How do you measure time?

On why the present moment is not real. Time is a construct, but it's killing us anyway. So how do you keep track? Coffee spoons and bedtimes and chapstick tubes.

The sorrow of the passage of time is why we take photos. It’s why we write newsletters.

Music doesn’t exist. A painting does. You can look at it in the present moment and consider its whole being. Music? I hate to be the bearer of bad news if this is something you’ve never thought about before, but music never exists wholly.

This is a thought I first had in the backseat of a yellow cab leaving Manhattan over a bridge on a rainy day when I was 16. I was listening to Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees and trying to figure out what the hell it was about (over the years I have concluded that Radiohead’s songs are all extremely literal and actually about boring things, but I digress) but I kept having to rewind the CD to hear the lyrics again and again.

And then it hit me: At any given PRESENT MOMENT (which is the only real moment that actually exists, since past is past and gone and future is just an idea we approach) MUSIC IS JUST A SINGLE SOUND. Melody? Doesn’t exist in the present moment. It can’t. It is a construct that requires the procession of time, and the holding in your brain of the memory of the first notes as the second and third and subsequent notes that follow.

As the kids on TikTok say, this thought rewired my brain and I have never really gotten over it. I realized that day that the sorrow of every single moment becoming past before we can even consider it is the reason I write. It’s then become the reason I love and the reason I have kids, and the reason to make art or a phone call or a dumb newsletter.

In college, tripping on mushrooms in a cinderblock dormitory, I remember taking a roll of toilet paper and writing “now” “now” “now” on each sheet as I sobbed and unfurled the whole thing. My tripping friends thought I was having a bad trip, but I was just actually sensing time fully. I was trying to capture the present and it just kept becoming the past. It was the saddest thing I had ever experienced.

T.S. Elliot measured his life in coffee spoons. When I was pregnant, I measured the progress of gestation in organic milk expiration dates. If the due date was before the expiration date on the milk, I knew I was getting close. When my children were babies I measured time’s progress in their freckles. They went from these unblemished soft creatures to dappled with the sun’s destruction. Huxley’s first freckle was on his finger. Asa’s was on his foot. Noticing each little mark, I knew: there went their infancy and my present moment being a mother to infants.

The present is fleeting. But it’s even worse than that. It’s actually often the past. William James wrote about the concept of the “specious present,” which is really the thing that makes me the most sad, if I allow my mind to linger on the subject of reality for too long.

The specious present is an idea that recognizes the three facts I just laid out above — 1. that the past is not real because it is past, 2. that the future is not real because it’s an idea we can only imagine in the present, and 3. that there is, at any given time, only one real moment, which we call the present. But the specious present gives name to the even more upsetting fourth truth: that present that we feel is real, that block of time we think of as NOW, RIGHT NOW, is almost entirely the past, as well. There is a present, but we do not have access to it with our senses. The present we sense is the specious present.

(At this point, feel free to leave, since this is some lolol undergrad level bullshit, but it’s also true, and is the best reason I have found yet to a) create anything b) keep on living c) not mourn the past too too much and d) embrace absurdity as the only way to function in the world, since life is literally so ridiculous. But if you are not comfortable being an absurdist, this might be the kind of idea you’d rather not dwell on.)

In order to understand why the moment we think of as the present is actually made up mostly of the past, we need to consider the components of the present moment. The present moment for me right now consists of sensory inputs and internal bits of information. I feel cold on my knees from the wind coming under the doorsill; in my peripheral vision I see the palm fronds lashing the windows in the atmospheric river that’s currently swirling over my neighborhood and the entire state of California; the bones in my right foot hurt from how I have it perched up on my chair; I taste soggy chips on my tongue; I hear the clack of my gaming keyboard; I see the red keys moving under my fingers and the letters piling up on the screen. The heater whirs.

