The fascination of the ephemeral

The experience of time is for all of us more than daily, it is a constant from the moment we get out of bed and find out that we are standing beside it instead of lying in it, or when we take a mug out of the cupboard to have a coffee. Time is intrinsically intertwined with change, so much so it is a frequent figure of speech, whenever we find ourselves in situation where no change is visible, to say that time has stood still. But not all changes are equal, and it is not any less widespread the notion that, while some actions can be undone, others are irreversible: you can put the mug back in the cupboard, but if you drop it you cannot un-break it. Even if you manage to gather all the pieces and glue them together, the cup will not be the same as it was before it broke. This is the "arrow of time", the entropy, a property of all physical processes, which tend to increase the mixing and the chaos and reduce the order and the regularity of things.

Photo: Leandro Inocencio

In Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five", Billy Pilgrim explains that Tralfamadorians, the alien race that kidnaps him, can travel freely across time as we travel across space, and therefore they have no feeling of loss for things that are past, because all they have to do is travel to any of the moments in time when the thing existed to see it again. It is like being in Paris and seeing the Eiffel Tower, there are parts of the city where you see it, and others where you do not see it, but you do not have a feeling of loss if you do not see from a given corner, because it is enough to walk a couple of blocks to see it again. Similarly, you do not feel sad for the Eiffel Tower when you leave Paris (you will probably be gloomy, but not for that particular reason), because even if you do not see it, you know it is there. 

However, we are not Tralfamadorians, so once something is engulfed by the past, all we have left are our memories. This conclusion, that might look sad on one hand, makes the experiences that we have all the more valuable, because they cannot be repeated. Just compare the emotional value of your grandfather's watch with a Patek Philippe: the latter might be expensive, but there are other watches, while there is only one that belong to your grandfather; even it is a hundred of a thousand times cheaper, it is way more valuable than the luxury one.

One indication of our appreciation for the ephemeral is the persistent fashion of giving flowers as a present: they are the quintessential beautiful but perishable object. You have to catch them early enough so that they will still be pleasant to look at for a while, but not so early that they still need a lot of time to develop. An extraordinary example of this fascination is the attention that the flowering of any Titan Arum generates, whenever it happens every seven to ten years.

Yesterday a friend of mine sent me a video of the Sanddorn Balance performance by Miyoko Shida Rigolo, where a dancer builds a complex structure on the stage by balancing a feather and several palm stems. The act ends with the removal of the feather, that leads to the collapse of the structure like the proverbial house of cards: the proven fragility of the structure only enhances its beauty and fosters an appreciation for the effort it takes to put it together.

This video immediately reminded me of Michel Grab, the Canadian artist that creates unbelievable stacks of rocks. As in the Sanddorn Balance, the structure is beautiful and its fragility, magical. One can only wonder the level of concentration required to perform such a feat. When I think that I sometimes lose my line of thought when solving a sudoku... I wish you all a nice weekend.