Tom Wolfe on Ken Kesey on time

I found this interesting, and I found it here. We completely take it for granted that we live in “the present” and yet everything we perceive is a split second behind reality because of the transmission lag in our nerves. This means that for tasks like catching a ball the brain has to employ some interesting trickery so that our hand reaches the ball and not the place it was 1/30 of a second ago. I wonder if babies have to learn this? I rather suspect they do.

In this brief excerpt from The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test, the novelist Wolfe describes the mind-set of writer and counter-cultural guru Ken Kesey. Kesey, who died in 2001, was the author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion, two novels that defined American life in the 1960’s. (“The Movie” mentioned in the excerpt was never finished.)

The Movie Of Our Life, Tom Wolfe

A person has all sorts of lags built into him, Kesey used to say. One, the most basic, is the sensory lag, the lag between the time your senses receive something and you are able to react. One-thirtieth of a second is the time it takes, if you’re the most alert person alive, and most people are a lot slower than that. Now, Cassady is right up against that 1/30th of a second barrier. He is going as fast as a human can go, but even he can’t overcome it. He is a living example of how close you can come, but it can’t be done. You can’t go any faster than that. You can’t through sheer speed overcome the lag. We are all of us doomed to spend our lives watching a movie of our lives — we are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we’re in the present, but we aren’t. The present we know is only a movie of the past, and we will never be able to control the present through ordinary means. That lag has to be overcome some other way, through some kind of total breakthrough. And there are all sorts of other lags, besides, that go along with it. There are historical and social lags, where people are living by what their ancestors or somebody else perceived, and they may be twenty–five or fifty years or centuries behind, and nobody can be creative without overcoming all those lags first of all. A person can overcome that much through intellect or theory or study of history and so forth and get pretty much into the present that way, but he’s still going to be up against one of the worst lags of all, the psychological. Your emotions remain behind because of training, education the way you were brought up, blocks, hang- ups and stuff like that, and as a result your mind wants to go one way but your emotions don’t –

… … Everybody, everybody everywhere, has his own movie going, his own scenario, and everybody is acting his movie out like mad, only most people don’t know that is what they’re trapped by, their little script. Everybody looks around inside the tent and nobody says it out loud, because nobody has to. Yet everybody knows at once ::::::::: somehow this ties in, synchs directly with what Kesey has just said about the movie screen of our perceptions that closes us out from our own reality :::::::::: and somehow synchs directly, at the same time, in this very moment, with the actual, physical movie, The Movie, that they have been slaving over the morass of a movie, with miles and miles of spiraling, spliced-over film and hot splices billowing around them like so many intertwined, synched but still chaotic and struggling human lives, theirs, the whole fucking world’s — in this very moment — Cassady in his movie, called Speed Limit, he is both a head whose thing is speed, meaning amphetamines, and a unique being whose quest is Speed, faster godamn it, spiraling, jerking, kicking, fibrillating tight up against the 1/30 of a second movie-screen barrier of our senses, trying to get into … Now — …

One Response to “Tom Wolfe on Ken Kesey on time”

1. RogerHyam says:

   February 25, 2009 at 7:34 am

   I like time. I like thinking about and of time. I find it one of the most useful tools to focus when sitting. You only have to be aware of the anticipation of a bell and the whole room-world comes live. There is suddenly space, metta and joy.

   A great general read on the time lag in our lives is Tor Nørretranders (1998). The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size. Viking. ISBN 0-670-87579-1. Bit long winded but one of those books I bought copies of to give to friends.

   There is a wonderful series of talks by a Japanese guest speaker to http://www.dharmafield.org/ that I down loaded when I had a subscription. I don’t even know the guys name. He spoke on D?gen’s notion of Uji in the Shobogenzo. Uji is usually translated as “time present” but he discussed it as meaning “time-being” and expanded on our separate notions of time and being as illusion.

   My feeling is that because every thought and action is foisted on us just before we are aware of it there seems to be little hope for free will – only the illusion of it – but because things arise in dependence on conditions we can influence what thoughts arise and what actions are taken by carefully developing meta and mindfulness. It is how the experiences are filed in our heads that effects subsequent actions not momentary free will. This gives a moral duty to meditate and keep oneself well for the benefit of all. To pass on the Dharma and infect other heads.

   It would take a tremendous spiritual leap to fully accept that we are not the autonomous beings we think. I find the thought of it both comforting and exciting – perhaps a route to liberation?