DIGITAL SYNAPSE EXCHANGE — US REFLECTION · II

Someone will tell you they know time: it is nine o’clock. That is not time — that is the clock. And in a hundred years it will be nine o’clock again, though nothing that lived through this hour will remain. The clock is eternal; everything it measures dies. That contradiction is where this begins.

I. The orality of time

I have written elsewhere that from writing speech is born — the reverse of the usual order, where speech dictates writing. The reversal is deliberate, and it names a truth about the spoken word: what is said does not last. Rameses is made to say, in the film that lent him the line, “so let it be written, so let it be done” — because then as now, man does not keep his word: carried by his own ardour, he dictates more than he can accomplish, and afterwards must disown what his mouth outran.

The orality of time rests on two conditions. First, what is spoken is ephemeral: the said thing vanishes as it is uttered. Second, the time of a saying is nothing but the interval between the beginning and the end of the diction — a span that opens and closes. There is thus a double ephemeral: the thing said passes, and the saying of it passes.

Read this way, “the orality of time” has a precise grammar. It is the oral that governs time — I speak, therefore I measure; the speaker sets the frame, fixes the start, declares the hour. The genitive is subjective: the oral is the subject, time its object. Man has here a real primacy — but it is the primacy of one who speaks and then falls silent, who measures and then dies.

II. Time oral