#linear time

[existennialmemes]

I'm stuck in the opposite of a Time Loop. Which I guess would just be the Linear Progression of Time. Does anybody know how to escape that?

I'd like a 5th dimensional perspective of time. You know, like where all possible futures and pasts exist simultaneously, infinitely folding in upon themselves with no regard for chronology.

That's the only relationship with Time I'm comfortable pursuing at this juncture.

[thriftstoresisyphus]

[mbharestuff]

holy shit, it's December? just like the character in Deltarune? how did Tricky Tony do this?

[mumblelard]

nothing i'd rather do but turn around or violet finns

[blackcrowing]

I recently started reading a book, which takes the time to talk about cultures that view time as circular as opposed to linear time for its premise. Here are a few of the really interesting points I took from it.

People who follow circular time fear the disruption of time/end of time

Rituals held at the turning points of the year (Fire festivals or solar festivals) are of two fold purpose. They are intended to magically insure that time WILL change to the next season and to cleanse the community of past ill luck/imbue them with future good luck.

When unnatural interventions to time happen (drought, solar eclipse, etc.) ritual 'resetting' of time must occur to put event back on a natural couse

These facts feel obvious once stated, but by virtue of thinking in linear time while following the Cosmology of circular time I've never really thought about them through this framing

[endlessandrea]

Diane di Prima, Revolutionary Letter #51

[haggishlyhagging]

The Neolithic farming communities had a nonlinear sense of time, believing that time began anew with each new year. The pregnant Mountain Mother gave birth in August when the seeds, spring-planted in her womb, had grown large. At that time the entire community came to be with her: the divine birth is the harvest of the wheat, and the first fruits were offered to the Goddess. Similar mysteries were enacted in Eleusis around Demeter, the Grain Mother. In Britain she was known as Bride, Ana, or Danu, and she was celebrated on her womb/mounds in August as late as the seventeenth century A.D. Great assemblies of witches traditionally gathered on Lammas Eve (August 1), the people believing that their welfare in the coming year depended on the performance of these sacred rites of the Corn Mother, or Harvest Queen. (The Christian church throughout Britain finally took drastic action against this "pagan cult worship." The Christian priesthood preaches linear, not cyclic time, hoping to separate "man" from the Goddess of Nature, and "God" from the great cosmic rhythms of creation. As many wise people have observed, the way to control human life is to control the rhythm of life. Pagan life was ruled by natural cyclic rhythms. The church opposed these female rhythms with linear-historic ones, thus trying to change human rhythm from natural to mechanical—which serves the industrial process but leaves human life and labor, including agricultural life and labor, quite alienated.)

-Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor. The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering The Religion of the Earth.

[tobiasdrake]

Very busy this weekend but I just wanted to pop in because I thought about it and I wanted to share a thing. I've always liked time travel. Everyone hates it, but I think it's fascinating. The trick with time travel is that it's kind of like magic: The rules are whatever the writer says they are, and that's it. That's all there is to it.

But what's fun with time travel is that writers often don't think of every single possible loophole or contingency or unintended ramification and so a lot of stuff winds up getting conceived that was never meant to exist in the story.

That brings me to my personal favorite piece of accidental time travel metaphysics: The Time Bastard Phenomenon.

What is Time Bastard? Well, it's something that doesn't happen quite so often anymore since modern writers are fascinated by Multiverse Theory. Time Bastard is actually one of many things that Multiverse Theory solves by being a story's working time model. Multiverse Theory has its own problems but at least it gets rid of all those Bastards running around!

Time Bastard is a consequence of linear time travel, one timeline no branches, existing alongside malleable history where the traveler is capable of changing the past. It's not actually something travelers do, so much as a byproduct of time traveling under this system. It's the process by which the traveler or Bastard murders themselves by traveling.

Consider Marty McFly of Back to the Future. Yeah, I know, that movie's pretty much an oldie now. I'M OLD. DEAL WITH IT. In the movie, Marty travels to the 60's and nearly causes his own birth to be unmade. He saves himself by getting his parents together. But in doing so, he changes the course of history.

When Marty returns to the present, he finds nothing the same as he left it. His family's successful now. The school bully works for his dad, who's no longer meek and helpless. And Marty has that cool truck he always wanted.

That's great for him. But what happened to the Other Marty? The Marty that was born into this timeline? The one that grew up with all of this being normal for him. The one that the new version of his parents knew. Where did he go?

Well. The answer is that he went into the past. He went to the 60's following Doc Brown's experiment. We know because when Marty returns to the present, that's still the same. Brown still gets assassinated, and Other Marty still escapes into the past. He just. Doesn't seem to have ever arrived.

He's gone. Wiped from existence by our Marty's act of time travel, the very act of time travel that made him. This is what I mean by a byproduct of linear time travel coexisting with malleable history. Because the story does not operate on Multiverse Theory, the Other Marty is simply.... Nothing.

He jumped in the DeLorean, gunned it into the past, and then he ceased to exist. Erased from his own body and replaced by the Time Bastard Marty, who arrived in the 60's with a completely different set of memories, orphaned from a timeline that no longer exists.

...

So, do you see why people love the Multiverse model so much instead? XD