Barb and I went to Mexico for a couple of weeks in January, 2025, on the Yucatan peninsula. I’ll blog some photos from there later, but today I want to write about this trip we just took to visit with my daughter Isabel in Fort Bragg, up in northern California, on the coast near Mendocino.
What were Isabel and I up to? Well, we did a performance on the theme of what Isabel is calling “The Time Ecosystem.” Here’s a YouTube video that Barb filmed and I posted…you can look at that and poke around in this post to get a general idea.
Isabel says that there are all different kinds of time–mechanical, celestial, tidal, migratory, now-moment, tree rings, heartbeat, generational, helical, dream, screen, emotional—and how they mix together into an psychic ecosystem of sorts.
I mixed in in some comments about the fourth dimension, which Isabel is also interested in.
About 40 in the audience, on rows of low benches, outdoors, at sunset, bundled up, philosophers all. Outside the Larry Spring museum in Fort Bragg on the northers California coast The event was backed by the Redwood Time Project of the Spring Museum.
Fort Bragg is kind of a shaggy town, a mixture of hippies and Latinos and country people and crafts people and devotees of the redwoods and the sea. Mellow and unpretentious.
Amazing bluffs.
We talked a little about how there’s a still time or a no-time or an all-time that you get into when you’re totally absorbed. Hiking or making something or focusing on something. For me, writing and painting are my favorite kinds of no-time. I’m the real me then.
This latest painting is based on the Mayan glyphs that Barb and I saw in Chichen Itza. I worked on the painting for about forty hours, doing the layers over and over, getting the colors right.
Isabel’s sketches for the painting of a hypercube that she made for the art show that went with our presentation. The idea is to draw two cubes and connect the corners. Like how can draw a cube by drawing two squares and connecting the corners,
One style of time. Another style is the very famous Jackson Pollock work called “Lucifer.” It’s at the Anderson Museum on the Stanford campus. The Anderson family used to have all these plantings in their home, and for kicks, the curators assembled some of the family furniture and put it beside the plantings.
I posted this, and someone asked if I really had a signed Jackson Pollock in my home. I wish! I like looking at this one for a long time, at least fifteen minutes, and I get into it, into that tangled Pollock time, the tangled space, and his body gestures. Price tag on this baby? Estimated at half a billion dollars.
Isabel is a pro jeweler, and I love looking around her studio. So very many kinds of time in this image. The hammering, the snipping, the letter-stamping, the polishing.
And I’m crazy about her pliers. I take t heir picture every time I’m in down. Pinch!
“Science” sort of bullies us into saying that time is line with numbers on it, to be measure by some boring clock. Oh yeah? Look at this path. The graceful organic curve. The pace I take going uphill or down. And my overlaid body images of the times I’ve walked it, at least once a week for about forty years. Two thousand weeks, two thousand walks.
How did I get go old? Where did the time go? But is it really gone?
In the special theory of relativity, and in other branches of physics, we talk about a four-dimensional spacetime. A stack of 3D moments, if you will. With all the old moments forever there, and perhaps future one’s there already. Look at that nice cliff. A flat person’s spacetime.
And here’s a nice image of the 3D spacetime that goes with the 2D world known as Flatland. Squares and triangles live in Flatland, sliding around like coins on a table top. And their spacetime selves are prisms..
And now here’s a deep rap from my best-selling book ever, Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension. I published it when I was 31, via Dover Books. The editor imagined I was a wise old man. She came to have a look at me. But I was just a hippie. I did not in fact get royalties for the book, due to the contract I signed for a one-time fee of one grand, but there are several hundred thousand copies of it out there, and that’s good enough for me. It was my start.
<Begin quote.
If we accept the spacetime view of the world wholeheartedly, the question becomes, “What causes the illusion of the passage of time?” David Park’s article, “The Myth of the Passage of Time,” insists that we are in fact at each instant of our lives. Every moment of past and future history exists permanently in the framework of 4-D spacetime. The illusion of the passage of time is a consequence of the structure of the universe; in particular, it is a consequence of the fact that the memory traces of an event are always located at spacetime points whose time coordinates have greater values than the time coordinate of the event.
