Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth [part 3]
(excerpt from “The Spell of the Sensuous“, by David Abram)
The Indistinction of Space and Time in the Oral Universe.
We touch here upon one of the most intransigent barriers preventing genuine understanding between the modern, alphabetized West and indigenous, oral cultures. Unlike linear time, time conceived as cyclical cannot be readily abstracted from the spatial phenomena that exemplify it–from, for instance, the circular trajectories of the sun, the moon, and the stars. Unlike a straight line, moreover, a circle demarcates and encloses a spatial field. Indeed, the visible space in which we commonly find ourselves when we step outdoors is itself encompassed by the circular enigma that we have come to call “the horizon.” The precise contour of the horizon varies considerably in different terrains, yet whenever we climb to a prominent vantage point, the cicular character of the visible world becomes explicit. Thus cyclical time, the experiential time of an oral culture, has the same shape as perceivable space. And the two circles are, in truth, one:
The lakota define the year as a circle around the border of the world. The circle is a symbol of both the earth(with its encircling horizons) and time. The changes of sunup and sundown around the horizon during the course of the year delinate the contours of time, time as a part of space.
On high plateaus in the Rocky Mountains, where the visible horizon is especially vast and wide, are circular arrangements of stones arrayed around a central hub. It is known that such “medicine wheels,” still used by various North American tribes, once served a calendrical function. Or, rather, they enabled a person to orient herself within a dimension that was neither purely spatial nor purely temporal–the large stone that is precisely aligned with the place of the sun’s northernmost emergence, marks a place that is as much in time(the summer solstice) as in space. A similar unity–of that which to us are two different dimensions, the spatial and the temporal–existed among the Aztecs at the time of the conquest, according to Diego Duran, a spanish monk who arrived in Mexico in the first half of the sixteenth century:
Duran reports that among the Aztecs, who distribute their years into cycles according to the cardinal points, “the years most feared by the people were those of the North and of the West, since they remembered that the most unhappy events had taken place under those signs.
So a cyclical mode of time does not readily distinguish itself from the spatial field in which oral persons find themselves experientially immersed. We must remember, however, that this experiential space is itself very different from the static, homogeneous void that alphabetic civilization has come to call “space.” As we saw above, space, for an oral culture, is directly experienced as place, or as places–as a differentiated realm containing diverse sites, each of which has it’s own power, its own way of organizing our senses and influencing our awareness. Unlike the abstraction of an infinite and homogeneous “space,” place is from the first a qualitative matrix, a pulsing or potentized field of experience, able to move us even in its stillness. It is a mode of space, then, that is always already temporal, and we should not be surpsied that oral peoples speak of what to us are purely spatial phenomena as animate, emergent processes, and of space itself as a kind of dynamism, a continual unfolding. For instance, a recent book-length analysis of spatial concepts among the Dine, or Navajo, concludes that for them
[s]pace, like the entities or objects within it, is dynamic. That is, all “entities”, “objects”, or similar units of action and perception must be considered as units that are engaged in continuous processes. In the same way, spatial units and spatial relationships are “qualitative” in this same sense and cannot be considered to be clearly defined, readily quantifiable and static in essence.
The authors assert, therefore, that a complex notion of space-time(or, in their words, “time-space”) would likely be a more relevant translation of Navajo experience “then clearly distinct concepts of one-dimensional time and three-dimensional space.”
A similar situation was discoverd by the American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf in his extensive analyses of the Hopi language during the 1930s and early 1940s. Whorf found no analog, in the Hopi language, to the linear, sequential, uniformly flowing time that Western civilzation takes for granted. Indeed, Whorf found no reference to any independent temporal dimension of reality, and no terms of expressions that “refer to space in such a way as to exclude that element of extension or existence that we call time, and so by implication leave a residue that could be referred to as time.” What we call time, in orther words, could not be isolated from the Hopi experience of space:
In this Hopi view, [that which we call] time disappears and [that which we call] space is altered, so that it is no longer the homogeneous and instantaneous timeless space of our supposed intuition or of classical newtonian mechanics.
Whorf’s fascinating disclosures were often taken simplistically, by researchers in other disciplines, to mean, among other things, that the Hopi people have no temporal awareness whatsoever, or that the Hopi language is utterly static, and has no way of distinguishing between earlier and later events, or between occurrences more or less distant from the speaker in what we would call time. Such misreadings, doubtless encourage by Whorf’s occasional propensity for vigorous overstatement, have led various linguists in recent years to decry Whorf’s findings. Several researchers, working closely with the Hopi language, claim to have refuted Whorf’s conclusions entirely. Such refutations, however, are themselves dependent upon an oversimplified reading of Whorf’s conclusions, upon a crusading refusal to discern that Whorf was not asserting an absence of temporal awareness among the Hopi, but rather an absence, in their discourse, of any metaphysical concept of time that could be isolated from their dynamic awareness of spatiality.
