on the metaphysical pendulum of time as demonstrated by a yo-yo
by Jordan Thibault
part one
The yo-yo they used was blue. It was not their favorite color—red like their frumpy hair—but of the remaining primary colors, blue would do. They stored the yo-yo in a stained and delinquent cigar box still rich in the musky scents of dark trees and spices, and this box was always stored carefully at the bottom of their little wooden crate when they returned to the eternal and provisional tent city they called home.
But now they were pitched on the side of Church Street between two metal-grated red maples in the blush of autumn watching the walkers and shoppers and tweakers and stalkers along the brick street. It was Sunday and a quarter to noon.
They made an expansive ritual of preparing for their performance, flinging their net as wide as it would spread. By the time they had strung and sprung their yo-yo for preliminary casts a spattering of spectators and one or two shills lurked about.
Their glasses—which were black and plastic and conjoined over the bridge with duct tape—lay crooked until corrected. Then they smiled at the crowd and when they smiled their missing left canine sucked all light from the sky and with their contagious flaming hair gave them the appearance of a jack-o-lantern grinning in the dead of night.
They hung the yo-yo from its string over the fulcrum of their index finger and let the blue spool swing along the trajectory set by its amplitude and mass from one extreme to another.
The pendulum, they said, was the greatest visual metaphor of time and its fluctuation, although the very conception of time as physical movement was inherently misinformed, and that time was simply the label applied to the growth and decay of the physical world, the three-dimensional world alone, to speak nothing of time’s relation to itself or the spaces where time does not exist, but that that was neither here nor there, or perhaps it was everywhere, or at the least a presumption of their thesis that time could not be comprehended by the human mind without the use of metaphor because our species has not evolved merely through the physical and psychological adaption as elucidated by Darwin and the scientific method, but from the constant assimilation of the natural, physical world in an attempt to understand our own ontological needs. Time was the result of this appropriation, and unlike the natural relativity of time, this time—the homo sapiens’ time—was a poor imitation and construction to quantify our perception of change.
While they spoke their eyes remained closed. The distraction of street traffic faded grey and distant like overcast waves upon dark shores, and all that they heard was the constant thrum of the wheel and string. More than a sound it was a feeling, a vibration of harmonious abstraction that pulled them higher than any drug.
Around them the crowd would watch. Their eyes would lock upon the spinning circumference. In their state of hypnosis their defenses against suggestion would be lowered to prenatal standards before their stunted prefrontal cortexes disengaged not from an innate or primal sense of self-preservation but from simple, ugly boredom.
As if sensing the shift then before it fully matured, the yo-yo shot up into the meat of their hand and the sudden slap reclaimed the audience’s wavering attention. They presented the azure ellipse against their palm in a sweeping demonstration before revealing a counterweight in their opposite hand. The finger loop yawned and retracted upon the bauble before swinging in one downward arc while the yo-yo spun in an opposite upward arc. And the eyes of the crowd goggled again.
But to get to the point at hand, they said, not only was the pendulum used to measure time in the physical world through the application of harmonic motion from as early as the seventeenth century—although who could really be sure of the original construction in a history rife with fraudulent and plagiarist inventors—onward, but the pendulum consequentially grew analogous—at least in the West—with not only the concept of time but time itself: a truly definitive metaphor.
They explained that the commonly touted philosophical concept of the eternal return elaborated upon by Nietzsche on the tradition of the stoics and then popularized by the phrase ‘time is a flat circle’ was true in the sense that history which was the occurrence of time would inevitably reoccur but that time would be more aptly described as an uncoiling spring that we perceive only as the horizon.
And all that being said, simply, wholistically a pendulum, the pendulum, was an apt metaphor for time without the need for abstract thinking simply because it was so fundamental, so rudimentary, so inherently bound in our historical understanding of time—incomplete as it may be—because as the clock’s pendulum swings to fixed points determined by the natural laws of physics so does humanity’s proclivity for long-standing patterns of behavior.
