Social Degeneration, Human Consciousness and their Relationship to Bram Stoker’s Dracula
England in the late 19th century saw substantial changes that engaged every facet of society. The Industrial Revolution and major scientific advancements lead to upheaval in gender roles and relations, the advancement of capitalism and the rise of a middle class, and mass influx of immigrants searching for a stable life. In addition to these seismic shifts, the entrance of Darwinian evolutionary theory in 1859 sent another science based shockwave through the already unsteady Orthodox religion. These massive disruptions in presumptive thought challenged and swayed rigid belief systems, instilling fear in Victorians who felt they might be robbed of their centers of belief, and therefore their grips on reality as they understood it. Bram Stoker encapsulated these fears in his hair-raising novel, Dracula. The villain of the novel, Dracula himself, represents a regressed, primitive consciousness in which binary oppositions are blurred to the point where Christian morality and society as Victorians knew it is dissolved.
The arrival of Darwin’s The Origin of Species was one of the most momentous moments in human history. Darwin’s theory of evolution exposed the roots of humanity, along with its place in its expansive family tree. Of course, a concept as revolutionary as evolution was not contained by the subject of biology, or even the physical sciences. It seeped into the social sciences, philosophy, the arts, and psychology. An “increasing number of articles and stories treating psychological issues in the light of the evolutionist hypothesis” were being published, offering up varying hypotheses on “dual consciousness, primitive man, ‘Animal Intelligence,’ and ‘Heredity in Health and Disease.’” (Block 443) James Sully, a psychiatrist and an early predecessor to Sigmund Freud, was already taking initiative in theorizing about consciousness in relation to evolution in the late Victorian period. Exploring ideas such as genius, regression, the relationship between the minds of man and animal, and illusion, Sully seemed enamored with “the borderland between the normal and the abnormal.” (Block 444) Freud would eventually adopt Sully and other Victorian psychologist’s theories to build up his own theory of the unconscious and its division into the id, ego and superego.
Bewitched by this goldmine of inspiration, Victorian Gothic writers took advantage of the more terrifying aspects of this “borderland between the normal and abnormal” in the mind: between the real and the fantastic, between sanity and madness, and between man and creature. Poe was already writing short stories and poems that compelled the sane to question the fortitude and stability of their own minds and sanity mid 19th century. In 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a nightmarish tale about a man whose conscious mind was both Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Stevenson himself once said that he “had long been trying to write a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle, for that strong sense of man’s double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature.” (Block 445) Samuel Butler, who was “fascinated with The Origin of Species” published a novel called The Way of All Flesh. In this book, he presented the idea that “evolution was a powerful chemical with which to destroy Victorian ideas and conventions.” (Irvine 627)
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness questioned the time’s assumptions on the distinctions between the “civilized” and “superior” English and “savage” and “inferior” peoples of England’s colonies, ultimately arguing that there was no psychological difference between these races, and that in fact the veil between man and beast was thin in all men. The famous writer and literary critic Walter Pater wrote of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray: “To lose the moral sense therefore, for instance, the sense of sin and righteousness, as Mr. Wilde’s heroes are bent on doing as speedily, as completely as they can, is to lose, or lower, organization, to become less complex, to pass from a higher to a lower degree of development.” (Elbarbary 118) Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, Henry James, Grant Allen also wrote “neo-primitivist” novels, short stories and poems around this same period and into the 20th century. (Elbarbary 115) Clearly, late Victorians had the metacognitive questions of human origins, the primitive nature of humanity, and the implications these things have for human consciousness stewing in their minds.
What defines this consciousness that existed before homosapiens made the transition from “animal” to “man?” If we are to believe Joseph Campbell, a disciple of Carl Jung, the story of Adam and Eve is a metaphor for the rise of modern man’s consciousness. After the symbolic couple partook of the apple of knowledge, they gasped at the sight of their own genitals, and felt they had done wrong before the eyes of God. The knowledge they had gained was the knowledge of duality, or in literary terms, a reality with binary opposition: they could now distinguish self from other, good from evil, man from woman, and, as we see in the story of their sons Cain and Abel, life and death. Humans were no longer driven simply by the satisfaction of their most basic needs and reproduction, but were self-aware and could take on the perspectives of others. Yet, when removed from primal consciousness, humankind was unable to see that nature is a unified whole in which all is connected and all is derived from a singular point, something we did not rediscover until the advent of Darwinian theory, and again 80 years later, with Lemaître’s theory of the Big Bang. We now understand through research in psychology that consciousness is a prism that creates our perception of reality, cutting us off from natural unity in order to grant us self-awareness, self-reflection, rational thought, and perhaps because of these things, free will.
In part because of this foundational origin story of Adam and Eve, the concept of free will was and continues to be central to Christian belief. From the Christian perspective, man’s mission on earth is to overcome sin so as to become more like God. This would not be possible without the ability to differentiate good from evil, and to then be able to make the decision to do one or the other. Throughout the novel Dracula, Bram Stoker continually compares and parallels the tropes of the animal, the child, the criminal and the madman, particularly in relation to his vampire characters. All of these symbols share one thing: an altered state of consciousness from that of human’s rational, logical consciousness. Without this state of “normal” and developed consciousness, a person is both immature and outside of the plane of perceptual reality as that of a developed, human adult. When a human’s state of mind to changed to that of a vampires, it would be as though they were regressing into the mind of a child or of our primal ancestors.
In particular, the villain Dracula’s mindset and actions parallel the primal consciousness that existed before humankind had the gifts of self-awareness, self-reflection, rational thought, and free will, and before humankind could tell self from other, good from evil, man from woman, and life from death. There are several passages that uphold this claim, but the following quotation from Van Helsing expresses this assertion most perfectly: “ The vampire live on, and cannot die by mere passing of the time...Even more, we have seen amongst us that he can even grow younger...He throws no shadow; he make in the mirror no reflect...He can transform himself to wolf...He can come in mist which he create...He come on moonlight rays as elemental dust...He become so small... (as to) slip through a hairbreadth space at the tomb door...He can do all these things, yet he is not free. Nay; he is even more prisoner than slave of the galley, than the madman in his cell. He cannot go where he lists; he who is not of nature has yet to obey some of nature’s laws—why we know not. He may not enter anywhere at the first, unless there be some one of the household who bid him to come; though afterwards he can come as he please. His power ceases, as does that of all evil things, at the coming of the day.” (Dracula 247)
This passage clearly indicates the fact that Dracula’s existence lies in abstraction, and within the human mind. Dracula is beyond life and death, meaning that his existence is in some sense outside of the confines of time. As Van Helsing states, when vampires “become such, there comes with the change the curse of immortality; they cannot die, but must go on age after age adding new victims and multiplying the evils of the world; for all that die from the preying of the Un-Dead become themselves Un-Dead, and prey on their kind.” (Stoker 248) In addition, Dracula does not live by the laws of the physical world. He has the ability to shapeshift, has no shadow, and cannot be seen in mirrors. When Jonathan Harker stares into the mirror as he shaves in chapter two, Dracula stands behind him; yet all that gazes back at Jonathan is his own reflection. Van Helsing claims of Dracula, “there have been from the loins of this very one great men and good women, and their graves make sacred the earth where alone this foulness can dwell. For it is not the least of its terrors that this evil thing is rooted deep in all good; in soil barren of holy memories it cannot rest.” (Stoker 248) Dracula lurks somewhere in the back of the mind of Jonathan Harker, and in all of us. Like Hyde’s Jekyll, he might be unleashed at any time. Having no true roots in the physical world, Dracula represents a socially contagious and degenerate state of mind.
Again, in this context, this degenerate and primal consciousness is defined by a lack of binaries and boundaries. Dracula’s dreadfulness seems to stem almost entirely from his animal like and uncannily indistinct nature. Throughout the novel, Dracula and the other vampires are consistently compared to beast even though he is most often represented in the shape of a man. Mina’s description of him is particularly poignant when she states that “His face was not a good face; it was hard, and cruel, and sensual, and his big white teeth, that looked all the whiter because his lips were so red, were pointed like an animal’s.” (Stoker 185) He is also compared to “‘a tiger,’ a ‘man-eater,’ and ‘panther-like in movement.’” (Elbarbary 125) As mentioned previously, he can shapeshift into a wolf, a dog, a bat, and even fog and elemental dust, at will. He can even control many more creatures in addition to those he can transform into, such as rats, showing that he is both physically and psychically connected to them.
One passage of significance describes the mind of this man-beast quite pointedly. In chapter 25, Van Helsing describes Dracula as akin to a “little bird,” “fish,” and “animal” that learns not through reason, but “empirically.” (Stoker 338) Because these creatures and Dracula cannot reason, they will try the same action time and time again; they only know their instinctual, animal way of thought. Dracula’s conscious mind is that of an animal: a slave to his senses, nearsighted, and without agency, he must kill or die. Van Helsing goes on to refer to an anecdote from Archimedes, who declared, “give me a fulcrum, and I shall move the world!” Applying this anecdote to the mind, Van Helsing continues, “to do once, is the fulcrum whereby child-brain become man-brain.” (Stoker 338) In calling Dracula both a child and an animal, we ought ask ourselves what the connection between the two is. Again, the answer is the state of the conscious mind.
As both Lacan and modern developmental psychologists have pointed out, children lack a sense of separateness from their mother and the world at large in infancy. Lacan himself had garnered the theory in studying the link between animal and human consciousness, noting that at a certain age, children and chimpanzees become intrigued by their own reflections in the mirror. While chimpanzees eventually become bored with the mirror, human children continue to “interact” with it, seemingly learning about themselves in the process of this so called “mirror stage.” Though Lacan’s original theory has been discredited, developmental psychologists have since discovered that children do in fact have little sense of self, nor separateness from their mothers and their environments, between birth and approximately two years of age. (Rochat 718) In this case, the “fulcrum,” or “lever” that Van Helsing refers to, and that would allow Dracula to enhance his mind from child’s to man’s would be the symbolic apple of knowledge; whatever it was in evolution that had transformed man’s consciousness from that of a “child’s” or an “animal’s” to that of a “man’s.” that could see himself as an individual separate from his mother and his environment. Again, Dracula cannot see his own reflection, indicating not only that he does not abide by the laws of the physical world, but that he has no sense of self and cannot self-reflect.
Seeing as Dracula represents a state of consciousness in which there is no separation between child and mother, we would expect him to be represented as both. This is exactly the case. While Dracula is referred to as having a “child-brain”, his actions are often akin to that of a mother’s. (Stoker 303) In chapter 21, Dracula attacks a helpless Mina in her sleep, opens a vein in his breast, and “when the blood began to spurt out” seized Mina, and “pressed (her) mouth to the wound, so that (she) must either suffocate or swallow” his blood, as if breastfeeding her. (Stoker 291) Again blurring binaries, Dracula is in the form of a man, but analogous to a mother in this scene and throughout the book as he “births” the other vampires in the novel. He brings those bitten into his state of consciousness, the primal consciousness beyond binary opposition. When Lucy is bitten, for example, her gender seems to become as confused as Draculas. She no is no longer “sweet” little Lucy, but, like Dracula, a blend of both femininity and masculinity, and both human and monster. She is even more beautiful than when she was alive, but she loses all maternal sensibility and instead attempts to savagely attack and kill children. Her physical strength grows far greater than that of a frail, mortal Victorian woman who has never had to lift a finger in life. Of course, as many have pointed out, Lucy’s sexuality is also transformed into what one would think of as more of a masculine sexuality for that time period. She becomes overtly sexual and ravenously wanton. Due to the fact that this social contagion of degeneracy was a conscious state of the mind, it is fitting that Lucy’s head would be both literally and symbolically removed from her body in order to destroy the beastly evil that took over her mind.
It is of interest to note that it is not only creatures of the night that Dracula can communicate with telepathically. Of course, we know that Dracula creates a psychic link with Mina after forcing her to drink his blood, but few have questioned why it is that he can speak to Renfield without any need to do the same to him. Both Renfield and Dracula have telling relationships with animals. Like Dracula, Renfield preys on the weak. Renfield makes his way up the food chain by first eating flies, and then rats, and perhaps would have done the same to the cat had he not been distracted by Dracula’s psychic grip. The obvious comparison here is the workings of Darwinian natural selection. Again, this type of primitive and selfish behavior can be seen lurking in every human, seeing as Dr. Seward is intrigued instead of disgusted by Renfield’s behavior.
Renfield is a madman and, like Dracula, eats other animals, but what is the significance behind the connection of the madman to Dracula? Again, the connection is in the state of consciousness. In the mid 1800s to early 1900s, it was not uncommon for physicians and psychologists to liken mad men to beasts, nor was it uncommon for them to uphold degeneration theory―the theory that mankind had begun to regress back to a more primal consciousness. Proponents saw social changes and deviations such as new art and writing styles, homosexuals, women in the workplace, other races and immigrants as threats to the forward moving evolution of our species. This is supported by the text when Van Helsing references both Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau in one description of Dracula. He calls the Count “a criminal and of criminal type,” and goes on to say that “Nordau and Lombroso would so classify him, and quâ criminal he is of imperfectly formed mind.” (Stoker 338) Helsing claims that the “true criminal” seems predestined to crime,” and “has not a full man-brain.” (Stoker 338) Cesare Lombroso was a criminologist who believed criminals to have brains that were less evolved than the non-criminal human’s, and thought that they were therefore both mentally ill and less than human. He built his theory out of both Social Darwinism and psychiatry. Max Nordau was a Hungarian physician and writer who first came up with the now discredited degeneration theory in his book Degeneration. Nordeau looked up to Lomboro and in fact dedicated Degeneration to him. Interestingly enough, one of the writers Nordeau used as an example of such degeneracy was one of Bram Stoker’s close friends, Oscar Wilde. Wilde was sentenced to prison for sodomy the year Degeneration was published.
