Barbara F. Lefcowitz

Amber, Water, and the Dauer Formation

"And thus though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run. 11

                                                                    —Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"

"For it is not possible to step twice into the same river,

according to Heraclitus, nor to touch mortal substance twice

in any condition:

by the swiftness and speed of its change, it scatters and

collects itself again—or rather,

it is not again and later but simultaneously that it comes

together and departs,

approaches and retires."

                           —Plutarch, Oti the E at Delplii 392B

            In the snapshot of my year‑old grandson I received in the mail today, I have just thrust forward the swing in which he sits; a week later now and more than 200 miles south of that Central Park swing I can hear his sheer delight, his small hands clutching the swing's chains just before it begins to move back to its original position, only to be thrust forward again by his grandmother. But in the snapshot itself the swing will always and forever remain in its forward, most exciting position, always on the brink of its backward trajectory. The stopped clock; the stilled swing; milk pouring from a pitcher held by a Vermeer milkmaid, the pitcher never to empty: our perception of all such images marks our

ultimately doomed efforts to halt the passage of time, even if move back to its original position' only to be thrust forward again by his grandmother. But in the snapshot itself the swing will always and forever remain in its forward, most exciting position, always on the brink of its backward trajectory.

            The stopped clock; the stilled swing; milk pouring from a pitcher held by a Vermeer milkmaid, the pitcher never to empty: our perception of all such images marks our ultimately doomed efforts to halt the passage of time, even if to do so we must consciously invoke illusion. So appealing is the possibility of stopping, let alone reversing time, many of us are drawn to fantasies thereof, even if we must imagine entering a state of being like that of a woodchuck in hibernation, most of our bodily processes dormant, our mind itself in a dreamless dream‑state. Or we might take our cue from a Balinese trance dancer, nerve endings so numbed even flames will not sear them or make us cry out in pain; in moments of extreme need, we might even resort to identifying with an insect caught centuries ago in the resin of a Baltic tree, our body now encased in amber.

Exploring the imaginative connections between hibernation, trance, and amber formation and their relation to our perceptions of time demands a cutting back and forth across wide expanses of both time and space, such an activity in itself a tantalizing fantasy, as well as braiding together such disciplines as biology, psychology, religion, music, poetry, and geology. At the moment, this free‑form essay itself cannot be more than a playful example of suspended animation. Anything more would require a book‑length study, ideally an incursion into the minds of all those who have preceded me and will succeed me. And let's not fool ourselves for a moment. When you finish reading what I have written you will, of course, be that much older than when you began and even if you became sufficiently absorbed as to neglect for that brief duration certain pressing obligations, when you finish reading you will resume your customary animations: the dog must be fed, the phone messages must be acknowledged, the treadmill must be trod upon, and, of course, you have miles before you can sleep, miles ... More important, you will resume your brooding about the swiftness of life, the inflexible nature of time, the mystery of life's creation in general and your own creation in particular, the inevitability of pain, the constantly moving target of love.

            One can see what will trouble

            This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.

            Were he not gone,

            The woodchuck could say whether it's like his

Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,

Or just some human sleep.

                                                               —Robert Frost, from "After Apple‑Picking"

More than any other modern poet, Robert Frost expresses a yearning for a trance‑like, dreamless state of being that closely resembles hibernation‑though the season need not be winter nor need there be an explicitly rendered despair preceding the wish to experience at least a temporary transcendence of everyday life: "I'd like to get away from earth awhile / And then come back to it and begin over" ("Birches"). Of course, as he later implies in the same poem, his wish should not be confused with the death wish; rather, he imagines riding a swinging branch 11 toward heaven," the branch dipping down soon afterwards to deposit him once more upon the solid, familiar earth.

What in the name of transcendence does Frost seek? Presumably not the near­ total oblivion of hibernation or a closely analogous state called, curiously enough, the Dauer Formation (Dauer in German means permanence): a larval stage when worms, especially the intriguingly named ice‑worms, migrate in search of a better environment. During this time, which does not necessarily coincide with the winter months when food in northern climates is scarce, the worm neither eats nor breeds. Imagine wandering through forests or deserts with no concerns about the number of calories from fat consumed in the course of a day, no worries about teen‑age pregnancy, indeed, no concerns about anything at all except finding the right tree which will become both the locale and raw material for your new home. Perhaps the vaunted birch tree itself? If such an experience were available to humans, would it not briefly be appealing as an alternative to driving around in the company of a real estate agent, Sunday classifieds in hand.? Briefly, ever so briefly.