Bound as we are by the cyclical nature of time, change — that is, not change of our physical world, but a revising of the metaphysical world that surrounds and informs us beyond our sensory understanding — can only be affected by removing ourselves from that fulcrum.
part two
On the weekends, sometimes, when I felt no desire to leave the yellowing walls of my studio apartment, I leaned out the screenless window half-way in the bracing autumn air with a mug of steaming coffee burning in my hands until its heat faded into a comforting radiation, and watched for their arrival.
I recalled some of my misinformed questions and the indomitable cheerfulness with which they responded.
“Where do you live?” I asked.
“Everywhere,” they said.
“Do you need anything? Can I get you anything?”
“I have everything I need,” they said.
“You almost convince me you’re happy,” I commented.
“I don’t need to convince you of anything,” they said, grinning their gap-toothed grin.
I thought about their yo-yo and their circumstantial speeches and the words they used like beads on long rosaries counting back to our beginning. I thought about my own life and the measure of decay I could see and feel and know with the whole of my body. I considered the metaphorical application of the yo-yo, the pendulum to human disciplines. And I recalled a further conversation on another tenet of their philosophy, or at least a line of reasoning which they were currently plotting out like constellations within the neurons of their own mind, but that was not yet ready to be formally introduced into their performance. A further exploration, they explained.
While the pendulum appears to contain only three distinctive points—the equilibrium flanked by its maxima—between these is an infinity of implicit points. Upon either height the pendulum momentarily exists at its fullest potential energy and but for gravity, but for the fulcrum, would ascend free. Bound as we are by the isochronal circle of time, genuine change can only be made in an attempt to remove ourselves from the eternal fulcrum from which we oscillate.
"But I have not discovered how," they admitted with a chagrined shrug, "and I must take my own advice. There is no shame in where you find yourself upon the pendulum’s arc if you are moving somewhere. But if you are content to remain in the equilibrium you are nothing but waste, benefiting no one, not even yourself, not even myself." And for the smallest moment their joy was drowned in the greatest sadness. "But! Imagine once we are free." They grinned their jack-o-lantern smile.
"The pendulum seen as three points was the restraint laid upon the careless, was something else," they said, and I thought: generational differences, political differences, cultural differences. These were all perceived within the confines of polar opposites or swings from left to right and right to left forever. And if we were to break free as they suggested, if we discovered how and were not afraid, then…then.
Then I remembered the man with the beer can crushed between his thick fingers and his red-faced meanness. The spittle that flew from his mouth. Tranny, he screamed. Tranny. Stay away from kids you fucking freak. And he hurled the empty can through the sparse crowd where it clattered harmlessly at their feet. Their yo-yo whirred up into their hand as they reached down to pick it up and toss it into a bag full of cans and bottles. Thanks for dinner, they said and smiled.
part three
On the day they disappeared, I nearly missed their absence, lulled as I was by their constancy and by the essential nature of their busk to Church Street’s decaying personality. The double-take pulled me back to that nook between the two grated red maples where they normally perched upon their impermeable crate.
I checked the time. A quarter to noon. The drum player who occupied this spot until their arrival had up and left according to the unwritten and unspoken social courtesies understood by only the local homeless and their competing performers. I sat on a nearby bench and waited.
Near noon a woman appeared with an old retrofitted stroller like some apocalyptic vehicle built of scraps and began unloading the necessary tools of her purview. I didn’t wait to see what magic or music or mimicry she would perform. I got up.
As I walked on down Church Street, I could only recall the look in their eyes when they spoke because though their eyes were closed one could see that they saw more clearly than ever in those moments. Their eyes were not closed or staring into an unknowable distance but simply into a distance they knew with perfect clarity and one that we were not yet aware of but soon would be if we only closed our eyes as well.
And I hoped that all their eloquent rambling held some merit if not truth. I hoped that the regular nature of their appearance beneath the turning maple leaves and their unexplained absence was a result of the pendulum flying free of its fixed point, no longer restrained, free.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Jordan Thibault is a writer living in Vermont. They often write at night as a meditative practice following the work day. Recent work of theirs can be found in Wilderness House Literary Review.
Mastodon: @JordanThibault@mastodon.social