TIME AT CREATION

So let’s try looking at this in another way. When you draw, what you really do is create time.

We already know that to knowledge form requires time. (See Time Of Seeing.) Your act of creation, therefore, gives structure to time which then permits the creation of a form. So, to create a form, your ordinal act is to separate / structure / symbolize time.

Creativity is central to our humanity. It is ordinal (we bring an object into existence), and it is ongoing (conservation). You can’t hear the word without all sorts of religious contexts. Creation, the beginning, even if it is of another cosmic cycle, is central to about 99% of religious traditions. So let’s look at a few world religious traditions to see if they provide any interest to our thesis of time as the ordinal ingredient.

“…time being the first principle of creation,…: (1) pp.128.

The author is describing the Hindu god Shiva, who periodically destroys and then regenerates the world. Both Buddhist and Hindu traditions explicitly link time as the necessary prerequisite to creation. In these traditions, time is cyclical. And in their accounting of creation, time is a fundamental component and is explicitly mentioned in the religious texts. The Upanishads tell us:

“In the beginning my dear, there was that only which is one only, without a second. Others say, in the beginning there was only which is not, one only, without a second; and from that which is not, that which is was born.” (2) pp.98

So, before the beginning of the world, there was not even one second. And after the beginning, what was born, was with time.

Time, as we understand it in these pages, relies on the properties of the physical Universe. All sorts of philosophers over the centuries have offered various concepts and theories regarding God, creation and time. Before creation, some traditions tell us, there was no time: this is commonly called metaphysical time. At creation, it was the creation of time which gave form to the physical Universe: this is what we call physical time. The Christian tradition posits that our physical world, in physical time, is surrounded by a timeless and true Universe, in metaphysical time.

“The paradox of creation, the coming of the forms of time out of eternity, is the germinal secret of the father. It can never be quite explained.” (1) pp.147.

Yet Christianity is not explicit on time. The Bible does not say, God created time. So God’s creation of the world, somehow, involved the creation of a physical time.

Islam does not explicitly mention time when the world is created. Islam states explicitly that God created everything, but the Koran does not refer to time as any precursor to this creation.

It is worth brooding over this concept of time and creation: the above mentioned historical contexts do give us a wider bandwidth. Given the penchant of these pages to follow Byanztine (Draw Like a Byzantine) and Eastern (The Chinese and the Jesuits) traditions, it is not surprising to learn that the Eastern traditions offer the greatest sympathy to our purposes.

The form you create is, first and foremost, a creation of time: that is fun to think about. When you pick up your pencil, say to yourself, I will now, first and foremost, correlate time. That resolved and transparent form on your paper, as holistic knowledge, is a delineation of time. We cannot understand an extant physical object without time. And we cannot knowledge a previously unimagined form on our paper without time.

1. Campbell, Joseph. “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.” Princeton University Press, Princeton. 1968.
2. Max Muller, ed., “The Upanishads,” in Sacred Books of the East, vol. 1, Sacred Books of the East (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879).

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The drawing at the top of the page was inculcated while using the photo below as the Source Image. I used the geometry of the stone slab, including the shadows, for my base geometry. I then form projected up and down. Acrylic ink is the tone. And I like this Source Image as it somehow gets at Universe and the delineation of form out of it, in some humble way.