…Time
In spring, nearby lakes will be jammed with fishermen on week-ends and in between, there won’t be a fisherman in sight even though the fish are biting like crazy. Too my people, this seems like very strange behavior. To them, the white man has a very poor sense of timing.
Most Indian guides know that there is no way they can satisfy their clients because almost every hunter from the city wants to crowd three months activity into two weeks time. There are a hundred things they want to do and as many places they want to go – all right now. My people feel sorry for those who have only two weeks out of the whole year to do what they want to do. But they know of no magic whereby two weeks can be stretched into three months.
I expect you’ve all heard about ‘Indian Time’. To non-Indians, ‘Indian Time’ means tardiness. It means that if a meeting is called for 2 p.m., the likelihood of anyone being at the appointed place at 2 p.m. is very slight. Some may be there by 2:30. It is possible the meeting may actually get under way by 3:00. But it is just as possible that it will not start until 4:00.
Now if non-Indians are involved, they will probably all be there, punctually at 2:00. By 2:30 they will be visibly annoyed. By 3:00 some may be threatening to leave; others will be suggesting that the meeting should begin even though everyone is not present. Meantime, those Indians who are present will be gathered together, off in a corner, visiting, and frequently announcing by their outbursts of laughter, that they are enjoying themselves.
I have observed this phenomenon many times and I often find that I have a real sympathy for those frustrated non-Indians. But I don’t know what can be done about it. The most punctual man I ever met always behaves as if he is late. In fact, he is always saying, “I’m late,” or, “I’m going to be late,” while frantically consulting his wristwatch. I have met this man many times but I will never know him, because there will never be enough time for us to get acquainted.
So there seems to be a basic difference in the way Indians and non-Indians experience time. Non-Indians relate to appointments – which, of course, are always in the future. And this creates anxiety. Indians related to reality – which is only in the present. And this creates conviviality and contentment. I have observed that most non-Indians feel subject to time. Indians tend to feel quite the opposite. Time is at their disposal. Time is subject to them.
This difference may be due to the fact that non-Indians invented time. They took the rotation of the earth and cut it up into twenty-four pieces of pie. Then they cut each of those pieces into sixty splinters and, finally, they cut each of those splinters into sixty more slivers. And that was called days, hours, minutes and seconds.
Then they took the orderly activities of the moon and tried to fit twelve of those into the circle of the earth around the sun. They called those segments, months, and the circle was called a year. Unfortunately, they didn’t quite fit. So every fourth year is called leap-year, and an extra day is added to February.
I don’t know why they added that day to February. I would rather have it in July – most years anyway.
Then, of course, there are weeks. Fifty-two of them in a year. Now why didn’t my people do that? Why didn’t they take the circular flow of existence and fragment it into a million pieces? Non-Indian scholars have been inclined to assume we weren’t smart enough to invent time. But the Mayans and Aztecs both had calendars more accurate than the one now universally in use.
My people were very observant. They knew the circumference of the circle you call a day, and that of a month, and that of a year. They kept their appointments with the earth, wit the sun, and with each other. But they did not invent artificialities and impose these on life. They had no weeks – no hours, minutes or seconds – because there is no such thing in nature.
Good times and bad times. Perhaps that is a sufficient description of my people’s kind of time. And just like all you people here, they probably tried very hard to experience only good times. In order to do so, they had to be sensitively attuned to time. They had to know when the bark would peel easily from the birch trees; when the salmon would return to the river; when all the different berries would be ripe; when the wild rice could be harvested; when to plant corn and squash and potatoes and a host of other vegetables.
My people had no end of appointments to keep. But they kept them as a river flows rather than as a clock ticks. Time came to them in its seasons. They did not go hurrying to meet it as if trying to get into the future faster.
For my people, bad times were always due to circumstances beyond their control. And the bad times were often very bad, resulting in starvation and death. People who live in fragmented time – the time of calendars and clocks – can experience bad times of this nature too, like an earthquake or a tornado. But for most of them, bad times and good times are scheduled, nine to five.
