Paragons of Truth and Time
“Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.”
— Arthur M. Schlesinger
17th century Europe had been regarded as the age of reason and scientific revelation, so there’s a lurid irony in the supra-natural narratives that hang from the older and lower branches of our progressing existence.
From those fringe incidents of the [seemingly] unreasonable, which regardless of generation or culture are no less our own, we can gather more about the nature of truth and what it really means within the course of our ongoing development.
Because there’s a link between Truth (as the powerful variable in a very curious equation) and the equally powerful element of Time
This is about the dynamics of perspective through time; how differing points of reference can interact with their respective reality in completely different ways, each just as real as the next.
It’s about an enigmatic equation which holds that an increase in Time simultaneously increases the probability of Truth — an equation which allows us to expand our perspective beyond the parameters of our humble drop of an existence.
And it’s about vampires.
Echoes of Equivalence
Mathematics preach Truth more than anything else.
While there doesn’t exist any specific formula in physics that directly correlates Truth with Time, several ideas (more obvious on the quantum side) definitely suggest an intimate association between the two.
It’s an association that we take for granted.
Because if we could bring ourselves to fully understand the interplay between Truth and Time, our orbits of perspective instantly become a whole lot more functional.
The Truth/Time correlates are the dynamo of development within any given system, enabling our understanding (or measurement) of reality via our discerning navigation through it.
It’s like a different style of movement through space and time — a higher gear of navigability.
Betaphysics
It can be said that we move through time and space via the collapsing of wave functions, which work to reveal certain truths or falsehoods as we go along.
Through such a process, we experience a continuous ascension over ignorance — learning via mistake, building prescience, anticipating outcomes.
This all implies a temporal link between all states of being; between the initial superpositions of possibility and the outcome(s) that follow.
This then suggests that Time is the medium, at the least, and quite possibly a more active catalyst in the whole dynamic, because Time isn’t only conducive to greater levels of Truth — it’s nurturing of it.
Concepts of decoherence and entropy imply that Time is an inextricable ingredient in deterministic systems. It suggests the pursuit of Truth to be the engine by which reality can be navigated with any successive progress. The knowledge gained via any given discernment process is thus the fuel.
So yesterday’s physicists, heating their loafers by fireplaces and layering the ivory walls with their pipe smoke, were onto something more simplistic but elusive than we can often appreciate.
That Time and Truth are exclusive, and that their relationship is deeper than we could ever imagine.
Best of Times
Those with the bleakest of outlooks on the present state of our civilization would likely fail to last longer than a few weeks in the 17th Century.
Plagued by plagues and frought by fear, survivalism had been so prominent a staple in daily existence of centuries past that every action was undertaken along some mightily consequential chains of causality.
Hawkish psycho-social axioms pulsated through villages like storms, mixing with the surging Catholic Orthodoxy to thicken an already dense atmosphere. The killing of suspected vampires is but only a small and sensational example, but it’s also one that isn’t too far a cry from today’s social uncertainties.
Reality is always whatever we make of it, and we play with all the possibilities generated along the way in such a way as to both help and hurt our existential meandering.
We’re creatures who undertake an active approach to manifolding our existence through space and time; the hiccups and missteps — and all the peculiar things we do — get less attention than they should.
They’re also often the most inspired wells of some pretty productive retrospection.
Myth-o-logic
Before the discovery of electromagnetism and steam power, and before we had any workable knowledge of evolution theory or bacterial infection, our definitions of reality had vastly different parameters for what had and hadn’t been possible.
And so we had vampires.
We had mermaids, giants and goblins, and a sun that revolved around us. We had more vivid tales of lore and myth all flowing through blurrier lines of perspective that symbolized our cautious and unaware state of being.
That we didn’t even know how blood circulates around our body (until finally deciphered by William Harvey in 1628) speaks to our adolescent relationship with the ever-actualizing truth that courses through the veins of the world around us.
Because as we evolve as a species, we navigate space and time on the shell casings of what has been verified.
And we have no reason to think that we’re anywhere near a finish line of any kind.
One problem that we continue to bump up against, something that routinely gums up our efforts and trips us up more than anything else, is that our hubris seems to propagate a bit faster than the information we cultivate.
It causes us to compartmentalize and over-specialize; to bureaucratize and caponize an organic process undertaken by a hyper self-aware organism with some rather phenomenal evolutionary potential.
So the goal becomes to break the limits of perspective, to alter the procedural methods by which we accumulate information; to see the likes of Truth as being something more than what we know it to be, and Time as a friend more than an enemy.
Almost easier done [by chance] than said.
Buried Hatchets
Numerous exhumations throughout Poland have unearthed the fact that many residents of villages feared the forces of fanged miscreants enough to lay sickles above the necks of those which had been buried.
The ‘apotropaic’ practices of yesterday, as referred to by Lesley Gregoricks (study here), had intended to prevent the growth and spread of wickedness (more than disease), and they weren’t exactly uncommon.
“…Those selected for deviant burial (defined as such by the presence of sickles lain across the neck or abdomen and stones placed beneath the mandible) are indicative of local origins… these individuals were not suspected of becoming vampires due to their identity as non-locals, but instead, were distrusted within some other, additional societal context as members of the local community.”
Myth had not been as potent as fact, but fact had been a scarcer resource.
Granted, there were many other strong variables at play — disease, famine, war. The innumerable challenges of daily existence hung over the most impoverished of regions like a thick, choking smoke that obscured the kind of reason that we’re afforded today.
Life expectancy in post-medieval Europe had been short enough that it wasn’t exactly possible to underthink the unknown; Occam’s razor had been more dull, the Overton window unscreened and Murphy’s Law more endearing to the imagination.
And so as the paradigms of existence looked far more different than many of those we cling to today, we believe ourselves to have developed the benefit of a more sound rationality.
But who’s to say that we’re not under the curse of our own shadows, long-casted upon on our ability to accurately discern our way through reality.
Tides of Time
So how do we navigate along the flowing rivers of Truth, if they tend to change so unpredictably as we come to map more territory?
What we knew to be true at any given point in time or space is far different from how it’s perceived by other reference points: tribes across valleys or civilizations across generations.
From political beliefs to ritualistic practices, space and time work to not necessarily distort but dilute what we deem to be real.
Those things that we come to call most true — those inarguable or unquestionable paradigms or axioms — they’re more able to be stretched through space and/or time without much distortion; they don’t erode as quickly.
This is how religions can so snugly wrap themselves around the globe or how a mathematical formula can permeate so potently across centuries.
It’s an easy enough premise: whatever withstands the tides of time is truer than that which doesn’t.
Terminator Lines
An important question comes up: are we really that much more wise today than we were yesterday?
We may certainly know more from a scientific-materialist perspective, but does that equate to a greater achievement of Truth? What about those who had lived truer to nature, not deviating as far as we have from the natural orders of existence, not dependent on the likes of pharmaceuticals, pesticides and plastics.
Past civilizations may call our insatiable materialism or blurry gender ideologies or inexplicable wealth inequality as the most self-deceptive positions that any civilization can try to exist their way through.
Like Time, Truth is relative. And like Truth, Time is the ultimate trier of fact.
Both of these ever-helixing variables, central to any equation, offer much less objectivity than we’d instinctively expect them to.
I’d argue that’s a very good thing, even if (and especially because) it allows for the existence of vampires.
