I’ve made good so far of my new commitment to write a chapter/song a week until I’m finished with Book 1. Yesterday I finished Chapter 6, a song that will bare (bear?) the title of something like “Revelations” or “Something or other about truth.” I’m excited to play this one live ’cause it packs a lot of emotion and it’s a fun, upbeat, trancy sort of track… except that it’s in 6/8 time. Trust me though, it’s good fun. Very danceable. I’ve been contemplating writing chapter 7 in 5/4 time, but we’ll see.
I’ve been thinking about time again lately, mainly because a friend of mine (Jake Pawlowski) who brought up a theory of his about it. He also mentioned that he found out that someone already came up with it and called it something like “The Now” theory. It;s kind of the curse of all mankind; If you have a great idea someone probably already thought of it. I think my inter/intra reality theory is great, but I’m sure someone’s already thought of it and published it under another name. Oh well. At least we’re figuring these things out ourselves, right? Anyway, the idea of time has always confused me, or at least as it is always presented. It seems like everyone thinks of it as a physical thing. Like we’re in a car moving down a road and if we could just figure out how to turn around we could go back in time to where we were. But, in my complete uneducatedness, this is what I think. Time is just a handy notion that we’ve created to give order to past, present, and future events. It’s like a measurement, but one that’s easily distorted. I could be wrong, but I think we measure time by the decay rate of atoms, or something like that. The problem is that this rate of decay is significantly altered under certain conditions, like intense gravity sources. I’ve heard it said that in a black hole the gravity is, theoretically, so much stronger that it speeds the passing of time. So if someone could go into a black hole and come back out, we outside of the the black hole might have only experienced a day, while the guy who went in had experienced a year. I may be totally misunderstanding the whole concept, so correct me if I’m way off here, but it seems like this is wrong. I don’t think that the guy inside would have experienced more time as we think of it, but perhaps his body would be more decayed. It’s more like the device for measuring the passing of “time” is becoming distorted. Let’s say you have a plastic cup you are using to measure out flour. If you apply a flame to it will start to warp and maybe stretch, making the cup’s capacity grow. But the flour inside the cup remains the same amount, well… unless it catches fire or something. But the point is that stretching out the cup doesn’t multiply the contents. The way we measure “time” is faulty because it is not a constant. My friends idea, the “Now” idea, is that it’s just always now. The past only exists in our memories. It’s not a physical place that we can go back to, and the future is not a physical place that we can go forward to. All there is is now. Time is just an artificial construct made by movement. Even if we could make things exactly like they were in 1600 B.C. it still would just be a xerox of the original, and it would still be the present. Anyway, that last part was Jacob’s thinking, but it fits in pretty well with my theory.
Was that as long as the last journal post? Sorry if I broke my promise to not make this one so long.