And Time Goes by So Slowly

'Unchained Melody' by the Righteous Brothers is a beautiful song. I don't really know enough about music to talk about time signatures, but I love songs like that, where each chord is a lilting arpeggio of 6 notes. 'For Your Precious Love' by Otis Redding, 'Last Kiss' by Taylor Swift, 'Hallelujah' by Jeff Buckley, 'Sanctus' from Fauré's Requiem, and, of course, possibly the most beautiful song ever written, Schubert's 'Ave Maria'. If you can collect enough of them, put on some headphones with a playlist of them and close your eyes. That class of song, they are irrefutably utterly beautiful. There must be something very specific about that rhythm for so many disparate songs to achieve the same effect.

So in amongst its kin, 'Unchained Melody' is probably third after 'Ave Maria' and 'For Your Precious Love'. What brings it to my mind to highlight is a section which, musically, just blows my mind every time. It's that bit near the beginning which goes '... such a long lonely time / and time goes by / so slowly / and time can do so much'. The emotion in those dulcet tones as the first stanza glides into the second really does one on the heart-strings.

However.


There's some cognitive dissonance in my sentimentality towards that short section of verse which so affects me and plays on my mind so frequently. While I agree with the emotion, and the melody, and the sentiment, I can't agree with the meaning. 'And time goes by-y-y so slo-o-owly'. Does it now? As far as I'm aware time seems to zip past with the nonchalance of the speeding truck which almost drags you off the pavement with its slipstream or the bus which covers you head to toe in filthy puddle-water on an already rainy day on the walk to work.

Maybe it doesn't help that recently I've been reading all kinds of books set all over the place (and time), so in effect I feel as though I've lived several lifetimes in the past few weeks. Yes, I may have helped Tom Jericho solve the U-boats' Enigma while out-sleuthing a spy in Bletchley Park, but as I return the book to a shelf all that's been achieved is depriving that title of its right to stare indignant 'why haven't you read me yet' daggers at me from across the room. Apart from that? The effect of those fictional lives (and real lives, biography is a genre I read) is to remind me that in a week Tom Jericho saved Britain and the Allies and the world, and in the 3 barely perceptible days it took me to read of his exploits I...

I had a dream on Thursday night, the night before I started writing this. A lie, I had two. Again a lie, psychology tells me I had thousands of dreams last night to enhance my ability to subconsciously handle circumstances, but forgot most of them during the night.  Those fleeting cerebral zips of phoney experiential data only last seconds yet seem to have lasted as much as a normal lifetime (just ask Leonardo DiCaprio) - remember that, especially for the second dream. The first was very clearly a nightmare, an awareness of being pursued with that rising sense of helplessness which tips a nightmare into an oblivion of fear. I don't have nightmares very often at all, but (or perhaps because) I can recognise that gathering crescendo of terror and wake myself up.

Of course waking up in a silent, dark room doesn't really help to dispel any creeping sense of dread, and falling back asleep without altering one's state of mind would just plunge one straight back into the suffocating, ethereal quicksand you just managed to scramble out of. Hardly ideal. Besides my first trick of escaping a nightmare, I have another for avoiding reentry - to hold an image in my mind and to keep it as pure and uncorrupted by other images (read: images conducive to nightmares) as possible. This effort is tiring but blissful, and creates a nightmare-free drift off to sleep somewhere near where 'Ave Maria' or 'Unchained Melody' would take me. Normally this wouldn't lead to any dreams, just waking up mildly thankful for a nightmare-free night, but on this occasion it did.

How you are in a dream is presumably how you have always been. The dream state feels like a continuation of your life at present, so the circumstance must be justified by extrapolating a dream-life before the dream. You don't realise you're doing this while dreaming - for example 'of course I'm holding this gun and running after that man, I've always been an FBI agent'. My second dream that night wasn't particularly mind-blowing, just blissful: a life, slightly more serene, more happy, more perfect than the one I currently live in. Now one must remember that in dreams what affects you as much as the events of the dream itself, or in this case more than the dream itself, is the emotional ambience which arises from the extrapolated dream-life. Imagine it as an alien atmosphere which engulfs you as you sleep, permeating from which are the emotions which give rise to the events of the dream. In the case of Thursday night an atmosphere equivalent to the air at sunset in summertime Italy, exuding contentment.

Then my alarm went off and that atmosphere evaporated like a spot of milk in a cup of coffee. Reluctantly reaching over to my phone to turn it off, I made two observations. First, I saw that it was 7 o'clock, and then I also saw that it was fucking June. What struck me was not the present time per se, more the time which had apparently evaporated without me noticing, day-to-day life had been the magician's cloth hiding the inexplicable disappearance of the block of time since the last big temporal landmark, the end of performances for Henry IV and the start of my gap year last September. I was struck by an epiphany of underachievement on the realisation that my first year as an independent adult had passed almost entirely by unremarkable - the insult added to the injury being the awareness that I hadn't achieved what I had in the dream, which had seemed fair enough while I was in it. A year suddenly solidified into meaning, became a quantifiable thing. A physical, observable thing which only became physical and observable as it passed and was irretrievably lost. Hence, I was up before 7:15 on Friday morning doing work on my TEFL qualification, frantically trying to get back some of the untapped achievement from the past year.

Time is not a river, it is a torrential waterfall. One is not borne down the current of passing time, one falls from second to second, from day to day, without the consciousness of that movement. To quote my favourite film, 'They say if you slow your breathing, time slows down,' which is true in a way: you can slow down time in the moment if you find something to secure yourself in there, momentarily. Nonetheless time has still moved around it, and while you cling to it you can observe afterwards that the lip of the waterfall is still further up and away than it was before. Ozymandias' spatial empire of stone crumbled in time, but a temporal empire is made of moments and days and years, of acts and events threaded through a four dimensional embroidery in living tapestry thread. Time, life, is in this way the most spectacular of aerobatic acts, trying to find what you can to do with a height of time as you fall through it when all that's visible is the space behind you, not what you're plunging into. Engage with life and you spread your arms and twirl beautifully in mid-air, space out for an hour and you nose-dive into terminal velocity. How do I pass time correctly, when time is so focussed on passing me?