The Arrow of Time
- ee8vvvv
- Jun 30
- 14 min read
Every so often, a question rearranges a room before anyone has the chance to answer it. The first question posed in my art history course on Memory and Monuments was one of those:
What is the difference between a monument and a memorial?
At first, it felt almost too ordinary—a distinction of language, perhaps even semantics. Yet something in the room resisted moving on. The question settled between us as an invitation to inhabit dialogue to consider not only what these structures are, but what they ask of us, what they preserve, and what kinds of remembering they make possible.
The room at first carried a stillness of presence, as though we were all waiting for the silence itself to offer the first response. Even the soft hum of the classroom projector seemed to participate in the moment—an ambient signal, the first faint harmony of the semester's energetic memory.
A monument, then, as a singular temporal point: a fixed point in time [1]. An object that appears to hold a moment still, a time keeper thats been passed down generations, or an old guitar— its a very brief cutout of the past, made solid and, or ornate. By contrast, a memorial suggested something more plural. (memo)—[0] many messages, multiple traces, and exist through a series of maybe more than a few generations. Not a single temporal node across a linear timeline, but a field of cyclic- rhythmic resonances. Soundwaves—-are like memories distributed, layered, diffused light synaptic impulses across a durational field of interlocking combustions forms. However if the monument, by my analysis asserts itself as fixed, then the idea of a memorial would be like an expanse toward the more reflective, almost communal, but more intimate and experience oriented.
I voiced something along these lines, if I remember correctly. and even as I spoke, I felt the language I used to describe myself, bending toward something larger, but not simply definitions, but something, although I couldn’t think of anything, my mind in a constant flux of reverse psychology. But maybe that was the point of what I was trying to do, like trying to name the moment by voicing, “now”. There’s now as in: we collectively, and or now as in [me] only me— one is a temporal being, and the other is a place in time. It endures only as it arrives to us in time. Its meaning emerges through a lived continuity of impressions, extending beyond a single point and unfolding outward and inward simultaneously.
This brings me to a word I found myself returning to: reverberation. I use it in the broadest sense. In sound, reverberation is not the original signal but the persistence of its energy as it interacts with space. It is sound becoming a feeling of time. But reverb also names something phenomenological: the way perception carries traces, the way meaning echoes within us. When I speak of the feeling of sound, I also mean the point at which perception becomes presence—the moment when sensation, memory, and intention align.
In phenomenology, this aligns with the inner structure of experience: a continuous sequence of retentions (what remains), impressions (what arrives), and protentions (what is anticipated) (Husserl 35–41). Remembrance is a form of reverberation that becomes a model for memory itself. It names the process by which a moment extends beyond itself, gathering meaning through duration and relation, and as feedback. This is the foundation of the question I bring into my research: What can we understand about memory when we ascribe the same conceptual meaning of time and space, as frequency and resonance? And if so—how might monuments operate not as fixed objects, but as temporal fields where the sensations collide memories, and is now, and the now becomes aware of an immanent object as past, and“all-at-once.”
To clarify what I mean by energetic interfaces, I reimagine memory as a sensorial lieu de mémoire: a site where fields of light crystallize, collapse, reform, and move on—leaving a self- actualizing trace of history, an energy that remembers itself. History folds and unfolds in a single breath. I keep circling the place where thought accelerates into memory—where the mind catches itself watching. A drifting presence moves there, the watcher of the watching, suspended in a field like an unseen firmament between earth and sky.
The gap between these ways of thinking has widened within media theory, especially with the rise of Speculative Realism and its critiques of post-Kantian traditions. My thinking touches the intertwined problems of perception and embodiment, and the ontological questions they open across art, language, and ecology. This inquiry continually returns to the limitations imposed by anthropocentrism—how it narrows what we allow reality to be. To move beyond these limits, I draw on speculative currents like Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology while also reaching toward ancestral dimensions that cannot be contained by reference or convention. Perhaps this curiosity explains my attachment to places like Chaco Canyon.
Much of my theoretical grounding comes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who describes perception as “a field of presence” (Merleau-Ponty 74). For him, perception is an ongoing event —a weaving of sensations in which the world reveals its intelligibility through our embodied participation. Memory, in this view, is not a storehouse within the mind but something that arises from the perceptual field itself. It emerges through the reactivation of the relational fabric connecting body, world, and time. (La nuit bleue)In the blue night, there was only them.
