was no memory of the time spent under anaesthetic Was I dead? Of course I wasn't - my body was very much alive but my mind was gone from the reality of the present. It had no conception of time whatever. Sleep is a less extreme escape from time. The mind works away in its creation of dreams, but there is no concept of real time. Sleep is a mini death. Sleep, perchance to dream.
My eyes opened and the light was dazzling. A host of flies were hovering over my exposed head. Instinctively my hand tried to sweep them away, but flies seem to have no sense of threat or danger as they simply continued in their seemingly aimless flight. I tried to lock my eyes on one and follow its flight but gave up - the flies do not follow Newton's law. Travelling in straight lines seems to be totally foreign to them. They seem to love taking acute angles and dives. They are never at constant speed, forever accelerating and decelerating. What must their world view be like? Maybe someday a scientist will attach a nano-camera onto one and we will experience fly-world. What could it teach us? Very little, I imagine unless the camera could be so designed as to emulate the fly's eye. Then we would begin to enter the fly's world. But even then the fly's eye is linked to that tiny fly brain and how it interprets sight is probably beyond the realm of our knowledge acquisition.
There got one. My hand had shot out and grabbed a luckless creature. I felt happy at my skill but then, the latent Buddhist in me, felt reproved at having snuffed out an innocent life form. I had acted as a careless God in the fly world. I opened my fist and the little black creature fell to the heather. The black fleck was almost lost in the purple flower, but my eye followed it, as it fell in its lonely isolated funeral cort?ge. Its brief inconsequential existence snuffed out arbitrarily. Now, it lay in a sweetly-scented, colourful grave in the early morning sunlight. But was its death as inconsequential as I made out? Was it not invoking in me huge remorse? The flap of a butterfly's wings can cause storms to rage - so the chaos theory tells us. Maybe the fly's existence will yet have far reaching effects.
My other hand was numb. The weight of my body, in its deep sleep, had cut off the blood flow. I used my free hand - the murdering hand - to raise my body and assumed a kneeling position in the opening of the tent. I stared out at the sea and the sky. There was no wind and the lightly clouded sky heralded a good day ahead - weather wise at least. I was thankful and, on my knees, I almost clasped my hands in a gesture of prayer, but my numb hand failed to respond. I smiled at my body's timing - it would not condone such hypocrisy. The tingles in my arm told me that blood was flowing freely again - the pressure pushing out the walls of the arteries. I thought of the brilliant, red, oxygen-filled blood that raced through my body, bringing life to the tissues, organs and cells. I was grateful to it, for its constant work on my behalf. It gets no shift premium for its twenty four hour cover, with no coffee breaks or holidays. The only holiday it gets, is the permanent lay-off of my death. I am not planning to give it a break just yet.
I tested the stiff arm by flexing and stretching. Back to normal. I climbed out of my tent-nest and fully stretched my entire body. I took in deep lungfuls of fresh air and exhaled slowly. I felt good - this is the happy life, I thought. For the first time since arriving on the island, my mind turned to the need to get some food. I wasn't hungry as such but I knew that my body needed energy input to maintain its well-being. I had a sense of duty to it. I rummaged in my pack but there was only a badly bruised banana and a half bottle of water. I gurgled with the mineral water, swallowed a mouthful then spat the rest onto the heather.
On the way from the pier the day before, I had noted there was a cafe, attached to an old traditional cottage. It was an isolated building on a lonely stretch of road with the mountains on one side and the sea on the other. I had liked the way the cottage had been framed by the tidy limestone walls surrounding its picturesque site. Behind it, the land rose sharply into the mountain. Amazingly the stone walls continued up the steep rise, marking out lands that can have had little or no use or value. I marvelled at the pointless labour that had been sweated out in their construction. But it had not been totally pointless because now it existed as a natural work of landscape art that no museum or gallery could boast of. I had stood for a long time taking in the scenery. This had not gone unnoticed in the cottage. The upper half of the half door opened and a middle-aged woman leaned out.