This fact cannot be explained; it is simply an observable property of the universe. That is, you are going to have memories of thoughts or events only at times “later” than the times at which these thoughts or events occur. Each point on the individual’s life-worm finds its place in relation to the other points on the life-worm by comparison of memories. There is no paradox in the claim that my earlier self who drew that image till exists. I will always be drawing that picture, typing this sentence and meeting my death. Every instant of your life exists always. Time does not pass.
You might argue, “Look, I know I am existing right now. The past is gone and the future doesn’t exist yet. If the past existed it would be possible for me to jump my consciousness back five minutes.” But there is no consciousness to jump back or forth; you are always conscious at each instant of your life. The consciousness of five minutes ago is unalterable. Even if it were meaningful to speak of “jumping back five minutes” and even if it were somehow possible to do this; you wouldn’t notice that you had done it! For if you entered back into your body and mind of five minutes ago, you would have no memory of having been in the future. You would think the same thoughts and perform the same actions. You could jump back over and over, read this chapter up to this point 50 times, and not notice.
Not that I think the idea of “jumping back” is meaningful. For this idea implicitly includes the notion of a consciousness that “illuminates” one particular moving cross section of spacetime-and this is the illusion that I am arguing against.
End quote>
But, you know, maybe that’s wrong. When I was getting my Ph.D. in mathematical logic at Rutgers, near Princeton, I managed to befriend the king of logicians Kurt Gödel , a mathematician and philosopher at the level of Einstein. This fp;;pwomg passage is taken from my august tome Infinity and the Mind, also online.
I managed to ask Gödel that same question, “What causes the illusion of the passage of time?”
Gödel spoke not directly to this question, but to the question of what my question meant — that is, why anyone would even believe that there is a perceived passage of time at all.
He went on to relate the getting rid of belief in the passage of time to the struggle to experience the One Mind of mysticism. Finally he said this: “The illusion of the passage of time arises from the confusing of the given with the real. Passage of time arises because we think of occupying different realities. In fact, we occupy only different givens. There is only one reality.”
And then I wrote my novel Software, with robots eating people’s brains.
As Isabel says about time lines, we don’t want to get so far into math and logic and science and *ack* computer science that we forget the hydra-headed times that pullulate around us.
The world really is not digital at all. It’s not made of numbers. It’s made of …what? Smears? Jiggles in infinite dimensional Hilbert space?
Great redwood stumps in the woods where the road back from For Bragg leaves Route One and rises into Anderson Valley. Each branch is a time line of its own, each breeze is a kingdom of Oz. 
I love the Fort Bragg stores with their utterly non-standard items on display.
Isabel enjoys the all-but-incomprehensible teachings of the late outsider scientist or artist or TV repairman Larry Spring, whose shop is a still-beating heart of Fort Bragg.
Why “Fort”? Why “Bragg”? Political history is a timeline I steer clear of.
While we were doing our show, I was looking at the phone poles and the wires and admiring how multidimensional they are. So cute here, like looking into the 1950s. Time machine!
Such fun to be presenting with dear Isabel! I think she’s onto something with her Time Ecosystem.
Excellent murals in Fort Bragg. Consider the timeline of a squid tentacle, yes!
Isabel has turned me onto two great works about the sea. One is the first-person film, My Octopus Teacher, and the other is the amazing book, How to Speak Whale by Tom Mustil.
Our cinematographer Barb Ash. Amazing how well a phone works by now. A video is a whisker of time.
Over in Mendocino they have this sculpture, “Time and the Maiden,” carved from a block of redwood about a hundred years ago. Supposedly it represents some stage of progress in becoming a high-ranking Mason. I always though the guy was about to cut the woman’s throat, but supposedly he’s just helping to braid her hair.
Hairs as time lines, of course. Time is everywhere, deeply intertwingled.
John Updike wrote a poem with the line:
“Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.”
In the end it’s all about nature. No numbers on a dial. The Calla lilies of spring.
The sunset clouds, never exactly the same, each sunset unique — like the time-line of your life.
And, ah, the gnarly roots beneath the Monterey pines by the Beachcomber motel above the Pudding River beach.
Our endlessly creative world. With time to spare.
And Isabel’s workbench is busy.