But surely, despite his variations on the lure of a quasi‑hibernatory state, such a keen observer of the natural world as Robert Frost does not wish to obliterate his senses. Rather, he wishes to remain on the branch at the moment it reaches its apex, remain at that point forever, experiencing to the fullest that moment's odd meld of excitement and relief. For it is time he wishes to freeze, not his ability to sense: a solid, immobile block of time in order to watch the snow failing in a neighbor's woods and be free from time's inevitable flux with its flotsam of responsibilities and banal promises, and worst of all, particularly for youth ­obsessed western culture, its jetsam of graying hair, sagging skin, tiny aches where none existed before‑all the markers, subtle and not so subtle, of our inevitable aging.

            The tendency of some to write off such yearnings as pathological desires to regress to infantile helplessness ( e.g. Freud's concept of the "oceanic experience") merely parches the sap not only from Frost's images but the many analogues of his vision. Consider, for example, the Buddhist concept of samsara, in which one experiences the genuine self only by casting off the demands of the false, temporal self, especially the latter's constant grasping and gasping in its perpetual demands that we act, that we rush out to the shopping mail or "surf the net" rather than listen to the music of the rain. Consider as well the entry of the self into the inner power of the Ayin, or nothingness, as delineated in the teachings of Jewish mysticism known as the Kabbalah, which bear some uncanny resemblances with Buddhist teachings. Think of the wish to believe in paradox, to hold simultaneously two opposing needs, such as the need to be separate and the need at the same time to be joined to another human being. Or even if, like myself, you have a scanty background in modern physics, think of the paradox of quantum theory, "in which subatomic stuff can act like both waves and particles and be in more than one place at a time" (George Johnson, "On Skinning Schrodinger's Cat," New York Times, June 2, 1996, section 4, page 16).

But how few of us are privileged by temperament and opportunity to enter genuinely into the Buddhist or Kabbalistic experience‑I dismiss at this point the all too numerous pronunciamentos of self‑anointed gurus touting the possibility (for a 'modest fee," naturally) of instant mind control, instant nirvana, instant bliss, alluring as they may seem at superficial glance‑or to work at the cutting edge of modern research into the physics of paradox. When confronted with such challenges, I feel a mixture of awe, envy, and futility. How can I, a middle‑aged American woman with a reasonably strong background in psychotherapy, and the visual arts, a woman who has been lucky enough to travel, not only for brief intervals, in the eastern world, at this point even pretend to know truly about such experiences other than what I read in books? It is tempting, of course, to be dishonest in that peculiarly academic way in which I was trained many decades ago: that is, to note apparent evidence of some profound and ancient tradition of thought in, say, a poem by Blake or Frost, quote heavily from secondary and tertiary sources, and‑voila!‑"New Light on Therayana Buddhism in Blake's Jerusalem." But my aim is to note how we fool ourselves with various illusions of stopped time; abstract discussion of those lesser known ways that might just promise a more fruitful, less deceptive approach to the problem would at this point be sheer chutzpah. (This is not to say that at some later point in my life I will not seriously involve myself in studies of Buddhist meditation, Kabbalistic wisdom, et. al.).

What a relief at this moment to browse through America Online's many folders and discover Zyplast 11, one of the latest weapons in the age‑old battle to avoid aging, or more accurately, to avoid the awareness of aging. NEW & IMPROVED WRINKLE ERASERS! How can I resist clicking my mouse to bring to screen so crucial a topic on the long menu of AOL's Longevity Club? Seems as if Zyplast 11, which contains far more collagen per milliliter than its predecessor, will not merely "smoothe the way to a smoother skin" with far greater efficiency but enhance our sense of controlling time through making us appear if not young, then at least not older than the day or week or year before. "Polyethylene glycol, or PEG, is .... active and sticky at both ends, allowing the injected collagen fibers to bond to the host collagen as well as each other" and surely such bonding is what we all need; what's more the process of extracting the collagen provides a useful 11 afterlife" for the placentas of newborn human infants instead of the formerly used cow placentas.

