My mother and the lightbulbs
or, how we sprint against Time's Arrow
A light bulb burned out in our house the other day and I thought of my mother. No, my mother was not an electrician, nor was she a light-bulb seller. But she could be counted on to express dismay and shock and even indignation whenever a lightbulb went out in her house. Or when an apple rotted, or a bunch of crackers went stale. My mother assumed that a bottle of wine would be fine to drink several years after it had been first opened. She was stunned to discover it was not. My mother, in short, could never believe or accept that time passes and that all things tend towards greater disorder. My mother refused to acknowledge entropy.
You can see, then, that she might be the kind of anti-patron saint of this Substack. She could never possibly have been the proprietor of any Entropy Hotel. She could only have ever been the person who closes the door (and her eyes) to the entropy of the world (see my very first post here about that closet). But that’s it.
I admit to expressing a certain amount of indignation myself when, say, the batteries on my trackpad keep running out. What is up with that?! Does my trackpad really consume that much battery power?! But mostly my anti-entropy behavior is limited to the weather and observations thereof (except the fundamental anti-entropy behavior of this tiny insignificant thing called Making Art and also sports).
I am someone who will look up at a cloudy sky in the morning and then be amazed and astonished that, later in the day, the sun comes out. A miracle! Or the other way around. Sunny in the morning and then clouds in the afternoon? A miracle—of change, of surprise. It’s a twist ending to the story of the day. Yes, of course I know that atmospheric conditions change. And more than that, I am a serious student of weather reports (historical and prospective), to guide my activities out there in nature. So you would think I would understand that clouds are going to roll in at such and such a time. But this is a part of my life, it seems, in which I am like my mother. I am shocked (shocked!) at Change.
My mother never accepted the most important change of all: aging. She did not at all go gently into that good night. She hated that time continued to pass for her physical being, and she tried—even though she read deeply in various rather scholarly areas, and in several languages—to keep her mental, imaginative, psychological, and emotional being squarely fixed in her youth. In a way, this was an admirable endeavor, this mission to remain young, new, fresh even as time moved inexorably in the other direction. There was a certain quixotic heroism to it, I think now.
As the new year began just over two weeks ago, I noticed for the first time in many years that the days were and are getting longer. I am not usually someone who welcomes the coming of the light (see my confession here). But this year felt different, and that’s perhaps because I was sensing enough figurative darkness in the world that I didn’t need any extra literal murk on top of that. This year, I’m more mindful of the entropy we can’t escape, and so I’m looking around me for signs of renewal and joy. Time’s Arrow goes in one direction, but we can make small little darts and spurts to put ourselves ahead of that flow if only for a short while before it catches up with us again.
We make art. We do sports. When we do those things, we engage in the illusion that we are creating something from nothing, that we are our own perpetual-motion machines. At core we’re more like the Drinking Bird toy that only looks like a perpetual-motion machine because a person gets it going with a cup of water (and has to get it going again when that water evaporates). But we’re so much more than that plastic bird with its repetitive and limited behavior. Our actions are fluid, inventive, and improvisational —whether we’re at a desk, an easel, a dance floor, or a ski run, a mountain, a trail. Maybe it’s better to say that we’re like actors doing improv every day, and our new energy charge—our replaced lightbulb, our new battery—is the “yes, and” with which we respond to each new day.
So, the next time a lightbulb burns out in my house, or a battery dies, I’m going to try to remind myself that I’m already doing things that help me sprint ahead of Time’s Arrow. Even if only for a little while.
