July 15th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Husserl suggested that our experience of the present, the moment of ‘now’, contains fragments of the past and the future, and that it was this smearing of the present across the timeline which allows us to experience music in its continuity, rather than as a series of disconnected notes. Recent studies into consciousness and the experience of the present seem to confirm Husserl’s model and to suggest that the extent of this smearing tends to be around one third of a second. This small section of duration we experience all and once and could be said to constitute the fourth dimension of awareness. Although the sense of now is usually of about this duration certain circumstances can alter this figure such that the moment of now becomes longer or shorter. It has been shown, for example, that at moments of extreme stress the duration of these moments of perceptual unity, these quanta of time, are dramatically shortened. We experience this shortening as a heightened attention to detail and an apparent slowing down of time’s passing. This slowing is a product of our effectively fitting more subjective moments of now into the same period of clock time. Conversely to this shortening of the present caused by stress, we can also suggest that now can be extended such that, instead of having a duration of less than half a second, now might extend over several seconds, or possibly even longer. An extended period of now would, to pursue Husserl’s example, allow for one’s experience of music as a holistic continuous experience, to extend beyond the small gap between one not and the next and into the silence which follows the gradual decay of the final chord.
Close your eyes and listen a piece of music; Debussy perhaps, or Ravel, something in which the closing notes are widely separated and pregnant with significance. Let the music wash over you and through you permeate the space inside you and the space outside you. And when the music is finished open your eyes.
In all likelihood, if the music is well chosen, you will not open your eyes the moment the echoes of the last note drop below the range of human hearing, but will keep them closed for some seconds after. During those seconds, even though no sound is being made and no sound is about to be made, the music is still proceeding. Or more accurately your contribution to the music is still proceeding. You are sitting with eyes closed in an active state of listening when there is nothing to listen to, attentive to the sounds that are not being made.
This listening is not waiting; you are not impatient for the next note to be played and will not be disappointed or surprised when the silence continues. Quite the reverse, a pre-emptive interuption to this silence would intrusive and inappropriate.
As noted above, when the length of now is shortened it has the effect of allowing time to apparently pass more slowly and also to permit greater attention to detail. When the length of now is lengthened we might expect it to have complementary effects. As the duration of now is extended (and this can be achieved through meditation for example) there is not a sense of time speeding up but one does begin to experience the passage of time differently. Subjectively it does not feel as if time is ‘passing’ at all, the beats of each moment of now are too far apart to give this quality of time’s movement. Rather one feels that each moment of now is endless and eternal; one is immersed in the immensity of time. Along with this (admittedly paradoxical) feeling of timelessness there is a lessening of attention to detail and difference, and a greater awareness of pattern and unity. So one might experience the growth of a plant not as a series of detailed moments but as an entirety, the whole lifecycle becoming apprehensible simultaneously within a single present moment.
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