Dracula is an extreme version of such “degenerate” behavior. Some have argued that Dracula’s attraction to both sexes is exposed in his possessive relationship to Jonathan Harker. Dracula is infuriated when the female vampires try to suck Jonathan’s blood in a scene that is saturated with sexual imagery. The vampires were said to be, “deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive.” Jonathan goes on to refer to their “scarlet lips ” and “hot breath on (his) neck,” and shivering at the “touch of the lips on the super-sensitive skin of (his) throat.” He closes his eyes in “a languorous ecstasy.” At this moment, Dracula enters, his eyes “positively blazing. The red light in them was lurid, as if the flames of hell-fire blazed behind them.” (Stoker 64) Dracula howls as he flies into the room, “how dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me! Beware how you meddle with him, or you’ll have to deal with me.” Perhaps this scene does indeed reveal that Dracula’s possessiveness over Jonathan is that of a sexual nature.
Relatedly many have pointed out, Dracula’s features and actions are also beyond binary opposition in that they are both masculine and feminine. Like Adam and Eve before their first taste of the apple, he seems to fit neither category. He is described as having a “white mustache,” “white and fine” hands, “nails...long and fine, and cut to a sharp point,” and “red lips”. (Stoker 44, 289) This sort of blending of binaries in sexuality and gender was considered a sign of social degeneracy by the likes of Lomboro, Nordeau and other prominent scientists of that time.
If Dracula represents a Victorian representation of regressed consciousness, is it any wonder that it would it take doctors of the mind to exile him? Though Van Helsing consistently uses the superstitious weapons of the cross, holy water and holy wafers to destroy Dracula, he also states that the vampire hunting team has “sources of science,” the freedom to “act and think” (free will), and the “hours of the day and the night” are theirs “equally.” (Stoker 245) Van Helsing represents a bringing together of two worlds: those of past spirituality and modern science. Similarly, Mina Harker represents a balance between the sexes. She is able to balance maternal empathy and softness, while also having a “man’s brain” and “gifted,” “brave, and gallant” qualities. (Stoker 242 & 371) Were the men not to have broken down and unleashed repressed emotions around Mina, and were Mina not to have been allowed to participate in the vampire hunt, Dracula and the regressed consciousness that he represents may never have been destroyed.
Stoker ultimately makes the argument that balance between the past and present, between spirituality and science, and between man and women would not add to a problem of social degeneracy, but would help humankind overcome it. Educated and skilled, and without forgetting their God, the team brought a balance into the world that would allow a family to flourish. The child Mina bares bares the names of all the hunters because were it not for their unique and divergent experiences, talents and knowledge, Dracula would have continued to spread evil into the world and the child may never have been born. To Stoker, such balance not only creates harmony, but is the key to new life and a better future.
Dracula was enveloped into the literary canon because it dug not just into a single and specific fear of the time period, but into the deep seated, subconscious fears that every person struggles with when the shifting tides of life and social convention become overwhelming. Change can be difficult, which is why there have always been conservatives throughout history who vehemently oppose it. In an era such as the Victorian period, it is unsurprising that Dracula invoked fear in those who read it. Staring into the face of Dracula is to stare into the face of an immense, incomprehensible and indifferent universe; it is confronting the darkness that lies in our evolutionary past and every human mind.
The arrival of Darwin’s The Origin of Species was one of the most momentous moments in human history. Darwin’s theory of evolution exposed the roots of humanity, along with its place in its expansive family tree. Of course, a concept as revolutionary as evolution was not contained by the subject of biology, or even the physical sciences. It seeped into the social sciences, philosophy, the arts, and psychology. An “increasing number of articles and stories treating psychological issues in the light of the evolutionist hypothesis” were being published, offering up varying hypotheses on “dual consciousness, primitive man, ‘Animal Intelligence,’ and ‘Heredity in Health and Disease.’” (Block 443) James Sully, a psychiatrist and an early predecessor to Sigmund Freud, was already taking initiative in theorizing about consciousness in relation to evolution in the late Victorian period. Exploring ideas such as genius, regression, the relationship between the minds of man and animal, and illusion, Sully seemed enamored with “the borderland between the normal and the abnormal.” (Block 444) Freud would eventually adopt Sully and other Victorian psychologist’s theories to build up his own theory of the unconscious and its division into the id, ego and superego.
Bewitched by this goldmine of inspiration, Victorian Gothic writers took advantage of the more terrifying aspects of this “borderland between the normal and abnormal” in the mind: between the real and the fantastic, between sanity and madness, and between man and creature. Poe was already writing short stories and poems that compelled the sane to question the fortitude and stability of their own minds and sanity mid 19th century. In 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a nightmarish tale about a man whose conscious mind was both Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Stevenson himself once said that he “had long been trying to write a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle, for that strong sense of man’s double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature.” (Block 445) Samuel Butler, who was “fascinated with The Origin of Species” published a novel called The Way of All Flesh. In this book, he presented the idea that “evolution was a powerful chemical with which to destroy Victorian ideas and conventions.” (Irvine 627)
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness questioned the time’s assumptions on the distinctions between the “civilized” and “superior” English and “savage” and “inferior” peoples of England’s colonies, ultimately arguing that there was no psychological difference between these races, and that in fact the veil between man and beast was thin in all men. The famous writer and literary critic Walter Pater wrote of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray: “To lose the moral sense therefore, for instance, the sense of sin and righteousness, as Mr. Wilde’s heroes are bent on doing as speedily, as completely as they can, is to lose, or lower, organization, to become less complex, to pass from a higher to a lower degree of development.” (Elbarbary 118) Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, Henry James, Grant Allen also wrote “neo-primitivist” novels, short stories and poems around this same period and into the 20th century. (Elbarbary 115) Clearly, late Victorians had the metacognitive questions of human origins, the primitive nature of humanity, and the implications these things have for human consciousness stewing in their minds.
What defines this consciousness that existed before homosapiens made the transition from “animal” to “man?” If we are to believe Joseph Campbell, a disciple of Carl Jung, the story of Adam and Eve is a metaphor for the rise of modern man’s consciousness. After the symbolic couple partook of the apple of knowledge, they gasped at the sight of their own genitals, and felt they had done wrong before the eyes of God. The knowledge they had gained was the knowledge of duality, or in literary terms, a reality with binary opposition: they could now distinguish self from other, good from evil, man from woman, and, as we see in the story of their sons Cain and Abel, life and death. Humans were no longer driven simply by the satisfaction of their most basic needs and reproduction, but were self-aware and could take on the perspectives of others. Yet, when removed from primal consciousness, humankind was unable to see that nature is a unified whole in which all is connected and all is derived from a singular point, something we did not rediscover until the advent of Darwinian theory, and again 80 years later, with Lemaître’s theory of the Big Bang. We now understand through research in psychology that consciousness is a prism that creates our perception of reality, cutting us off from natural unity in order to grant us self-awareness, self-reflection, rational thought, and perhaps because of these things, free will.
In part because of this foundational origin story of Adam and Eve, the concept of free will was and continues to be central to Christian belief. From the Christian perspective, man’s mission on earth is to overcome sin so as to become more like God. This would not be possible without the ability to differentiate good from evil, and to then be able to make the decision to do one or the other. Throughout the novel Dracula, Bram Stoker continually compares and parallels the tropes of the animal, the child, the criminal and the madman, particularly in relation to his vampire characters. All of these symbols share one thing: an altered state of consciousness from that of human’s rational, logical consciousness. Without this state of “normal” and developed consciousness, a person is both immature and outside of the plane of perceptual reality as that of a developed, human adult. When a human’s state of mind to changed to that of a vampires, it would be as though they were regressing into the mind of a child or of our primal ancestors.
In particular, the villain Dracula’s mindset and actions parallel the primal consciousness that existed before humankind had the gifts of self-awareness, self-reflection, rational thought, and free will, and before humankind could tell self from other, good from evil, man from woman, and life from death. There are several passages that uphold this claim, but the following quotation from Van Helsing expresses this assertion most perfectly: “ The vampire live on, and cannot die by mere passing of the time...Even more, we have seen amongst us that he can even grow younger...He throws no shadow; he make in the mirror no reflect...He can transform himself to wolf...He can come in mist which he create...He come on moonlight rays as elemental dust...He become so small... (as to) slip through a hairbreadth space at the tomb door...He can do all these things, yet he is not free. Nay; he is even more prisoner than slave of the galley, than the madman in his cell. He cannot go where he lists; he who is not of nature has yet to obey some of nature’s laws—why we know not. He may not enter anywhere at the first, unless there be some one of the household who bid him to come; though afterwards he can come as he please. His power ceases, as does that of all evil things, at the coming of the day.” (Dracula 247)
This passage clearly indicates the fact that Dracula’s existence lies in abstraction, and within the human mind. Dracula is beyond life and death, meaning that his existence is in some sense outside of the confines of time. As Van Helsing states, when vampires “become such, there comes with the change the curse of immortality; they cannot die, but must go on age after age adding new victims and multiplying the evils of the world; for all that die from the preying of the Un-Dead become themselves Un-Dead, and prey on their kind.” (Stoker 248) In addition, Dracula does not live by the laws of the physical world. He has the ability to shapeshift, has no shadow, and cannot be seen in mirrors. When Jonathan Harker stares into the mirror as he shaves in chapter two, Dracula stands behind him; yet all that gazes back at Jonathan is his own reflection. Van Helsing claims of Dracula, “there have been from the loins of this very one great men and good women, and their graves make sacred the earth where alone this foulness can dwell. For it is not the least of its terrors that this evil thing is rooted deep in all good; in soil barren of holy memories it cannot rest.” (Stoker 248) Dracula lurks somewhere in the back of the mind of Jonathan Harker, and in all of us. Like Hyde’s Jekyll, he might be unleashed at any time. Having no true roots in the physical world, Dracula represents a socially contagious and degenerate state of mind.
Again, in this context, this degenerate and primal consciousness is defined by a lack of binaries and boundaries. Dracula’s dreadfulness seems to stem almost entirely from his animal like and uncannily indistinct nature. Throughout the novel, Dracula and the other vampires are consistently compared to beast even though he is most often represented in the shape of a man. Mina’s description of him is particularly poignant when she states that “His face was not a good face; it was hard, and cruel, and sensual, and his big white teeth, that looked all the whiter because his lips were so red, were pointed like an animal’s.” (Stoker 185) He is also compared to “‘a tiger,’ a ‘man-eater,’ and ‘panther-like in movement.’” (Elbarbary 125) As mentioned previously, he can shapeshift into a wolf, a dog, a bat, and even fog and elemental dust, at will. He can even control many more creatures in addition to those he can transform into, such as rats, showing that he is both physically and psychically connected to them.
One passage of significance describes the mind of this man-beast quite pointedly. In chapter 25, Van Helsing describes Dracula as akin to a “little bird,” “fish,” and “animal” that learns not through reason, but “empirically.” (Stoker 338) Because these creatures and Dracula cannot reason, they will try the same action time and time again; they only know their instinctual, animal way of thought. Dracula’s conscious mind is that of an animal: a slave to his senses, nearsighted, and without agency, he must kill or die. Van Helsing goes on to refer to an anecdote from Archimedes, who declared, “give me a fulcrum, and I shall move the world!” Applying this anecdote to the mind, Van Helsing continues, “to do once, is the fulcrum whereby child-brain become man-brain.” (Stoker 338) In calling Dracula both a child and an animal, we ought ask ourselves what the connection between the two is. Again, the answer is the state of the conscious mind.
As both Lacan and modern developmental psychologists have pointed out, children lack a sense of separateness from their mother and the world at large in infancy. Lacan himself had garnered the theory in studying the link between animal and human consciousness, noting that at a certain age, children and chimpanzees become intrigued by their own reflections in the mirror. While chimpanzees eventually become bored with the mirror, human children continue to “interact” with it, seemingly learning about themselves in the process of this so called “mirror stage.” Though Lacan’s original theory has been discredited, developmental psychologists have since discovered that children do in fact have little sense of self, nor separateness from their mothers and their environments, between birth and approximately two years of age. (Rochat 718) In this case, the “fulcrum,” or “lever” that Van Helsing refers to, and that would allow Dracula to enhance his mind from child’s to man’s would be the symbolic apple of knowledge; whatever it was in evolution that had transformed man’s consciousness from that of a “child’s” or an “animal’s” to that of a “man’s.” that could see himself as an individual separate from his mother and his environment. Again, Dracula cannot see his own reflection, indicating not only that he does not abide by the laws of the physical world, but that he has no sense of self and cannot self-reflect.
Seeing as Dracula represents a state of consciousness in which there is no separation between child and mother, we would expect him to be represented as both. This is exactly the case. While Dracula is referred to as having a “child-brain”, his actions are often akin to that of a mother’s. (Stoker 303) In chapter 21, Dracula attacks a helpless Mina in her sleep, opens a vein in his breast, and “when the blood began to spurt out” seized Mina, and “pressed (her) mouth to the wound, so that (she) must either suffocate or swallow” his blood, as if breastfeeding her. (Stoker 291) Again blurring binaries, Dracula is in the form of a man, but analogous to a mother in this scene and throughout the book as he “births” the other vampires in the novel. He brings those bitten into his state of consciousness, the primal consciousness beyond binary opposition. When Lucy is bitten, for example, her gender seems to become as confused as Draculas. She no is no longer “sweet” little Lucy, but, like Dracula, a blend of both femininity and masculinity, and both human and monster. She is even more beautiful than when she was alive, but she loses all maternal sensibility and instead attempts to savagely attack and kill children. Her physical strength grows far greater than that of a frail, mortal Victorian woman who has never had to lift a finger in life. Of course, as many have pointed out, Lucy’s sexuality is also transformed into what one would think of as more of a masculine sexuality for that time period. She becomes overtly sexual and ravenously wanton. Due to the fact that this social contagion of degeneracy was a conscious state of the mind, it is fitting that Lucy’s head would be both literally and symbolically removed from her body in order to destroy the beastly evil that took over her mind.