While Whorf did not find separable notions of space and time among the Hopi, he did discern, in the Hopi language, a distinction between two basic modalities of existence, which he terms the “manifested” and the “manifesting.” The “manifested” corresponds roughly to our notion of “objective” existence, and it comprises “all that is or has been accessible to the senses…with no attempt to distinguish between present and past, but excluding everything that we call future.” The “manifesting,” on the other hand,
comprises all that we call future, but not merely this; it includes equally and indistinguishably all that we call mental–everything that appears or exists in the mind, or, as the Hopi would prefer to say, in the heart, not only the heart of man, but the heart of animals, plants, and things, and behind and within all the forms and appearances of nature, in the heart of nature [itself]
The “manifested,” in other words, is that aspect of phenomena already evident to our senses, while the “manifesting” is that which is not yet explicit, not yet present to the senses, but which is assumed to be psychologically gathering itself towards manifestation within the depths of all sensible phenomena. One’s own feeling, thinking, and desiring are a part of, and hence participant with, this collective desiring and preparing implicit in all things–from the emergence and fruition of the corn, to the formation of clouds and the bestowal of rain. Indeed, human intention, especially when concentrated by communal ceremony and prayer, contributes directly to the becoming manifested of such phenomena.
While the language of the Hopi belongs to the Uto-Aztecan family of languages, the neighboring Dine, or Navajo, speak an Athapaskan language–like the Koyukon and other tribes of the far Northwest, from whence the ancestors of the Apache and the Navajo first headed south many centuries ago. (The nomadic Navajo first came into contact with the Pueblo peoples of the Rio Grande valley around six hundred years ago, and ultimately adopted a range in the Arizona desert less then two hundred years ago.) Nevertheless, the navajo language also seems to maintain a broad notion of the influence of human desire and imagination upon a continually emergent world, a notion very analogous to that found by Whorf among the Hopi. In the 1983 study of navajo semantics alluded to earlier, the authors claim that “existence,” for the Navajo “should be understood as a continuous manifestation…[as] a series of events, rather then states or situational persistences through time.” They then go on to suggest that what Western people call “the future” is experienced by the Navajo to be
like a stock of possibilities, of incompletely realized events and circumstances. They [these circumstances] are still most of all ‘becoming’ (rather then being) and involved in a process of ‘manifesting’ themselves. A human being can, through his thought and desire, exert an influence on these ‘possibles.’
Thus, in place of any clear distinction between space and time, we find, in examples of both the Uto-Aztecan and the Athapaskan language groups, a subtle differentiation between manifest and unmanifest spatiality–that is, a sense of space as a continual emergence from implicit to explicit existence, and of human intention as participant with this encompassing emergence.
The indistinction of space and time was also evident in our discussion, in the last chapter, of Aboriginal Australian notions of the Alcheringa, or Dreamtime does not refer to the past in any literal sense(to a time that is finished and done with), but rather to the temporal and psychological latency of the enveloping landscape. Different paths through the present terrain resonate with different stories from the Dreamtime, and indeed every water hole, every forest, every cluster of boulders or dry creekbed has its own Dreaming, its own implicit life. The vitality of each place, moreover, is rejuvenated by the human enactment, and en-chant-ment, of the storied events that crouch within it. The dreamtime, then, is integral to the spatial surroundings. It is not a set of accomplished events located in some finished past, but is the very depth of the experiential present–the earthly sleep, or dream, out of which the visible landscape continually comes to presence. And once again human dreaming, human intention, human action and chanting participate vividly in this coming-to-presence.
Numerous other examples could be cited. These few instances, from opposite sides of the earth, should suffice at least to demonstrate that separable “time” and “space” are not absolute givens in all human experience. It is likely that without a formal system of numerical and linguistic notation it is not possible to entirely abstract a uniform sense of progressive “time” from the direct experience of the animate, emergent environment–or, what amounts to the same thing, to freeze the dynamic experience of earthly place into the intuition of a static, homogeneous “space.” If this is the case, then writing must be recognized as a necessary condition for the belief in an entirely distinct space and time.
This post was about: apache, books, Hopi, human worldviews, Koyukon, language, Navajo, oral history






