I bought a book by Henry Bergson a couple of months back: The Creative Mind. I wanted to supplement my reading about particular creative artists (Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Richard Diebenkorn, Willem de Kooning), with some of the philosophical underpinnings of the concept of creativity.

However, I was stopped within the first few pages of the Introduction I (Introduction I and Introduction II comprise the first 90 pages of the text) and brought back to the time I was a began my engineering studies. I flashed back to some difficulties I encountered with the concept of graphs depicting changes in quantity with respect to time. I believe my inability to recall my troubles precisely is due to my indoctrination and acceptance of convention. It is difficult to think deeply about the concept of time.

Bergson states that real time eludes mathematical treatment. Since time flows. “not one of its parts is still there when another part comes along.”* Therefore it is impossible to superimpose one length of time upon another. Here is the astonishing part:

“To state that an incident will occur at the end of a certain time t, is simply to say that one will have counted, from now until then, a number of t simultaneities of a certain kind. In between these simultaneities anything you like may happen. Time could be enormously and even infinitely accelerated; nothing would be changed for the mathematician…”**

Below is my Bersonian time line.

Bergsonian Time Line
12″x9″ 140# Cold Pressed Watercolor Block

* The Creative Mind, Henry Bergson, First Replica Books 1999 Bridgewater, NJ p.12

**Ibid p.13