It is of interest to note that it is not only creatures of the night that Dracula can communicate with telepathically. Of course, we know that Dracula creates a psychic link with Mina after forcing her to drink his blood, but few have questioned why it is that he can speak to Renfield without any need to do the same to him. Both Renfield and Dracula have telling relationships with animals. Like Dracula, Renfield preys on the weak. Renfield makes his way up the food chain by first eating flies, and then rats, and perhaps would have done the same to the cat had he not been distracted by Dracula’s psychic grip. The obvious comparison here is the workings of Darwinian natural selection. Again, this type of primitive and selfish behavior can be seen lurking in every human, seeing as Dr. Seward is intrigued instead of disgusted by Renfield’s behavior.
Renfield is a madman and, like Dracula, eats other animals, but what is the significance behind the connection of the madman to Dracula? Again, the connection is in the state of consciousness. In the mid 1800s to early 1900s, it was not uncommon for physicians and psychologists to liken mad men to beasts, nor was it uncommon for them to uphold degeneration theory―the theory that mankind had begun to regress back to a more primal consciousness. Proponents saw social changes and deviations such as new art and writing styles, homosexuals, women in the workplace, other races and immigrants as threats to the forward moving evolution of our species. This is supported by the text when Van Helsing references both Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau in one description of Dracula. He calls the Count “a criminal and of criminal type,” and goes on to say that “Nordau and Lombroso would so classify him, and quâ criminal he is of imperfectly formed mind.” (Stoker 338) Helsing claims that the “true criminal” seems predestined to crime,” and “has not a full man-brain.” (Stoker 338) Cesare Lombroso was a criminologist who believed criminals to have brains that were less evolved than the non-criminal human’s, and thought that they were therefore both mentally ill and less than human. He built his theory out of both Social Darwinism and psychiatry. Max Nordau was a Hungarian physician and writer who first came up with the now discredited degeneration theory in his book Degeneration. Nordeau looked up to Lomboro and in fact dedicated Degeneration to him. Interestingly enough, one of the writers Nordeau used as an example of such degeneracy was one of Bram Stoker’s close friends, Oscar Wilde. Wilde was sentenced to prison for sodomy the year Degeneration was published.
Dracula is an extreme version of such “degenerate” behavior. Some have argued that Dracula’s attraction to both sexes is exposed in his possessive relationship to Jonathan Harker. Dracula is infuriated when the female vampires try to suck Jonathan’s blood in a scene that is saturated with sexual imagery. The vampires were said to be, “deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive.” Jonathan goes on to refer to their “scarlet lips ” and “hot breath on (his) neck,” and shivering at the “touch of the lips on the super-sensitive skin of (his) throat.” He closes his eyes in “a languorous ecstasy.” At this moment, Dracula enters, his eyes “positively blazing. The red light in them was lurid, as if the flames of hell-fire blazed behind them.” (Stoker 64) Dracula howls as he flies into the room, “how dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me! Beware how you meddle with him, or you’ll have to deal with me.” Perhaps this scene does indeed reveal that Dracula’s possessiveness over Jonathan is that of a sexual nature.
Relatedly many have pointed out, Dracula’s features and actions are also beyond binary opposition in that they are both masculine and feminine. Like Adam and Eve before their first taste of the apple, he seems to fit neither category. He is described as having a “white mustache,” “white and fine” hands, “nails...long and fine, and cut to a sharp point,” and “red lips”. (Stoker 44, 289) This sort of blending of binaries in sexuality and gender was considered a sign of social degeneracy by the likes of Lomboro, Nordeau and other prominent scientists of that time.
If Dracula represents a Victorian representation of regressed consciousness, is it any wonder that it would it take doctors of the mind to exile him? Though Van Helsing consistently uses the superstitious weapons of the cross, holy water and holy wafers to destroy Dracula, he also states that the vampire hunting team has “sources of science,” the freedom to “act and think” (free will), and the “hours of the day and the night” are theirs “equally.” (Stoker 245) Van Helsing represents a bringing together of two worlds: those of past spirituality and modern science. Similarly, Mina Harker represents a balance between the sexes. She is able to balance maternal empathy and softness, while also having a “man’s brain” and “gifted,” “brave, and gallant” qualities. (Stoker 242 & 371) Were the men not to have broken down and unleashed repressed emotions around Mina, and were Mina not to have been allowed to participate in the vampire hunt, Dracula and the regressed consciousness that he represents may never have been destroyed.
Stoker ultimately makes the argument that balance between the past and present, between spirituality and science, and between man and women would not add to a problem of social degeneracy, but would help humankind overcome it. Educated and skilled, and without forgetting their God, the team brought a balance into the world that would allow a family to flourish. The child Mina bares bares the names of all the hunters because were it not for their unique and divergent experiences, talents and knowledge, Dracula would have continued to spread evil into the world and the child may never have been born. To Stoker, such balance not only creates harmony, but is the key to new life and a better future.
Dracula was enveloped into the literary canon because it dug not just into a single and specific fear of the time period, but into the deep seated, subconscious fears that every person struggles with when the shifting tides of life and social convention become overwhelming. Change can be difficult, which is why there have always been conservatives throughout history who vehemently oppose it. In an era such as the Victorian period, it is unsurprising that Dracula invoked fear in those who read it. Staring into the face of Dracula is to stare into the face of an immense, incomprehensible and indifferent universe; it is confronting the darkness that lies in our evolutionary past and every human mind.
Timekeeping, Temporal Consciousness and Mrs. Dalloway
There are many ways to define time. The Greeks, for example, distinguished between “Chronos” and “Kairos,” Chronos being linear, chronological, quantifiable time, and Kairos being non-linear, immovable, qualitative time. A person experiences a strong sense of Chronos when laboriously planning a wedding, stressing about an exam, or contemplating death. One experiences Kairos, on the other hand, when getting lost in a favorite hobby, in a moment of awe staring at the night sky, or in losing track of the hours when in the presence of one’s object of affection. Chronos is measured in seconds, minutes and hours, while Kairos is measured in moments. Chronos is an abstract, man-made invention that is advantageous in the sense that people can plan ahead and know that at “this time and place” and in “X amount of time” a certain meeting can be had and goal accomplished. However, with the technological advances in timekeeping and standardization of time, emphasis was placed heavily on Chronos, and few stopped to consider what was being lost in the process.
Today the standardization and universality of “Chronos” time is taken for granted, but its development and refinement spanned hundreds of years. These developments were in part due to advances in timekeeping technology, such as clock towers, clocks and watches, and in part to human problem solving around the issue of synchronizing these devices within cities and globally. These developments were carried out by the hands of Western religious organizations, governments and their militaries, and business and industry in the name of coordination and efficiency within these institutions. With these goals in mind came the mechanization of society and time’s commodification. Time was no longer valuable in and of itself, but as an external object that could be “spent,” or “saved.” The evolution of timekeeping methodology and its effects on human valuation, experience and perception of time sheds new light on literary Modernism and the consciousness-driven narrative of Virginia Woolf’s monumental work, Mrs. Dalloway.
The seeds for time abstraction, lineation and commodification was planted by Roman Catholic monastics in the 12th century as more religious services were added and the, “celestially determined day was increasingly subdivided to enable religious observance” (Hom 1154). As there was little division between religious and public life at the time, this chronological concept of time spread quickly into the secular world, assisting in the creation of the “Protestant work ethic.” John of Salisbury, a political philosopher of the time, wrote that there is nothing more, “unworthy…than the man who wastes time – this precious time, the one thing you can’t get back once you lose it. The man who wasting time, wastes his own life…dishonors himself” (Landes 55). By the 14th century, mechanical timekeeping devices were created by churches in the form of clocktowers, placing bells “in high places, the better to hear them” (Landes 51). By the nineteenth century, the “Traditional rhythms” of time “began to look indolent and even primitive” (Gay 110).
Recognizing the power and authority timekeeping endows on the timekeeper, religious timekeeping was appropriated by European monarchies over the following centuries, helping further shape the “emerging modern social order” during the ascent of cities through an externalized, abstract, systematic, and discrete version of time – in essence, Chronos (Hom 1156). Still, at this time many were still in tune with the cyclical sense of time based on planetary motions, the sun and the seasons that repeatedly emerges in hunting and gathering or agricultural cultures with close links to the natural world. The transition between these two frameworks in Britain was a long one finally completed by the 1920s after the onslaught of industrialization, the mass production of clocks and watches, and the eventual successful standardization of time within European cities then internationally.
The rise of modern time consciousness had a reciprocal relationship with British industrialization, both encouraging the advent of the industrial revolution and being further animated by the replacement of rural, craft and cottage work by factories. While these autonomous, self-sufficient laborers and contract laborers had worked when and how they pleased in and around their own homes depending on the rising and setting of the sun, factory laborers were brought, “together in a place where the employer could directly oversee their performance,” due to the “perception of profits lost by the employers due to the poor efficiency of the dispersed labor force” (Hom 1158). Capitalism and industrialization was built up around the idea that time should be utilized in the most economically efficient way possible, and so clocks were advertised and sold as “indispensable” to “schools, colleges, factories,” and “public buildings” (Prentiss Clock Improvement Co.). Laborers in the 19th and 20th centuries began to see clocks, time, and the factory management who owned both, as prison guards. Unsurprisingly, clocks became a point of contention between laborers and management. This tension was exacerbated by the fact that timekeeping had yet to be standardized and laborers had to trust their bosses’ word on the time. As a result, and due to the falling prices of what were now mass-produced timekeeping devices, laborers began purchasing clocks and watches, facilitating the spread of such timekeeping devices from public spaces into common homes.
In complementary opposition to “labor time,” the concept of “free” or “leisure time” emerged in the nineteenth century (Hom 1160). Researcher Steven Hanson of Berkeley explains that this contrived demarcation between a person’s personal, private time and a person’s employer’s time was a response to, “Early liberal capitalist regimes forc(ing) newly urbanized workers to adjust to the idea that the rule of abstract time is inexorable,” and that it encouraged “further compartmentalization of modern life” (1160). Leisure time, “came to be seen as a measure of wealth, and thus deserving of zealous safeguarding,” commodifying time all the more (1160).
In 1847, “the British Railway Clearing House suggested that all rail stations adopt Greenwich Mean Time (GMT),” to coordinate the coming and going of trains, and to prevent train accidents” (Warf 102). The British government adopted GMT as the “legal standard” in 1855. In 1884, the International Meridian Conference officially standardized time globally, establishing, “a world-wide system of time zones and Mean Time.” It became all the more imperative to synchronize time during World War I for, “exactly timed coordination of troop movements and telegraphy” (Stevenson 125). More exact timekeeping was encouraged by World War I, and subsequently helped make the framework of modern warfare possible.
Despite these efforts, Europe lagged behind the conference’s ideal, not yet successfully synchronizing clocks even within the bounds of a number of individual cities, let alone worldwide. This includes the city of London. This was due both to nationalistic attachments to “local” times and lagging technology. Oxford researcher Hannah Gray writes that even, “In 1908, Sir John A. Cockburn wrote a letter to the Times complaining about the clocks in London streets, none of which appeared to record the same, let alone the correct, time” (Gay 112). E.J.D. Newitt, a manager at the private electric clock company Standard Time Company, complained of the “lying clocks” in an editorial to the London Times that, “In the present state of affairs every man’s time is his own…the standard of time ascertained at Greenwich… which is placed at the disposal of the community in a variety of ways is of much less use than it should be” (Gay 114). This attitude exposes the growing emphasis placed on clock time in the modern world, while also displaying the difficulty in reaching the goal of a universal standard time. By the 1920s, the problem of time standardization had finally been overcome, as is seen in Hamilton Watch Company adverts of the time promoting pocket watches that are, “Acknowledged by All Experts to be America's Standard Railroad Timekeeper” (Hamilton Watch, Co.).
With these many changes in the timekeeping methodology, it is no wonder that many scientists, philosophers, artists and writers of modern times had the subject of time and the multiplicity of its interpretation on the mind. For instance, many were trying to solve the time coordination dilemma, so timekeeping patents were abundant. It is quite certain that Einstein had a multitude of timekeeping related patents and patents related to electrical transmission signals come across his desk as he worked at the electromagnetic division of the Swiss patent office in Bern (Galison 368). These two topics would later show up in the thought experiments he produced to explain his theories of relativity, theories that would completely upend modern physics and revolutionize the way we understand time and space. Ironically, business was moving in the exact opposite direction on the issue of time as the sciences and the arts. As critic Randall Stevenson puts it, “Just a few weeks…before the establishment of ‘l’heure définitive’ (a more exact extension of GMT established by astronomers in Paris called “Universal Time”) on 1 January 1920, Einstein proposed with what seemed scientific certitude that no definitive or universally valid scale of time could be assumed to exist at all” (Stevenson 126; Murdin 157). In 1923, two years before the publication of Mrs. Dalloway, D.H. Lawrence exclaimed that, “everyone catches fire at the word Relativity. There must be something in the mere suggestion which we have been waiting for.” (126)
Around the same time, the philosopher Henri Bergson shook up the intellectual atmosphere of the time with his theory that intuition is more real and more important than abstract rationalism. Influenced by Immanuel Kant, Bergson believed that time is a subjective inner experience, and that “clockwork division of the flowing continuity of life into quantifiable temporal units was a fundamental conceptual error…to (Bergson), the clock and its precise hours had indeed become a curse.” (Stevenson 127) Though there is no direct evidence that Woolf read Bergson or Einstein, Whitworth of Cambridge University notes that "Bergsonism was part of the intellectual atmosphere of the years from 1910 to 1912, as Einstein was to be in the years from 1919 to 1930." (Willis 10) Other modernist writers clearly had the topic of the mechanization and commodification of time on the mind, as H.G. Wells described the, “clock and towers of the Law Courts, the advertisements, the luminous signs, into one social immensity, into a capitalistic system gigantic and invincible.” (Wells 261-316) Likewise, T.S. Eliot wrote a short story for Blast! magazine that occurs in the short timeframe between midnight and 4am. The time is continually noted throughout the poem, much like in Mrs. Dalloway. In addition to these facts, Virginia Woolf, “was contributing or associated with,” the several publications that reviewed Einstein’s books (Willis 10). It is more than likely that Woolf was contemplating the theories of Einstein and Bergson, whether directly through their writings, or indirectly through the intellectual discourse buzzing around their ideas.
