Can anyone picture a time continuum?

Editor's note: This column originally was published Dec. 2, 2001.

In former creative writing workshops I have stressed the value and craft of making your reader See, Hear and Feel. Feel, as in some emotion -- joy, sorrow, laughter, compassion, etc.

The easiest of these guidelines is, at least for me, See. With an abundance of legitimate adjectives, as well as some made up, one can make the Peace Rose or a red apple still hanging on a tree branch, come pictorially alive in the reader's mind's eye. But can one make someone see the concept of the abstract, the unseeable things such as time? I don't know.

I have never studied the history of art, as in painting, nor how to interpret what it is, if anything, the artist is trying to get across in a grotesque profile of a person with a misplaced eye, ear or other facial features, surrounded by a pile of cubes.

I know exactly what Grandma Moses and Currier and Ives are saying, as well as Doris Lee in her painting titled, "Thanksgiving." So, how to paint time, i.e., the passage of or, more especially, time continuum?

The painting by Michaelangelo of God reaching out with a long arm and pointed finger to touch the upward reach of man's (mankind's) finger to bestow the spirit, is the best example that I know of to represent the painting of an abstract.

Screenwriters can easily portray the passage of time by showing the rapid unrolling of the calendar sheets. Rapid pictures of the change in seasons is another way. But time continuum? Could a picture of the firmament do it? Just space, with nothing moving in it? That's a stretch of the imagination.

Sometimes I think of a picture in an old book accompanying the story of "The Magic Carpet." There was a character on a small fringed carpet just lazily floating around in the sky, giving the impression that he was, or could be, floating in unending time. Nothing else in the picture. Just space. Could this be an abstraction of time continuum? Perhaps only if one had the same feeling I have when looking at it.

Ah, there's that word -- feeling. Perhaps I've put my tortuous effort to explain this abstract conception of picturing time in the wrong category of the See, Hear, Feel suggestions.

I can richly feel time, or the passage of it, in many unsplendid ways, as can countless octogenarians. But the weight of it doesn't even register against all the splendid things I've seen, heard and felt.

My questions and suppositions are as unconventional as Picasso's strange placement of eyes.

In the dictionary, under the definition of continuum, it does not say, see infinity. Neither does the infinity definition say, see continuum. I think these words are first double cousins.

Margaret Sangster, granddaughter of the poet of the same name, say "Time flies? Nay, time says; we go." Naturalist Hal Borland, upon seeing a sunrise, comments, " ... a day not one instant shorter or differently proportioned than Julius Caesar knew, or the Pharaohs, or the earliest cave man. ..."

Steve, who reads everything, tells me that Professor Stephen Hawking has written a book entitled, "A Brief History of Time." I haven't read it so don't know how he approached this subject. Very scholastically, I'm sure.

Let me know if you have a mental picture of this vague abstraction.

REJOICE!

Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.