For most people the routine of enforced work when the “earn” a living, is the bad time. Simply the relief from routine is enough to constitute a good time for many of them, so that they are content at the end of their working day, just to sit, looking at television or reading the newspaper. Good times seldom just happen to those who are trapped in abstract time.
For them “good times” are also scheduled, they take place “after hours” – parties, dances and entertainments of all kinds. Then there are others sorts of good times planned for “days off.” Many of these activities are called “outings.” For my people, who always lived out-of-doors, this is probably the strangest idea of all. Outings!
A picnic may be planned for Saturday. But when that day off comes it is raining. Then the people who planned all that are bitterly disappointed. Yet all the days in the week up to Saturday have been sunny and clear, The picnickers may say, “To hell with the rain,” and go on their outing anyway, taking with them all sorts of feelings of anger and resentment. They are not angry with themselves nor with their way of life which made it impossible for them to have their picnic on a nice day. They are angry at the weather!
One of the things I was taught when I went to school was that Columbus discovered America. It said in the book that that happened in 1492. 1492! That date really got my thinking about time. You see, I doubted that any of my people even knew they had been discovered. And so, I wondered – if they had known – how they might have reckoned that even in terms of their concept of time. And I have been wondering ever since.
My first experience of clock time came when I went to school. I didn’t learn much in school. But I did learn that school was run by the clock even more than by the teacher – and that one of the worst crimes anyone can ever be guilty of is being late. But the time I was running on was not clock time. And that got me into trouble.
My time told me that if it was raining and cold, that was a good time to be indoors. And even the school was better than no shelter at all. But there were many warm, sunny days in the spring of the year when every cell in my body proclaimed that this was to time to be outdoors. This was the time to be out in the sun and the wind, running in the fields and the woods.
And so, there were many fine days when, long before I got to school I would know what I was going to do. After I had been in class for 10 or 15 minutes, I would put up my hand and ask to be excused. Ours was a country school with an outhouse nearby. My first request was usually refused and sometimes, the second also. But finally, the teacher would grant me permission and, quick as a rabbit, I would be gone for the remainder of that day. Of course, I only got away with this a couple of times before the teacher refused to trust me anymore. Then she took to sending another boy with me when I was allowed to go to the outhouse. And he was charged with seeing that I came back. When we got outside, I would grab the other boy by the front of the shirt, shake my fist in his face as fiercely as I knew how, and say: “If you try to stop me from leaving I’ll beat the hell out of you.” Then I would jump over the old school fence and take off. And he would be too frightened to go back to the classroom without me. So the teacher lost two pupils instead of one.
The schoolroom was also the place where, at the age of six, I was first confronted with those strange references to time which were very confusing to me then and still have little meaning. When we came into the classroom in the morning, for example, the teacher might call out something like this: “Hurry up children. Get your coats and hats hung up. We must not lose any more time than necessary.” Now this made me suspect that “time” had gone lost. And I couldn’t help glancing under the desks and in the corners to see if it was there. But I was wrong about this.
I learned, slowly, that time, when it is lost, can never be found again. But there was something else you could do about it. Sometimes, if we have been very good, the teacher would read us a story. She always made it clear that stories were a mere pleasure-a sort of vacation from the real business of school, which was hard work. I enjoyed being read to and was always saddened when the story came to an end. When she finished reading, the teacher would always jump to her feet and say, in a voice all prickly with business: “Now we must work very hard and make up for lost time.”
So I learned that, while you could never find time that was lost, you could make up for the crime of losing it by working extra hard. I also learned, incidentally, to associate good times with lost time-and bad times with time saved.
That poor teacher was obsessed with time. She never tired of telling us that time was precious. There was never a day she did not tell me not to waste time. Nothing pleased her more than being able to show us shortcuts which, if we learned them, would save us time. It seemed to me that what she was really trying to teach us was to hurry. Hurry, hurry, hurry. Life is a race against time.