In addition to these intellectual currents, the concept of standardized time that is sliced up and diced into units in order to be commodified was still fairly new in Woolf’s time. The British had grown accustomed to clock towers like Big Ben synchronously “blen(ding) with that, of other clocks,” but they had also known a time when times were legion (Woolf 56). While Bergson’s philosophical and Einstein’s scientific methods and declarations about time were quite different and in many ways in opposition, the two’s ideas had this in common: they challenged this lineation, division, and subdivision of socialized time. Just as British government and industry was constructing standardizing time, scientists, philosophers and artists were deconstructing it.
With synchronized mechanical clocks flanking her on all sides, and with the shake up of humanity’s understanding of time lingering in the air, it is entirely unsurprising that Virginia Woolf would take time on as a major theme in Mrs. Dalloway and other works. Many modernists, including Woolf, were especially interested in the subjective conscious experience of the individual. Dalloway is written in stream of consciousness form, thereby allowing the reader to stand spectator to the flow of conscious thought within several of its characters. Consequently, a Bergsonian perspective on time comes through in Mrs. Dalloway, even in terms of its form. The entire novel is set in the space of a day, and yet the reader gets a picture of the entire lives of its narrators due to their oscillations in time as they revisit the past through memory. In the opening scene, for example, Clarissa Dalloway is immediately catapulted back in time by the sound of a squeaky door hinge. Suddenly she is again an eighteen-year-old girl in love with Peter Walsh. There is no sense of linear time in Clarissa’s internal experience, jumping fluidly from the thought of Peter Walsh as a boy and into this prediction of the future: “(Peter Walsh) would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket–knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished” (Woolf 4).
At other points in the novel, the passing of time as noted externally by the narrator does not seem to match up with the narrator’s internal experience of time. For example, the novel itself takes place in the span of sixteen hours, but the first quarter of the book is dedicated to a single hour (Willis 39). At another point in the novel, Peter Walsh has an internal dialogue consisting of 195 words about a broad variety of topics including Clarissa’s parties, personality, and relationship with her daughter, love, his sense of self, India, and car’s and their mechanics, all within the few seconds it takes for Big Ben to sound out the time of 11:30 AM.
This personal, subjective experience of time is constantly challenged by impersonal, abstract time through the chiming of Big Ben and other clocks. Elizabeth, alone at one point and “delighted to be free,” takes a ride to the Strand, and feels inspired by its liveliness. She thinks that she would like to “have a profession,” to become a doctor, a farmer, or a politician. (Woolf 79) Woolf describes these thoughts as something that sometimes occurs when one is, “alone;” that sometimes, “buildings without architects’ names, crowds of people coming back from the city… stimulate what lay slumberous, clumsy, and shy on the mind’s sandy floor to break surface, as a child suddenly stretches its arms…an impulse, a revelation, which has its effects forever.” And yet, Elizabeth’s thoughts are quickly interrupted by the thought of clock time: “She must go home. She must dress for dinner. But what was the time?—where was a clock?” and so her grand thoughts of becoming and selfhood fell “down again…to the sandy floor” of consciousness (80).
Passages like this lend credence to both the impersonal nature of external, abstract time, and to the reduction and devaluation of the rich and substantial inner life that follows from that version of time. As noted previously, time was standardized and stolen away from individuals and families and redefined for the sake of war, religion, business and industry. In Woolf’s words, Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out in chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion, until the mound of time was so far diminished that a commercial clock, suspended above a shop in Oxford Street, announced, genially and fraternally…that it was half–past one.” (Woolf 61) It is no coincidence that this passage lay in a portion of the book about Septimus and Rezia Smith. In personifying the clock as having, “pointed out…the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion,” the clocks description is paralleled with that of Sir William Bradshaw, one of Septimus’s mental health care physicians. Bradshaw represents more than just the mental health industry of the time, but also the spiritual emptiness of industry and commercialization, the repressed and detached nature of modern society, and, as shown in the above passage, the vacuous nature of abstract time that helps create these conditions.
Bradshaw is represented not as a compassionate doctor who wants to help and listen to his patients, but as someone who makes a vast fortune off of impersonal and ineffective treatments. Everything that Bradshaw owns is a bleak, bland, industrial grey. His power grows out of upholding societal expectations of what is “normal.” When Bradshaw asks Septimus about the war, it is about what should be trifles to a mental health professional: his accolades. After he confirms that Septimus, “served with the greatest distinction and hadn’t had any trouble at work,” Bradshaw dismissively says that all he needs is rest and “proportion.” (57) This is a great irony considering that Septimus has been unable to feel anything emotionally since the war, a war driven in part by the standardization of time. In returning from war with severe mental health problems, Septimus needed warmth, compassion and understanding from the country he fought for, but instead found a dull office job run by depersonalized time, and the cold, detached, alienating judgment of modern society, what Septimus calls “human nature.” He is left, “quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone” (55).
Clarissa and Septimus never meet, yet are intimately connected throughout Mrs. Dalloway. Both love Shakespeare and have “beak” shaped noses, and early in the novel, they stand on the same street and hear an “explosion” that turns out to be a car backfiring. Clarissa jumps at the sound. Septimus gains a, “look of apprehension…which makes complete strangers apprehensive too,” and then goes off into a paranoid, delusional head space (10). Though they don’t know one another in the least, they are consciously linked through this external sound of an explosion, a sound that perhaps also momentarily brought them simultaneously back in time to Great War that left no man or woman in England untouched.
These connections were no accident, and neither were their differences. Both Septimus and Clarissa feel that certain forces of society are overwhelming. Septimus fears “human nature.” He fears the way that society boxes up and classifies everything in sight. He fears its watchful eyes and the pressure of their judgement. Clarissa is much the same. She talks of the “cruelty” of “love and religion.” There is a little old woman living across the way who she sometimes watches climb the stairs to her apartment, open the curtains, pear outside and go about her business in her apartment. Clarissa believes that love and religion are cruel because they “destroy…the privacy of the soul” (74). It is “conversion” and the reduction and devaluation of time to oneself that Clarissa detests. It is the flattening of the personality to fit societal norms that she detests. When there is always someone looking over one’s shoulder, whether it be a lover, God, a doctor, or any other social force, and one feels afraid to be themselves. These times when a person is alone that he or she has the space and presence with which to experience Kairos, and those are the times in which individual finds his or herself. Because in modernity time was stolen away by the powers that be, the modern man or woman runs like a hamster on a wheel, always thinking about the past or the future, what we must accomplish or prove to other people, there is little time in which discover, explore and develop the inner self.
There are many angles from which to analyze the connections between Clarissa and Septimus, but at least one of them is made clear at the end of the novel. While Clarissa fully embraces life and fears death, Septimus chooses death over life. He, in essence, places himself outside of time. He removes himself from time’s constraints and the expectations it places on modern man. Clarissa envisions herself having done this deed; as having thrown herself from a high window as Septimus did. She then contemplates the meaning of his death, reflecting that, “Death was defiance…an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically evaded them,” for, “rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death” (105). Clarissa knows that even surrounded by people in a bustling city, if one does not have the time or space for Kairos, the “indescribable pause;” for the rich inner life that attends it, one still feels empty, alienated, alone (4).
In this moment of lone quietude, Clarissa faces and stops fearing death, as is indicated by her allusion to Shakespeare: “Fear no more the heat of the sun.” Clarissa says that she felt “glad” that Septimus, “had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun.” (106) Time passes, perpetually, always leading on to the same conclusion. Clarissa and Septimus’s tie is as clear as the tie between life and death, endings and beginnings; the cycles of life and nature. Life and death are bound together as one; two sides of the same existence, and here in lies its beauty. Readers would be wise to take note from Clarissa and ask more of the interior life. Kairos is the key to such discoveries as these.
Citations
Eliot, T. S. “Rhapsody of a Windy Night.” Blast: War Number, no. 2, July 1915, pp. 50–51. The Modernist Journals Project,
library.brown.edu/pdfs/1144603354174257.pdf.
Galison, Peter. “Einstein's Clocks: The Place of Time.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 26, no. 2, 2000, pp. 355–389. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1344127.
Gay, H. “Clock Synchrony, Time Distribution and Electrical Timekeeping in Britain 1880-1925.” Past & Present, vol. 181, no. 1, Jan. 2003, pp. 107–140. JSTOR, doi:10.1093/past/181.1.107.
Hamilton Watch, Co. “The Hamilton Watch.” National Geographic: "The WATCH for Discriminating Buyers," vol. 21, no. 6, June 1910, p. 3. See Figure A.
Hom, Andrew R. “Hegemonic Metronome: the Ascendancy of Western Standard Time.” Review of International Studies, vol. 36, no. 4, 2010, pp. 1145–1170. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40961974.
Kohler, Dayton. “Time in the Modern Novel.” College English, vol. 10, no. 1, Oct. 1948, pp. 15–24. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/372065.
Landes, David S. Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World. Harvard University Press, 2000.
Murdin, Paul. Full Meridian of Glory Perilous Adventures in the Competition to Measure the Earth (Book)
https://epdf.tips/full-meridian-of-glory-perilous- adventures-in-the-competition-to- measure-the-ear.html
Prentiss Clock Improvement Co. “INDISPENSABLE FOR SCHOOLS COLLEGES FACTORIES PUBLIC BUILDINGS.” The World's Work, Feb. 1911, p. 204. See Figure B.
Stevenson, Randall. “Greenwich Meanings: Clocks and Things in Modernist and Postmodernist Fiction.” The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 30, 2000, pp. 124–136. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/3509247.
Warf, Barney. Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies. Routledge, 2014.
Willis, Erica B. “The Philosophy of Time in Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves.” Digital Commons at Brockport, 2006. Brockport University, digitalcommons.brockport.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=eng_theses.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Hogarth Press, 1925,
thevirtuallibrary.org/index.php/en/?option=com_djclassifieds&format=raw&view=download&task=download&fid=10214.
Today the standardization and universality of “Chronos” time is taken for granted, but its development and refinement spanned hundreds of years. These developments were in part due to advances in timekeeping technology, such as clock towers, clocks and watches, and in part to human problem solving around the issue of synchronizing these devices within cities and globally. These developments were carried out by the hands of Western religious organizations, governments and their militaries, and business and industry in the name of coordination and efficiency within these institutions. With these goals in mind came the mechanization of society and time’s commodification. Time was no longer valuable in and of itself, but as an external object that could be “spent,” or “saved.” The evolution of timekeeping methodology and its effects on human valuation, experience and perception of time sheds new light on literary Modernism and the consciousness-driven narrative of Virginia Woolf’s monumental work, Mrs. Dalloway.
The seeds for time abstraction, lineation and commodification was planted by Roman Catholic monastics in the 12th century as more religious services were added and the, “celestially determined day was increasingly subdivided to enable religious observance” (Hom 1154). As there was little division between religious and public life at the time, this chronological concept of time spread quickly into the secular world, assisting in the creation of the “Protestant work ethic.” John of Salisbury, a political philosopher of the time, wrote that there is nothing more, “unworthy…than the man who wastes time – this precious time, the one thing you can’t get back once you lose it. The man who wasting time, wastes his own life…dishonors himself” (Landes 55). By the 14th century, mechanical timekeeping devices were created by churches in the form of clocktowers, placing bells “in high places, the better to hear them” (Landes 51). By the nineteenth century, the “Traditional rhythms” of time “began to look indolent and even primitive” (Gay 110).
Recognizing the power and authority timekeeping endows on the timekeeper, religious timekeeping was appropriated by European monarchies over the following centuries, helping further shape the “emerging modern social order” during the ascent of cities through an externalized, abstract, systematic, and discrete version of time – in essence, Chronos (Hom 1156). Still, at this time many were still in tune with the cyclical sense of time based on planetary motions, the sun and the seasons that repeatedly emerges in hunting and gathering or agricultural cultures with close links to the natural world. The transition between these two frameworks in Britain was a long one finally completed by the 1920s after the onslaught of industrialization, the mass production of clocks and watches, and the eventual successful standardization of time within European cities then internationally.
The rise of modern time consciousness had a reciprocal relationship with British industrialization, both encouraging the advent of the industrial revolution and being further animated by the replacement of rural, craft and cottage work by factories. While these autonomous, self-sufficient laborers and contract laborers had worked when and how they pleased in and around their own homes depending on the rising and setting of the sun, factory laborers were brought, “together in a place where the employer could directly oversee their performance,” due to the “perception of profits lost by the employers due to the poor efficiency of the dispersed labor force” (Hom 1158). Capitalism and industrialization was built up around the idea that time should be utilized in the most economically efficient way possible, and so clocks were advertised and sold as “indispensable” to “schools, colleges, factories,” and “public buildings” (Prentiss Clock Improvement Co.). Laborers in the 19th and 20th centuries began to see clocks, time, and the factory management who owned both, as prison guards. Unsurprisingly, clocks became a point of contention between laborers and management. This tension was exacerbated by the fact that timekeeping had yet to be standardized and laborers had to trust their bosses’ word on the time. As a result, and due to the falling prices of what were now mass-produced timekeeping devices, laborers began purchasing clocks and watches, facilitating the spread of such timekeeping devices from public spaces into common homes.
