Vanished Like the Snow

Whistle
1

I’ve been reading Augustine’s Confessions,
especially Book 11, which is the
greatest treatise on time in the
history of philosophy, I believe.

Augustine holds that the past is no
more and the future is yet to be;
the present alone is real.
I believe this is the first clear
statement of a doctrine now called
‘presentism.’

He argues that if the past is real, where is it? If the Civil War, say, exists, where
is it going on? There is, it seems,
no answer to such questions, so the
past is no more.

Immediately I recalled the Solas
song, ‘Vanished like the Snow,’ sung
by Karen Casey. It goes like this:

Where did Helen go?
This is where she had her dwelling.
She has vanished like the snow,
Where there is no way of telling.

This is where she had her dwelling,
All the while they come and they go.
Where there is no way of telling.
She has vanished like the snow.

What became of Heloise?
Abelarde was her lover.
Once they lived in St. Denis.
Where they’ve gone I can’t discover.

Abelarde was her lover,
All the while they come and they go.
Where they’ve gone I can’t discover,
They have vanished like the snow.

Joan came riding from Lorraine,
Everybody knows the story.
England burned her in the rain,
Their’s the shame and hers the glory.

Everybody knows the story,
All the while they come and they go.
England’s shame and Frances’s glory.
She has vanished like the snow.

Where’s the times and where’s the places?
That is what I’d like to know,
For they gloried in their graces
When they vanished like the snow.

I don’t have the tape at hand,
and so I can’t say who wrote the
song, but I’ll wager a pint s/he
read St. Augustine!

Also, in light of our recent
discussion about blank verse vs.
rhyme and meter, just see the
almost magical effect of this
poem’s form.

Presentism is embattled these days,
because there appears to be
a growing tension with physics.
A consequence of general
relativity theory is that some
entities (‘tachyons’)
go backwards in time,
but if there is no past, there
is nowhere to go, you see.

Well, I’ve e mailed the song
to a leading presentist philosopher,
by way of moral support,
proposing that presentists
adopt it as an anthem. Best, Jim

2

Jim,

Interesting post.

Here’s what the liner notes say about Vanished Like the Snow:

“Thanks to Frank Harte for putting this song on tape for Karan. It was written by singer-songwriter Sidney Carter. It is about remembering the women who are so often written out of the history books.”

An anthem, then, for more than presentists…

3

Thanks! I don’t know who
I envy more, Augustine or
Sidney Carter (Abelard
is out of the running,
of course). Wouldn’t it
be great to write songs
like that? Jim

4

On 2002-10-29 15:36, cskinner wrote:
Jim,

Interesting post.

Here’s what the liner notes say about Vanished Like the Snow:

“Thanks to Frank Harte for putting this song on tape for Karan. It was written by singer-songwriter Sidney Carter. It is about remembering the women who are so often written out of the history books.”

An anthem, then, for more than presentists…

What a coincidence.The last few days "Henry Joy"beautifully sung by Franke Harte has been haunting me.
Thanks Jim for bringing me back to the present. :slight_smile: Mike

5

On 2002-10-29 15:30, jim stone wrote:
I’ve been reading Augustine’s Confessions,
especially Book 11, which is the
greatest treatise on time in the
history of philosophy, I believe.

Augustine holds that the past is no
more and the future is yet to be;
the present alone is real.
I believe this is the first clear
statement of a doctrine now called
‘presentism.’

He argues that if the past is real where is it?

That—the Solas song—is very beautiful, Jim—a favourite of mine too—and it seems to capture an attitude which, at least metaphorically, is quite common. Do you know Sandy Denny’s ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’; same sentiment and at least equally beautiful?

I have trouble taking this any way other than metaphorically for a reason that has nothing to do with modern physics. Your formulation of the puzzle makes the question look muddled. You ask where the past is to be found, as though you look for non-present times in places. This involves a mixing of spatial and temporal imagery which I can’t make literal sense of. What would someone say if we tried to do the same for hereism. Hereism is the view that the only place that is real is here (where I currently am). Now I do the equivalent mix of spatial and temporal imagery. I’m not in England and I conclude that England isn’t real because when is it? In other words, I look for absent places at times just as your question seems to invite us to look for absent times in places. But this just seems like a muddle.

Whatever you make of this, it is certainly true that the temporal view (presentism) does seem to capture something we can’t help reflecting on while the spatial version (hereism) is just silly. I wonder why.

[Edited to insert the part of the quote I actually discuss.]


