessed with time. And for him, the time of the poet, the time of poetry is not the time of the present or the future or it’s the time of the interregnum, right? The intermission, the time between the time out of time, he would’ve said buffering had such a thing existed in the 1890s. And I was very taken with that because yeah, it seems again, a time of potential. 

Laurie Anderson:

One of the things I’m very obsessed with lately is this. What part of the brain is activated when you’re seeing something, let’s say a tree and it’s only 10% is you’re going to your optical part of your brain and the rest is going to basically the part that remembers things. So you’re not seeing it, you’re remembering trees. So these sorts of things that are going on in our brains, what part of them are processing information for me go a long way to understanding buffering and ways that were chemical animals that run short of certain chemicals at certain times, and that changes our perception radically. And that one of the things about meditation that helps you stay in the present is being able to regulate all your physical systems and for example, pay attention to the breath so that everything, you’re not, you see things differently if you’re like, you’re nervous and breathing shallowly. If you’re breathing in a loop in, not in one of the scary loops, but in the more calming loops, your perception changes enormously. 

Tom McCarthy:

I mean, we get the buffering circle, but you can track back all the way to, we’re talking about Tristram Shandy. He goes and he says, I’m going to give you a description of Lipious’s famous clock in Leon Cathedral. And then he goes there and it’s broken. And he goes, okay, don’t worry. I can describe it even better in its broken state. And then you see, you think, go on then. And then he doesn’t describe it and then you realize, oh yeah, the whole book is kind of that. But is that different from a novel. Now, I dunno, 

Laurie Anderson:

It’s an interesting thing because when I get a message on my phone, your screen time is down this week kind of like, okay, I’m having life a little bit anyway. But screen time is a time type of time where you’re focusing somewhat on a rectangle alloy. I don’t buy that so much anymore. I think that people are getting beyond that and using their minds and their equipment in different ways that are much more flexible and intuitive than it used to be. Every time a new device comes along, the Walkman suddenly meant that you didn’t have to be listening at home to music. You could be walking around and that changed your perception of music. It changed the way your body was with music. So I think that the interface is a really important one, or the difference between a film on a screen, let’s say, and VR. So you’ve been sitting there looking at the movie for a couple of hours and it’s over and you’re like, whoa, whoa. Where’s my coat? Who am I? What time is it? You’ve been gone. In VR you need your body. I think that that has a very interesting future in terms of screens and perception and imagery so that we can begin to use our bodies again as we get more portable, flexible technology that acknowledges that we have spines that it will get, I think better. Don’t you think? 

Laurie Anderson:

There’s a lot of things you really can’t articulate so well. What is the present? It’s a very, very profound question that many people in every discipline struggle with and have no answers to. And it’s something that we live, it’s not necessarily something we can kind of cut and dry analyze. 

Tom McCarthy:

Can I let Mallarmé speak one more time? He has the exact answer to this. Mallarmé’s answer to your question. 

Laurie Anderson:

Oh yes. 

Tom McCarthy:

There is no present. A present does not exist. Ill informed anyone who would announce himself his own contemporary deserting, usurping with equal impudence when the past ceased, and when a future is slow to come or when both are mingled perplexidly to cover up the gap. So watch out and be there. 

Laurie Anderson:

Mind the gap. Thank you Tom McCarthy. 

Tom McCarthy:

Thank you very much. 

Tim McHenry:

Thank you for listening to About Time. If you liked this program, you’ll enjoy the Rubin’s AWAKEN podcast which explores the dynamic path to enlightenment. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or online at rubinmuseum.org. And be sure to follow us on social media @rubinmuseum.

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About Time was supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

About Time was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.

And until next time.