In complementary opposition to “labor time,” the concept of “free” or “leisure time” emerged in the nineteenth century (Hom 1160). Researcher Steven Hanson of Berkeley explains that this contrived demarcation between a person’s personal, private time and a person’s employer’s time was a response to, “Early liberal capitalist regimes forc(ing) newly urbanized workers to adjust to the idea that the rule of abstract time is inexorable,” and that it encouraged “further compartmentalization of modern life” (1160). Leisure time, “came to be seen as a measure of wealth, and thus deserving of zealous safeguarding,” commodifying time all the more (1160).
In 1847, “the British Railway Clearing House suggested that all rail stations adopt Greenwich Mean Time (GMT),” to coordinate the coming and going of trains, and to prevent train accidents” (Warf 102). The British government adopted GMT as the “legal standard” in 1855. In 1884, the International Meridian Conference officially standardized time globally, establishing, “a world-wide system of time zones and Mean Time.” It became all the more imperative to synchronize time during World War I for, “exactly timed coordination of troop movements and telegraphy” (Stevenson 125). More exact timekeeping was encouraged by World War I, and subsequently helped make the framework of modern warfare possible.
Despite these efforts, Europe lagged behind the conference’s ideal, not yet successfully synchronizing clocks even within the bounds of a number of individual cities, let alone worldwide. This includes the city of London. This was due both to nationalistic attachments to “local” times and lagging technology. Oxford researcher Hannah Gray writes that even, “In 1908, Sir John A. Cockburn wrote a letter to the Times complaining about the clocks in London streets, none of which appeared to record the same, let alone the correct, time” (Gay 112). E.J.D. Newitt, a manager at the private electric clock company Standard Time Company, complained of the “lying clocks” in an editorial to the London Times that, “In the present state of affairs every man’s time is his own…the standard of time ascertained at Greenwich… which is placed at the disposal of the community in a variety of ways is of much less use than it should be” (Gay 114). This attitude exposes the growing emphasis placed on clock time in the modern world, while also displaying the difficulty in reaching the goal of a universal standard time. By the 1920s, the problem of time standardization had finally been overcome, as is seen in Hamilton Watch Company adverts of the time promoting pocket watches that are, “Acknowledged by All Experts to be America's Standard Railroad Timekeeper” (Hamilton Watch, Co.).
With these many changes in the timekeeping methodology, it is no wonder that many scientists, philosophers, artists and writers of modern times had the subject of time and the multiplicity of its interpretation on the mind. For instance, many were trying to solve the time coordination dilemma, so timekeeping patents were abundant. It is quite certain that Einstein had a multitude of timekeeping related patents and patents related to electrical transmission signals come across his desk as he worked at the electromagnetic division of the Swiss patent office in Bern (Galison 368). These two topics would later show up in the thought experiments he produced to explain his theories of relativity, theories that would completely upend modern physics and revolutionize the way we understand time and space. Ironically, business was moving in the exact opposite direction on the issue of time as the sciences and the arts. As critic Randall Stevenson puts it, “Just a few weeks…before the establishment of ‘l’heure définitive’ (a more exact extension of GMT established by astronomers in Paris called “Universal Time”) on 1 January 1920, Einstein proposed with what seemed scientific certitude that no definitive or universally valid scale of time could be assumed to exist at all” (Stevenson 126; Murdin 157). In 1923, two years before the publication of Mrs. Dalloway, D.H. Lawrence exclaimed that, “everyone catches fire at the word Relativity. There must be something in the mere suggestion which we have been waiting for.” (126)
Around the same time, the philosopher Henri Bergson shook up the intellectual atmosphere of the time with his theory that intuition is more real and more important than abstract rationalism. Influenced by Immanuel Kant, Bergson believed that time is a subjective inner experience, and that “clockwork division of the flowing continuity of life into quantifiable temporal units was a fundamental conceptual error…to (Bergson), the clock and its precise hours had indeed become a curse.” (Stevenson 127) Though there is no direct evidence that Woolf read Bergson or Einstein, Whitworth of Cambridge University notes that "Bergsonism was part of the intellectual atmosphere of the years from 1910 to 1912, as Einstein was to be in the years from 1919 to 1930." (Willis 10) Other modernist writers clearly had the topic of the mechanization and commodification of time on the mind, as H.G. Wells described the, “clock and towers of the Law Courts, the advertisements, the luminous signs, into one social immensity, into a capitalistic system gigantic and invincible.” (Wells 261-316) Likewise, T.S. Eliot wrote a short story for Blast! magazine that occurs in the short timeframe between midnight and 4am. The time is continually noted throughout the poem, much like in Mrs. Dalloway. In addition to these facts, Virginia Woolf, “was contributing or associated with,” the several publications that reviewed Einstein’s books (Willis 10). It is more than likely that Woolf was contemplating the theories of Einstein and Bergson, whether directly through their writings, or indirectly through the intellectual discourse buzzing around their ideas.
In addition to these intellectual currents, the concept of standardized time that is sliced up and diced into units in order to be commodified was still fairly new in Woolf’s time. The British had grown accustomed to clock towers like Big Ben synchronously “blen(ding) with that, of other clocks,” but they had also known a time when times were legion (Woolf 56). While Bergson’s philosophical and Einstein’s scientific methods and declarations about time were quite different and in many ways in opposition, the two’s ideas had this in common: they challenged this lineation, division, and subdivision of socialized time. Just as British government and industry was constructing standardizing time, scientists, philosophers and artists were deconstructing it.
With synchronized mechanical clocks flanking her on all sides, and with the shake up of humanity’s understanding of time lingering in the air, it is entirely unsurprising that Virginia Woolf would take time on as a major theme in Mrs. Dalloway and other works. Many modernists, including Woolf, were especially interested in the subjective conscious experience of the individual. Dalloway is written in stream of consciousness form, thereby allowing the reader to stand spectator to the flow of conscious thought within several of its characters. Consequently, a Bergsonian perspective on time comes through in Mrs. Dalloway, even in terms of its form. The entire novel is set in the space of a day, and yet the reader gets a picture of the entire lives of its narrators due to their oscillations in time as they revisit the past through memory. In the opening scene, for example, Clarissa Dalloway is immediately catapulted back in time by the sound of a squeaky door hinge. Suddenly she is again an eighteen-year-old girl in love with Peter Walsh. There is no sense of linear time in Clarissa’s internal experience, jumping fluidly from the thought of Peter Walsh as a boy and into this prediction of the future: “(Peter Walsh) would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket–knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished” (Woolf 4).
At other points in the novel, the passing of time as noted externally by the narrator does not seem to match up with the narrator’s internal experience of time. For example, the novel itself takes place in the span of sixteen hours, but the first quarter of the book is dedicated to a single hour (Willis 39). At another point in the novel, Peter Walsh has an internal dialogue consisting of 195 words about a broad variety of topics including Clarissa’s parties, personality, and relationship with her daughter, love, his sense of self, India, and car’s and their mechanics, all within the few seconds it takes for Big Ben to sound out the time of 11:30 AM.
This personal, subjective experience of time is constantly challenged by impersonal, abstract time through the chiming of Big Ben and other clocks. Elizabeth, alone at one point and “delighted to be free,” takes a ride to the Strand, and feels inspired by its liveliness. She thinks that she would like to “have a profession,” to become a doctor, a farmer, or a politician. (Woolf 79) Woolf describes these thoughts as something that sometimes occurs when one is, “alone;” that sometimes, “buildings without architects’ names, crowds of people coming back from the city… stimulate what lay slumberous, clumsy, and shy on the mind’s sandy floor to break surface, as a child suddenly stretches its arms…an impulse, a revelation, which has its effects forever.” And yet, Elizabeth’s thoughts are quickly interrupted by the thought of clock time: “She must go home. She must dress for dinner. But what was the time?—where was a clock?” and so her grand thoughts of becoming and selfhood fell “down again…to the sandy floor” of consciousness (80).
Passages like this lend credence to both the impersonal nature of external, abstract time, and to the reduction and devaluation of the rich and substantial inner life that follows from that version of time. As noted previously, time was standardized and stolen away from individuals and families and redefined for the sake of war, religion, business and industry. In Woolf’s words, Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out in chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion, until the mound of time was so far diminished that a commercial clock, suspended above a shop in Oxford Street, announced, genially and fraternally…that it was half–past one.” (Woolf 61) It is no coincidence that this passage lay in a portion of the book about Septimus and Rezia Smith. In personifying the clock as having, “pointed out…the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion,” the clocks description is paralleled with that of Sir William Bradshaw, one of Septimus’s mental health care physicians. Bradshaw represents more than just the mental health industry of the time, but also the spiritual emptiness of industry and commercialization, the repressed and detached nature of modern society, and, as shown in the above passage, the vacuous nature of abstract time that helps create these conditions.
Bradshaw is represented not as a compassionate doctor who wants to help and listen to his patients, but as someone who makes a vast fortune off of impersonal and ineffective treatments. Everything that Bradshaw owns is a bleak, bland, industrial grey. His power grows out of upholding societal expectations of what is “normal.” When Bradshaw asks Septimus about the war, it is about what should be trifles to a mental health professional: his accolades. After he confirms that Septimus, “served with the greatest distinction and hadn’t had any trouble at work,” Bradshaw dismissively says that all he needs is rest and “proportion.” (57) This is a great irony considering that Septimus has been unable to feel anything emotionally since the war, a war driven in part by the standardization of time. In returning from war with severe mental health problems, Septimus needed warmth, compassion and understanding from the country he fought for, but instead found a dull office job run by depersonalized time, and the cold, detached, alienating judgment of modern society, what Septimus calls “human nature.” He is left, “quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone” (55).
Clarissa and Septimus never meet, yet are intimately connected throughout Mrs. Dalloway. Both love Shakespeare and have “beak” shaped noses, and early in the novel, they stand on the same street and hear an “explosion” that turns out to be a car backfiring. Clarissa jumps at the sound. Septimus gains a, “look of apprehension…which makes complete strangers apprehensive too,” and then goes off into a paranoid, delusional head space (10). Though they don’t know one another in the least, they are consciously linked through this external sound of an explosion, a sound that perhaps also momentarily brought them simultaneously back in time to Great War that left no man or woman in England untouched.
These connections were no accident, and neither were their differences. Both Septimus and Clarissa feel that certain forces of society are overwhelming. Septimus fears “human nature.” He fears the way that society boxes up and classifies everything in sight. He fears its watchful eyes and the pressure of their judgement. Clarissa is much the same. She talks of the “cruelty” of “love and religion.” There is a little old woman living across the way who she sometimes watches climb the stairs to her apartment, open the curtains, pear outside and go about her business in her apartment. Clarissa believes that love and religion are cruel because they “destroy…the privacy of the soul” (74). It is “conversion” and the reduction and devaluation of time to oneself that Clarissa detests. It is the flattening of the personality to fit societal norms that she detests. When there is always someone looking over one’s shoulder, whether it be a lover, God, a doctor, or any other social force, and one feels afraid to be themselves. These times when a person is alone that he or she has the space and presence with which to experience Kairos, and those are the times in which individual finds his or herself. Because in modernity time was stolen away by the powers that be, the modern man or woman runs like a hamster on a wheel, always thinking about the past or the future, what we must accomplish or prove to other people, there is little time in which discover, explore and develop the inner self.
There are many angles from which to analyze the connections between Clarissa and Septimus, but at least one of them is made clear at the end of the novel. While Clarissa fully embraces life and fears death, Septimus chooses death over life. He, in essence, places himself outside of time. He removes himself from time’s constraints and the expectations it places on modern man. Clarissa envisions herself having done this deed; as having thrown herself from a high window as Septimus did. She then contemplates the meaning of his death, reflecting that, “Death was defiance…an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically evaded them,” for, “rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death” (105). Clarissa knows that even surrounded by people in a bustling city, if one does not have the time or space for Kairos, the “indescribable pause;” for the rich inner life that attends it, one still feels empty, alienated, alone (4).
In this moment of lone quietude, Clarissa faces and stops fearing death, as is indicated by her allusion to Shakespeare: “Fear no more the heat of the sun.” Clarissa says that she felt “glad” that Septimus, “had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun.” (106) Time passes, perpetually, always leading on to the same conclusion. Clarissa and Septimus’s tie is as clear as the tie between life and death, endings and beginnings; the cycles of life and nature. Life and death are bound together as one; two sides of the same existence, and here in lies its beauty. Readers would be wise to take note from Clarissa and ask more of the interior life. Kairos is the key to such discoveries as these.
Citations
Eliot, T. S. “Rhapsody of a Windy Night.” Blast: War Number, no. 2, July 1915, pp. 50–51. The Modernist Journals Project,
library.brown.edu/pdfs/1144603354174257.pdf.
Galison, Peter. “Einstein's Clocks: The Place of Time.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 26, no. 2, 2000, pp. 355–389. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1344127.
Gay, H. “Clock Synchrony, Time Distribution and Electrical Timekeeping in Britain 1880-1925.” Past & Present, vol. 181, no. 1, Jan. 2003, pp. 107–140. JSTOR, doi:10.1093/past/181.1.107.
Hamilton Watch, Co. “The Hamilton Watch.” National Geographic: "The WATCH for Discriminating Buyers," vol. 21, no. 6, June 1910, p. 3. See Figure A.
Hom, Andrew R. “Hegemonic Metronome: the Ascendancy of Western Standard Time.” Review of International Studies, vol. 36, no. 4, 2010, pp. 1145–1170. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40961974.
Kohler, Dayton. “Time in the Modern Novel.” College English, vol. 10, no. 1, Oct. 1948, pp. 15–24. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/372065.
Landes, David S. Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World. Harvard University Press, 2000.
Murdin, Paul. Full Meridian of Glory Perilous Adventures in the Competition to Measure the Earth (Book)
https://epdf.tips/full-meridian-of-glory-perilous- adventures-in-the-competition-to- measure-the-ear.html
Prentiss Clock Improvement Co. “INDISPENSABLE FOR SCHOOLS COLLEGES FACTORIES PUBLIC BUILDINGS.” The World's Work, Feb. 1911, p. 204. See Figure B.
