The Four-dimensionality of Modern Moments

I have always been interested in the relationship between space, time and the mind and the intriguing ways in which they interact to create feelings of presence, belonging and beingness. Indeed, one of my favourite concepts to come out of modernist literature is the idea of ‘epiphanic moments’ (Joyce) or ‘moments of being’ (Woolf) which possess a euphoric quality that allow us to feel or see the unseen or unfelt parts of life. Of course, as a former literature student, I am so utterly transfixed by this concept that I feel the need to commit it, at some point, onto my skin as a tattoo. A cliché, I know, but a deliciously tempting one inspired by Mark Doty’s gorgeous poem ‘My Tattoo’. Whilst my friends would undoubtably mock me for being a raging twat and though my parents would berate me, I am determined to get a very small tattoo of a matchstick on my body because that symbol encompasses my belief that we can, in the sometimes mundane or painful humdrum of the everyday, find ‘matchsticks struck unexpectedly in the dark’ (Woolf), little daily miracles and illuminations which add up over the years to create a wonderful ebb of light and warmth. What I love so much about that tiny matchstick is it opens up discussions on huge topics such as grief, darkness, light, the seen and the unseen, hope and the fleetingness of the world, beauty and time. A matchstick brings light momentarily then fades, much like the way love comes and goes and the way happiness often bleeds away into a dullness at best or a sadness at worst. This ephemerality is something I am particularly occupied with at the moment, specifically because I think the pervasiveness of social media in our everyday reality has changed the human psyche to desire permanence in a way that we probably haven’t desired it before. Social media is, like most technical advancements, a double-edged sword that allows us to capture and preserve moments in time, making them visible in ways they wouldn’t otherwise be visible. So, on one hand, social media allows us to preserve a moment in time to make it perpetually ‘present’ or at least it acts as a solidification of the fact ‘we were there’ and ‘this is what happened’. In some ways this actually disrupts traditional understandings of time, because what would originally be considered as ‘past’ then becomes made a perpetual presence by virtue of the fact it can be re-accessed again and again. However, this urge to capture moments also destroys our capacity to fully live that moment and furthermore creates multiple versions of that moment which ironically empty it of its original ‘feeling’ or ‘beingness’. Paradoxically then, social media somehow preserves and solidifies ‘moments of being’ but also destroys and empties them. In his wonderful book, ‘The Four-Dimensional Human’, Laurence Scott says the following:

‘Social media, for example makes a moment four-dimensional by scaffolding it with simultaneity, such that it exists in multiple places at once.’

To ‘scaffold [a moment] with simultaneity’ is a brilliant phrase that requires unpacking. We can think about a pre-digital ‘moment of being’ in analogous terms as a house being erected on a street – it exists in one place/space, in one particular moment in time. Obviously, the moments fades (as by definition a moment is only a moment because it exists then ceases to) and so the house is always knocked down. The important thing to understand here is the spatial concept of locality. Effectively, a pre-digital ‘moment of being’ is felt locally in the body and mind and that body and mind technically exist in one place - the site of the experience. Scott’s notion of four dimensionality takes that idea of a house and applies scaffolding to it, to demonstrate how social media allows us to build a quasi-replica structure of beingness around that original moment of beingness so that the moment/house is then expanded upon in some form. For example, a video from a night out posted on Instagram scaffolds that localised moment with simultaneity because it then makes that moment present on a global platform. That moment, and therefore our conscious experience of that moment, is therefore localised but also globalised and virtualised so that it then exists in three different ways at once: locally (beingness actual), online (beingness virtual) and is then consumed and experienced by a viewing ‘other’ (beingness by proxy). We then have to consider that these three versions of the same moment all differ. Say person A is behind the camera filming a moment. Person A could be feeling incredibly upset or ill but this is not seen or experienced or visible in the virtual version of that moment because how could it be? The virtual moment is then consumed by watchers so that they access the moment but are now 3-steps removed from it happening as ‘beingness actual’. Indeed, how a 100 different people then consume that virtual version will also differ, so that singular Moment X becomes Moment X to the power of 100. In this sense, the film ‘Everything, Everywhere, all at Once’, though classed under the genre of ‘absurdism’, is ironically the most perfect encapsulation of our lived reality. Perhaps that says enough: the absurd is no longer ‘irreal’ or ‘unserious’, no the absurd is our reality.

I wonder then how much this experience of ‘everything-ness’ actually induces an experience of ‘nothingness’ and I also wonder how much making these moments visible in this plethora of scaffolded simultaneities actually functions to mask the original lived reality of that ‘beingness actual’. Does dissipating a moment into these various forms actually cause a feeling of extreme solitariness or is this multi-existence actually really suffocative or is it somehow suffocative, freeing and isolating all at once?  These questions boggle my mind somewhat. No wonder we are so confused and so unhappy when we are trying to exist everywhere all at once, as both real and unreal, visible and invisible. Not only does this everywhereness disrupt traditional understandings of time and reality but it also demands us to question where our bodies begin and end in a world where moments of beingness can extend into a unquantifiable everywhere and nowhere. Scott gives the example of a toddler who used to hug the iPad that his grandpa would speak through – an example I find oddly endearing but also haunting. If we are beginning to ask where our bodies begin and end, we are also beginning to ask where humanity and reality begin and end, which to me is seriously terrifying.

I appreciate that this piece has strayed a little from my original matchstick discussion but I find it quite interesting that my desire to get a tattoo runs parallel with my desire to write which runs parallel with the modern impulse to ‘capture’ and to make permanent. After all, the ink etched onto a human body is not dissimilar from the ink etched onto the body of a page, and both represent a yearning to actualise the abstract, to commit what is fleeting or intangible into something tangible, visible and most importantly permanent. I then start to think about the relationship between preservation by writing and preservation by social media, and how they may be similar or different. Through this thinking I get back to where I began, with Virginia Woolf – which is a loop I’m happy to stay in for an eternity as everything should begin and end with her. Alongside Woolf’s idea of the matchstick is her notion of an ‘inner life’ or that ‘wedge-shaped core of darkness’ that hides within us all. Far from being something to fear, this inner life is the delicate private dimension we have left of ourselves to know ourselves by. Sadly, with social media, the wedge has decreased in size because we have been conditioned to want the most private aspects of ourselves to be visible. Our bodies are more visible than ever (with devastating effects) as are our friendships, thoughts and feelings, nights out, private dinners, and even our moments of intimacy (think porn). So yes, I am extremely guilty of wanting to ‘lock in’ a moment by writing or by pictures so that I can say ‘I am here, I am present, I exist’ but it is human impulse to want to stop time from destroying us. We want more than ever to keep all our little matchsticks burning so that when the darkness of death comes, we can say ‘look at all that light’. But there is something so precious about holding those little individual matchsticks up for ourselves at the very moment they are lit, and to enjoy that little moment of being for simply what is/was at the time. I therefore think we must shelter that beautiful private dimension of the inner self so we can know for ourselves, who we are, who we were, who we loved and what we achieved, and we should be able to know these things quietly, privately and authentically.