[ This Message was edited by: Wombat on 2002-10-30 04:17 ]

6

Sounds like a very interesting song. I’ll have to see if I can find a copy of it and listen to it sometime.

7

Hi Elf, the song is on the Solas
CD or tape, Sunny Spells
and Scattered Showers, which is
well worth owning. ‘The Unquiet
Grave’ is on it, too. Always
good for a laugh.

Thanks so much, Wombat, for your
very astute and helpful
comments. I’m not
really quoting what Augustine
says, quite; also I very barely
grasp this stuff.

Your analogy to space is spot on.
I’m here but of course I know that
there are plenty of places that
exist but aren’t here.
It would be odd to say that
here is the only real place,
as you note.

The analogue to time is
that I’m in the present–but are
there other times and events that
exist but
aren’t present? Presentism
says No (an option about
time, but not space, as
you say). ‘Eternalism’
says Yes.

Augustine, a Presentist,
says, on my rendition of
him, suppose Eternalism
is true. So WWII, that
event, exists and is real
even though it isn’t
present. Well, a real
war with real battles
and explosions happens
somewhere–real wars
are spatially located.
So if WWII is a real
war (it just isn’t present),
where is it
being fought?

I can ask when England
exists if it isn’t here
(as it isn’t). It exists
now.

I don’t necessarily endorse
Augustine’s argument.
But it is very interesting,
and, well, there’s the song!

Let me add this:
it has always consoled me
to think that the suffering
of the past is no more,
vanished like the snow.
The thought that the
Holocaust is to me
temporally as the war
in Chechnya is to me
spatially, elsewhere
but real, is, for me,
unspeakable.

I vote for transience!
Thanks again, Jim

8

On 2002-10-30 11:13, jim stone wrote:
Let me add this:
it has always consoled me
to think that the suffering
of the past is no more,
vanished like the snow.
The thought that the
Holocaust is to me
temporally as the war
in Chechnya is to me
spatially, elsewhere
but real, is, for me,
unspeakable.

I vote for transience!
Thanks again, Jim

Jim, the only reason why you can even ask your question is because you have a memory: images preserved from the past. Think about this: What if memory is not an element of our natural existance, but something later and extrinsic? What if memory is a deficiency, a decadence of our minds? Like a certain posture or limp that one might develop because of an injured leg.

If that is the case, if memory is in fact “unnatural”, then how does the past/present problem play out? The question “does the Battle of Stalingrad exist somewhere?” couldn’t be asked without the images in mind of location, time, space, faces. What would a mind record that doesn’t store images? Deeper things, like emotions or movements of the spirit, I would say: that which finds expression in specific acts of love or hate, construction or destruction, but is not act itself. And those states can be viewed to persist without regard to the surface of human activity (as it is remembered in images). In that sense WWII, but also Golgotha, persists outside a perception of time that is contingent on the ability to remember images.

Think of the Balkans: A tone set four hundered years ago by surging muslims and powerhungry Habsburgers has persisted through political eras and myriad changes on the map: And it finds expression rather than exists in acts of the present. That doesn’t mean that Prince Eugene is lurking around the corner somewhere, still.

9

Bloomfield suggests a significant point that needs to be addressed in all philosophical considerations of time, that is, the relation between real time and mental time. Mental time is obviously not clock time: sometimes an hour is endless, sometimes it’s fleeting. It depends on what you’re doing with it, how occupied your senses and intellect are, whether you are happy or uncomfortable. Two people in the same event can experience its duration very differently; presumably their watches “experience” the hour in exactly the same way, however. Memory also has a lot to do with how the present seems to us. To Augustine memory is not just the recalling of past experience in the imagination but also the present pre-cognitional activity of the mind in being aware and interested in the world generally. The content of this nonthinking awareness or present memory is of course very largely determined by the memory of the past; most immediately the time just gone through, but also the whole complex of actions and reactions and considerations that one has done and experienced throughout life and which make up your mental attitude, so to speak. But what is most and truly present to the memory is right now, the moment actually being lived, and what is being sensed and thought in it. Compared to this, of course, the past is just gone and the present not yet, no matter how clearly I’m thinking of it or recalling it.

Now, not from the human perspective, what is the past really? Of course to talk about it in space is just a metaphor which can easily confuse things, but the problems can go both ways. One Augustinian might point to the senselessness of saying that it’s anywhere and conclude that it isn’t. One modern physicist might point to his fourdimensional Cartesian grid of spacetime and say that WWII is “right here” and of course it exists in the manifold or complex or whatever of the complete multidimensional universe. But the physicist, thinking that being scientific must mean being objective and true, too often forgets that the Cartesian grid and talking about four dimensions and such is all a bunch of mathematically convenient metaphors as well and doesn’t really solve the problem in a metaphysically convincing way.