Stevenson, Randall. “Greenwich Meanings: Clocks and Things in Modernist and Postmodernist Fiction.” The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 30, 2000, pp. 124–136. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/3509247.
Warf, Barney. Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies. Routledge, 2014.
Willis, Erica B. “The Philosophy of Time in Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves.” Digital Commons at Brockport, 2006. Brockport University, digitalcommons.brockport.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=eng_theses.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Hogarth Press, 1925,
thevirtuallibrary.org/index.php/en/?option=com_djclassifieds&format=raw&view=download&task=download&fid=10214.
Figure A
Figure B
Space, Time and the Paradox of Self in the Poetry of Walt Whitman
Drawing by Kaleigh Stock
Time and space are not what they seem. Often, discoveries in the sciences leave scientists with more questions than answers, and many recent discoveries in quantum physics and theoretical physics seem completely illogical. Intriguingly, some of the unexpected discoveries physicists are finding seem to have been predicted by mystics and poets time and time again over the span of many centuries, particularly in regard to a timeless, spaceless reality. Walt Whitman was one of the latest great poets to take up the monumental task of describing this ineffable layer of existence.
There are two ways to gain insight into reality. The first is externally through observation. The second is intuitively within the self. The former of these is the work of the scientist; the latter the work of the mystic and the poet. Though many feel the need to create friction between materialism and spirituality, it is typically unnecessary. The Dalai Lama and Carl Sagan, who once met in 1991 to find common ground, are great examples of the potential continuity and conversation that can occur between the two. In his book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Sagan wrote that while he was opposed to, “superstition and pseudoscience… distracting us, providing easy answers, dodging skeptical scrutiny, casually pressing our awe buttons and cheapening the experience,” he also believed that, “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual…The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.” (Sagan) Truth comes to those who are open to many channels of information, taking what is correct, and dismissing what is not. Whitman, a clear champion of both the sciences and spiritual life writes of a spiritual reality grounded in the physical world, “A word of reality . . . . materialism first and last imbueing.” “Hurrah for positive science!” he continues, “Long live exact demonstration!” (“Song”). In other sections he writes about his openness to new ideas and change of mind in response to new information:
argue not concerning God,
Have patience and indulgence toward the people.
Re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book,
Dismiss whatever insults your own soul.
And your very flesh shall be a great poem.
Religion, mythology, philosophy and literature are awash with metaphors about a higher form of reality that is timeless and spaceless. This is certainly true of the work of Walt Whitman. Whitman clearly believed that, at least on some level of life and death, that time and space do not exist, and that the differences between us are infinitesimally small. For example, Whitman calls a leaf of grass the “journeywork of the stars,” and in doing so asks the reader to disregard change over time and instead pay heed to the continuity between objects outside of time and space. He believed that, there is no death, that all is “immortal,” and that, “All goes onward and outward . . . . and nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” What is it that truly separates individuals when humans share 99.9 percent of our DNA with other humans, and when humanity has only existed for an infinitesimally small fraction of time of the 13.8 billion years the universe has existed?
Perhaps in support of these notions, physicists and biologists have slowly and methodically undone many of the assumptions humanity has had about time and space. For example, in recent years it has been found that the less mass an animal contains, the faster is their perception of time, seemingly due to their slower metabolism rates. A dog, for example, “Can take in visual information at least 25 percent faster than humans—just enough to make a television show look like a series of flickering images” (Reas). This is also why it can be so difficult to swat a fly. Some scientists have postulated that this is also why time seems to slow for human beings as they age. Clearly, time perception is tethered to one’s physical body, a rather thin sheath between one’s sense of self and external reality.
In relation to physics, in the early 20th century, Albert Einstein completely upended the way that humanity thinks of time and space with his theories of relativity. For starters, space and time are a continuum, meaning that they cannot be separated from one another. With this information in hand, Einstein discovered that because the speed of light is constant, space and time must be both relative and constant. This proven fact has resulted in the observations of strange events: Einstein’s thought experiment of clocks in motion relative to an observer ticking more slowly than a clock in stasis near the observer being played out in a particle accelerator in Germany, and atomic clocks passing faster at higher elevations and slower at sea level due to gravity’s dilation of time (Witze, Ost). In one thought experiment, it has been noted that one twin in space would age more slowly than a twin on earth due to the differing forces of gravity. As Even every day events become strange, as theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli demonstrates: “If things fall, it is due to this slowing down of time. Where time passes uniformly, in interplanetary space, things do not fall. They float” (Rovelli).
One physicist has even calculated a time travel possibility based on relativity. Space and time being a continuum, Ben Tippet believes one should be able to travel through time as one travels through space. Because the universe is both provenly finite and curved, Tippet was able to on paper use, “curved space-time—to bend time into a circle for the passengers, not in a straight line. That circle takes us back in time.” (Aderin-Pocock) Of course all of this is theoretical and may in fact be physically impossible, but the implications are profound, regardless. The potentiality of time travel gives us an easy way to see just how malleable and illusive time is.
If this were not enough, time does not seem to exist on the quantum level. Many quantum physicists are working to build a bridge between Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum physics, a massive gap in our understanding of physics. Rovelli observes: “If I observe the microscopic state of things then the difference between past and future vanishes … in the elementary grammar of things, there is no distinction between ‘cause’ and ‘effect.’” Just as humans were completing the construction of a universal, standardized abstract time, physicists were deconstructing it and showing the human race that there is no such thing as “universal time;” that “times are legion” (Rovelli). This brings up some odd questions. Is time more correct in this place or that? If time isn’t universal what is time? One deeper planes of existence, does time exist at all? Our bodies anchor us in this time and place, but what is time outside of this body?
Stranger still is the matter of space. Physicists have discovered that even the moniker “space” is a misnomer. Space is not empty. It in fact behaves in all of the same ways as time: gravity curves it and gravity waves ripple it. Gordon Kane, director of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor explains, “Quantum mechanics allows, and indeed requires, temporary violations of conservation of energy, so one particle can become a pair of heavier particles (the so-called virtual particles), which quickly rejoin into the original particle as if they had never been there” (Kane). There is also the matter of quantum entanglement, what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” in which two seemingly separate particles behave in the exact same manner at the exact same time with a 100% concurrence rate. It has been shown mathematically that these particles could be on opposite ends of the universe, and the results would be the same. Due to this fact, physicists believe the particles are not communicating in any way (such as through radio or sound waves), because if they were, the signal would have to travel faster than the speed of light. This, of course, is impossible. If this is the case, is the space between these particles an illusion? How could this be? And what are the implications?
One incredible theory that would make sense of the fact that, at least on same plane of existence, time and space may be nonexistent, is the holographic principle of string theory. Physicists Gerard 't Hooft, Leonard Susskind, and Charles Thorn proposed that in terms of how information is stored, reality may be a 4-dimensional, holographic projection out a lower dimensional event horizon, such as a black hole. This theory would not only bridge the gap between relativity and quantum physics by explaining how temporality and space could emerge out of the non-temporal, non-spacial system of quantum mechanics, but would also solve the black hole information paradox (what happens to information when it falls into a black hole?). String theorist Raphael Bousso of Stanford explains that, “The world doesn't appear to us like a hologram, but in terms of the information needed to describe it, it is one…The amazing thing is that the holographic principle works for all areas in all space times. We have this amazing pattern there, which is far more general than the black hole picture we started from” (Minkel). Were this true, it seems to follow that the seed of all reality would reside in all things. Every human being would contain within them, on a quantum level, all of time and space.
If time is dependent on a person’s brain, body and metabolic processes, if it depends his or her particular coordinate in supposed space, on the gravity acting on him or her, on the velocity at which he or she is moving, and on the trajectory at which he or she is moving; if it is entirely elastic, the question should be asked: what is time? Is time more “correct” for this person, or at this supposed point in space? Does it exist at all? (Stock) If each coordinate in space has its own time, the entire concept of time becomes meaningless. As discussed previously, similarities between Whitman and the holographic principle and other hypotheses and theories in physics can be easily drawn. This is true of countless other sages and poets. Just about every religion describes an ultimate form of reality that is both spaceless and timeless, and how that form somehow birthed the universe. In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu describes the Tao as such: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things” (Lao Tzu).
Similarly, Saint Augustine wrote in his Confessions, “Try as they may to savor the taste of eternity, their thoughts still twist and turn upon the ebb and flow of things in past and future time. But if only their minds could be seized and held steady, they would be still for a while and, for that short moment, they would glimpse the splendor of eternity, which is forever still.” The Christian God is also described in such terms as omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient. Jeremiah 23:23 of the Christian Bible reads, “‘Am I only a God nearby,’ declares the Lord, ‘and not a God far away? Can anyone hide in secret places so that I cannot see him’ declares the Lord. ‘Do not I fill heaven and earth?’”
Hinduism’s Bhagavad Gita, a text that heavily influenced the Transcendental movement and that Whitman certainly read, the god Krishna says,
"I am the source of all the universe, just as I am its dissolution. Nothing is higher than I am; all that exists is woven on me like a web of pearls on thread. I am the taste in water…the light in the moon and sun, OM resonant in all sacred lore, the sound in space, valor in men. Know me…as every creature’s timeless seed…all this universe deluded by the qualities inherited in nature fails to know that I am beyond them and unchanging."
Finally, the Mahāyānan Buddhist Lotus Sutra describes the slippery definition of “emptiness” as the following: "Bodhisattvas should view all phenomena as being intrinsically empty in order to correctly perceive their true nature, which has no movement, no regression, and no evolvement. It is like an empty nothingness without intrinsic nature and beyond the expression of word. There is no birth, no emerging, no arising, no name, no form, no substantial existence, no quantity, no boundary, no hindrance, and no obstruction. "(Miller) Similarly, the Heart Sutra states that, “Form does not differ from Emptiness, and Emptiness does not differ from Form.” These are, of course, just a few examples of many.
The goal of physics is to understand the elemental foundations of reality. As physicists and also biologists peel back layer after layer of existence, it is repeatedly found that the origins of all things recede into a single point. However, if we work forward instead of backward out of those layers, there is a question yet answered and equally as profound. Whitman asks us, “To be in any form, what is that?” and, What is a man anyhow? What am I? and what are you?” (“Song”). How is it that life exists? How is it that anything exists at all? What does it mean to be human? Whitman understood not only the center of all being, the place that each being was born from and share, but also how incredible it is to be, let alone to be a unique, sentient, living, breathing being. How wonderful and strange it is to look in the mirror and see an animated piece of the universe that experiences itself, that seems, perhaps, the hands and eyes of God.
An analogous concept can be found in many religions. The Hindu pantheon for example begins at the top with the triumvirate of first Brahma, the creator, then the complementary gods Vishnu, the preserver, and Shiva, the destroyer. Most other gods in the pantheon are avatars, or incarnations, of these three original gods. All gods and everything in the universe derived from the same underlying metaphysical principle called “Brahman,” the “eternal, conscious, irreducible, infinite, omnipresent, and the spiritual core of the universe of finiteness and change” (Britannica).
In Taoism the Taijitu symbol, better known in the West as “Yin and Yang,” represents the, “Principle of natural and complementary forces, patterns and things that depend on one another and do not make sense on their own.” (BBC). This duality of nature is necessary for the existence of the universe, as Whitman wrote, “lack one lacks both,” and the two forces are ultimately seen as aspects of the same unified whole of the Tao. Consider, for example, black and white film. A photograph could not exist were it not for the complementary shades of black and white. Darkness and light are not opposing forces, but work together to create an image. It is the diversity of complementary forces that create and harmonize the universe, make life possible, and that make each individual being very much the same and paradoxically unique. As Whitman describes it,
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.
Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex,
Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life. (Whitman)
Just as sages have intuited that human beings and all that exists was individuated from a singularity, the “great first nothing,” physicists have concluded that we stand here “with (our) robust souls” today because of the Big Bang; because a timeless, formless, super dense mass rapidly and forcefully expanded out, and over an unimaginable length of time developed into atoms, and then stars and galaxies. Biologists have come to the understanding that we evolved from and alongside the animal world; that they are in fact our ancestors and cousins, a theory that Whitman was on board with even before Darwin wrote The Origin of Species in 1859, evidence of this can be found in “Song of Myself.” He says that he sees in animals, “the same old law,” and later continues,
They bring me tokens of myself . . . . they evince them plainly in their possession.
I do not know where they got those tokens,
I must have passed that way untold times ago and negligently dropt them,
Myself moving forward then and now and forever,
Gathering and showing more always and with velocity,
Infinite and omnigenous and the like of these among them;
Not too exclusive toward the reachers of my remembrancers,
Picking out here one that shall be my amie,
Choosing to go with him on brotherly terms. (“Song”)
This is also similar to the Christian, Judaic and Islamic idea of all the universe being create by one god, and of all people being birthed from that god. In each of these cases, singularity became multiplicity, and all people are kin because they are connected back to that source. It is the resulting diversity as much as a shared core of being that gives life meaning. This paradox of self is what makes reality possible. It is what gives us diversity of life while connecting all beings. What scientists have not yet been able to answer is how the “bang” itself started, and how it is that the inanimate became animate, and then conscious. Are animation and consciousness even so different? At one point does an animate being become conscious? Again, this most profound of questions begs an answer: “To be in any form, what is that?”
Throughout his work, Whitman laces the idea that this timeless, spaceless reality is accessible through the individual; that this immovable center connects us all and seems to give life inherent meaning. In “Song of Myself,” Whitman writes that all of the external, human constructs, such as his dress and the books he has read, all of his troubles, and even all of the emotional turmoil he feels at times, is “not the Me myself” (“Song”). He concludes, “Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am.” Under the slight, if essential, differences of each individual being lay a common core. At the center of each being resides the infinite. This is the same as Hinduism’s belief in “Atman,” or the universal self. The Atman is commonly seen as indistinguishable from the metaphysical concept of Brahman, the only distinction being that the Atman is Brahman inside the individual self. This higher reality can only be accessed internally. As the Sufi poet Rumi writes, “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop,” and so, “Everything in the universe is within you. Ask all from yourself.”