Isn’t it strange what we learn-even in classrooms-as opposed to what we are taught? I’m afraid I didn’t learn much about arithmetic or spelling in those early years, but I did learn all about time. I learned that time could be lost, made, saved and wasted. Later in life, when I heard that time is also money, I agreed heartily.
I recall hearing a conversation, when I was very young, between my father and an uncle, who was going away on a trip. My uncle wanted to know what time the train left. My father told him he would have to get a timetable. And I went around for quite a while with a picture in my head of a table with a clock set in the middle of it-so that people sitting around could all see what time it was. I once heard my mother remark that a neighbor lady had time on her hands. The first chance I got, I looked at that lady’s hands real good and was disappointed to see they were just like any other lady’s hands. She wasn’t even wearing a wrist watch.
Now I have a wrist watch of my own that someone gave me. And I can tell the time. I learned to do that when I was about fifteen. I had a job in a logging camp and I didn’t trust the timekeeper. But I suspect that other people get more out of their watches than I ever got out of mine. To them, a watch is a precise and necessary instrument-something they can depend on and which, somehow, helps them to live a better life. To me, a watch is a marvelous collection of gears and wheels and springs. I love to take the back off and watch all the fragile machinery running so beautifully. If my watch had a crystal on the back instead of the front I imagine I would wear it night and day.
I used to wear it every day but I hardly ever looked at it. I guess I wore it because I had it. Maybe wearing it was a sort of obligation, like pajamas. When you get pajamas for Xmas, you feel obligated to wear them, even though getting dressed to go to bed is pretty silly, when you stop to think about it.
I sometimes wonder what might happen if watches were made with a syncopated tick. Suppose your watch had a rock beat and mine, a blues beat? What kind appointments might we keep then? And what sorts of schedules would we run on?
My problem is that I have never been able to experience the information my watch is designed to give me. A watch deals in hours, minutes and seconds…units of time. I have never been able to experience time in units, and I distrust anything I can’t experience. I doubt its existence.
It isn’t that I haven’t tried. I have sat with that little watch in my hand and looked at the tiny second hand going round and round. And, putting it to my ear, I have listened to its steady voice quietly whispering the hours away-tick, tick, tick. Then I have said to myself: “Okay Wilfred, we will catch one of those little seconds and really see what it is like.” So I would get all set for that, like a cat all crouched up and ready to pounce on a mouse. Then I would say,
“Now! …….. THERE …… That was a second.”
“No ooo……..I missed it”
All right….Try again.
“Now……..That was a second.”
“No oooo……..I didn’t catch it.”
Sometimes I have sat for as much as an hour trying to catch one of those seconds-trying to really know what a second feels like. And I have never succeeded yet.
Then I have said: “Well, I guess seconds are too small and too fast. I will try minutes. And I would sit there and look at the minute hand, while watching the little second hand out of the corner of my eye until it had swept its full circle. Then I would say: “Now …..That is a minute.” And I would sit back and close my eyes and really try to appreciate what that minute felt like. But it was never any good. It didn’t feel like anything. It might just as well have been half a minute or five minutes.
The truth is that even the best watch hasn’t a shred of time in it. Time is not in timepieces. Time is not in hours, minutes and seconds. Time is the continuity of experience. Our sense of the passage of time is strictly relative to the present-that is, to involvement in what is happening here and now. When involvement is minimal and interest slight, anxiety mounts. Then you find yourself waiting – anxiously waiting for something interesting to happen.
Waiting time is a long time, no matter what the clock may say. When you were uncorrupted, unscheduled children, for example, how long was that hour you spent with your parents in church every Sunday? When you were grade school students, how long was that last week before the summer holidays? Waiting is a timed hell of weeks, days and hours. But it can seem like months, years and decades.
Children and Indians are both capable of total involvement in the here and now. And that space is timeless. But children and Indians are forced to conform to routines and schedules – at what price? Timelessness is eternal. And only those who live in the timeless present experience eternal life.
