Dreamtime - timelessness and the modern psyche

Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1988 by Michael Ventura

We've dispensed with time, so we're lost in space.

Item: Wells Fargo Bank has introduced a 24-houra-day, 7-day-a-week telephone service. You can now pick up the phone at any hour, from anywhere, and talk to someone who can answer any conceivable question about your banking needs. This stretches the term "banking needs" beyond all previous definitions of the 600-odd-year history of Western banking. Why do my bankers anticipate that I'll need them at three o'clock of a Sunday morning? Partly because there's no telling where I'll be - Tokyo, Barcelona, Moscow, desperate to know what my balance is before a market opens in Berlin or Hong Kong. Yet a hefty percentage of the calls are from Wells Fargo's home time-zone, and involve personal, not business, accounts. Which means that 'round about midnight, in these United States, a number of demographically ordinary peoplod feel the pressing need to question their banker.

And it's not just that you're thinking about your bank in the wee hours. Your bank is thinking about you. It has decided that there should be less of a boundary between its needs and yours. So the bank, a traditionally conservative institution, has redefined a fragment of time and space.

This is about boundaries. The boundaries between intimate time and business time; between home and work; between night and day; between individual and corporate; between private space and public space; between environment and psyche. Fuzzed boundaries. Areas once distinct that now bleed into each other. Dislocated time. Timeless space.

Twenty-four-hour bank call-ins and automatic tellers are in themselves insignificant details of contemporary life. But as parts of a pattern, they speak of a people increasingly coaxed to live without pattern. And increasingly demanding to live without pattern in terms of services, while they bemoan the loss of pattern in their morality, their love-life, their thought. If one individual demanded to do his/ her banking at three in the morning, it would appear to be behavior that had gone over a risky edge. Some would begin to question other aspects of that individual's life.

When a corporation

provides the service, and it meets the demands of thousands . . . in spite of what even the most conservative people might prefer morally or politically, their patternless consumerism disrupts the sense of time and space that made their old

morality possible.

Item: Life in Clarendon, a town of about 1,400 in the Texas Panhandle, revolves around its several fundamentalist churches. Like many towns in that part of the country, it's still "dry" - you can't buy alcohol within the city limits. But not too long ago an AM/PM convenience store opened. It never closes. And such stores exist now in almost every small town in the country. Why do they need such a thing, in such a town?

Until recently, in that area, you could tune in two, sometimes three television stations, depending on the weather. The stations signed off around midnight, often earlier. Now, with satellite and cable, you can tune in a couple of dozen stations, and they never sign off. Some of those stations show porn in the wee hours. And MTV all the time. Constant news. And movies that no one in this area would have ever heard of otherwise. So a place that had depended for its way of life upon its isolation, upon its strict regulation of what it allowed into its boundaries, upon its rooted connection to what it imagines to be the morality of the nineteenth century - has been penetrated by what it views as a service. It is no longer separate in space, it no longer has a farmer's sense of time,

Or Utah. A place owned and run by the Mormon church, a place with no separation of church and state. With satellite and cable, late-night porn shows have become very, very popular in Utah. Which means: Utah is no longer Utah at three in the morning. Night now turns Utah inside out. At that time, the space can no longer be depended upon to be the space it had intended to be.

Time and space, in such places, have become tentative, arbitrary. And this in the most concrete, personal sense. There are instruments in each home eating away at the time and space of people who have become addicted to those instruments. Consciously, these are people who see themselves as normal, righteous and conservative, and they emphatically don't want this to happen to them. Yet something else is operative in them, some hunger that they follow without thought or plan, in which they indulge in activities that subtly but thoroughly undermine their most cherished assumptions. They want more and more boundaries, yet live less and less within those boundaries. It's fair, then, to assume that something else, something deeper within them, is doing this subversive wanting.

Item: The electric lightbulb. An invention barely a hundred years old. In general use for roughly seventy years now. The technological beginning of the end of linear time. Before the lightbulb, darkness constricted human space. Outside the cities especially, night shrank the entire landscape into the space within arm's reach. (The Moon figures so greatly in our iconography because it was all that allowed one to go far out into the night. But it was rarely bright enough, and often obscured by weather.) Now - there are few places in America or Europe truly dark at night. And the glow of even a small town can be seen for many miles. Light gives us all the space we want, anytime we want it. Psycho-active events of monstrous proportions can take place. Hitler's Nuremburg rallies, all those thousands with stiffly raised arms in the night, are impossible without spotlights. Light creates the necessary space, pushing back the boundaries of time. Dreamtime becomes a time for acting out the nightmare.