This connects to a photograph I took titled, La nuit bleue, an image of the galactic plane captured outside San Saba, Texas, on a night spent anchoring a radio antenna. I listened to the sky for three hours in fifty-degree winds, letting starlight drift over me in slow frequency. It appears millions of seconds unfolding—and yet here you are, reading this, meeting me in the aftermath of that moment. I’ve been told I write from inside an idea, that reading me feels like chasing an image before it dissolves. Perhaps that is because impression is only half of perception; the other half is expression. When they meet, experience becomes awareness, and awareness becomes knowledge through attention.
Edward Casey writes that memory is inseparable from place—that remembering forms within the textures and atmospheres around us. Monuments are not just a container of the past; they can also condition its return. Anticipation as it gathers like fast-moving particles in dust, each beam of light entangled with time. How do we speak such a sensation into form? What shape does nothing take when it senses our attention, if not of one made to catch the spirit of our deepest loves?
Each act of perception opens a different world: some small and lightweight, others dense, high-quality, low-power, some happy, some sad, some just wished never happened if we just saw the information. The world that emerges is simply the one that holds our attention—the doorway in the desert through which energy rises into an ocean of sunsets, where light moves with the electricity of a dream. Its whatever you want it to be; and even gifted all this—you know, all anyone ever wants, is to be paired with someone who can at least hold a conversation to form it all out. But depending on the time, sometimes less is more.
It was the phenomenological psychologists who first noted that figure and ground are shaped by where the perceptual field bends, and by the subject’s relation to that bend—like seeing the world behind you reflected in a parabolic mirror.
This insight later resonated with the work of David Bohm and Roger Penrose, who argued that space and time are dynamic: each particle, each planet, carries its own measure of time depending on how it moves, while the structure of space-time simultaneously shapes the motion of bodies and the forces acting upon them. The drawing that won Roger Penrose the Noble-prize. Figure reprinted from Roger Penrose, “Gravitational Collapse and Space-Time Singularities,” Physical Review Letters 14, 57 – Published 18 January 1965
Memory shifts how I listen. It’s always connected to the environment around me—light, surface, season, atmosphere. What I notice isn’t the same as what someone else would notice; perception is never perfectly aligned.
In The Memory of Place, Dylan Trigg writes about sites where the past still clings to the present: ruins, historic spaces, landscapes shaped by long histories. These places feel charged, almost like they’re breathing. They stay in the air. When I look at cave drawings or ancient structures, I sense that overlap. The past leans forward; the present leans back. Trigg calls this a kind of lingering residue. To me, it feels like holding a double-exposed photograph—two moments slipping into one another, making a third. In standard acoustics, when two or more sound waves occupy the same space, they affect one another. The waves do not bounce off of each, but they move through each other (superposition). The resulting wave depends on how the waves line up. Which can result in louder sound (constructive interference) or quieter sound (destructive interference), Together, these ideas form the basis of what I call energetic memory.
If perception holds memory, then its true that memory also defines presence. It’s not something that comes back to us; it’s something that operates in the moment—alive and already here. It feels pre-sent, almost collaborative or parallel with another world, as if something in the structure of experience holds things together. This fits with phenomenology’s view of time as a mix of what we remember, what we’re sensing now, and what we anticipate next (Husserl 41–45). What we’re blind to is the piece that runs through everything we assume we understand. Light, for example, does not in itself carry images of the past through space, yet it marks temporal change of warp-time with exquisite precision—through shadow, angle, and light intensity. Sound, too, occupies space in a way that discloses the environment it encounters; reverberation stretches an event across a 3-dimensional fabric, allowing gravity to be sensed even after its source has faded.
Think about what happens when a sound source moves past you—the familiar shift we call the Doppler effect. It isn’t a perfect comparison to memory, but itoffers something useful: a reminder that things can change form and stillstay connected. The sound shifts the medium, but it doesn’t everdisappear. Memory can work the same way. Energetic memory showsup in traces that stay active over time—seasonal eclipse, or invisiblestructures that only appear once in alignment with the sky’s movements. A rainbow is one example. It’s only water and sunlight, yes, but italso reflects how the atmosphere joins in rhythm with the Earth’s motion.The Belt of Venus, also known as Venus’s Girdle or anti-twilight arch, is a pinkish glow visible shortly before sunrise or after sunset during civil twilight. It's the shadow of the Earth itself, blocking the direct sunlight and projecting its silhouette onto the atmosphere.
