Wild thoughts from wild.., p.26
Wild Thoughts from Wild Places, page 26
Like Kleiman before them, Van Schaik and Dunbar also ventured into the subject of human pair-bonding. Yes, the new hypothesis is applicable to Homo sapiens, they argued: If human babies didn’t face a high risk of fatal abuse, human adults might not be inclined toward monogamy. In support of this notion, Van Schaik and Dunbar cited two chilling sets of data. One study, done in Canada, indicated that stepchildren are sixty-five times more likely to die before their second birthday than children living with both biological parents. Another study, among the native Ache people of Paraguay, found a similar pattern: Children whose fathers died or departed were fifteen times more likely to die as youngsters themselves. It makes monogamy seem mortally pragmatic.
• • •
BUT MONOGAMY isn’t mortally pragmatic. Not in all cases, anyway. If it were, we could understand it better. Just as surely as the weird, ethereal howls of an indri duet contain some transcendent dimension of grace—and they do, I promise you—so does the weird, narrow mystery of monogamy transcend Darwinian explanation. The data on which I base that assertion are less formal and orderly than Van Schaik and Dunbar’s, but still persuasive: The world is filled (though sparsely) with voluntarily childless human couples whose bondings endure, even thrive, against all the social and biological odds.
Some people like to argue that childless couples are selfish. On a planet already worn threadbare beneath its burden of human population, that notion seems too perversely delusional to merit refuting. Anyway, I’m not going to bother refuting it, because the subject at hand is monogamy, not ecological overshoot. The subject at hand is tail-twining and song.
I can imagine a case of human monogamy in which all the hypotheses of the scientists don’t apply. I can imagine a case in which the gestation and rearing of young doesn’t figure and there’s no egg to be held on the tops of the male’s feet through a long Antarctic winter. I can imagine a case in which habitat resources aren’t scarce, in which the physical environment isn’t too difficult, in which early breeding at the first flush of spring isn’t the least bit advantageous. A case in which infanticide presents no concern. I can imagine a case, say, in which the man spends a month in Madagascar or somewhere almost as remote and, with that absence, his heart grows fonder for no pragmatic Darwinian reason. I can even imagine that, when he hears duetting indri on a hillside in the northeastern forest, their glorious tangle of voices evokes in him a twinge of envious melancholy, as well as thrilled admiration. I can imagine that this sort of linkage between one human male and one human female might evolve slowly over a period of years, from the hot immediacy of youth to the sedate forms of affiliative behavior that become more important in middle age, and beyond. I’m talking now about that part of the social dimension even sociobiology can’t explain.
Biologists call it pair-bonding. Others simply call it love. Let’s us call it true and lasting love, as distinct from more familiar varieties. It’s one of those unfunctional and gratuitous phenomena, like the sonnets of Shakespeare, the paintings of Mark Rothko, the music of Andrés Segovia, that make humanity just a little peculiar.
Love in the Age of Relativity
Fourteen people sit gathered together in a room, performing a ceremonial measurement. Here, to this point, they declare, marks fifty years. For the matter at hand, a marriage, fifty is the roundest of figures. Pearl Harbor hadn’t yet happened. Henry Fonda was young. The wedding took place in a world without television, without the Bomb, a world of Elgin and Bulova watches with jeweled movements but a world lacking any such thing as a Timex digital chronograph. Then the world changed but a few things remained constant, and lo, fifty years later this marriage is one of them. Someone speaks a toast. Goblets go up, wine goes down. In the air is a flavor of joy, gratitude, triumph against the winds of modernity, love, and a little quiet amazement. The number fifty seems both grave and festive. It seems stupendous. It fills the mind with all sorts of human questions, and with one that can be taken as scientific: What do we measure when we measure time?
