Much as I am enjoying writing this blog free of the constraints of 1914-15 Time, I think long-term followers may understand when I say that I still think of my 1914-15 ‘blography’ of George as Calderonia proper.
Those followers will remember that several posts between July 2014 and July 2015 touched on what I called chronotopia (e.g. 12 September 2014, 8 December 2014, 30 March 2015, 18 June 2015). This word was intended to define the difficulty I had, as a biographer, of two-timing with time, viz. of writing the day-to-day 1914-15 blog strictly in ‘real time’ whilst continuing to write George Calderon: Edwardian Genius in extended narrated time. I don’t know if it was Bakhtin who invented the word ‘chronotope’, but it was certainly needed, to identify the different time/space forms that different genres of writing employ (‘temporalities’ has also been used). When I was trying to write in two chronotopes simultaneously, I felt that circuits in my brain kept shorting. Above all, the ‘real time’ chronotope of the blog kept infecting my writing of the book, sapping its narrative propulsion, until faute de mieux I gave up writing the book for five months, concentrating on completing research for the last two chapters, which I started writing only when Calderonia proper was over.
When I said that I felt it was my brain that couldn’t cope with writing in these two chronotopes simultaneously, I was aware that I was speaking metaphorically, since I have, of course, no idea of how my own brain physically works. I was also very ready to believe that younger writers’ brains would be more able to two-time than a sixty-eight-year-old’s. But in the course of working on something quite different, I have just read a short article by Dr Detlef B. Linke, Professor of Clinical Neurophysiology and Neurosurgical Rehabilitation at Bonn University, which — in so far as I can understand it — seems to suggest there is empirical evidence for my metaphorical hypothesis.
Dr Linke begins his article by stating that ‘there is no common pacemaker by which intervals of time could be defined in the brain. […] The data demonstrate that the brain is not a clock in the physiological sense’. The brain has developed ‘different time-scales’ for itself, partly through ‘imaginative capabilities’ according to German Idealist philosophers (which I daresay Bakhtin would agree with), but:
Too much rhythmic synchronization is deleterious for informational content, and generalized rhythmic synchronization of the brain is a well-known pathological condition. The question of informational coding therefore has to be seen as a complex system of time-scales in which a complete presence of all the information would destroy the complex hierarchical and heterarchical interactions.
Polychronotopia, then, can cause a complete brainstorm… To complicate matters further, ‘for the right hemisphere, the flow of time is experienced as slower than for the left hemisphere’. Could this mean that two-timing with the narrative-biography-chronotope (slower) and the real-time-chronotope (faster) is a question of repeatedly switching from one hemisphere to the other, which some brains might be better at than others? Linke even seems to suggest that ‘a part of biography […] belongs to the way from the right to the left hemisphere’. He concludes, encouragingly:
Reflection takes time and therefore makes a difference to the passing of time. […] I think this difference need not be painful but it can, instead, be taken as the possibility of the brain being a host to others. There are good reasons to keep up differences and time-scales when they could be the origins for better contact with alterity. But the question of unity therefore remains, especially the question of the ability of being a host while being preserved in unity.
This begs a few questions, and sounds to me as though it may have been translated from German by someone whose native language is not the target one, but it’s still interesting, I find, coming from someone who is described as a ‘brain scientist’ and clearly works with measurable data, unlike myself who can merely speculate.
The full reference for this article is: Detlef Linke, ‘The Lord of Time: Brain Theory and Eschatology’, in The End of the World and the Ends of God, ed. by John Polkinghorne and Michael Welker (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Trinity Press International, 2000), pp. 42-46.
Last year in Calderonia, John Dewey, the author of Mirror of the Soul: A Life of the Poet Fyodor Tyutchev (2010), and I discussed the tristesse that a biographer often experiences when the subject of their biography has died in the text, so to speak. Since s/he has always known the subject is dead, and the death in the text being written rarely coincides with any commemorative date, we speculated that the tristesse/mourning is also connected with something happening in the brain as that very personal ‘time-track’ comes to an end.
Since then Dewey has published a much-needed collection, in his own elegant English translation, of stories by Yevgeniy Zamyatin, the bracing ‘first dissident’ Soviet writer; see http://www.brimstonepress.co.uk/books/detail/YZ-TheSignAndOtherStories.htm . In my first post next week I shall look at the possibility that there is a link between Zamyatin and George; whilst endeavouring to avoid both apophenia and pareidolia.
For the archive of posts since 31 July 2015, please click here.
What a fascinating phenomenon this chronotopia is! It must be unusual (perhaps unique?) for a biographer to run a day-to-day blog on their subject at the same time as writing the biography, so perhaps you’re the first to have encountered it. The article you quote (rather impenetrable to me, I must admit) suggests further research by neurologists could yield exciting results for understanding exactly how time works in biographical and other narratives