The Tick-Tock Tractatus
Speaking of 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
7.3.5.2
Opportunities for Change
Aging provides
more opportunities
for becoming the person
you should
have been.
BU995
Aging Wisely
7.3.5.3
Bent and Twisted
My experiences at times
have not damaged or broken me;
but, indeed,
have bent and twisted
my identity.
BU3528
How to Live a Good Life
Advice from Wise and Respected Persons
7.3.5.4
Who Am I?
my identity
exists for me
resting on the shoulders
of my memories
substantially
BU3131
Personal Identity
Identity
7.3.5.5
A Conscience for the Future
The Id is only Present Tense Alive,
focused on immediate needs
and drives flowing bodily, incessantly,
facing only nowness craving sensuality---
The Super-Ego, Conscience, has future schemes.
BU3355
Freudian Psychology
Conscience
7.3.5.6
Perspectives Towards Time
Past-positive: In the good old days...
Past-negative: My childhood was painful...
Present-hedonistic: I want some fun now...
Present-fatalistic: Que Sera, Sera
Future-options: Here is the schedule for tomorrow...
Transcendental-future: We want to go to Heaven...
The Time Paradox, p. 30-69
BU1575
Oulipos Quintain Museum
Time Research
7.3.6
Appear and Disappear
Time is an idea about
how objects/things interact,
move from place to place,
appear and disappear untraced,
are at our hands for work and play.
BU3022
Time - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Time, 2018
Time Research
Reism Reism is the doctrine that only things exist.
7.3.6.1
subjective/objective?
Our naive perceptions of Time,
Sequenced cause-effect Directionality,
Time headed south for sleepy entropy--
Was this merely my subjective Kantian processing;
or is it true of Nature's own activities?
BU3146
- Immanuel Kant
Kantian Space and Time
Kant holds that we can't have any experience
unmediated by our internal mental temporal
modes of being and understanding. Time is
constructed by our minds.
Reism Reism is the doctrine that only things exist.
7.3.7
Heartbeats of Time
The ticking of the metronome:
It's a lie told by a machine.
My heartbeat
is a truth
told by my body.
BU3192
Felt Time, by Marc Wittmann, 2017
Time and Free Will, Henri Bergson, 1910
Living in Time, by Barry Allen, 2023
Henri Bergson (1859-1941)
7.3.7.2
Stretched Tight
between
two eternities
my brief life
is stretched
tight
BU1503, BU978
CHB: Time
- Being and Time, by Martin Heidegger
Time is our 6th Sense.
Five Senses
7.3.7.3
What to Defer
Live Now in this moment
Cultivate presence within Today.
But, unwise to act exclusively
Within pleasures only of today---
Deferment of pleasure... time to delay.
BU3349
Bundled Up: Volume 2
Table of Contents
