Sans time, any time at All

In the 11th century, a ruthless and determined man named Canute was king of England, Denmark, Norway and part of Sweden. Sycophants at court whispered in his ear that he could accomplish anything. So hearing, he ordered his throne brought to the sands at the edge of the sea. In imperious voice he addressed the incoming tide: I, Canute, order you to halt. As his royal robes began to drink of the advancing waters, he now ordered a return to his castle.

What could he have been thinking at the time? Did he or did he not realize the wisdom with which Chaucer would be credited with writing some three hundred years later in his vernacular prologue to the Clerk’s Tale? Indeed, time and tide wait for no one.

What is the common ground of time and tide? This pirate thinks it is the sands. And where would the sands of time and tide live to escape the vulnerable edge? Of course, in the hourglass.

The hourglass is quite a design achievement. To control for the non-fluctuating rate of sand flow the ratio of neck width to sand particle diameter must be exactly determined and measured. And the sand must not be too coarse, for fear it might wear away the glass at the neck. The seal must be tight. The surface must be level.

The proscriptions seem endless, but the appreciation was clear. At the time of its invention in third century Alexandria, the hourglass was carried like a wristwatch. By the time of our Canute, the hourglass was as important in sea navigation as the astrolab.

Christopher Moody, the 18th century pirate known for taking “no quarter,” that is, sparing no life, flew his special Jolly Roger that sported a gold on red winged hourglass.

And even for us postmoderns, though domesticated beyond tolerating sand in our shoes, the hourglass is no stranger. We have our perfect three-minute eggs and our games of Boggle. We have our shapely women and our impatience at transformed cursors. We have our 60-ton Time Wheel in Budapest, the largest hourglass, flipped over once each year since 2004. And one of the smallest in Hamburg, which runs through in less than five seconds.

As memorable as Chaucer and the literary giants who echoed him is the epigram of the 1965 soap “Days of Our Lives”: “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.” I think Canute knew this.

Certainly the ancient Greeks of the Golden Age (500 - 300 BCE) thought about time. They posited two kinds of time: the quantitative, sequential, objective time called Chronos, and the qualitative, subjective time Kairos. If Chronos is the measured sands either at top or bottom of the hourglass, then Kairos is the neck. Kairos is the fleeting moment, the movement now, the in between top future and bottom past.

With the magic of Tennyson’s flower in the crannied wall, in the hourglass we hold it all in hand, both precisely and beyond precision. The hourglass permits a loose holding that sees the timelessness in time as we are compelled to stare at the uncapturable, inconceivable middle ground between coming and going, between permanent and impermanent. We cannot look away. We are captivated by a blur that is somehow between sand particles, sans particles.

This is the feeling brought by the Sandman to this pirate child. It was not sleep. It was an awakening beyond that achieved by a rubbing of my eyes. It was the singing in both high and low frequencies of sand pressed, groanings of new vision birthed from winds fornicating dunes. And it was seeing sand paintings of all pure worlds, beyond the illusion of time, shifting sands merely held in mind. In the middle of it All: the falling of the effortless worship of extravagant loving in which the particular particulate body parts defy possession or identification. All in all, in between, be coming, out of my mind, out of time, left here, washed away.

Come with me, please. 

— Rx is the FloridaW eekly muse who hopes to inspire profound mutiny in all those who care to read. Our Rx ma y be wearing a pir ate cloak of in visibility, but emanating fr om within this shado w is hope that readers will feel free to respond. Who kno ws: You may e ven inspir e the muse. Make contact if you dare.