Being in the Now: Zips and Trumpets

October 3rd, 2006 Fred McVittie Posted in Husserl, Edmund, Time, Universe |

The moment of ‘now’, a perception which, according to Husserl, also contains the no-longer-now of the recent past, and the not-yet-now of the anticipated future, is clearly not a symmetrical moment. We move from a singular past in which events have already been experienced and can therefore be retrodicted with absolute certainty, and we move into a future which becomes increasingly unpredictable the further into that future we project. The past is singularly solid, the future is a ‘blinding mirage’ of multiplicities. The moment of now, containing fragments of past and future within itself, must therefore also contain to some degree this difference. If we could visualise or graph the now we could see each corpuscular moment, each perception of now, as having a polarity; the end directed toward the past narrowing to an infinitely fine point representing the singularity of past events, the end pointing toward the future flaring out like a trumpet representing the increasingly multiple universes of possibility. Or we might imagine it not like a trumpet but like a zip fastener, the cloth of the distant future infinitely separate and the cloth of the past permanently united. As our perception of the now proceeds the universe is zipped up around us, perpetually cocooning us in the present.