Perhaps time is nothing more than the way each person experiences himself as existing in the world. If this is true, the richest experiences for me have been timeless – outside of time. The next best have been when existence was exactly attuned to the time of the first snowfall – the time of maple syrup. The most worthless and painful have been when existence was forced to conform to schedules and appointments.
I have always heard it said that the people of the western world are materialists. I do not think they are materialists at all. They are abstractionists. They spend their whole lives manipulating abstractions rather than handling, shaping and using real materials. They are trained to do this, for that is the essence of western technology. And the results of their combined efforts is called “management.”
Spelled out, this means that forest which grew since time, began without being managed, are now managed.
Rivers which flowed forever without benefit of management, are now being managed.
Fish are managed.
Game is managed.
Birds are managed.
Even insects are managed.
People are managed also. More and more of them don’t like it. And they are beginning to react with violence.
Management is the by-product of regulation. Regulations are abstracted from reality. Life flows in curves. And the flow is balanced and rhythmic. Those who would “bring order out of chaos” in the Canadian Arctic or elsewhere, should remember that. That is reality.
Clocks and calendars regulate the flow of time in the same way that the military goose-step regulates the flow and rhythm of walking.
Survey lines regulate the flow of space and fences violate the rhythmic waves of hills and valleys.
Money regulates the flow of abundance.
Education regulates the rhythm of learning.
Games are the regulation of play.
Marriage seeks to regulate love.
Religion tries to regulate wonder and kills it in the cradle.
Contrary to popular opinion, regulation begets deprivation. The monetary regulation of abundance creates vast stockpiles of produce on the one hand, and a deprived class on the other.
The regulation of time causes the chronic and universal complaint: “I never have enough time.”
The regulation of space through real estate dispossesses most of us, ruling us out of 9/10ths of the world’s land mass.
The regulation of learning has made most of us so educated we may be too unlearned to survive.
All my life I have heard non-Indians complain about the “system.” But I have never heard any of them express the desire to get out of all systems. They all seem to have a better system they want to promote and impose. And the systems referred to have always been political and economic. A world of abstractions – that is the real oppression they feel – that is the actual system. A web of abstractions. And they are all caught in it like flies.
Abstractions mask reality. Abstractions mystify and confuse people so badly, they don’t know when they are being robbed and enslaved. And they don’t know when they are robbing and enslaving others. They don’t know they are locked into educational institutions, locked into professions and jobs, religious denominations, marriage contracts, political parties, timetables…locked into a system of living – and locked out of life.
My people have always been materialists. They have always lived by gathering, hunting and collecting the materials of environment – and processing these, personally, with their own hands and with tools fashioned by their own hands, into food, clothing, shelter – the elementary means of survival. And for my people, time is also a kind of material – as tangible as air or water…as real as mud.
For them, time is a kind of living history, held between the latest infant born and the oldest resident – a living flow of experience, issuing from what has happened, into what is happening now, and on to what is about to happen. And there is no point at which anyone can lay a yardstick of units on that river and accurately measure its flowing.
For my people, time is implicit in environment and experience. We are never going to join the dominant white society back there, where it was, in their historical, rear-view mirror. Nor are we going to be sucked into their beautiful, wide-screen, full-color projection of where it will be. We are going to stay where its at. In environment – which is here, and in experience – which is now.
Time is all there is. There is no way it can be split off from the rest of life and hung on the wall or put on anyone’s wrist.
Abundance is all there is. And no amount of money will ever measure the bounty of the great spirit.
Learning is all there is. And learning will never be captured in classrooms or organized between the covers of books.
Religion is all there is. And worship will never be limited to one day in seven, or contained within the walls of even the most impressive cathedral.
Love is all there is. And marriage contracts will never define or protect or control love.
Systems are man-made. Systems are logical combinations of parts. But there are no parts. If that sounds illogical to you – that is because it is a-logical. There is no logic in reality. Logic, like clocks and calendars, exists only as the science of manipulating abstractions.
By Grandfather Wil