Local time feels less like an abstraction and more like a line of awareness of the planet: what comes into view, how it fades, and what returns. These cycles ask us to think about how spaces and materials carry this fingerprint. My intuition looks toward the magnificence of the northern lights, or aurora borealis. The magnitude of such an interaction of charged particles from the sun with the Earth's magnetosphere, similarly, I think of the way flowers lean toward the sun. It’s a simple gesture, but it says a lot about how energy moves toward what supports it
To ground this, I want to position memory as an acting event horizon—something that appears, resonates, and transforms. This also suggests that monuments create the conditions for memory to reappear, reform, and re-experience itself over time. What matters is not its physical permanence but the recurring activation of memory it orchestrates in those who encounter it— those who believe in it. In this sense, monuments become a kind of intelligent field: not simply structures of stone or metal, but sites where memory vibrates, likes stars. A star is like a monument of existence that is as alive as the memory it helps summon.
Monuments as Temporal Systems: Shifting Forms, Energetic Fields
If I’ve managed to guide you into how I think about memory as an energetic field, then perhaps we can also reconsider the form of the monument in our minds. The traditional monument seeks durability—stone, metal, height, permanence. Its authority comes from a feeling of stability and from the claim that a particular moment can be anchored and preserved if held in this way. As Pierre Nora argues, the classical monument aims to “freeze” memory in place, transforming lived experience into static representation (Nora 12). But when memory is understood as an unfolding—resonance rather than storage—the idea of a monument as a static object becomes insufficient, even incompatible.
What begins to emerge instead is the monument as an infinite yet temporal system, a structure that remembers by transforming. In this sense, a monument does not represent the past but performs with time. It becomes a site where presence is generated through shifting environmental conditions—a place where memory is activated through light, shadow, sound, weather, duration, and the movement of bodies in space. As James E. Young notes, monuments gain meaning not through their permanence but through the “ongoing choreography” betweenA viewer, site, and temporal change (Young 94).
To think of a monument as temporal is to recognize that its meaning isn’t fixed in the material itself, but in how it changes with time. Small shifts—light, weather, use, memory— become part of what the monument holds. Its meaning comes less from what it symbolizes and more from the relationships that form around it as time moves. This aligns with Merleau-Ponty’s idea that perception is always relational and shaped by time—that meaning emerges through the ongoing exchange between body and world (Merleau-Ponty 207). Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1976) comes to mind. The tunnels are aligned with the solstice sun, so light moves through them in repeating, seasonal patterns—a kind of quiet timekeeping built into the work (Holt 56; Kastner 112). Its memory comes from these returns of light, not from a story placed on top of it.
These rhythms of light and season in Holt’s work find a quiet parallel in Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where the timing shifts from celestial cycles to the slow pace of a viewer’s movement. The polished surface and descending path ask viewers to walk, look, and notice how presence, absence, and landscape overlap. The design is minimal, but it works through time—the light changing, the reflections shifting, the slow movement of the body. Memory becomes something visible in passing (Young 52–53). These works comparably are different in form and function, however their connection is how both operate as fields rather than objects. They demonstrate that a monument can be porous, responsive, and dependent on its interconnectedness. They also reveal that a monument’s meaning is not secured once but continually reconstituted through every encounter. In phenomenological terms, these sites are event-spaces: relational zones where perception combines with environment to produce memory anew (Casey 314).
To turn toward temporal monumentality, the amazing musical composition that comes to mind is the William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops. While digitizing his analog tape loops from the 1980s, Basinski found that the magnetic tape was disintegrating as it passed through the machine. Rather than stopping the process, he allowed the loops to play and deteriorate, recording the sound of their gradual collapse. Completed on the morning of 9/11—smoke rising over Brooklyn as the final transfers finished—the work became a monument directly through
resonance rather than an interpretative perseverance. The loops formed a kind of self-generating field in which memory returns through decay. As the sound moves, it transforms; as it breaks apart, it reconstitutes itself. Memory becomes an energetic recurrence, a structure that emerges precisely through its own disintegration.
