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Monday, 15 November 2004
Slowing down into the Long Now ::
Earlier this year I read about The Clock of the Long Now, a clock designed to run for 10,000 years, and Longplayer, a 1000-year-long piece of music which began on 1 January 2000. I also saw and listened to some samples from Brian Eno’s Bell Studies for the Clock of the Long Now, and read his article The Big Here and Long Now. Here’s a favorite passage:
Humans are capable of a unique trick: creating realities by first imagining them, by experiencing them in their minds. When Martin Luther King said “I have a dream…”, he was inviting others to dream it with him. Once a dream becomes shared in that way, current reality gets measured against it and then modified towards it. As soon as we sense the possibility of a more desirable world, we begin behaving differently—as though that world is starting to come into existence, as though, in our minds at least, we’re already there. The dream becomes an invisible force which pulls us forward. By this process it starts to come true. The act of imagining something makes it real.
I found myself thinking about Big Here and Long Now this past week and again this afternoon. It seems these are concepts that challenge many of our other concepts. If something is bothering me, it seems that that problem can become the center of the universe, even though an hour or day later, I’ll be seeing things differently and see the previous problem as a temporary hallucination.
This afternoon passed quickly as I tweaked the effects on a drum track I’d recorded at 7 am before going to sleep (a 100% wet reverb on drums put through a modulating delay with filtering and feedback, then some compression, can make a sparse part into a dense, breathing atmosphere).
Around 6:15 I discovered that I’d missed a couple of calls from C while in headphones. I called her back and we agreed to meet with J and B in S.F. for dinner and to see The Incredibles at 8.
By 7:00 I was stuck in traffic on 101 going into the city and listening to NPR. A program started about a widespread movement towards slowing down, rushing less, working less, contemplating and enjoying our lives more. B called—they were at the restaurant and ordering; I told him my request. A guest on the radio program spoke of how people get frustrated when stuck in traffic and I was amused; I forgot about being late for dinner and stuck in traffic and just kept listening.
The host played an excerpt from “the fastest song in the world,” something by Moby at 1000 beats per minute. I’ve written buggy MIDI File players that had played faster and more interesting music. The host played what he called “the slowest song in the world,” and it sounded familiar. Indeed, it was Longplayer’s 1000-year piece, and I was amused that I’d been thinking about the Long Now this week.
Tara Branch, a psychotherapist, Buddhist and author, was a guest on the program, speaking about the movement towards slowness in general, and her book Radical Acceptance : Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha (hmn, the second half of the title wasn’t mentioned on the program, I don’t think). She said something like this, a quote from the book:
Believing that something is wrong with us is a deep and tenacious suffering.
I parked near the restaurant and turned off the radio, promising myself to investigate this book. It was 7:30.
I arrived at the restaurant a little flustered at being late, until I realized—the entrees had not arrived yet. At one point the conversation turned to the good and cheap espresso at work. I joked that “the stimulants are free or subsidized.” C mentioned a friend who had worked at a pharmaceutical company where they left little bowls of ephedrine pills lying around. I thought of the radio program again.
It got to be 7:55, 5 minutes before the show. The waiter finally arrived with the food. My companions were anxious about being late for the movie. I didn’t want to miss the beginning either, but I wasn’t anxious about it—it wouldn’t have gotten me to the restaurant any sooner or brought the food to the table any sooner if I’d felt anxious and hurried while stuck in traffic. The waiter was told he wouldn’t get a tip and protested that he should have been told we were in a hurry. My friends thought that an hour was too long to wait for entrees, but now, I wish I’d surreptitiously left a tip.
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