The Tick-Tock Tractatus
Speaking About Time: The Poetic Investigations
By Michael P. Garofalo
August Offerings, Red Bluff CA, 2010, MPG
Sections
1. Time: time-space, movement, measurement
2. Past: memories, habits, fixed, specific, tradition
3. Present: now, here-now, day, duration
4. Future: maybe, planned, anticipated, uncertain
5. Passing: change, cycles, aging, growth, death
6. Beginning: renewal, starting, enthusiasm
7. Psychology: learning, experience, knowing
8. Middle: in progress, half-way, steady, living
9. Language: poetry, philosophy, ordinary
10. Silence: inexpressive, nonsense, illogical
11. Mystical: numinous, profound, intense, insightful,
12. Beauty: art, crafts, music, reading/writing
13. Social: ethics, morality, economics, manners, value
14. Philosophy: ethics, history, analysis, arguments, logic
15. History: landmark events, books/printing, memory
16. Eternity: forever, infinite, unimaginable, death
Preface
Key to Books Cited
Bundled Up Quintains about Time
Additional Notes
7. Psychology: experience, learning,
phenomenology, sense of time, personal
7.1
Generalities, Questions, Quips
What you see depends on when you look.
What you hear requires you to listen now.
Time is our 6th Sense.
The Specious Present extends consciousness
to include a pinch of the past,
a pinch of the future,
and the fullness of the now.
Give awareness a 5 second window
for processing perceptions.
Afraid to run out of time.
He had time on his hands, then dropped it.
Your brain works on time schedules.
"The quality of attention determines
the nature of the experience."
Joanne Kyger
BU794, GC§14
The Five Senses
7.2
Using vs Knowing
We knew that water was essential,
but did not know it was H2O;
We knew the sun was hot,
but had no concept of nuclear.
It works but we don't know how or why.
BU2930
History of Science
7.2.1
Unfolding Time
Implicate orders of a
Underlying Reality
Unfolding Being... and the
Explicate orders of
ordinary common things.
BU1149, GC§7
David Bohm
Net of Indra
7.3.1
End Game
They ran out of time
The game ended on time
They lost this time.
They all got back to the bus in time.
They will do better next time.
BU2835
7.3.1.1
The Game of Death
I'm too old
for any real Destiny
except for Death
creeping up to me, tagging Me:
"Your It!"
BU891, GC§36
7.3.1.2
Impermanence of Samsara
Samsara is Nirvana?
10,000 Things are Nothing?
Past and future are gone (Empty?).
The Present is gone in a Flash.
What's left? Samsara won't last.
BU918
7.3.1.3
Silent Lips
The sting of Death,
the sharp pains of unseeing,
the final closing of the eyes,
the silent lips of emptiness...
faces lost forever in future times.
BU1246
7.3.2
Better Next Month
That such and such is the case
May piss me off for all the day
Why should it be this damn way?
Next month, such and such will not be the case.
I will be very pleased come that day.
BU3431
Quintain Poetry
Time Explained: Experience, Consciousness and Relativity.
By Alan Bennett, 2026.
Reading Wittgenstein 1975-
7.3.2.1
Timely Emotions
Emotions cluster around Immediacy.
Distant futures lack emotional density.
We feel very little about 2222 CE.
Few have any passion for far distant unrealities.
We lust after, say, Hot SEX Today! Fuck the Future!
BU3371
Emotions and Time
7.3.3
Take it Slow
Travel light
Even yesterday is a heavy backpack.
Travel slowly
Even tomorrow can wait---
Move on, don't hesitate.
BU2890
Time, Change, Freedom:
An Introduction to Metaphysics
By Nathan Oaklander
7.3.4
Differences and Distinctions
Things that look the same
are often really different---
in a web of new respects as to usage
in a web of words wedded meanings
in a different place in space/time.
BU2968
Appearances
7.3.5
Time Snuck By
The time sauntered by
invisibly, casually, punctually...
I barely noticed.
so busy with pressing deeds---
time flew by in a gentle breeze.
BU3083
"... time is not a linear flow, as we think it is,
into past, present, and future. Time is an
indivisible whole, a great pool in which all
events are eternally embodied and still have
their meaningful flash of super-normal or
extra-sensory perception, and a glimpse of
something that happened long ago in our
linear time."
- Frank Waters, Mountain Dialogues, 1981
7.3.5.1
The Time of Inner Mind
Under the Water
of my mind
an unconscious Sea
of Memories
guide me through time
Keep me on a course line
send me some signs
become conscious at times...
freedom may a fiction be
controlled by unknown destinies.
Bring the Unconscious,
Sub-Conscious, ego, and Id,
Collective Unconscious figured in—
Over the waves of Consciousness
the flotsam of Unknowns are adrift.
BU9
The Gushen Grove Sonnets
The Five Senses