Picture this scene with me. The room is a private banquet hall on the second floor of a fancy hotel, downtown in a certain midwestern city. Windows overlook a civic plaza, with its statuesque fountain, its trees, branches cheerfully strung with small yellow lights. The planes have arrived at the midwestern airport, roughly as scheduled, and the kin have assembled—daughters, a son, their spouses, grandchildren. Also a handful of old friends. Fourteen is a low number of place settings to encompass so many categories of people and the atmosphere is expansive but intimate. Dinner materializes from backstage. Ceviche, chicken and salmon, perigourdine sauce whatever that is. A bit more wine. Then a small woman with Irish red hair, the bride of fifty years’ standing, pulls the gift-wrapping off a large box. She untangles padding. She lifts out an elaborate clock, crystal and gold and polished hardwood beneath a glass bell. She tilts her head back and laughs hilariously, because the clock comes as punch line to a joke.
It’s an inside joke, an unintentional joke derived from improbable circumstance, and it will require a touch of explaining. We’ll get to that explanation in due time. Meanwhile, the moment itself. This particular tableau on this particular evening isn’t captured by any flashing Minolta. But memory can be lithographic. The small red-haired woman laughs hilariously.
Her daughters were smarter than her son, who doubted briefly the wisdom and good taste of choosing a clock to commemorate a fiftieth anniversary. Her son was wary of what he took for the double-edged symbolism. Anyone who has been married for fifty years—thought the son—and who therefore has passed seventy-some-odd birthdays, doesn’t need to or want to be reminded about the inexorable tick-tock of time. It seemed faintly morbid. But what did he know? Stop thinking so hard, said his sisters. He was happy to be overruled by their wiser heads. The clock chosen is a handsome mixture of high-tech precision and old-world craft, from Kern & Söhne of Germany, with a quartz controller and a crystal pendulum that twirls rather than swings. The twirling, he admitted, is a nicely nonlinear touch. Now it sits, golden and unawakened, on the banquet table. Batteries not included. Time is momentarily frozen, according to this discreet gift. The groom of fifty years standing wears a contained but expressive Norwegian smile. Irish laughter fills the room like chimes.
• • •
WE LIVE in an age of shattered absolutes, and one of those absolutes is time. It’s not what it used to be. For this we can blame Albert Einstein, among others. Just as the Newtonian revolution in physics (with its own sort of action-and-reaction relativity) had destroyed the idea of absolute space, absolute stillness, absolute movement, Einstein’s revolution destroyed the idea of absolute time. Space-time, a four-dimensional matrix, replaced the three dimensions of space and the linear continuum of time. Simultaneity became a dubious proposition, something that could only be claimed for two events that occurred in the same spot. The question when? became inextricably linked to the question how far away? The special theory of relativity decreed this rejection of time’s absoluteness in order to make sense of the speed of light, which was itself an oddly relativistic absolute.
A startling experiment by two physicists named Michelson and Morley had shown that light always seems to move at one speed (186,000 miles per second), whether or not its source is moving also. That violates Newtonian dynamics, in which a spear thrown at forty miles per hour from a horse galloping at thirty miles per hour will hit its target at a summed speed of seventy. The speed of light, Michelson and Morley discovered, doesn’t sum. To a hypothetical astronaut, moving at half of light’s speed himself, the headlight beam on his spaceship seems to flash forward at 186,000 miles per second. To a ground controller on the planet of destination, the beam also seems to arrive at just 186,000 miles per second—not at that speed plus the speed of the spaceship. The rectification of this paradox is achieved by recognizing time as relative.
Put simply: The astronaut and the ground controller measure light’s speed with two different clocks. The figure of 186,000 miles per second remains constant, between the two witnesses, because the duration of a second does not. The astronaut’s second is much longer than the ground-controller’s. With his spaceship moving so quickly, his clock has slowed down. This is one of the tenets of relativity: Speed slows time. Gravity also slows time. A clock on a huge massive planet, like Jupiter, will advance more slowly than the same clock when it’s on Earth.
