Symmetry and Time

     In Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern he examines many centuries of great philosophic thought and comes to the conclusion that the loss of symmetry between science, technology and human beings was a a wrong turn in human history. Even history, he says was ruined by the over zealous  application of science. "The modern concept of time, as it is embedded into the discipline of history depends --strangely enough -- on a certain conception of science that suppresses the ins and outs of Nature's objects and presents their sudden emergence as if it was miraculous.' This brought to my mind something I had seen while in the desert in Egypt. The landscape all around was devoid of greenery for as far as I could see. Sand and rock was all that appeared to be there. Yet, near a water point where a water tanker was parked, just under the faucet where spare drops of water landed on the sandy, rocky soil was a miniature garden of green sprouts. I wondered how many years the hidden seeds had waited for that life giving water. What else is hidden by time or history? The great moments in life seem to be the ones where surprising or highly contrasting events bring change to or notice, such as pre and post 9/11, or a death, or a birth.

     "Modern temporality" is based on a "line transformed into an arrow by the brutal separation between what has no history but emerges nevertheless in history -- the things of nature -- and what never leaves history --the labors and passions of humans. The asymmetry between nature and culture then becomes as asymmetry between past and future"( 71).

 In this scene from Harry Potter and the Prisoner from Azkaban, Hermione Granger and Harry Potter use a time turning devise to go back in time to correct wrongs that will save at least two lives.

They will make the past and present symmetrical by being in both at one time. Many themes in the Harry Potter series involve loss through death and the idea that those who are seeming gone are near at hand. Love is what make this all possible which echoes the Christian ideas of love, resurrection and eternal life after death. As Latour says, "...neither Jewish mystics nor Christian theologians have had any inclination whatsoever for the modern Constitution. They have constructed their regime of time around Presence (that is, the presence of God), and not around the emergence of the vacuum, or DNA, or microchips, or automated factories...(71).

 People who meditate sometimes say they have the feeling they are out of their own bodies. People sometimes find themselves briefly in scenes from the past or see visions of future events. No doubt they are, for the briefest moments in the symmetrical experience of past and present. How it happens or why I don't understand.