Augustine does have more resources to cope than have been allowed him so far. To contrast his “presentism” with “eternalism” ought not to overlook the fact that Augustine certainly believed in eternity in the form of an eternal God. To him there are no tenses and all things happen in a universal and simultaneous present; every moment which to us is successive to him is part of the Great Now. To us, however, it will always remain true that the holocaust was and is no more and that’s the end of it. It’s a sort of metaphysical relativity with a profounder absoluteness underpinning it and I find it pretty plausible.

Thanks for putting up with the lecture–the Solas song sounds great! I’ll have to get hold of it.

Michael

[ This Message was edited by: Michael Sullivan on 2002-10-30 13:13 ]

10

Just to clarify: I my post I didn’t mean to suggest that such a thing as “real time” exists.

11

But what is most and truly present to the memory is right now, the moment actually being lived, and what is being sensed and thought in it.

Coincidentally, I am going to hear Solas tonight here in Chicago. That got me thinking about the temporal quality of music itself, including that lovely song. It’s always seemed somewhat melancholy to me that we can never experience a whole song all at once; that only the part in our ears right NOW is “the moment actually being lived,” and what we’ve just heard vanishes like the snow, though we may remember images and still feel the movement of the soul that the vanished part caused. And instantaneously the cycle begins again…

And when we are moved by a song or a symphony or a book or a movie, we feel such a loss when it comes to an end that we want to repeat it: hit the repeat button, re-read, rewind. But it’s never the same, because we’re no longer the same. Though we all refer to the same song, “Vanished Like the Snow” on the Solas CD, which is in some ways real and can be quantified with lines and graphs just as our chiff was, it is more meaningfully a different song for Jim and for Michael and for bloomfield and for me because of how our different life experiences from the past and present interact with it; and not only that, it’s different even for each of us each time we hear it.

12

Wow, so much profundity! Great remarks.
Here are some quotations:

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies
he only appears to die. He is still very
alive in the past, so it is very silly for
people to cry at his funeral. All
moments, past, present, and future,
always have existed…It is just
an illusion we have here on Earth
that one moment follows another one,
like beads on a string, and that
once a moment is gone it is gone
forever. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-
Five.

Einstein’s theory of time was that we are
like people in a boat drifting along
a winding river. We see the present,
but the past and the future are hidden
around the curves. Still they
are there. How would it be if one
could step out of the boat and
walk back around the bend to the past?
(From the dust jacket of Jack Finney’s novel
Time and Again)

Coming into being is only coming
into awareness. (Adoph Grunbaum,
Philosophical Problems of
Space and Time)

Or we seem to think that we sit
in a boat, and are carried
down the stream of time,
and that on the banks there is
a row of houses with numbers on
the doors. And we get out of the
boat, then suddenly find ourselves
opposite 20, and having there done
the same, we go on to 21. And, all
this while, the firm fixed row of
past and future stretches
in a block behind us and before us.
(F H Bradley, The Principles of
Logic, Oxford 1883)

These quotations express the
static view of time, the eternalist
view, to which Augustine is
opposed. Where did Helen go?
Downstream! But where is that?
‘That is what I’d like to know.’

I very much hope Augustine
is right! As mentioned earlier,
we know well enough
what is going on in many
of those houses that always
existed and always will exist.
Very bad news!

13

On 2002-10-30 15:07, jim stone wrote:
I very much hope Augustine
is right! As mentioned earlier,
we know well enough
what is going on in many
of those houses that always
existed and always will exist.
Very bad news!

Why? Whether events in the world are transient or permanent: it would be the same for good and wicked acts. Permanent evil balanced by permanent good or transient evil balanced by transient good. It’s not the question of persistance that is bad news, it is the wicked act itself. Short suffering is no better than long suffering if what is good fades as quickly or as slowly as the suffering.

14

Neat argument! I didn’t know what
to say so I asked my wife. She says
your argument works only if there
is overall as much good as evil.
Suppose, though, that there are 75 units
of bad each day balanced by 25 units
of good. Suppose today is the only
day. Then there are 50 net units of bad.
Suppose there are ten such days.
Then there are 500 net units of bad.
If there’s more bad than good,
the bad accumulates over time,
she says.

