Of Time and the Falklands

By LANCE MORROW

The Falklands crisis blew up weirdly--out of nowhere, it seemed, or out of another century. It was a little too dangerous to remain as diverting as it seemed at first. Still, people mentioned The Mouse That Roared. The sheer oddness of it jarred the imagination. Just as the late 20th century was elaborating new anxieties about nuclear war, its gaze flicking distractedly over the future, abruptly the 19th century came barging into the room: a plumed, anachronistic production of outraged empire in its panoply and high rhetoric. The British fleet steamed out of Portsmouth. To relieve Gordon at Khartoum? To lift the siege of Lucknow? The British were vividly time traveling. The ministers of the ex-empire took a bracing, almost archaically principled stand--a position that itself seemed an exercise in nostalgia: quaint, perhaps, but admirable. Honor was mentioned. The imperial ships set sail like positrons on an expedition into reverse time.

The conflict over the Falklands is a moment dislodged from its natural home in the late 19th century--a period piece. It has played tricks with the world's expectations about time and timing, about history and how long it should take.

Everyone has an internal sense of history's motions. What is the appropriate time frame for a war, for example? In an earlier age, a pair of countries tenaciously aggrieved could spend 100 years at it. But that is exceptional--war as a kind of habit. Human memory is usually too short for that. War after all requires a certain amount of concentration.

In the late 20th century, war has Dopplered up to the opposite extreme. Today the serious part of a global war might last no longer than several passionate kisses. That is why some bystanders witnessing the war of the Falklands find themselves almost charmed by its stately pace, its long preliminaries--the fleet steaming off from England as the Prime Minister quotes Queen Victoria; the weeks at sea as the foreign offices indulge in truculent communiques and atavistic displays of national plumage. (The long interval between the patriotic eruption and the moment of actual contact also opens up room for negotiation.) A world apocalyptically armed has absorbed the notion that there will not be much safe territory in wars of the future: the war will fall out of the sky one afternoon and land on J.C. Penney's. But in the Falklands, we have a war--if it came to that--that would presumably be conducted in what used to be the great colonial Elsewhere, the distant and exotic battlefield that soldiers sail away to. It would be a regressive war fought for the most part with means that seem almost primitive--ships at sea, for example, and marines.

The earth supposedly keeps one general clock and calendar as it twirls in a universe precisely machined. The minute pulses of quartz vibrating on the wrist imitate the clockwork of the planets. We stripe the globe with time zones. Time is the most predictable of abstractions, a one-directional flow that carries the universe along with its impartial and inexorable wave. The discovery of measurable time is one of the early signs of civilization, like literacy and cosmetics. Time may be mysterious, but it also possesses an admirable objective purity, a sort of narrative genius, like Tolstoy.

But what is a civilization to do when it discovers that time also thinks like James Joyce, or worse? Time goes in for wildly irrational effects. It is kinetic and plastic and malleable. Greenwich mean time, described as universal tune, is infinitesimalry parochial. Science fiction at its most routine will have time split and bent, laminated, turned back until it flows uphill and billiard balls leap out of their pockets and astronauts turn up as infants in King Arthur's court. In Freudian time, an apparent trifle from the distant past can go monstering through the skull and hold it hostage. As Einstein knew, God is subjective and moody about time. He and human history keep time in unpredictable, discontinuous ways.

Different societies inhabit different times, for example, different zones of history. The sweet Tasaday tribesmen of the Philippines lived in a peaceful Stone Age dream until anthropologists and TV crews descended on them. The Ayatullah Khomeini's Iran, or much of it, spends its days in the 16th century. The late Shah's fatal error may have been that, among other things, he attempted to accelerate Iranian time; he disturbed the Shi'ite nest and pace in history. Nations, like individuals, have their natural locations in time, and such placements often have nothing to do with the calendar.

The year of Our Lord that we inhabit is inescapable, of course, in the same sense that time is ultimately and literally unendurable: we all must die in it at last. But we also seem to exercise an amazing psychological and cultural discretion about the kind of time we inhabit. Menachem Begin's epoch, for example, is essentially biblical; ancient events in Judea, as far as he is concerned, occurred the day before yesterday.

Perhaps time is ultimately a matter of metabolism. It slows and speeds according to the agitations of consciousness that occur therein. A man or a society can be frozen until science discovers a cure for its illness: cultural cryonics. Spengler wrote of a time when "high history lays itself down weary to sleep. Man becomes a plant again, clinging to the soil, dumb and enduring."

Britain has not yet subsided into a peasant stupor. But it is a retrospective society. On gray, rainy afternoons, it still dreams of empire. The Falklands crisis called forth all kinds of wistful Churchillian rhetoric, a whiff of the grapeshot gusting through the letters column of the Times. The star may be long dead, but the light from it persists in space: a pure idea, a memory.

The Rumanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade some years ago proposed a theory of sacred and profane time among primitive peoples. In Eliade's formula, profane time means the quotidian rounds of life, the business of eating and sleeping and working and birthing and dying. Profane time is essentially meaningless. Sacred time is ritual time, the brief transcendence through festival, life mythologized and sanctified in ceremony. Sacred time consists of those rites in which a people re-enact the holy, aboriginal events of their culture: a sacrifice, for example. The escape into sacred time means immortality, a rescue in any case from the meaningless.

Modern nations as well as primitive tribes may try to repeat their primordial events and look for escape into sacred time. It is a dangerous passage. Hitler's 1,000-year Reich, the tribe of fur-clad Uebermenschen with Aryan fire in their eyes, lasted for twelve years. Hitler meant to inject his vulgar sacred time into profane time, but the sacred can never intrude for more than an instant. Any longer, and the results are monstrous.

In the Falklands, the British have wistfully and almost reflexively sought their sacred epoch, their more vigorous, regenerating myths. Their ships are afloat not only on the South Atlantic but on the mysterious fluid of time.

--By Lance Morrow

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