One more point for immortality! Or at least that deathlessness provided by the eternal afterlife, the placenta‑heaven of a middle‑aged human being's formerly wrinkled facial skin. But why do I mock such news? Only because one part of me nags that "I'm supposed to" if I am a true student of the fantasy of stopped time: after all, every philosophical and religious approach of which I am aware posits a stripping away of body from soul, a movement away from the here and now, the surface, the sheerly material. And what could be more superficial than skin? Yet I am fully aware that on a shelf above my bathroom sink even at this moment there sit three jars of expensive wrinkle erasers, one in liquid form, one in jelly form, one in the form of a cream that stings and itches, sometimes turning my skin red and peeling as if I had spent hours lazing in a hot sun, which we all now know can not only bring on skin cancer but accelerate the appearance of wrinkles. Further, at least once each day, no matter how preoccupied I might be with my writing and thinking, I ask myself if it is not time seriously to investigate the possibility of a face‑lift. As T.S. Eliot never said, I should have been a moth caught in the resin of an ancient Balkan cedar in the forest of my Eastern European ancestors . . .

CAMBODIA'S POL POT IS SAID TO HAVE DIED: "Pol Pot, whose Marxist Khmer Rouge regime caused the deaths of more than I million Cambodians during the 1970's, may have died at his jungle headquarters today . . . " [italics added]. . . "But Ieng Moly and other officials acknowledged there was no hard evidence of Pol Pot's demise" (The Washington Post, 6/7/96).

            Is this an indirect way of noting a long overdue political death? More likely, evidence of political conflict among Cambodian leaders, some of whom still align themselves with the long deposed Indochinese Hitler; thus the news item is merely a matter of wrenched political semantics. Did it not take several days back in 1953 for the Soviets officially to acknowledge the death of Stalin? And the South American Nazi community to admit the death of Dr. Josef Mengele? After more than twenty years, some still deny the deaths of many of our MIA's in Vietnam. And after nearly two thousand years, some deny the death of Christ . . . or, for that matter, various messiahs alleged to be hibernating in the hills of Jerusalem, waiting to return at the midnight stroke of the Millennium . . . But only the most naive can take comfort in illusions of stopped time that rest on the insubstantialities, the slipperiness and elasticity of words. I cannot deny, however, flipping through tabloids whose headlines trumpet the aliveness‑and wellness‑of Hitler, of Elvis, of JFK, of God. Always, of course, I limit such indulgences to supermarket checkout lines‑just like you do. And if a neighbor should appear? Well, there's always a new diet article ("Rutabaga: The Key to Eternal Youth" ) on the next page.

            As I study the tiny moth caught in the brooch I purchased at the New York Museum of Natural History during its recent show on amber called "Windows to the Past," I find myself wondering if a human being, a complete human being, had ever been caught in resin and ultimately preserved in a chunk of amber. A museum piece, to be sure, an artifact in the same general category as the recently discovered frozen mummies at the summit of Mt. Ampato, a 27,000 foot volcano in the Peruvian Andes, their bodies so beautifully preserved we can study their clothing's intricate weaving and ascertain what they ate for their last meal.

            Juanita, they named her: Johan Reinhard, the anthropologist who with partner Miguel Zarate discovered and transported the first frozen Inca female. Because she was naturally rather than artificially mummified with the aid of various potions and chemical brews, Juanita's body tissues and organs are rife with information about her life, her death (probably through ritual sacrifice to the local mountain gods), even her long deceased family: "Her DNA should enable us to identify not only the region she came from but also who her relatives are." (Reinhard, The National Geographic, vol. 189, no. 6, p. 69.) Because the extreme cold is such an excellent preservative, the skin‑creases around her finger joints, her thigh muscles, and her hair‑among other body parts yet to be fully studied‑are as vivid as the day she died.

            Not long after news about the discovery of Juanita was announced along with a photograph of her delicately featured face, the CEO of a company specializing in genetic research asked if the investigators would be interested in recovering eggs from Juanita's ovaries, eggs that might likely be intact, given her frozen condition, and possibly, just possibly, capable of being fertilized by late 20th century human sperm. Given the already heavy agenda of scientific and anthropological studies awaiting Juanita‑and presumably given the shaky moral implications of producing a child whose mother has been dead for over 500 years‑the investigators refused the offer. But does not the assumption that such a retrieval and fertilization of Juanita's eggs is possible imply that in the broadest expanses of the imagination, mummies such as Juanita are simultaneously dead and alive?

Am I not my DNA? Even though neither Juanita nor I nor anyone else who has ever lived or will ever live would recognize our DNA in the mirror, so to speak . . . Faintly as I write this I hear the word narcissism, as if some part of my brain were whispering it to another part. is the wish for stopped time merely another guise of that unavoidable fantasy that shines from every reflecting surface, even the handle of a spoon if one is desperate enough to check one's lipstick in the semi‑dark of a mirrorless restaurant, the fantasy that our own self is so powerful that our own (and, of course, others’) love for it will stop at nothing, even if fated to drown in watery worship of its image?

