Looking down the catenaries

It is easy to understand why every manufacturer loves anniversaries; it gives them an excuse to wheel out commemorative items, to put a new spin on workaday objects, individualising them with an anniversary label which both signals their immediate reason for existing and guarantees their imminent obsolescence. For the consumer, complicity in this specious commemoration offers the chance to live an enhanced life: each day, manufacturers tell us, is special because by an amazing coincidence something happened ten, fifty, a hundred, or a thousand years ago; buy a useless token and you validate your otherwise pointless life.

There are, of course, more worthwhile acts of homage to the past.  The wedding anniversary can be an occasion of true remembrance for all the joys of a relationship; too often, though, it degenerates into routine or sham. The birthday usually escapes that fate if only because it is principally a selfish occasion, centred entirely on one person and on the less equivocal celebration of their continued existence.

But anniversaries and birthdays serve a more pragmatic if covert purpose: they are markers in time. Imagine life without birthdays, without ages; many people would find it hard to locate sequentially their past and the events it contained; instead, they would enter the great bag of memory, to join and augment the hopeless jumble already there. We need anniversaries as signposts to tell us where we are in time.

Time and space are the two most fundamental givens of every human being's existence; perhaps because of this deep commonality, we take them totally for granted.  Space is easier to come to terms with.  Space is defined by the presence of objects in it, and they in turn are predicated upon a physicality - which, by definition, is graspable and apprehensible. Time offers no such handholds. Its analogous definition is through one-dimensional durations, which lead to the idea of things existing for a time; unfortunately this timefulness - the correlate of spacefulness or extension - seems not to imply any useful idea corresponding to physicality.  Although we exist temporally through our thoughts which occur in time, that time proves a worryingly slippery concept.

How, for example, do we manage to think back over time for these anniversaries and commemorations?  A distance we can theoretically travel over again to re-win the experience; time is a one-off.  It is almost impossible to say how we conceive of time - we lack the appropriate words. The nearest I can get to articulating the idea of the past, of years, of centuries, is to visualise time as a suspension bridge made up of a series of spans stretching away into the far-off, misty past. In this image, each span is a century, with the hundred years hanging from the main steel cable like fluttering tags.  Clearly, this is a crude attempt to formulate a spatial analogue of time. For me, centuries are mapped neatly if arbitrarily onto catenaries - the name of the curve followed by such heavy cables suspended between two points. Why, I do not know; but without this construct, I would have no idea of a continuous, structured past; to our present-day anniversaries' besetting fault of false piety would be added the far more frightening one of complete meaninglessness.

(9.12.89)

Index