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Exploring time-binding formulations with William Wordsworth.

Article Excerpt
DURING this past winter break, fortified with my portable MP3 player and a disk of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar radio serials, I took a leisurely hike around the lake at Tyler State Park in deep East Texas. During this walk, while listening to an episode called the Sealegs Matter (originally broadcast on August 8, 1956), I experienced a vivid burst of memory in which my visual, audio, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory sensations became dramatically activated. I clearly heard my grandmother's distinctive laugh as one of the characters on the radio (Parley Baer playing a lovable, but unscrupulous Nicaraguan travel guide) said something very amusing. I remembered the tartness of the rhubarb pie we were eating as we listened to the program on the Philco console radio. I remembered the pleasant aromas emanating from the kitchen as Grandma was putting up preserves for the winter. These sights, sounds, smells, and tastes flooded from my memory as vividly as though I had been miraculously transported in a time warp back to that very happy summer in 1956, when as a twelve-year-old, I had spent a joyously happy time on my grandparents' farm.

I reflected that the stimuli embedded electronically on this MP3 disk had dislodged a dormant time-deposit or epiphany, or perhaps what William Wordsworth would have described as a "spot of time" in book twelve of The Prelude:

There are in our existence spots of time, That with distinct pre-eminence retain A renovating virtue, whence--our minds Are nourished and invisibly repaired; (Wordsworth, The Prelude, lines 208-215, p.369)

Alfred Korzybski has identified the chief measurable characteristic that separates human beings from other forms of life as the ability to bind time, to freeze experience, so to speak, thus enabling older generations to pass down the cumulative cultural experience to younger generations. With this remarkable ability, we have the capability of freezing or "canning" "time-preserves" much the way my late mother and grandmother prepared bottled preserves from summer fruit and vegetables, enabling us to have a taste of summer in the freezing cold of a Minnesota January.

In many of his works, Wordsworth anticipates a number of fundamental general semantics formulations,...