I am reminded again of amber, of the indirect suggestion in some of the literature accompanying the Museum of Natural History's exhibit, that amber has had a peculiar pull on the human imagination not only because of its beauty but because of its appeal, on the basis of the swarms of ancient insects and plants encased within, to the fantasy to stop, or at least anneal, time ... perhaps maybe as well to bring back to life the only seemingly lifeless?

A couple of summers ago, every kid on the block was talking about dinosaurs, amber, and DNA, courtesy of Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park, a movie which, unfortunately for science but fortunately for box offices around the world, gave way to a dinosaur stampede worthy of the wildest old Western. And why not? Even if the movie had explored further the scientific validity of reviving and then reproducing the DNA of amber‑encased bacteria and viruses, it would have been on shaky ground indeed. So far the possibility of actual "rebirth" is highly uncertain despite the lure of "reviving" the moth or ant trapped through amber formation in a moment of time so many eons ago it is difficult to imagine what even the trees must then have looked like. From a very much lay point of view, I imagine that fertilizing one of Juanita's eggs has a slightly more likely chance of success.

Indeed, even a revived moth might find life in the very late 20th century somewhat disturbing: what to make of artificial light, for example, or industrial pollution? But, once again, how tempting to believe that a particular creature, this time a creature embedded in amber is, like Schrodinger's cat, both dead and alive. A highly visible metaphor of stopped time, to be sure. For, if decay of earthly matter is a primary marker of death, the embedded creature certainly has avoided that fate. And since its lack of decay has been achieved naturally, without the benefit of highly cosmetic chemical potions, does it not then follow that the moth or ant or even frog is more "alive" than the best preserved mummies? That it, admittedly through no act of its own volition, has succeeded in stopping time?

Let us return to Schrodinger's cat. In the words again of George Johnson: "'We are asked to imagine a cat trapped in a box with a glass vial of poison. Nearby lies a chunk of radioactive material, like uranium. If an atom of the uranium decays, an electronic detector will trip a hammer that smashes the vial and kills the cat .... [but] uranium atoms, unlike marbles or baseballs, cannot be said to be in a definite state‑decayed or undecayed‑until they are observed [italics added]. Before that, the atoms hover in a quantum limbo, stuck in both possible states at the same time. Thus, it is only when we open the box and make the observation that the uranium emerges from this nether world and makes up its mind. So why can't the same be said for the poor cat? Until we lift the lid and peer inside . . .. the hapless creature will be both dead and alive. . . . An uranium atom may have indeed decayed, spilling the poison, but it will be our observation that kills the cat."

Unfortunately, after this lucid explanation, Mr. Johnson of the Times article goes on at once to note that Schrodinger was merely pulling a prank on some of the mystical thinkers of his time, especially their narcissistic reliance on human observation as the determinant of whether something is or is not real. No wonder, in a rather unpleasant dream last night, I was flying low over vividly green rice paddies, presumably somewhere in Indonesia. But my companions on the plane were either aloof or downright hostile; I felt terribly hot but was unable to remove my heavy jeans so I could change into some more appropriate clothing; my arms were so painfully paralyzed I could not reach for the food the leader of our '(expedition" had supplied. Despite my entreaties, no one would tell me over what specific places we were flying. Either they didn't know or didn't care, and became annoyed with me merely for asking such a stupid question.. But worst of all, when I finally struggled to open a small carry‑on hag, the kitten I had packed inside (and forgotten about) tumbled out on the floor of the plane, if not dead, then very nearly so, its labored and intermittent breathing as well as its refusal to eat warning me that soon I would be faced with the sad task of observing the young cat die; moreover, I would have to jettison its body out a window of the plane.

Fortunately, I woke up before having to perform such a distasteful act, and in the process, never learning if the dream‑cat was dead or alive. Perhaps it was merely hibernating? Or since the flight was clearly taking place in summer, engaging in the reverse activity of aestivating, when a few creatures, mostly worm­like, lapse into a quasi‑sleep after seeking shelter from excessive heat or light, only to reappear reinvigorated in the fall. Even as I write this, my poor young cat might well have rallied and be scampering around the plane in a most animated manner.. Scant comfort, nonetheless; a more comical version of the peculiar comfortlessness experienced when our dreams are visited by a pe‑,on we know is dead, for even in such common dreams, we know such moments are wishes doomed not only to disappear with the dream but to make us feel all the more bereft when we wake up. Imagination has its disillusions as well as its far more numerous delights.