'Can I help you?' Her voice had no traceable accent, yet there was a distinct refined quality to it. I smiled to convey friendliness and nodded.
'Ah, no - I'm just admiring the setting of your lovely cottage - you are very lucky to be living amidst such beauty.'
'You might not think that if you were here on a bleak winter's day. But yes, it is wonderful this evening.' Her voice did not betray any emotion and her eyes had not smiled back. Her eyes seemed to have a sadness. Maybe it was the deep eyelashes framing them, but there was a certain wistfulness to them. I found I was staring at her and quickly lowered my gaze. In the half door, I could only take in her upper body and I thought how impossible it is to assess someone on their upper half. There seems to be an instinctual need to see the hips and legs. Was that a sexual response - perhaps related to potential successful birthing. She was wearing a denim shirt that hung loosely over her shoulders and gave her a bohemian air, or was that due to the earrings she was wearing? My eyes fell on the colourful glass beads hanging from each ear. As she talked the beads seemed to dance. Funny the things that attract - but I felt a strange attraction to the beads. A smile once more broke out on my face - this time genuine appreciation. I bade her farewell and continued on my way.
So along with the rising sense of the need for food, there was a curiosity about the woman in the half door that had me scrambling back down the scree slopes from my isolated eerie By the time I had reached the foothills, I had a real hunger and my mouth began to water at the thought of some scrambled eggs on toast and a mug of strong tea. I found the start of the surfaced road, and there was now a jaunt in my step. It took a further half hour to reach the isolated cottage, and it was only when it came into view, that I suddenly realised that it was probably very early in the morning. I began to regret my decision to throw away my watch. I'd have no need of regulated time from hereon, I had figured. I looked at the sky and the low sun, and reckoned it must be sometime before seven. How could I expect to knock on someone's door at that hour, looking for food. I slowed down my pace and eventually stopped.
I needed to let some time pass. I sat on a stone wall and tried to relax and take in the beautiful scenery. But, now that my body had decided it wanted food, there was no relaxation. The time that heretofore flowed serenely, now welled up and hardly moved at all. It was playing its games again. I tried to get my mind to forget about the now. I needed to think on anything but the present, because the present was an obstacle to time flow. I hated myself for wanting the precious commodity of time to be wasted. I had such little time left - it should not be squandered. I felt at odds with my body, because it was my body that demanded the quicker flow of time. Now I was painfully aware of each second as it passed. Yet the previous twenty four hours passed, as if, in an instant. I had not felt the time flowing. I could see how related was time-flow and the psychological state of the mind. Time must therefore be only in the mind and not an objective reality at all. In other words time is only there when we measure it. Another insight?
There was a curious parallel with quantum measurement theory here. Measurement is the linchpin of quantum theory, I thought. What am I trying to say here? My mind was now sifting back over the studies of the last two years. Try and make it simple, I chided myself. Forget the mathematics, I urged myself.
I thought of a single particle, like a speck of light, moving with a uniform speed in a dark void. The void has the three dimensions of space and because the speck of light is moving there is a concept of time. What can I say to describe this ghostly particle. What are its degrees of freedom. Well, it has a position in the void, it has a speed and a direction of travel. The latter are ch
aracterised by momentum which is its mass and velocity combination. Suppose I try to find out its speed - how do I proceed? Therein lies the measurement problem of quantum mechanics. To measure, say speed, I have to interfere with the particle by firing a photon of light, from my measuring instrument, at it. But this very act interferes with, or changes the momentum. So the paradox is - I can only know the particle's position and not its momentum at any one time. It is the choice of what we want to measure that determines the reality for the particle. If we measure position, the theorists say that the system jumps into an eigenstate of position.
Now is there a similar parallel with time. What is time? It is something we surely can measure. Time is based on repetitive motion, the swing of a pendulum say. Each swing is counted and time is thus measured in swing counts. But a swing count is a very large measure of time. If we want to decrease this measure, the swing must go ever faster, or ever smaller. What is the natural limit of time? Well, it is related to the measurement of speed, and nothing can go faster than the