“What is a clock?” Einstein asked, in a surprisingly readable book called The Evolution of Physics. “By the use of a clock the time concept becomes objective.” But objective, as he meant the word here, should not be confused with absolute. The invention of clocks merely objectified the flow of time into countable increments. Whether those increments were inherent or arbitrary, constant or changeable, cosmically truthful or imaginary, is another question. “Any physical phenomenon may be used as a clock, provided it can be exactly repeated as many times as desired,” Einstein added. For instance, a heartbeat might serve as a clock. Geese flying south might serve as a clock. An oak tree—budding, leafing, turning crimson, going bare, budding again, leafing again—makes a rather good clock, highly reliable though not precise. Dripping water and falling sand were harnessed in clock-like devices and performed fairly well (except when the water was frozen or the sand was wet), until mechanical clocks became popular in the thirteenth century. But the oldest and most dependable clocks were the sun and the moon and the stars.
Celestial timekeeping has been universal to all human cultures. Sometimes it was elaborate, as with the Mayans, and sometimes rudimentary, but always there. The rising and setting sun measures a day; the sun’s movement around the horizon, or the stars’ movement around the night sky, measures a year; the waxing and waning moon measures a month. Unfortunately, none of these measurements quite agrees with the others, so time as marked off by our species has always been a confused set of numbers and labels with a margin of error that continually grows larger, and so requires continual adjustment, like an off-balance Maytag in need of a shim. By the moon’s cycle, a month is 29.53 days long. By the sun’s cycle, a year is 365.24 days long. How long is a day? Using the stars as referent, it comes to 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.1 seconds; but using the sun, it comes to 24 hours, 3 minutes, and 56.55 seconds. The cycles are incommensurable, an astronomer would say. The numbers don’t match, either directly or as multiples. No wonder we’ve had to patch the system with leap years. No wonder we’ve got months of four different sizes, arranged so illogically that they can only be remembered by means of a dippy rhyme. No wonder Julius Caesar saw need to reform the calendar, and then Pope Gregory XIII saw need to reform Caesar’s reformation, chopping eleven minutes and fourteen seconds out of the year. No wonder Russia’s October Revolution turns out to have happened in November. Time, as we choose to construe it, is not one of nature’s immanent truths. It’s a conceptual structure of pure human contrivance, like WordPerfect or mah-jongg.
What is a second? We have arbitrarily decreed it to be one sixtieth of a minute. A minute is equally arbitrary. These things don’t exist in the real world of oak trees and geese and the sun and the moon. An hour? One-twelfth of an equatorial day and one-twelfth of a night, likewise for no particular reason. Twelve seems to have been an appealing figure that, unlike ten, contains even multiples of the magical number three. In medieval European monasteries, where some standard of promptness was important for scheduled prayers, daylight was divided (before the appearance of those first mechanical clocks) at all times of year into twelve equal segments, known as the canonical hours. As a result, the twelve daytime hours were each shorter in winter than in summer. The nights in winter were longer, and therefore the night hours were longer too. Such god-like tinkering was only the logical antecedent to daylight savings, another signal of time’s relativity. And of course time zones represent a small earthly pantomime of the reality of Einstein’s space-time, whereby the question when? still can’t be detached from the question how far away?, its Siamese twin. On an intergalactic scale, that linkage shows up in talk about light-year distances. How far to a certain star or galaxy? The answer is given as so many years’ worth of flying photons. Four light-years to Alpha Centauri. Nine light-years to Sirius. Eight hundred thousand light-years, a far piece, to the Andromeda Nebula. Distance becomes time, at the scale on which relativity is noticeable, and time becomes the trajectory of light.
The philosopher Krishnamurti once offered an epigram that seems to converge here with relativity theory. “To meditate is to transcend time,” he wrote. “Time is the distance that thought travels in its achievements.”