Ninety‑six years ago today on New York's Lower East Side, my maternal grandfather Joseph Nisenson, recently emigrated from Vilna, married my grandmother, Anna Bauer, recently emigrated from Pinsk. Their parents, numerous sisters and brothers, and new‑world friends attended the crowded ceremony, which took place in a small Jewish wedding chapel on Orchard Street which has long since given way to a dairy restaurant, a candy store, a dress shop, and now a vague store which sells "notions": small Chinese mirrors brightly framed red; plastic monsters for children; cheap earrings destined to slip quickly from ear lobes to cracks in the sidewalk, never to be found again; an array of boxed cleansers and old‑fashioned soap flakes; stale‑looking cakes; candles; cutlery; pillows decorated with pink and magenta flowers. The marriage of Anna and Joseph is somewhat of a rarity for the Jewish immigrant community of which they are part, since it is not an arranged marriage, the bride and groom are not distant cousins or in any other way related, and they are not even Landsmen immigrants from the same shtetl or even province of the Russian pale. I imagine much dancing and singing, klezmer music before it became part of American pop culture, mountains of stuffed cabbage, potato kugel, knishes, roast chickens. I imagine the bride is a virgin‑and probably the groom as well‑though later there were hotly denied rumors that their first child, my late Uncle Sam, was born only six months after the wedding. I imagine flowers, my grandmother slim and beautiful in a long lace and satin gown she has stitched by hand, my grandfather dapper in a dark suit, his mustache turned up at the corners. I imagine the wedding songs merging with the street music as men and women shout out the worth of their vegetables, fabrics, kettles, and brooms they sell from pushcarts. I imagine a comedian telling off‑color jokes, like in the old country. I imagine a young girl carrying a bouquet and perhaps a ring‑boy. I imagine young versions of my late aunts Zelda and Fannie and Mamie and Gertie, uncles Izzy and Herman and Moe. I imagine Anna's father, Jacob Bauer, downing large quantities of very strong slivovitz. Many of his friends do the same, and their rambunctiousness bothers my grandfather, who above all wishes his wedding day to be one of joyful dignity and restraint. I imagine exactly what the slivovitz tasted like and the pickled herring that accompanied it. But I do not imagine I was there. Nor do I for a moment imagine that anyone present imagines first my mother's birth, five years later, and my own birth, some thirty years later. Let alone what I am like now. Not one person. Is the impossibility of imagining myself remotely present in any way the reason my reconstruction of their wedding is not a moment of stopped time, but rather a jerky, spasmodic movie in my head, possibly less accurate than a dream? Which leads me to an odd thought: is recapturing the moment of one's conception the true aim of the desire for stopped time? One's conception, not the subsequent division of one's cells into teeth, hair, eyes, toes, etc.; one's conception, not one , s birth, which is anything but a frozen moment.

Assume for a moment there exists in molecular form somewhere in the universe a raw, shapeless memory of the moment we were conceived. Assume further that the moment is retrievable even if it could not possibly be imprinted in our brain cells since those cells did not exist except in potentia the moment one of our father's sperm cells penetrated the rind of our mother's egg: would not the captured moment, in all its glory, be but the image of an unrepeatable event, not a timeless event at all? Which leads to yet another illusion of stopped time, that conjured by repetition in as unvarying a form as possible of a particular past experience, whether through a quirky individual repetition ‑compulsion or a grand ritual replete with candles, incense, a burst of music, the stunning play of light upon gold. As if one could obliterate the passage of time between, say, last Christmas and this one; as if in those twelve months nobody had died, nobody had been born, no new withers had appeared on anybody's skin, no cells had divided and subdivided, not even a single twig had been blown loose from the tree across the way. Yet the fantasy is tempting all right: though such a fantasy is not by any means the sole reason, why else do we have a need to return to houses we have lived in decades ago, if we are lucky enough even to find such places; to watch an old movie over and over again, the script so familiar we can recite the lines before the actors do so, watch Bergman and Bogart depart from each other on that railroad car as we weep in unison with the Paris rain, to engage over and over in an activity that is thoroughly predictable, such as long‑married sex or watching, as if mesmerized, an ad or, for that matter, most programs on TV.

I have received another snapshot of my grandson, again in that same Central Park swing. Again he is laughing but this time the swing is in its backward position, about to be pushed by his father. Probably my grandson is laughing from anticipation of the joyful ride forward he is about to experience, or more accurately, re‑experience, his anticipation made possible by memory of many other such exciting arced journeys up, up towards the trees and curving, sometimes even lurching, back again for another push. Wonderful snapshot‑but hardly a repetition of the earlier mentioned photo. Even the leaves on the trees look different, having turned larger and a richer green in the week or so of early spring days separating the two moments.