Importantly, in both “Song of Myself” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Whitman notes that the immovable is shared between and connects all beings. In “Song of Myself,” Whitman begins I celebrate myself,/And what I assume you shall assume,/For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Within the poem, Whitman uses “I” as an all-encompassing term, leveling the false hierarchies and divisions between rich and poor, intellectual and laborer, man and woman, and people of high and low social status. He writes, “In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barleycorn less, And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.” He reminds the reader that each came from the same “lethargic mist,” and will return to it once more. Paradoxically, he knew that
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.
What is time to “the smallest sprout?” What is death to a flower? “What is it then between us?/What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?/ Whatever it is, it avails not-distance avails not, and place avails not.”
This point is one of the most essential to Whitman’s writing, and seemingly the skeleton key to his code of morality. Whitman both celebrates diversity and individuality, and simultaneously sees little separation between himself and the next human being. In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Whitman writes that each person furnishes his or her “parts toward eternity…toward the soul.” In other words, each plays their part and is essential to the whole, and all are karmically connected. All life is interaction, and therefor intertwined. If every being is of utmost value, and all life is intertwined, every single thought and action of an individual is of monumental importance. All beings must keep aware of their entanglement in the lives of others, and care for each other. In “Song of Myself” Whitman writes, “Agonies are one of my changes of garments;/I do not ask the wounded person how he feels . . . . I myself become the wounded person, /My hurt turns livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.”
While language is a most useful tool for understanding reality and its significance, it can also be a hindrance. Perhaps the duplicity of ways that humanity describes the universe are in fact in many ways more similar than believed, the truth at times getting lost in the vain attempt to perfectly capture the ineffable. This is not to diminish the belief of any person of faith or to reduce or change scientific discovery in any way, but an askance of an olive branch; a level-headed dialogue that is far too seldom had. Sometimes truth and understanding is found not through breaking reality into its component parts, although this too is vital, but by trying to find its center.
While the universe may seem stranger and stranger to the scientist, it makes more and more sense to the poet who has known the beautiful strangeness of the universe all along. Walt Whitman knew how to listen to the universe; he knew to let it speak through him instead of speaking for it. Perhaps Whitman was right to be so completely open to so many different perspectives and avenues of thought; that it is in this space where religions, philosophies, and the sciences meet that truth lie.
Citations
Aderin-Pocock, Maggie. “How Do We Know the Big Bang Actually Happened?” BBC IWonder, BBC, www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zgr7fg8.
BBC. “Religions - Taoism: Concepts within Taoism.” BBC, BBC, 12 Nov. 2009, www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/taoism/beliefs/concepts.shtml.
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Brahman.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 19 Feb. 2018,
www.britannica.com/topic/brahman-Hindu-concept.
Kane, Gordon. “Are Virtual Particles Really Constantly Popping in and out of Existence? Or Are They Merely a Mathematical Bookkeeping Device for Quantum Mechanics?” Scientific American, Scientific American, www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-virtual-particles-rea/.
Lao Tzu, and Yi-Ping Ong. Tao Te Ching. Edited by George Stade. Translated by Müller Charles, Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005.
Miller, Barbara Stoler. The Bhagavad-Gita: Krishna's Counsel in Time of War. Bantam Books, 2004.
Minkel, J. R. “Sidebar: The Holographic Principle.” Scientific American, Scientific American, www.scientificamerican.com/article/sidebar-the-
holographic-p/.
Ost, Laura. “NIST Pair of Aluminum Atomic Clocks Reveal Einstein's Relativity at a Personal Scale.” NIST, U.S. Department of Commerce, 8 Jan. 2018,
www.nist.gov/news- events/news/2010/09/nist-pair-aluminum-atomic-clocks-reveal-einsteins-relativity-personal-scale.
Reas, Emilie. “Small Animals Live in a Slow-Motion World.” Scientific American, Nature Publishing Group, 1 July 2014,
www.scientificamerican.com/article/small-animals-live-in-a-slow-motion- world/.
Rovelli, Carlo. “'Time Is Elastic': an Extract from Carlo Rovelli's The Order of Time.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 14 Apr. 2018,
www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/14/elastic-concept-order-of-time-carlo-rovelli.
Sagan, Carl. “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark : Draft.” Library of Congress, Victor, 1994,
www.loc.gov/resource/mss85590.004/?sp=18&r=0.296,0.323,0.444,0.161,0.
Stock, Kaleigh. Ethical Implications of Space-Time Singularity. 23 Apr. 2018.
Whitman, Walt. “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry by Walt Whitman.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation,
www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45470/crossing-brooklyn-ferry.
Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself (1855).” Bailiwick, Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library, bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/whitman/1855.html.
Witze, Alexandra. “Einstein's ‘Time Dilation’ Prediction Verified.” Scientific American, Scientific American, 22 Sept. 2014,
www.scientificamerican.com/article/einsteins-time-dilation-prediction- verified/.
There are two ways to gain insight into reality. The first is externally through observation. The second is intuitively within the self. The former of these is the work of the scientist; the latter the work of the mystic and the poet. Though many feel the need to create friction between materialism and spirituality, it is typically unnecessary. The Dalai Lama and Carl Sagan, who once met in 1991 to find common ground, are great examples of the potential continuity and conversation that can occur between the two. In his book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Sagan wrote that while he was opposed to, “superstition and pseudoscience… distracting us, providing easy answers, dodging skeptical scrutiny, casually pressing our awe buttons and cheapening the experience,” he also believed that, “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual…The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.” (Sagan) Truth comes to those who are open to many channels of information, taking what is correct, and dismissing what is not. Whitman, a clear champion of both the sciences and spiritual life writes of a spiritual reality grounded in the physical world, “A word of reality . . . . materialism first and last imbueing.” “Hurrah for positive science!” he continues, “Long live exact demonstration!” (“Song”). In other sections he writes about his openness to new ideas and change of mind in response to new information:
argue not concerning God,
Have patience and indulgence toward the people.
Re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book,
Dismiss whatever insults your own soul.
And your very flesh shall be a great poem.
Religion, mythology, philosophy and literature are awash with metaphors about a higher form of reality that is timeless and spaceless. This is certainly true of the work of Walt Whitman. Whitman clearly believed that, at least on some level of life and death, that time and space do not exist, and that the differences between us are infinitesimally small. For example, Whitman calls a leaf of grass the “journeywork of the stars,” and in doing so asks the reader to disregard change over time and instead pay heed to the continuity between objects outside of time and space. He believed that, there is no death, that all is “immortal,” and that, “All goes onward and outward . . . . and nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” What is it that truly separates individuals when humans share 99.9 percent of our DNA with other humans, and when humanity has only existed for an infinitesimally small fraction of time of the 13.8 billion years the universe has existed?
Perhaps in support of these notions, physicists and biologists have slowly and methodically undone many of the assumptions humanity has had about time and space. For example, in recent years it has been found that the less mass an animal contains, the faster is their perception of time, seemingly due to their slower metabolism rates. A dog, for example, “Can take in visual information at least 25 percent faster than humans—just enough to make a television show look like a series of flickering images” (Reas). This is also why it can be so difficult to swat a fly. Some scientists have postulated that this is also why time seems to slow for human beings as they age. Clearly, time perception is tethered to one’s physical body, a rather thin sheath between one’s sense of self and external reality.
In relation to physics, in the early 20th century, Albert Einstein completely upended the way that humanity thinks of time and space with his theories of relativity. For starters, space and time are a continuum, meaning that they cannot be separated from one another. With this information in hand, Einstein discovered that because the speed of light is constant, space and time must be both relative and constant. This proven fact has resulted in the observations of strange events: Einstein’s thought experiment of clocks in motion relative to an observer ticking more slowly than a clock in stasis near the observer being played out in a particle accelerator in Germany, and atomic clocks passing faster at higher elevations and slower at sea level due to gravity’s dilation of time (Witze, Ost). In one thought experiment, it has been noted that one twin in space would age more slowly than a twin on earth due to the differing forces of gravity. As Even every day events become strange, as theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli demonstrates: “If things fall, it is due to this slowing down of time. Where time passes uniformly, in interplanetary space, things do not fall. They float” (Rovelli).
One physicist has even calculated a time travel possibility based on relativity. Space and time being a continuum, Ben Tippet believes one should be able to travel through time as one travels through space. Because the universe is both provenly finite and curved, Tippet was able to on paper use, “curved space-time—to bend time into a circle for the passengers, not in a straight line. That circle takes us back in time.” (Aderin-Pocock) Of course all of this is theoretical and may in fact be physically impossible, but the implications are profound, regardless. The potentiality of time travel gives us an easy way to see just how malleable and illusive time is.
If this were not enough, time does not seem to exist on the quantum level. Many quantum physicists are working to build a bridge between Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum physics, a massive gap in our understanding of physics. Rovelli observes: “If I observe the microscopic state of things then the difference between past and future vanishes … in the elementary grammar of things, there is no distinction between ‘cause’ and ‘effect.’” Just as humans were completing the construction of a universal, standardized abstract time, physicists were deconstructing it and showing the human race that there is no such thing as “universal time;” that “times are legion” (Rovelli). This brings up some odd questions. Is time more correct in this place or that? If time isn’t universal what is time? One deeper planes of existence, does time exist at all? Our bodies anchor us in this time and place, but what is time outside of this body?
Stranger still is the matter of space. Physicists have discovered that even the moniker “space” is a misnomer. Space is not empty. It in fact behaves in all of the same ways as time: gravity curves it and gravity waves ripple it. Gordon Kane, director of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor explains, “Quantum mechanics allows, and indeed requires, temporary violations of conservation of energy, so one particle can become a pair of heavier particles (the so-called virtual particles), which quickly rejoin into the original particle as if they had never been there” (Kane). There is also the matter of quantum entanglement, what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” in which two seemingly separate particles behave in the exact same manner at the exact same time with a 100% concurrence rate. It has been shown mathematically that these particles could be on opposite ends of the universe, and the results would be the same. Due to this fact, physicists believe the particles are not communicating in any way (such as through radio or sound waves), because if they were, the signal would have to travel faster than the speed of light. This, of course, is impossible. If this is the case, is the space between these particles an illusion? How could this be? And what are the implications?
One incredible theory that would make sense of the fact that, at least on same plane of existence, time and space may be nonexistent, is the holographic principle of string theory. Physicists Gerard 't Hooft, Leonard Susskind, and Charles Thorn proposed that in terms of how information is stored, reality may be a 4-dimensional, holographic projection out a lower dimensional event horizon, such as a black hole. This theory would not only bridge the gap between relativity and quantum physics by explaining how temporality and space could emerge out of the non-temporal, non-spacial system of quantum mechanics, but would also solve the black hole information paradox (what happens to information when it falls into a black hole?). String theorist Raphael Bousso of Stanford explains that, “The world doesn't appear to us like a hologram, but in terms of the information needed to describe it, it is one…The amazing thing is that the holographic principle works for all areas in all space times. We have this amazing pattern there, which is far more general than the black hole picture we started from” (Minkel). Were this true, it seems to follow that the seed of all reality would reside in all things. Every human being would contain within them, on a quantum level, all of time and space.
If time is dependent on a person’s brain, body and metabolic processes, if it depends his or her particular coordinate in supposed space, on the gravity acting on him or her, on the velocity at which he or she is moving, and on the trajectory at which he or she is moving; if it is entirely elastic, the question should be asked: what is time? Is time more “correct” for this person, or at this supposed point in space? Does it exist at all? (Stock) If each coordinate in space has its own time, the entire concept of time becomes meaningless. As discussed previously, similarities between Whitman and the holographic principle and other hypotheses and theories in physics can be easily drawn. This is true of countless other sages and poets. Just about every religion describes an ultimate form of reality that is both spaceless and timeless, and how that form somehow birthed the universe. In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu describes the Tao as such: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things” (Lao Tzu).
Similarly, Saint Augustine wrote in his Confessions, “Try as they may to savor the taste of eternity, their thoughts still twist and turn upon the ebb and flow of things in past and future time. But if only their minds could be seized and held steady, they would be still for a while and, for that short moment, they would glimpse the splendor of eternity, which is forever still.” The Christian God is also described in such terms as omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient. Jeremiah 23:23 of the Christian Bible reads, “‘Am I only a God nearby,’ declares the Lord, ‘and not a God far away? Can anyone hide in secret places so that I cannot see him’ declares the Lord. ‘Do not I fill heaven and earth?’”
Hinduism’s Bhagavad Gita, a text that heavily influenced the Transcendental movement and that Whitman certainly read, the god Krishna says,
"I am the source of all the universe, just as I am its dissolution. Nothing is higher than I am; all that exists is woven on me like a web of pearls on thread. I am the taste in water…the light in the moon and sun, OM resonant in all sacred lore, the sound in space, valor in men. Know me…as every creature’s timeless seed…all this universe deluded by the qualities inherited in nature fails to know that I am beyond them and unchanging."
Finally, the Mahāyānan Buddhist Lotus Sutra describes the slippery definition of “emptiness” as the following: "Bodhisattvas should view all phenomena as being intrinsically empty in order to correctly perceive their true nature, which has no movement, no regression, and no evolvement. It is like an empty nothingness without intrinsic nature and beyond the expression of word. There is no birth, no emerging, no arising, no name, no form, no substantial existence, no quantity, no boundary, no hindrance, and no obstruction. "(Miller) Similarly, the Heart Sutra states that, “Form does not differ from Emptiness, and Emptiness does not differ from Form.” These are, of course, just a few examples of many.