What is a decade? At the speed of light, it comes to fifty-eight trillion miles of distance. But to a pious Druid who worshipped at the clock called Stonehenge, a decade would have been ten fingers’ worth of spring equinoxes, each one greeted with glad clamor when the sun rose at just the right notch in the rocks. To a Crow or a Blackfeet in the northern Rockies, a decade was ten fingers’ worth of mnemonic winter counts: 1804 Heavy spring snow, even the dogs went snow-blind; 1847 White buffalo, Dusk killed it; 1872 Comes Out of the Water, she ran off the Assiniboine horses; 1973 Geese, they flew over in a storm. And what about fifty years? One handful (five fingers’ worth) of decades. Within the pectoral fin of a whale lurk five metacarpaloid bones that would seem to salute the fundamental rightness of a system of fives and tens; but, then again, to an octopus fifty means nothing. On dry land, we humans are left to make of it what we can.
• • •
STEPHEN HAWKING, who may be the most original thinker in physics since Einstein, is entitled by his record of brilliance to ask a question that would land most of us in a rubber room: “Why do we remember the past but not the future?”
This is a matter more puzzling than it might seem, because the laws of science, as Hawking notes, “do not distinguish between the forward and backward directions of time.” The descriptions of events and transformations offered by physics, in particular, contain no inherent distinction between past and future. “Yet there is a big difference between the forward and backward directions of real time in ordinary life,” he admits in his book A Brief History of Time. The solution that Hawking offers for this conundrum is more elaborate than satisfying, I warn you. It’s based on what Hawking calls “three different arrows of time.”
These are the thermodynamic arrow, the psychological arrow, and the cosmological arrow. The cosmological arrow involves arguments about how an expanding universe must differ from a collapsing universe, and if we followed him out to the turnaround point on that line of thought we would probably never get home. The thermodynamic and the psychological arrows are more pertinent here. The thermodynamic arrow of time, derived from the second law of thermodynamics, is defined by Hawking as “the direction of time in which disorder or entropy increases.” In the universe that we happen to inhabit, a wineglass might fall off a table and shatter to pieces on the floor; but pieces of glass don’t fall off the floor and tumble upward into conjoinment as a wineglass on a table. Therefore the wineglass is necessarily past and the fragments are necessarily future. The psychological arrow of time is “the direction in which we feel time passes, the direction in which we remember the past but not the future.” That psychological arrow, Hawking says, is determined within our brains by the thermodynamic arrow. Like the memory function in a computer, creating small pockets of order within a larger context of expended electricity and dissipated heat, we too are programmed to remember things in the order in which entropy increases. Of course, common sense hollers out that we’re programmed to remember things in the order in which they happened. But why did they happen in that order? Besides, Hawking’s business is deep physics, not common sense.
Show someone a film of a falling and shattering wineglass. Then show the same film in reverse. The person will be able to tell you which showing corresponds to the flow of time. This linkage between the psychological arrow of time and the thermodynamic arrow, if I read Hawking correctly, results from the expectations that every human inherits and acquires as part of life in an entropic (and expanding) universe.
What do we measure when we measure time? The gloomy answer from Hawking, one of our most implacably cheerful scientists, is that we measure entropy. We measure changes and those changes are all for the worse. We measure increasing disorder. Life is hard, says science, and constancy is the greatest of miracles.
• • •
THE JOKE at the banquet is this: There are two clocks. The Irish bride and the Norwegian groom have already bought one for themselves.
The son arrived first at the midwestern airport, after weeks of long-distance consultation with his sisters, during which the banquet had been arranged and the Kern & Söhne gift clock had been settled upon. Before they were out of the parking garage his parents had confessed gleefully that they’d decided to treat themselves to a present. Something that we could choose together and share, they explained. Not a jade necklace then? he guessed. No. Not a new car? No. A clock! said his red-haired mother. A beautiful gold-and-brass clock, with lovely chimes. That’s a very apt choice, said the straightfaced son. Somehow it seems just right. I can’t tell you how apt it seems, he said. Later he took his own consolatory enjoyment in watching each of his sisters receive the same glad news with the same sort of maniacal, paralyzed, grinning wince.
Everyone admired the new clock. Each time its chimes sounded, the Irish bride’s face lit with pleasure. The Norwegian groom curled up a corner of his mouth. They were still sharing the music of time, as they had for exactly five decades. Then everyone dressed up nice and went off to the banquet.