Some time ago I had my own experience with the repeatable moment. Or more accurately with indulging in the illusion of such in order to convince myself, ever so briefly and with the help of much vodka and wine, that one could, indeed, stop time. The moment involved a particular island in Casco Bay, Maine; a particular person; a particular meal at a particular table by a particular window; the passage of a ferry at a particular time.

For a few years, a friend and I rented a small island that had only one wooden cottage; no electricity, no plumbing, no neighbors. With little else to do but gaze at the ocean and the dance‑patterns of the gulls, perhaps pick some wild berries or climb the rocks in the cove searching for driftwood, shortly after arrival on the island I fell into a trance‑like state, fully conscious of my surroundings, but convinced‑especially on the many foggy mornings‑that they were self-­contained. The rest of the world, the rest of my life, existed, of course, but only as an abstraction; even familiar faces were hard to conjure up as the small island itself became a sometimes eerie combination of the real and imagined. Despite the tranquility of the place, each time I arrived, starting with the second visit, I felt a peculiar anxiety about time. The house was the same, down to the exact location of the white mixing bowl, the old leather couch with its crackled cushions and claw feet, the ancient hurricane lamps, the pinned‑up maritime maps, thanks to the fastidiousness of the owners from whom we had rented the place. But on the wall just opposite the front door, as if in mockery, there stared the same mirror, its common sense wooden frame making it seem all the more powerful. Hello, island. Hello, cottage. Hello, face in the mirror, one year older than the last time you were reflected in all your silvery exactness in that same glass.

Hence the ritual dinner. While never consciously planned as such, the dinner always unfolded the same as the first time: my friend and I would sit at either end of the pine slab that served as the kitchen table; look with pleasure at the white platter on which there sat three bright red barely dead steamed lobsters; the ritual bottle of Merlot; a salad and a loaf of blueberry bread, plus minced garlic, mussels, and lots of melted butter in which to dip the lobster meat. My friend would pour the wine, I would slice the bread, and as we extracted the first smooth white flesh from the lobster claws, a fog horn would sound and out the large kitchen window we could see the Scotia Prince, the nightly ferry from Portland to Nova Scotia, cross Casco Bay in the early stages of its journey cast. The hell with the mirror, with the new face‑cracks and neck‑sags it revealed; the hell with the battery radio that chattered the time, weather, and latest murders; the hell even with th weather itself (I recall that at least twice the skies were a menacing gray rather than the cerulean blue I used to paint this scene): this was the repeatable moment And if it was repeatable, no time has passed since the last such occasion. Right? No time had passed because I said so, and, to a lesser extent, my friend agreed. Lobster, Merlot, the Scotia Princess . . . until death do us part..

It is now nine years since I have seen that island. Probably I will never see it again, let alone walk upon it. My friend and I have long since parted ways. In recent years, the lobster crop has been scanty and very expensive. Red tide has affected the coast of Maine, rendering inedible any mussels one might find. If I searched hard enough, I could probably find the Merlot, but someone who later rented the island has told me the white platter broke beyond repair. And the company that runs the ferry from Maine to Nova Scotia has changed its schedule.

But what, you might well ask at this point, of more controlled, less capricious repeatable moments, time‑honored ritual events like a mass, a Shabbat service, or any religious ritual that follows predictable rules in a particular pattern and locale? It is my own belief that though less obviously so, such events are subject to the same rules of mutability as the lobster dinner and snapshots of my grandson: natural rules that transcend any man‑made rules concerned with the order of prayers, their particular content, the melody in which a particular prayer is chanted, sung, uttered. Similar but not the same. This week at church, Mrs. Stickney might be wearing a green rayon dress with small daisies around the neckline; while singing a hymn she might be thinking about a report she must complete by tomorrow for her advanced computer seminar at the local community college.. Next week she wears black and wonders what her husband is doing on his business trip to Ocean City; the week after she is not there at all, having been struck by a hit‑and‑run driver while crossing Little Falls Parkway, etc., etc. Similar but not the same. Though judging by the popularity of ritual events, and I speak not only of the religious, the lure to repeat a past occasion is strong indeed. Think of any holiday, but especially holidays that commemorate a particular event in the past: the 4th of July, Bastille Day, Veteran's Day (which used to mark the anniversary of the end of World War 1). More or less enjoyable occasions, at least in what time remains from shopping for sales‑a relatively recent accoutrement of nearly every American holiday‑but still not candidates for stopped‑time ... even if Cousin Harry always spills red Manischewitz all over the same white linen tablecloth at the Passover seder.

