“If we’re approaching the concrescence, defined as the ever-accelerating coming together of disparate phenomena into a kind of singularity”, Wolf said, “that means time itself is actually speeding up. Dopler Effect, Zootch.”
Wolf paused to relight a half-burned cigarette that had been stationed at the corner of his mouth for roughly ten minutes. There was something particularly jagged and feral about him today. This was due in large part to his hair – a dense, gravity defying mane that he had carved into a mohawk the night before while hopped up on beer and another substance he referred to cryptically as ‘The Great Googly Moogly’. But there was also something in the eyes, Asiatic and darting furtively in the angled, late afternoon light of a hot and clear September day.
He continued, smoke drifting from his nostrils, “And what follows, dig, is that actual productivity per actual man hour is dropping rapidly, because an hour isn’t what it used to be.”
Point, counterpoint. We were thanking god it was Friday – yielding to routine, cerebral jibber-jabber.
I countered, “But efficiency per man hour has increased on average, which sort of compensates for the time crunch. We’re under the illusion that time remains constant, because we’re getting done in half an hour what would have taken our ancestors an hour. Our half hour equalling one of their hours, you see, and feeling like an hour from our relative perspective because we’ve gotten x amount of shit done – a lot of shit – and how do you get that much shit done in a half hour?” I made a broad sweeping gesture of the imperial variety with my right hand. “It must’ve been an hour. The fucking clock, after all, still says an hour.”
Wolf raised a skeptical eyebrow and took a philosophical drag off his cigarette.
Through a billowing cloud of grey-blue smoke, he said, “You speak of productivity gains, but what are we really getting done in this day and age? How many people out there get home from work at the end of the day, crack a beer, and ask themselves, what the fuck did I actually do today?”
I said, “We’re moving faster, we’re getting more shit done, man. And you look at the clock and an hour has passed. Our systems of measurement are themselves speeding up because they exist within the world of phenomena not outside it – they’re subject to the same time-crunch that phenomenon in general is subject to. The clocks and calendars of this world are keeping pace, know what I’m saying. If we could snatch a moment of cosmological objectivity, you’d see that the hands of your kitchen clock are actually ticking away faster than clocks of the 1950s.”
Wolf continued to smoke, staring intently at a brick wall about two metres away.
He said, “You crack into that second or third beer. You acknowledge how fast you’ve been moving, and you think, for someone who has been moving so fast all day, what the fuck of import actually happened? Did you sit in traffic for three hours? Did you analyze statistics for the new strategic internal communications plan that may or may not be implemented in the year 2013?”
“It’s a strange thought to think, that the clocks keep pace with the overarching time crunch. That as we move faster, the clocks move faster, at roughly the same rate of acceleration – keeping our perception of the crunch just below the surface of consciousness.”
Wolf approached the wall tentatively – as if it was an unidentified flying object docking in his backyard, and he approached it with measured steps, hand extended, in what seemed like a benign attempt to make first contact. He pressed his index finger against one of the myriad rust-coloured bricks, an action that carried a symbolic weight incongruous with the context. It was Friday, we had successfully completed the job, we were thanking god on account of it being Friday in a similar manner that we usually thank god on each and every Friday – and here was Wolf communing with the inanimate.
“You’d think – and this is the funny thing,” he said. “That if the concrescence is really happening, like we all know it is, and that time is being crunched, which is what it feels like is happening, intuitively speaking …”
Wolf paused to run his index finger along the mortar joints surrounding the brick, which he circumambulated three times before regaining his train of thought.
“Following your logic,” he continued, “you’d think that because the time crunch is operating on an exponential curve, at some point we’ll be getting so much shit done in x amount of time that x will seem longer than it actually is. Because the human brain is hard wired, dig, to equate a certain amount of activity with a certain amount of time passing.”
I considered this a moment, squinting in the slanted light of an ecstatically bright mid-September day.
“Like we’ve crammed so much shit into an hour that it will begin to feel like an hour and fifteen or an hour and thirty minutes,” I said.
“But this is all depending -”
“This, buddy, is when the time crunch reaches a rate of acceleration that surpasses our capacity to correlate it to what we have traditionally experienced as the rough constancy of time,” I said, with a kind of robotic flair. “This is when the clocks can’t keep pace – or they keep pace, but only superficially. We start to suspect that they’re no longer up to the task.”
“But this is all depending on whether anything actually gets done. Shit is speeding up, but what is happening, what is getting done? My brother-in-law is a strategic analyst for a management consulting firm, he’s currently working on a tactical work flow plan for a company that develops stock derivatives. He goes to the gym and plays squash in a sterile, white-walled room with a look on his face like he’s supremely pissed off about something. Without real shit getting done, are we going to experience the hour on that lagging clock like an hour fifteen or is it going to feel like the same old hour? Is it going to feel like 45 minutes even?”
Pondering his own question, Wolf shouldered in close to the wall, then pivoted, facing it squarely, his nose brushing up against the sacralized brick. He stared intently, projecting onto the brick his loose grasp of quantum mechanics, perhaps conjuring a flashback of a turn of the century mushroom trip.
“If I had an electron microscope,” he said, his voice reverberating off the unyielding surface of the wall, “I’d tell you right now that these brick molecules here are vibrating at a higher frequency than when they were laid by Italian immigrants in the 1960s. Frequencies are rising, but you finish that sixth beer at the end of the day after working on a Request For Proposal from a state-owned Chinese company looking to mine uranium in Saskatoon …”
“So what you’re saying, in effect, is what?”
Wolf was speaking directly to the brick now, he said, “This is a company looking to manage their message online in a staunchly Canadian context. The uranium is strictly for clean energy and a better tomorrow.”
“Are you saying tomorrow will be faster or slower? Or will tomorrow be what the Chinese propagandists say it will be – that tomorrow will be better than today.”
Wolf leaned slightly from the wall, arcing his head back, creating the required space between him and the wall to successfully bring his cigarette to his mouth and take a drag. He exhaled slowly, directing a steady stream of smoke against the brick, the brick that had been singled out and deified by the Wolf – a million or more microscopic collisions in the effort.
He said, “This company is grappling with major issues – there’s going to be slurry out the yin-yang as a result of the intensive nature of uranium mining. They’re going to build a series of tailings ponds in downtown Saskatoon and they’re going to have to manage the message. And the guy responsible for managing the message, at the end of the day, when he’s polishing off beer number eight, he’s going to say to himself, a bunch of shit occurred today but what actually got done?”
There was a momentary fissure in the surreal and slanted mid-September light, in the high pressure system sweeping the area, that seemed to give this conversation direct access to the upper reaches of the stratosphere.
I responded dryly, “He’ll have managed the message faster, from the perspective of the cosmological constant, than the spin doctors of the late 1990s.”
Into all that subatomic empty space in the brick he mumbled, “Tomorrow will be better.”
