The project is inspired by the preface of Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt. I intend to use my personal past experience to illustrate an excerpt which explores the philosophical concept of time as not merely a linear progression but a complex interplay between past and future, with human's existence creating a rupture in the continuum. Drawing on Kafka's metaphorical landscape, the excerpt argues that human agency disrupts the traditional view of time as a straight line, instead envisioning it as a battleground where past and future forces intersect at an angle, forming a dy namic "parallelogram of forces." This perspective suggests that human action, positioned within this temporal framework, generates a new force—a diagonal—that emerges from the clash of opposing temporal directions, creating a nuanced understanding of time's multidimensional nature.
A text documentation of the voiceover:
Voiceover:
2 days
One and half
Two
Two and half
Three
Four
Five
Six
All of these happened …
Here
Here ...
And then we moved from here to here
Here ...
Old dvd
Ticket
Gift from travelling
Scratch paper
Letters
And more letters
Newspaper section
Skating records
Candy paper
Yearbook page
Gift
Painting
School map and calendar
Ticket
Halloween card
Rewards
Toy
And more tickets
Letter from chemistry teacher
swimming wristband
And all of these stories had a terminal ending at the point at which they clash with ...
The present
Present also clashes with another drive of infinite force:
The future
The two opposing forces, the future and the past, collide at the point where I stand.
As our observations are inherently bound to the perspective of the subjective experiencer, the future remains elusive and beyond our reach, forever shrouded in the mists of uncertainty.
However, the human mind has a peculiar tendency to embellish and rework memories, striving to imbue them with coherence, purpose, and value. Yet, in this process of romanticization, the memory becomes no more real than the nebulous, uncertain landscape of the future. Thus, both the past and the future are revealed to be illusory constructs, equally unreal and unattainable.
Time, too, is revealed to be broken in the middle, at the point where I stand, instead of a continuous, unidirectional and uninterrupted flow.
My standpoint is not the present as we usually understand it, but rather a gap in time which my constant battling against the past and the future keeps in existence.
"The first thing to be noticed is that not only the future—“the wave of the future”—but also the past is seen as a force, and not, as in nearly all our metaphors, as a burden man has to shoulder and of whose dead weight the living can or even must get rid in their march into the future. In the words of Faulkner, “the past is never dead, it is not even past.” This past, moreover, reaching all the way back into the origin, does not pull back but presses forward, and it is, contrary to what one would expect, the future which drives us back into the past. Seen from the viewpoint of man, who always lives in the interval between past and future, time is not a continuum, a how of uninterrupted succession; it is broken in the middle, at the point where “he” stands; and “his” standpoint is not the present as we usually understand it but rather a gap in time which “his” constant fighting, “his” making a stand against past and future, keeps in existence. Only because man is inserted into time and only to the extent that he stands his ground does the flow of indifferent time break up into tenses; it is this insertion—the beginning of a beginning, to put it into Augustinian terms—which splits up the time continuum into forces which then, because they are focused on the particle or body that gives them their direction, begin fighting with each other and acting upon man in the way Kafka describes.
Without distorting Kafka's meaning, I think one may go a step further. Kafka describes how the insertion of man breaks up the unidirectional flow of time but, strangely enough, he does not change the traditional image according to which we think of time as moving in a straight line. Since Kafka retains the traditional metaphor of a rectilinear temporal movement, “he” has barely enough room to stand and whenever “he” thinks of striking out on “his” own “he” falls into the dream of a region over and above the fighting-line -- and what else is this dream and this region but the old dream which Western metaphysics has dreamed from Parmenides to Hegel of a timeless, spaceless, suprasensuous realm as the proper region of thought? Obviously what is missing in Kafka's description of a thought-event is a spatial dimension where thinking could exert itself without being forced to jump out of human time altogether. The trouble with Kafka's story in all its magnificence is that it is hardly possible to retain the notion of a rectilinear temporal movement if its unidirectional flow is broken up into antagonistic forces being directed toward and acting upon man. The insertion of man, as he breaks up the continuum, cannot but cause the forces to detect, however lightly, from their original direction, and if this were the case, they would no longer clash head on but meet at an angle. In other words, the gap where “he” stands is, potentially at least, no simple interval but resembles what the physicists call a parallelogram of forces.
Ideally, the action of the two forces which form the parallelogram of forces where Kafka's “he” has found his battlefield should result in a third force, the resultant diagonal whose origin would be the point at which the forces clash and upon which they act. This diagonal force would in one respect differ from the two forces whose result it is. The two antagonistic forces are both unlimited as to their origins, the one coming from an infinite past and the other from an infinite future; but though they have no known beginning, they have a terminal ending, the point at which they clash. The diagonal force, on the contrary, would be limited as to its origin, its starting-point being the clash of the antagonistic forces, but it would be infinite with respect to its ending by virtue of having resulted from the concerted action of two forces whose origin is infinity."
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