Wild Time

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And then there’s drugs. Surely one reason alcohol and drugs are so much in demand in modern life is that they twist and tangle time, stretch and bounce it and resist the clock’s coercion. Perhaps, sadly, this is partly why many indigenous peoples across the world, who have been enclosed in reservations and subjected to Western imperialism of both land and time, now have such a strong desire for alcohol—it’s a way of releasing themselves metaphysically into the only freedom still available to them—the wild time of drunkenness.

And finally rock ’n’ roll. The music of tribal peoples is almost always designed to take people out of ordinary time, into an extraordinary trance time, for hours or even days. And the roots of rock ’n’ roll reach into these rituals, as well as blues, jazz, dance, rap, techno and most other pop music forms. Wild time has also found its way into the Western classical tradition. Around the turn of the 20th century, just when time had been widely standardized and wild lands were being ransacked by industrial civilization, the most brilliant musicians in Europe exploded with a rendition of wildness. Claude Debussy wrote “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” with its unforgettable, wild flute opening, which evokes hillsides, barrows, and woods. The passage then evokes the great god Pan, the pagan patron saint of Wild Time, who himself played the pipes. According to tradition, he, like the Pied Piper, lures you out of town into a green wilderness to dance on the wild side of time. Gustav Mahler’s third symphony, originally called the Pan symphony, is passionate and playful, and hums with the erotic intensity and earthy beat of wild time.

Wild time transcends ordinary limits of hours, days, weeks. In many languages of India, the day-before-yesterday and the-day-after-tomorrow are expressed by the same words—more testimony to the centrality of the present. Now is what matters. Now transcends into wild time.

Ancient religions honor this and have long sought a sacred eternity where the secular clock is stopped. Shamans in many tribal cultures seek ecstasy by entering a primordial Great Time. Hui-neng, the Sixth Zen patriarch, says: “The absolute tranquillity is the present moment. Though it is at this moment, there is no limit to this moment, and herein is eternal delight.” The Tao Te Ching says: “Move with the present,” this moment, which is described as a river, the flow with which we want to go. The 13th-century mystic Meister Eckhart—unusual in the Christian tradition—speaks of time’s uncounted beauty of now; in moments of inner quiet. He wrote, “There exists only the present instant . . . a Now which always and without end is itself new.”

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