A short little riff today, just a few ideas to consider.

[ELP \\ Take a Pebble]

First You Make a Stone of Your Heart

Part II

C2.1

There is a rhythm to life, and to death, and perhaps there is purpose in the rhythm.

C2.2

Time, like an arrow. 

Like red and orange leaves drifting on a cool autumn breeze; their life under the warming sun has come and gone – and now they are left to drift along gray cobblestones, waiting.

But the arrow does not care about the passage of time, and who knows what leaves feel?

Time, in the human realm, had almost always been a relative measurement; when the sun was highest in the sky it was midday – and that worked – most of the time. When the smallest human settlements formed, clusters of buildings encircled open areas where sundials measured noon, and soon enough markets and trade fairs developed in these open areas. Time became an organizing principle even though time was still relative to place; the sun might be highest overhead at noon along the banks of the Thames estuary while along the banks of the Rhein it would already be mid-afternoon.

But that relativity was hardly worth a passing thought. There was no need for such precise measurements of time as most humans lived their entire lives within a few miles of their birthplace. 

Mariners at sea were the first to need a standardized locus of time. While it was easy enough to determine a vessel’s latitude by taking a single measurement of the sun’s angle above the horizon at local noon, deriving that vessels longitude was another matter. The globe had to be partitioned into 360 degrees, and time at zero degrees longitude had to be precisely known for meaningful calculations of local longitude to be made.

At that same approximate point in time, iron horses began pacing along evenly spaced rails, and soon enough both passengers and freight began moving faster than humans had ever moved before. Interconnecting railway lines converged at distant stations and soon enough railway companies, as well as their agents and passengers, needed accurate timetables, and for those tables to provide meaningful information local sundials would no longer suffice. Clocks, and clock towers, began to appear as humans continued to redefine their relationship to time. In time, the telegraph and then radio waves sent out their standardized time hacks, for the first time allowing coordinated human activities to occur over distances unimaginable even a few decades before. Traders in New York City could coordinate their economic activities with their counterparts in Tokyo or London almost as easily as they could converse with neighbors across the street. 

Time, in a sense, was no longer relative to place, and man’s understanding of his place in the cosmos began to change.

+++++

An old man walks along a waterfront crowded with merchant ships; the night is still and a thick fog is settling over the water in the bay. Sailors sing shanties in distant taverns and horses seem to sleep in their harnesses, waiting for the whip. Streetlights cast flickering pools of light on damp cobblestones as fallen leaves gather in gutters, while amber light bathes the scene in sepias and gold. Cargo from the latest ship to berth is being unloaded into horse drawn carts, and a handful of passengers walk down the gangplank and gather in the pools of light, and as it has been a rough passage most seem more than grateful to be back on land. 

The old man watches these passengers intently before disappearing among the leaves and shadows; a blue sphere no larger than a Danish kroner hovers over the ship, it’s sensors focused on just one of the passengers, a rather pleasant woman in her twenties.

The ship had just arrived from Königsberg, perhaps a half hour ago, and while the woman feels more tired than she ever has before, there is a hopeful patina of joy covering her lingering fatigue. She is a music teacher, yet in her heart of hearts she longs to write symphonies; she has been engaged to teach piano at a school for girls in the heart of Copenhagen, but even now she longs to travel on to Paris. Her name is Anna Regina Kant, and she was born in the small coastal city of Memel, just north of Königsberg. She has recently graduated after studying music at the university in Königsberg, and this at a time when few women gained admission to such schools, but there had been no denying her gift. Even now, as fog pressed in from the harbor and as sailors back to their ships, she felt the possible frameworks of a new composition taking shape in her mind, for in everything she found music – but most especially the sea. Still, she could not break free of the black and white ‘whales’ that had frolicked beside their ship for hours earlier that day, because one of them had seemed to stare at her for time without end.

As she stepped from the gangplank onto the bricked walkway beside the ship she looked for a carriage from the school, for they had promised that a representative would be on hand to help her out to the school’s grounds. She had all her worldly possessions with her, all that would fit into two steamer trunks, anyway, and as she had no desire to return home again, she had included all her earliest compositions.

So she felt some modest relief when a carriage pulled up and a young man called out her name. Her trunks were located and loaded atop the carriage, and soon she is on her way into the city.

And curiously, no one noticed a small sphere hovering over the wharf, even as the young woman in the carriage looked out over the harbor – where a large male orca circled patiently in the night.

The old man looked after her carriage as it rattled away from the wharf. After the carriage was out of sight he turned to the creature standing by his side and sighed.

“And so it begins. Again,” the Old Man said quietly, patiently.

“Yes. Again,” the creature said. He stood just more than two meters tall, his skin was the purest white, and his name was Pak. “We cannot fail.” 

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