It all depends on whether the
bad outweighed the good in the past.
Well, consider the last century;
and the century before, and all the
suffering due to disease that
preceeded, the infant mortality,
and the long ghastly evolutionary
struggle that preceded that,
in which most animals
died as infants–in pain and terror.

So I figure the world is a better
place one day at a time–unless it’s
a very bad day, indeed. Thanks.

15

Lovely lyrics and lovely structure. I will have to find the album now, to see if the tune measures up. There was a song by Joni Mitchell that followed a similar structure, The Ladies of the Canyon, and I always found it hypnotic and evocative.
I like a good philosophical discussion, but it just doesn’t beat a great song.

16

True! I think the melody of the song
is very beautiful, John doyle’s
guitar accompaniment extraordinarly,
and he sings with Karen Casey on
the chorus. One of those achingly
beautiful jobbies…

On the same album ‘The Unquiet
Grave’ with KC singing, Seamus
playing a Copeland low D,
is simply diabolical–you’ll
see what I mean. Please don’t
listen to this song in the
vicinity of sharp objects.

17

On 2002-10-30 16:57, jim stone wrote:
So I figure the world is a better
place one day at a time–unless it’s
a very bad day, indeed. Thanks.

I am too lazy to type a full refutation, and anyway I have no spousal support. I don’t think my argument depended on an even distribution of good and evil.

And the world one day a time would by necessity be meaningless and that would be the worst evil of all. But you probably take it as a premise that the world is meaningless, anyway, which is why you can set suffering and physical pain in one; a pessimistic hedonism that.

Finally, even if evil outweighed good 99:1, the permanence of that 1 good might still be worth the 99 units of suffering, in perpetuity. A common romantic theme, actually.

And do you remember this?

Then one day near Salinas
I let her slip away
She’s looking for that home
And I hope that she finds it;
But I’d give all my tomorrows
For a single yesterday
To be holding Bobby’s body
Next to mine.

Transience. Are you hoping for another word for nothing left to lose?

18

This is some message board. Post a little puzzle in reply to someone’s metaphysical reflection before going to bed and when you look in the morning there are about six attempts to solve it.

I think I agree with Bloomfield here; by tweaking the metaphysics of time we can’t make the world a better or worse place or make joy or despair a more rational reaction to it.

What makes time the subject of songs of loss and yearning in a way that space isn’t-although songs of parting exploit features of spatial separation that are just as poignant—is the difference in the way we experience those dimensions. In principle, we can always revisit, or avoid revisiting, absent places, quite literally. We can’t revisit past times and we can’t avoid visiting future ones while remaining alive. We lament the passage of time for rather different reasons to those that make us lament spatial separation. If I lament the death of a loved one, part of my sorrow is that I can’t see him or her again in this life time. If I lament the fact that someone I love has gone away overseas, they are there to be visited but that is impractical. It’s not a matter of a difference in reality; it’s a matter of a difference in accessibility. That’s how I see it; it’s obviously not a gloss on St. Augustine.

When, for practical purposes, spatial separation is bound to be permanent, there isn’t much difference in how we experience it. I understand that in Ireland in the past wakes were held for emigrants. There still is some difference though—we might get letters and it makes sense to wonder how they are doing in their new home. No wonder we write and sing beautiful songs about both kinds of separation.

19

On 2002-10-30 17:03, Blackbird wrote:

I like a good philosophical discussion, but it just doesn’t beat a great song.

Got both bases covered here, Blackbird. That Solas CD is sitting in the drawer beside the computer ready to yield its pleasures whenever I call. Now I wonder where the Sandy Denny and Joni Mitchell CDs are? Never mind, it’s best to play them one at a time.

20

Jim’s worries that there might not be as much good as bad is very dualist thinking that St Augustine would repudiate. For him good is Good and evil Not Good Enough. Evil has no existence which is not a parasitical leeching of good. Blindness, to take the classic example, is evil but it’s not something–rather it’s the absence of something that ought to be there. When something that isn’t supposed to see (like a rock) can’t see we don’t call it blind because there’s nothing wrong with it. Similarly moral evil is the use of good faculties for purposes other than what their nature demands; but nothing is evil In Itself.

Because of this, as long as anything exists at all there will always be more good than evil. Any evil thing can be broken up into its good counterparts and be put back together into something really good–even really bad whistles can be tweaked. This would not be possible if there were pure evil.

Never mind that, as I said before, the eternity of the spacetime continuum could only exist in the eternity of God, where everything is good simply.