CONCEPT: TIMELESS

“Time is a river that drags me, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mauls me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that devours me, but I am the fire”

Jorge Luis Borges

“All this for a bit of wordplay, for a bit of anachronism: a misery. Will there never be a way out?”

Raymond Queneau

There is the time of physics, where an object moves from point a to point b, or that of a ray of light imprinted on a negative, to represent a supposed ‘reality’. There is the time of relativity, which depends on the observer. There is the time of logic, of ‘cause and effect’, and historical time, which investigates human progress. It is a time which unfolds like a scroll: it has a beginning, it will have an end. Then there is the time of life, which for Henri Bergson is a ball of thread, an avalanche: each instant contains in its entirety the whole of the past and has in it the germs of the future, and this time is not calculated in minutes or even years. It is an inner, intuitive time, not only memory, but above all unconscious. 

It’s just in this time – no clock can measure it- that intuition, the creative act, takes place. It happens perhaps in a dream, or in a double dream, like the one that in Queneau’s Les Fleurs bleues links the anti-historical hero Duke D’Auge and the indolent Cidrolin, who lies idle on a barge along the Seine. Each in falling asleep dreams of the other. But if Cidrolin dreams of the Duke, he wakes up a few hours later, in an eternal present, when the Duke dreams of Cidrolin, he wakes up 175 years later: from the Middle Ages he moves on to the Renaissance, the French Revolution, until their absurd meeting in 1964.

What is the meaning of History, of time passing? To what inscrutable end does it aim? At their meeting, the two dreamers find their way out: from their own history, but also from universal History, in search of an impossible utopia of freedom. The contemporary image has now lost its role as a representation of reality, it has no before or after. It is a theatrical representation in which the unity of time, place and action has been lost. Yet it does not cease to provide us with its meaning, because, as Bergson said: «Life is always creation, unpredictability and at the same time integral and automatic preservation of all the past».

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