Echoes of the Past

...processed, compressed, retrieved from storage, emulated and hyperlinked. 

(The Anti-Timeist Agenda- part one)

"Predeceased"
benjamin harubin 2017
collage in silico

What is time?
Does it flow from a single source, read by the needle of consciousness, and pass into the oubliette of the past?
Are we standing in a river, never the same water again,
or are we floating down it on our way to the Death Sea?
Such is an insistence on this instant, this instant, while the past and the future are merely thinkings of things; memories and fantasies.  
But have some faith!
Do birds stop flying when you're not looking at them?

Imagine you're trapped in a giant eyeball, perhaps in nice tiny cabin atop an observation tower in the middle.
Light flows in through the pupil towards you- this is the flow of time, at the speed of light.
You can see that there are other openings, releasing dark sounds or gases or dust, each with their own rates, each intersecting and interfering with the others.  
Time is Plural.  
There are as many time streams as you care to notice, converging on your cabin, falling to the bottom, getting squashed, rotting and then getting sucked up by these other holes...  
Sometimes what goes in comes back out, echoed, but processed, compressed, retrieved from storage, emulated and hyperlinked. 
Never mind the moles.  

All in an instant.
Because you're just imagining this, right?
...And what are you?
The tick tock of a single clock assigned the task of coordinating the streams?
Or are you just standing too close to the cabin clock?
This convergence, this single clock is an illusion, however.  
It is a patch, a picture, a useful idea we call now, invented when first was uttered then.
The function of TIME is to extract useful information from multiple TIMES.
It's the TWiSM: the Timey-Wimey Spaghetti Matrix