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How could I in those years on the island in Maine have fooled myself with such a contrived effort to attain the repeatable moment? At best, I might have attained a measure of predictability, a more predictable than usual few moments: the lobster, the white platter, the ferry to Nova Scotia. Likewise the far less private rituals, such as religious ceremonies: despite their ancient roots, the frequent beauty of their songs and chants, the incense and candeflames, they, too, are marked by predictability, no matter how much they might seem to replicate a ceremony once celebrated by distant ancestors. That such relative predictability strongly appeals to the human psyche I have no doubt, but it is folly to confuse that appeal with the wish for stopped‑time. To partake in a ceremony whose shapes and images are relatively predictable is especially appealing at the present time, when change, ranging from the trivial‑hey, what happened to that nice old building? I'm sure it was there yesterday‑to the profound‑so the sun may not be a star after all?—is so constant, it would have driven our village ancestors mad.

This very evening I fully expect one of those predictable experiences. For at least the 100th time, I shall be presenting my mandatory Introduction to Literature class with that greatest of carpe diem poems, Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," along with a few other well known poems concerned with mutability.

Using, after nearly three decades of teaching, the same words, I fear, that I have always used when teaching these poems, I shall begin by defining two key terms: mutability and carpe diem, explaining the etymology of the latter from the Latin few if any will know. Thanks to a puerile but moderately amusing movie of seven or eight years ago, The Dead Poets' Society, some students will, however, know the meaning of carpe them the minute I write the words on the board. I will commend them for their knowledge and ask for examples‑"hey, you know, like doing what you want" or "doing it now"‑before going on to explain why in 17th century England consciousness of time's passage had become an acute concern, treading lightly in my explanation on changes in perception of the universe brought on by popularization of the Copernican heliocentric theory and its effects upon traditional Christian beliefs in a stable, caring God. You know, God, the same who reigned not only over the cherished and central planet Earth but also over a Heaven where those who led a good enough life could retire to a golden condominium cared for by the angels, etc. All this to underscore the poor would ­be lover in Marvell's poem, who after several witty hyperboles to make his coy mistress aware of the severely limited time at their disposal, confronts her with the stark fact that after her death, "worms shall try / Thy long preserved virginity."

 So far, so good. Aside from explaining a few allusions, such as "The Flood" and "The conversion of the Jews," and refraining from jokes about the speaker's 11 vegetable love," the poem‑as we English teachers sometimes say‑is a "good teach." Except, of course, for the last few lines of the third stanza, especially the young man's conviction that once he and his lady finally make love, they will be able to exert some control over the inexorable passage of time: "Thus though we cannot make our Sun stand still / Thus will we make him run."

"OK, class, what is the young man saying in plain everyday English?"

Invariably, even in the most lackluster class, somebody shouts out within seconds, "Time goes by fast when you're having fun."

A few words on the nature of paradox, how the line makes sense if we take the first part literally and the second part figuratively despite the apparent contradiction, and we're ready to move on to Herrick or perhaps A.E. Housman's “Loveliest of Trees.”

So much, however, for predictability. Since the previous section, I have once again taught the poem, to an accelerated evening class of genial but weary summer students whose curiosity about literature extends only to a need to attain the required three credits in Freshman English before going on to their chosen fields of study, nowadays (in a community college) most likely business, computer programming, or health and human services. You can imagine my surprise when a thin‑faced young man wearing old fashioned wire‑rimmed spectacles calls out, "That's crazy. How can anyone believe two contradictory things at the same time?"

How indeed. "But they're only apparently contradictory," I try. "Really, they're just two different sides of tile same thought. Or thinking process."

He shakes his head. "You mean when he finally gets her to bed, this guy and his girl are thinking all that?" Laughter. I recall some long ago professor commenting how carpe them is wasted on the young, almost say so myself, but say instead that he should try to find another example. Silence. Outside the classroom window, nearly purple storm clouds are gathering in heaps that resemble hills, some with a peculiar reddish tint.. "Let's take that sky as an example. Is it beautiful or ugly?" Both, a girl says, thank god: "The colors are great but the gashes of lightning are ugly and soon the whole sky will be ugly with rain." A few other students nod, one saying the sky was both scary and "nice. Like a postcard."

"And the one quality cannot be separated from the other," I say, pleased that they are at least responding. But is the both dangerous and alluring quality of the sky really paradoxical? Certainly it did not fit one definition of the word paradox: that which is beyond belief. A mere glance outside the window was sufficient. "We must accept both qualities at once."