But my brain doesn’t see the tree moving as it moves. My eyes take in the light of the trees moving and sends that information to my brain, which turns it right side up and process it and tells me that green shapes are swaying back and forth. My brain uses its prior knowledge of the physical reality of my home to conclude those waving shapes are leaves of a tree I know and love. Meanwhile my ears send the tap- tap- tapping of the leaves against the glass into my auditory processing system, which sorts out that the clacking of my keys and the tapping of the trees and the whirring of the fan and the dripping of the raindrops are different sounds.

My eyes and my ears and my skin do not process information at the same rate. Neither do yours. What this means is that the way we perceive the present is not the way the actual present exists. It feels real. It feels consistent, but actually there are lags in our ability to perceive the sound and the sights and the feelings that make up NOW. (If you want to go down a neuroscience rabbithole about how this all works, start with the essay “Brain Time.”)

The trees I’m seeing in my window did not flutter as I see them flutter. They fluttered slightly earlier, before my brain could process it.

Does that mean the present that I am seeing is the past? Yes and no. Yes literally, but no because our brains create a feeling of presence, a MOMENT of now that is longer than a mere pulse or blip. In research about time perception, psychologists and neuroscientists basically agree that the specious present is what we think of as “now” and that it’s some length of time that permits our brains to catch up with all the inputs around it and make them line up in a way that makes sense. It’s less than a minute. And in that minute we feel we are perceiving the world as it exists, when in reality we humans — or any sensing creature that exists on Earth — are not really perceiving the world as it exists. The world we are perceiving is already gone as we are sensing it, even as the starlight we see at night is just a ghost of a past star that could, at the exact moment we are admiring its brightness, actually be a dark black hole.

I think about this when I pick Huxley up and realize he’s so big now I can’t just fling him on my hip as I have done for the seven previous years he has existed. I think about this when I realize late at night that I have to give a speech the next day and I’ve forgotten about it. No time like the present, I say to myself. No time at all.

So I measure my days in breaths and poems. How many pills are left in the pill bottle? That’s how much time has passed. How much adrenaline is pulsing through my veins? That’s how close to the deadline I am. We measure time in the years since a man named Jesus died. In the number of times seven repeating days cycle toward an imaginary future. We measure our days in floods and flood insurance. In bills to pay, and parties to plan, in gifts to give, in I Love Yous to whisper. We measure time in the short lives of our pets. I felt time stop acutely a month before Christmas when our 15-year-old cat Theo took his last breath. I am old enough now to measure my time in the lifespans of my pets.

I used to dream about trying to take Fake Plastic Trees and spreading each and every note out onto a separate line of music and playing them all at once. It would sound awful. It’s not even a very great song to begin with! But then, and only then, would the song actually exist in the present moment. I think there would be some comfort in that.

ANNNNNNNNNYYYYYYYYYWAYYYYYYYYYYYYYY. Here’s a poem.

Pep Talk For My Face

kid,
i say, 
as i slather retinoid firming cream up my neck,
you gotta get your shit together.

run the applicator up
gua sha
for the blood flow.

your cells need demonstrations too. push the skin up, defying gravity for one moment before it springs back to its settled state.

kid, your skin needs to remember it is young. it's gotten the wrong idea somewhere along the way.

you're not in trouble, kid.
i'm just worried.
suck it up.
stand up
upsy daisy
unfurrow your triangle of sadness
let the volcano between your eyes sleep, kid, 
let the scrunch release.

aim your energies lower, kid,
toward holding in all the gangly parts,
the waddles and flaps and belly bands of fat.

take the week off kid, and breathe. pull your naval to your spine,
a million times
before you die.

Thanks for reading!!!!!!! LOL. Happy Wednesday, if you believe in time!!!!!!!!!! Subscribe and share this newsletter with anyone else who you think might want to be haunted by the things that haunt me. LOVE YOU.

Music might not exist, but musical instruments do. And so do paintings. And books of music. That black painting is about the passage of time and is also the first-ever painting I stretched myself from raw canvas. And even though the experience of stapling it to the wood is gone and past, the painting itself still exists as a consolation prize and an emissary from the past. Better than nothing.