Days like this I feel like I am trapped in some kind of existential loop, a la “Groundhog Day,” forced to live and relive excruciatingly painful parts of my life. I suppose it is simply the fact that I really haven’t learned any of the lessons I was supposed to have learned, so I haven’t really learned to avoid these situations that make me want to weep, and maybe even sometimes writhe in agony.

So for some bizarre reason today, my thoughts strayed to the movie “Donnie Darko,” of which I’d written about some time ago (and since it is quite the non-linear narrative, and if you don’t have the time or patience to actually watch it, wikipedia has a pretty good synopsis, including commentary from the director which I wasn’t aware of before.

As you may have guessed from the allusions in my intro, this movie discusses temporal loops, or more specifically, pocket universes. As the director explains, what happens is that a tangent universe spontaneously arises from the pre-existing timeline. Unfortunately, most tangent universes are extraordinarily unstable, and this one happens to have a finite lifespan of 28 days. The goal of the protagonist is to close off the tangent universe before it destabilizes and destroys the pre-existing timeline.

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, there is the allusion to “The Last Temptation of Christ”. Given my recent ramblings-on regarding religion, perhaps this is the thread that my mind chased.

Interestingly, another time-loop I have been obsessed with is Phillip K Dick’s conceptualization of the Black Iron Prison, which, briefly, is Dick’s concept that a tangent universe arose sometime shortly after the Death of Christ, and which continued until the Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace. So Dick acknowledges the existence of this time-loop by stating that “The Empire never ended,” which can be taken to mean the Roman Empire specifically, but can be easily read to include all forms of state-sponsored tyranny. (Of note, one can say that the U.S. is the heir of the Roman Empire through two routes: the British and the Spanish, which were both great empires in their day, and which were once provinces of Rome) It is somewhat disquieting to see that the spirit of Nixon doesn’t seem to be completely defeated, and apparently lives on in the current Bush administration, but that is a topic for another blog post.

In any case, the trigger to collapse the tangent universe is the destruction of the Empire, which, despite Dick pinning it to Nixon’s fall, may still be some time in the future. Until then, we essentially live in an unreal world stuck in apostolic times, still waiting for the Second Coming™

But I kind of wonder if the First Coming wasn’t itself a way to collapse a tangent universe. What if Jesus Christ had to die by the Cross so that we wouldn’t be stuck in a temporal loop caused by Adam and Eve’s (and Satan’s) Sin of Pride? What if that is what the Old Testament is? A narrative of the tangent universe, the Unreal universe, in which reality is distorted, in which God is misrepresented and the Original Sin™ is obscured?

Interestingly, these Gnostic ideas pervade “The Matrix”, which is perhaps the only redeeming quality of the sequels, but I digress.

But I don’t know, I guess I’ve also been mulling over the nature of time for a while now. In simplistic terms, it is ever the conflict between the Western idea of linear time and the Eastern idea of cyclic time, and much like the dual wave-particle nature of matter, the reality is probably that time is both linear and cyclic.

It is interesting that the reason why the Western idea is sometimes decried is because of its effect on colonial thinking and the way it touches upon the concept of the White Man’s Burden. The idea of linear time (in the Victorian Age that was obsessed with the Great Chain of Being) was that time meant “progress” and advancement, which many interpreted as meaning “primitive” is “bad,” and “modern” is “good,” something which this post-modern age proves to be wrong. (Can we say impending nuclear apocalypse, global warming, perturbed weather patterns, non-sustainable urban growth and development, chemical and biologic warfare, designer illicit substances?) In truth, linear time in of itself does not necessarily bear any of these connotations, but if you contextualize it within humanities and social sciences, this is what you end up conveying.

So. Time is in many ways cyclic. History is doomed to repeat itself. And yet, and yet, Time continues to run out.