In this light, the idea of a monument shifts away from strict historical representation and moves toward something more experiential—closer to a field of relations than a fixed object. I keep noticing the gap between memory and history widening, and that gap shapes how I see things. Some sites seem to respond directly to their surroundings, holding a sense of continuity while changing with weather, season, and shadow. At times they feel almost alert to their environments, hard to pin down with a single definition.
This is especially true at Chaco Canyon, where architecture and cosmology meet environmental rhythms to form a monument shaped by time. Thinking this way, energetic memory starts to feel alive—alive in the quiet, private sense of trusting yourself when there’s no witness. I don’t meet this feeling in academic spaces. It shows up on long drives or in the empty stretches between places, when memory moves differently. In those moments, I imagine earlier versions of myself—one sitting by the warmth of a fire in some distant past, another waiting in a future lit by spider-like machines—each carried forward by whatever force moves us from one moment to the next.
Chaco Canyon as a Living Field of Memory
Chaco Canyon offers a way of understanding how memory can function as an energetic and temporal field. Long before European traditions framed monuments as fixed markers, the ancestral Puebloan peoples created structures that interacted with celestial cycles, environmental rhythms, and cosmological order. In this landscape, memory was not carved into stone at these sites—its emergence is in the movement of light, shadow, sound, and season (Sofaer 5–7). Among many Pueblo cultures, stories of emergence describe humans rising from earlier worlds with guidance from beings such as Spider Grandmother, Awonawilona, or Tawa the sun spirit (Whiteley 43; Parezo and Provencio 87). These narratives emphasize transition— movement from darkness to light, from subterranean spaces to the surface, from one form of awareness into another. This cosmological motion is embodied in the kiva: a semi-subterranean ceremonial room whose sipapu symbolizes the passageway through which the first people entered the present world (Noble 112). A kiva is not in the structure; it is in its threshold of an event, an architectural memory of emergence.
While learning about Chaco, I came across a Diné teaching that offered another perspective on how relate this idea to light and cosmic origins. A Diné elder described Monument Valley—Tsé Biiʼ A, “the valley within the rocks”—as part of a larger continuum of light and energy. Before we were physical, he said, we existed as energy, and when we look back into deep time, we are really looking back into the light process that continues through us. The sun and moon are understood relationally: the sun as our eye during the day, the moon as our eye at night. Letting the morning light touch the forehead is a way of recognizing that kinship. “We are star people,” he said—not metaphorically, but in the sense that the same energy that forms the stars forms us. He added that “only language separates us,” pointing to an underlying unity that precedes words. I hold this Diné teaching beside, but not inside, Pueblo cosmology—aware that these are distinct traditions. But hearing it helped me understand how Chaco’s architecture participates in something larger: not simply trying to align with the sky, but entering into relation with it.
Across the canyon, the great houses, plazas, and roadways extend this relation across the land. Their orientations trace cardinal directions, solstices, equinoxes, and the rare 18.6-year lunar standstill (Sofaer 15–17; Malville 231). At Fajada Butte, the Sun Dagger sends thin blades of light across petroglyphs, marking the movement of celestial time without a single written word (Sofaer 36). Stone surfaces become calendars; shadows become language (Malville and Putnam 9). Light returns, shadows lengthen, and the winds tunnel through hidden passages and rise in the kiva, a cosmic energy reappears. Memory happens in these recurrences. The canyon remembers with the sky. And in this place, the past is not lost or sealed away. It moves through warmth and cold, brightness the day. To stand in Chaco weather—an atmosphere in experience, alive in the present.
Conclusion
and stone, the long breath of Canyon is to feel memory as which time becomes a sensory moment. In the end, I’m less interested in monuments as objects than in the way they invite us into time. They remind me that memory is not an archive to be accessed, but a relation we step into— shaped by where we stand, how the light falls, what the season is doing, and who we have become since the last time we looked. Energetic memory names this movement: the way past, present, and possibility fold into one another through attention. Chaco Canyon shows this in stone.
The Diné teaching expresses it through sunlight on the forehead. Other moments surface on long drives, or in pauses where the world suddenly feels older than we are.Maybe what matters isn’t what a monument once meant, but how it continues to move—how it gathers time around itself and asks us to notice. Memory, too, gathers. It doesn’t hold still. It keeps returning in new forms, offering us another way to meet the world.
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