The goal of physics is to understand the elemental foundations of reality. As physicists and also biologists peel back layer after layer of existence, it is repeatedly found that the origins of all things recede into a single point. However, if we work forward instead of backward out of those layers, there is a question yet answered and equally as profound. Whitman asks us, “To be in any form, what is that?” and, What is a man anyhow? What am I? and what are you?” (“Song”). How is it that life exists? How is it that anything exists at all? What does it mean to be human? Whitman understood not only the center of all being, the place that each being was born from and share, but also how incredible it is to be, let alone to be a unique, sentient, living, breathing being. How wonderful and strange it is to look in the mirror and see an animated piece of the universe that experiences itself, that seems, perhaps, the hands and eyes of God.
An analogous concept can be found in many religions. The Hindu pantheon for example begins at the top with the triumvirate of first Brahma, the creator, then the complementary gods Vishnu, the preserver, and Shiva, the destroyer. Most other gods in the pantheon are avatars, or incarnations, of these three original gods. All gods and everything in the universe derived from the same underlying metaphysical principle called “Brahman,” the “eternal, conscious, irreducible, infinite, omnipresent, and the spiritual core of the universe of finiteness and change” (Britannica).
In Taoism the Taijitu symbol, better known in the West as “Yin and Yang,” represents the, “Principle of natural and complementary forces, patterns and things that depend on one another and do not make sense on their own.” (BBC). This duality of nature is necessary for the existence of the universe, as Whitman wrote, “lack one lacks both,” and the two forces are ultimately seen as aspects of the same unified whole of the Tao. Consider, for example, black and white film. A photograph could not exist were it not for the complementary shades of black and white. Darkness and light are not opposing forces, but work together to create an image. It is the diversity of complementary forces that create and harmonize the universe, make life possible, and that make each individual being very much the same and paradoxically unique. As Whitman describes it,
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.
Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex,
Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life. (Whitman)
Just as sages have intuited that human beings and all that exists was individuated from a singularity, the “great first nothing,” physicists have concluded that we stand here “with (our) robust souls” today because of the Big Bang; because a timeless, formless, super dense mass rapidly and forcefully expanded out, and over an unimaginable length of time developed into atoms, and then stars and galaxies. Biologists have come to the understanding that we evolved from and alongside the animal world; that they are in fact our ancestors and cousins, a theory that Whitman was on board with even before Darwin wrote The Origin of Species in 1859, evidence of this can be found in “Song of Myself.” He says that he sees in animals, “the same old law,” and later continues,
They bring me tokens of myself . . . . they evince them plainly in their possession.
I do not know where they got those tokens,
I must have passed that way untold times ago and negligently dropt them,
Myself moving forward then and now and forever,
Gathering and showing more always and with velocity,
Infinite and omnigenous and the like of these among them;
Not too exclusive toward the reachers of my remembrancers,
Picking out here one that shall be my amie,
Choosing to go with him on brotherly terms. (“Song”)
This is also similar to the Christian, Judaic and Islamic idea of all the universe being create by one god, and of all people being birthed from that god. In each of these cases, singularity became multiplicity, and all people are kin because they are connected back to that source. It is the resulting diversity as much as a shared core of being that gives life meaning. This paradox of self is what makes reality possible. It is what gives us diversity of life while connecting all beings. What scientists have not yet been able to answer is how the “bang” itself started, and how it is that the inanimate became animate, and then conscious. Are animation and consciousness even so different? At one point does an animate being become conscious? Again, this most profound of questions begs an answer: “To be in any form, what is that?”
Throughout his work, Whitman laces the idea that this timeless, spaceless reality is accessible through the individual; that this immovable center connects us all and seems to give life inherent meaning. In “Song of Myself,” Whitman writes that all of the external, human constructs, such as his dress and the books he has read, all of his troubles, and even all of the emotional turmoil he feels at times, is “not the Me myself” (“Song”). He concludes, “Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am.” Under the slight, if essential, differences of each individual being lay a common core. At the center of each being resides the infinite. This is the same as Hinduism’s belief in “Atman,” or the universal self. The Atman is commonly seen as indistinguishable from the metaphysical concept of Brahman, the only distinction being that the Atman is Brahman inside the individual self. This higher reality can only be accessed internally. As the Sufi poet Rumi writes, “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop,” and so, “Everything in the universe is within you. Ask all from yourself.”
Importantly, in both “Song of Myself” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Whitman notes that the immovable is shared between and connects all beings. In “Song of Myself,” Whitman begins I celebrate myself,/And what I assume you shall assume,/For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Within the poem, Whitman uses “I” as an all-encompassing term, leveling the false hierarchies and divisions between rich and poor, intellectual and laborer, man and woman, and people of high and low social status. He writes, “In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barleycorn less, And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.” He reminds the reader that each came from the same “lethargic mist,” and will return to it once more. Paradoxically, he knew that
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.
What is time to “the smallest sprout?” What is death to a flower? “What is it then between us?/What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?/ Whatever it is, it avails not-distance avails not, and place avails not.”
This point is one of the most essential to Whitman’s writing, and seemingly the skeleton key to his code of morality. Whitman both celebrates diversity and individuality, and simultaneously sees little separation between himself and the next human being. In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Whitman writes that each person furnishes his or her “parts toward eternity…toward the soul.” In other words, each plays their part and is essential to the whole, and all are karmically connected. All life is interaction, and therefor intertwined. If every being is of utmost value, and all life is intertwined, every single thought and action of an individual is of monumental importance. All beings must keep aware of their entanglement in the lives of others, and care for each other. In “Song of Myself” Whitman writes, “Agonies are one of my changes of garments;/I do not ask the wounded person how he feels . . . . I myself become the wounded person, /My hurt turns livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.”
While language is a most useful tool for understanding reality and its significance, it can also be a hindrance. Perhaps the duplicity of ways that humanity describes the universe are in fact in many ways more similar than believed, the truth at times getting lost in the vain attempt to perfectly capture the ineffable. This is not to diminish the belief of any person of faith or to reduce or change scientific discovery in any way, but an askance of an olive branch; a level-headed dialogue that is far too seldom had. Sometimes truth and understanding is found not through breaking reality into its component parts, although this too is vital, but by trying to find its center.
While the universe may seem stranger and stranger to the scientist, it makes more and more sense to the poet who has known the beautiful strangeness of the universe all along. Walt Whitman knew how to listen to the universe; he knew to let it speak through him instead of speaking for it. Perhaps Whitman was right to be so completely open to so many different perspectives and avenues of thought; that it is in this space where religions, philosophies, and the sciences meet that truth lie.
Citations
Aderin-Pocock, Maggie. “How Do We Know the Big Bang Actually Happened?” BBC IWonder, BBC, www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zgr7fg8.
BBC. “Religions - Taoism: Concepts within Taoism.” BBC, BBC, 12 Nov. 2009, www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/taoism/beliefs/concepts.shtml.
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Brahman.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 19 Feb. 2018,
www.britannica.com/topic/brahman-Hindu-concept.
Kane, Gordon. “Are Virtual Particles Really Constantly Popping in and out of Existence? Or Are They Merely a Mathematical Bookkeeping Device for Quantum Mechanics?” Scientific American, Scientific American, www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-virtual-particles-rea/.
Lao Tzu, and Yi-Ping Ong. Tao Te Ching. Edited by George Stade. Translated by Müller Charles, Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005.
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Emily Dickinson's "I heard a Fly buzz — when I died," at a Glance
(Informal Notebook Entry)
“I heard a Fly buzz” is a classic, and one of the poems that first got this reader interested in poetry. The fly seems an absurdity. What a thing to cast one’s focus on while in the throes of death. Its buzz feels like an existential question – the kind that perhaps every human being, even the most devout, asks on occasion throughout their lives, and once more on their deathbeds. The lines, “With Blue - uncertain - stumbling Buzz -/ Between the light - and me –,” certainly seems a more than apt description of doubt. The color blue has connotations of coldness and fear, all the more powerful a description in this synesthetic form used to describe the “buzz.” The flies hum lingers, perhaps annoyingly or disturbingly, in the back of the mind throughout life, and blocks out the light near death. Is there a God? Is there a heaven? Will I ever see my loved ones again? Or is this all there was to existence?
The lines “The Stillness in the Room/Was like the Stillness in the Air -/Between the Heaves of Storm –” are spectacular. There are many interpretations one could supply, including that of the emotional atmosphere in the room. The narrator has already put everything in order – taken care of all of the mundane, impersonal parts of the death business, having, “willed Keepsakes - Signed away/
What portion of (her) be.” Things of the earth stay on earth, becoming meaningless in death. It is clear that the people in the room have prepared themselves for the death of their loved one as, “The Eyes around - had wrung them dry -/And Breaths were gathering firm.” The person dying seems rather isolated and alone – set apart from life even before (s)he has finally departed from it. The death is expected, and so after the tears, everyone simply waits for death, the King, to come and take her away.
Beyond the room itself, these lines may also be interpreted as a feeling that one’s life does not end on earth. Perhaps the heaves of a storm are representative of heaven and earth. Personally, I like thinking of it as reincarnation. Heaven does not seem particularly storm-like, in my opinion, but life on earth certainly is. Death may very well be the thin edge between two existences.
The lines “The Stillness in the Room/Was like the Stillness in the Air -/Between the Heaves of Storm –” are spectacular. There are many interpretations one could supply, including that of the emotional atmosphere in the room. The narrator has already put everything in order – taken care of all of the mundane, impersonal parts of the death business, having, “willed Keepsakes - Signed away/
What portion of (her) be.” Things of the earth stay on earth, becoming meaningless in death. It is clear that the people in the room have prepared themselves for the death of their loved one as, “The Eyes around - had wrung them dry -/And Breaths were gathering firm.” The person dying seems rather isolated and alone – set apart from life even before (s)he has finally departed from it. The death is expected, and so after the tears, everyone simply waits for death, the King, to come and take her away.
Beyond the room itself, these lines may also be interpreted as a feeling that one’s life does not end on earth. Perhaps the heaves of a storm are representative of heaven and earth. Personally, I like thinking of it as reincarnation. Heaven does not seem particularly storm-like, in my opinion, but life on earth certainly is. Death may very well be the thin edge between two existences.
A 500 Word Analysis of Leaves of Grass
(Informal Notebook Entry)
Whitman was as receptive to ideas, experiences and people as soil is to rain. He absorbed all he could of the sciences, religious texts, philosophy and politics, and conversed with the uneducated as often as the educated. He listened to all people and things and spent much of his time closely observing the natural world. His reward was universal truth. Whitman’s openness, presence and awareness, and faith in intuition opened his eyes to the interconnectedness of the universe.
Though the law of conservation of energy was discovered thirteen years before Leaves of Grass, The Origin of Species was published four years after Leaves, a theory of everything wasn’t considered until the 1920s, the Big Bang Theory wasn’t discovered until 1948, and only one of these discoveries was established while others had yet to be imagined, Whitman had language layered throughout Leaves that predicted them all. We now know we all descended from a single source. Most every religion has its own language and symbols to indicate this, and now science has proven it true. In an unfathomably long prelude to our existence, elements that originated from the Big Bang traveled to this planet and eventually formed the first life. This life evolved into all living things, including our primitive ancestors. At some point, these ancestors took the symbolic bite of the “apple” that gave us a level of consciousness above other creatures. We were separated from the “garden” when we understood the concepts of “I” and “you.” The ego gave us intellectual advantage, but cut us off from our origins.
The truth Whitman unfolds repeatedly is that separation from the whole is an illusion. When we set ego aside, we catch glimpses of God. God isn’t necessarily a man in the sky, but whatever force set existence into motion and binds everything together by natural law. Egos aside, nature’s laws become clear. The true self is not the ego because the prism our consciousnesses construct to interpret the world is subjective and often inaccurate. The true self is infinite and eternal because it is cut from the fabric the universe which is infinite and eternal. Whitman knew the individual is sacred because all existence is sacred. All existence has immeasurable meaning because all is one. The universe and the lives in it can only be as they should be. All is whole, and all is good.
Whitman embodies the ideal poet because he was able to see the places all things meet. The eternal truths he found lie inside and all around us. They are there for anyone and everyone to take. If we are to become great poets ourselves, we must be receptive, accepting and full of love; we must let the universe speak through us instead of speaking for it.
Though the law of conservation of energy was discovered thirteen years before Leaves of Grass, The Origin of Species was published four years after Leaves, a theory of everything wasn’t considered until the 1920s, the Big Bang Theory wasn’t discovered until 1948, and only one of these discoveries was established while others had yet to be imagined, Whitman had language layered throughout Leaves that predicted them all. We now know we all descended from a single source. Most every religion has its own language and symbols to indicate this, and now science has proven it true. In an unfathomably long prelude to our existence, elements that originated from the Big Bang traveled to this planet and eventually formed the first life. This life evolved into all living things, including our primitive ancestors. At some point, these ancestors took the symbolic bite of the “apple” that gave us a level of consciousness above other creatures. We were separated from the “garden” when we understood the concepts of “I” and “you.” The ego gave us intellectual advantage, but cut us off from our origins.
The truth Whitman unfolds repeatedly is that separation from the whole is an illusion. When we set ego aside, we catch glimpses of God. God isn’t necessarily a man in the sky, but whatever force set existence into motion and binds everything together by natural law. Egos aside, nature’s laws become clear. The true self is not the ego because the prism our consciousnesses construct to interpret the world is subjective and often inaccurate. The true self is infinite and eternal because it is cut from the fabric the universe which is infinite and eternal. Whitman knew the individual is sacred because all existence is sacred. All existence has immeasurable meaning because all is one. The universe and the lives in it can only be as they should be. All is whole, and all is good.
Whitman embodies the ideal poet because he was able to see the places all things meet. The eternal truths he found lie inside and all around us. They are there for anyone and everyone to take. If we are to become great poets ourselves, we must be receptive, accepting and full of love; we must let the universe speak through us instead of speaking for it.