"OK. Gotcha." The thin‑faced young man again. "So someone can be both good and evil at the same time. Like Jeffrey Daurner. Like the Menendez brothers. The Unabomber."

"Like Hitler. Like Stalin," calls out a nearly bald man in his 30's who has not said a word all semester. I nod yes. How to get out of that one? Change the Subject. "And a thing can be both here and sornewhere else at the same time," I say. Luckily time is running out‑yes, I smile to myself, the illusion of stopped time may indeed have a twin illusion, that of time moving at enormous speed. There I was trying to round out the lesson, hoping the impending storm would result in a power failure so I could dismiss the class at once, for in my imagination I was maybe four or five years old, a small girl standing on a bridge above a creek many miles and many years away from that stuffy classroom. In her hand she is holding a bright new penny.

Perhaps it is the color of the sky tonight that reawakens the coin fantasy; in any case, while I continued to teach the class, shifting to the neutral matters of comma placement, I keep seeing myself as a young girl, standing on a dirt‑covered bridge many miles and years away, then tossing the penny into the swiftly flowing creek below. Someone older and wiser was with me. Perhaps my Aunt Millie?

What excitement to run to the other side of the bridge and see my penny reappear after only about thirty seconds! Reappear just as shiny on the other side!

The next day I went back to the bridge all by myself, clutching another penny I had cajoled out of my mother, presumably so I could play some game with a pink rubber ball. Again I tossed the penny into the creek, again rushed across the bridge to see my penny reappear on the other side. Never one to be content with a simple success, I began to toss other items: the cap from a milk bottle, a black­eyed susan still attached to its stem, a slip of paper. All of them worked, though none excited me as much as the coin, which, in retrospect, had become more important to me than the swiftness of the creekwater, the ever‑flowing water that from Thales and Heraclitus on men have linked with ever‑flowing time, the great flux. My coin had survived; it was not lost at all, only someplace else, someplace else in that lovely cool green water. In my childish way, was I not un ting as one and the same both coin (moment, self) and water (ongoing time, other)?

            "And so we must be careful not to overuse the comma," I conclude, pointing to a page in our grammar text that lists several NEVERS: NEVER use a comma between a subject and its verb; NEVER use a comma between a verb and its object ... On my long drive home, I keep thinking only about the coin and the creek. So time itself is the answer; grasping the paradox of time itself the only possible answer to the illusion of stopped‑time and all the contrived efforts to achieve the latter.

            Yes, there are problems. Several. What if I had tossed a rock into the creek, a rock that sank immediately to the bottom of the creek, which itself, like all surfaces of water, remembers nothing. But surely the rock would have resurfaced from the silt and pebbles, lost socks and skeletal fish, sooner or later. Mostly later, perhaps centuries or eons later. But still there was a good natural chance it would resurface.

            Another problem: what if the reappeared coin was considerably changed from the original, its rim nicked, its surface now partially tinted a phthalo‑green tint from the creek's algae? But for the amateur artist that I was and am, such variation would only render the coin that much more interesting. Granted, I might feel differently if I were a coin‑collector, more interested in the coin's man‑made designs than any serendipitous contributions from nature.

            Ah, but what if the coin had been nearly crushed into scrap from some powerful surge of natural energy, a tsunami produced by a seaquake or underwater volcanic eruption? I say now with only minor hesitation: perhaps sometime another little girl, another coin clutched in her hand and she herself standing by another bridged creek, will have better luck.

Suddenly I can smell the twisted rope that my grandfather had hung from a chestnut tree and nailed to a board which became my own swing. How I loved to further twist each rope by plaiting one with the other, spinning myself in circles, and then the real fun: letting the ropes separate and with a sharp snapping sound spin me back to where I could start the whole thing over again. I am convinced for a while that deep in a dark corner or a drawer there exists a crackled, brown‑gray snapshot of myself, age about 4 or 5, on that swing, but no matter how hard I search I cannot find any such proof. Did that snapshot, indeed, never exist at all? Has it been lost over the decades? Is it stuck between the pages of an album with which I am so familiar I never bother anymore to open its cover? Or in a frame hung on the wall right in front of my eyes, so close and familiar I never look there anymore, just as one ceases after a while to look much at a favorite painting in one's home, even if the painting was created by a close friend or by oneself? Or did the old Brownie Reflex run out of him just before someone decided to preserve my moment on the swing? Do I really need to know the answers to these questions?