Written piece
Time and Space
Sharon Rundle
Australia
About this piece
A prose story about the conundrum of time and space, how time is threaded through space; and how they are a gift to writers.
Time and Space
Lately, Penny is feeling a lack of corporeality— an impression of being in this material world but not quite part of it. In her liminoid zone, it’s as if she enters a temporary holding space but it’s not unpleasant.
She has read that some people read scripts from left to right, or right to left, or top to bottom which alters their perception of timelines, time’s arrow, entropy, and how personal narratives flow. Is the past behind or in front of us? And where is the future situated? When she calls friends in the UK from Australia ‘her time’ is in their future—she is some eleven hours ahead—which time is true? Time is threaded through space, it is not linear.
Penny knows she’s not the only one to experience the weird phenomena of time standing still, passing as slowly as a wet week in a thunderstorm, or moving faster than an OMG particle.
In Sydney in the 1930s, Arthur Stace began to write the word Eternity (for which time has no application) in chalk, He wrote the word perhaps half a million times over for more than thirty years. Eternity, timelessness, infinity.
Time is of the essence, no time like the present, time and tide wait for no one, time heals, a stitch in time, a waste of time, time is money, time flies, time covers and discovers everything, there is a time and place for everything. This too shall pass. The fascination is endless.
Some of the tales closest to her current experience of the metaphysical are found in fiction. She wonders if writers are searching for that mythical Door in the Wall? So they can invent a space and time then fill it with characters with motives, actions, and dialogue. As a writer, she is given leave to play with and manipulate time, to explore other dimensions, even quantum consciousness using literary techniques and devices. Time slips, flashbacks, premonitions, glimpses of the future, past, present, and future tenses—all at her disposal. Like microtubules, stories can have the power to trump the laws of time and space. Forgetting time, Penny finds her way into another narrative with the certainty that she can be physically here in her room writing, while simultaneously locating her mind in a paracosm of her own imagination and invention.
Dr Sharon Rundle