do tempo presente

A river without banks, Marc Chagall

"The present does not truly exist. We experience a crisscrossing set of force fields, the aesthetic-causal fields emanated by a host of objects. Anyone familiar with relativity theory will find this idea reasonably intuitive. What is called present is simply a reification, an arbitrary boundary drawn around things by a particular entity — a state, philosophical view, government, family, electron, black hole. Time is not a series of now-points (Aristotle himself refuted this idea) but rather a sickening surge, like crosstown traffic, or an ocean with many currents; or 'a river without banks,' like the title of a painting by Marc Chagall. Time is a flurry of spells and counterspells cast by objects themselves. Past and future do not intersect in the usually visualized way, as (say) the left-hand and right-hand sides of a cursor blinking on a screen. What we have instead is a nonspatial rift between past and future that corresponds to the Rift between appearance and essence. Between these two fundamental forces, the present is nowhere: objects are never present."

Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects