Category: Time

Be the Tenth Muse

Featured Monica Carroll2 Comments

Does your work endure, Writer?

Anytē of Tegea (early 3 BCE) was called one of the nine earthly muses for her epigrams and nature poems. Below is her epitaph for the tomb of two lost pets.

For her locust, the nightingale of the fields,

and her cicada that rests on the oak trees,

one tomb has little Myro made,

shedding girlish tears; for inexorable Hades

has carried off her two pets and their double song.

 

Ἀκρίδι τᾷ κατ᾽ ἄρουραν ἀηδόνι, καὶ δρυοκοίτᾳ

τέττιγι ξυνὸν τύμβον ἔτευξε Μυρώ,

παρθένιον στάξασα κόρα δάκρυ: δισσὰ γὰρ αὐτᾶς

παίγνι᾽ ὁ δυσπειθὴς ᾤχετ᾽ ἔχων Ἀίδας.

With thanks to Paton, W. R., 1917 The Greek Anthology. London: William Heinemann

Richtmyer-Meshkov Instability

Featured Monica Carroll5 Comments

Secant time. You can do that. You are a writer, after all. You can make anything happen.

From playwright Julie Goodall (1997:235):

She knocks over her cup. AUDREY jumps up to wipe the table. ISABEL indicates no.

ISABEL: If you were a fly you’d see that in slow motion. They’re so tiny, they perceive smaller amounts of time than we do. Smaller than a second. I saw it on TV. You knock over your cup. It sees the coffee pour out like a slow waterfall. Or lava flowing down. Hitting the table drop by drop. And single drops fly up to make a crown. Small units of time. See, Audie?

AUDREY nods.

Writer, would you like to stop time. See the moment. Is there collision? Is there crown? Is there crater?

Goodall, Julie. 1997. ‘Texas, Queensland’ in The La Mama Collection: Six Plays for the 1990s. Sydney: Currency Press

What do you write with your last year of life?

Featured Monica Carroll17 Comments

Ever reflective and tender, Keats, in a letter to his love Fanny Brawne,

“If I should die,” said I to myself, “I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d.” (Feb. 1820)

Love the principle of beauty in all things, writer.

What makes no difference?

Featured Monica Carroll12 Comments

Have you left it too late for your writing? Too late in the day? Too late in your life?

No. Not conceivable.

Marcus Aurelius says, “Many grains of incense fall on the same altar: one sooner, another later—it makes no difference.”

Write now, writer.

End of the World

Featured Monica Carroll18 Comments

For Volume IV of his Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire wrote an entry for ‘End of the World’.

The greater part of the Greek philosophers held the universe to be eternal both with respect to commencement and duration. But as to this petty portion of the world or universe, this globe of stone and earth and water, of minerals and vapors, which we inhabit, it was somewhat difficult to form an opinion; it was, however, deemed very destructible. It was even said that it had been destroyed more than once, and would be destroyed again.

Let this set you free, writer. The end of the world will come again, and then again. Let it come. Hasten it with your words if you dare.

Nonumque prematur in annum

Monica Carroll3 Comments

Horace advised in, Letters to Piso, that once we have written we let our work rest.  “Put your parchment in the closet and keep it back till the ninth year.”

While these lines (386-390, Art of Poetry) are often interpreted as guidance towards quality, they also highlight the proper length of a thing (with a dash of Horace’s characteristic mockery).

A breath is half a chorus. Twelve hours turns a tide from high to low. A carronade is much shorter than a long gun.

The time it takes to write our work is as long as it takes. Speed is not admirable.

Side-step imposed narratives about writer’s block by casting time as part of the writing. The value of the Sun King’s soup tureen is the price that someone is willing to pay for it. The value is set by the act of payment.

The time it takes to write our work is the time it takes. The time we give is part of the writing, not a measure of the work nor a ruling of ourselves as failing or otherwise.

 

… Siquid tamen olim

scripseris, in Maeci descendat iudicis auris

et patris et nostras, nonumque prematur in annum

membranis intus positis; delere licebit

quod non edideris; nescit uox missa reuerti.

Sharp