On Time-Lapse

On Time‐Lapse Photography 
 
One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand 
which could be fully satisfied only later. 
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the 
Age of Mechanical Reproduction" 
 
Accelerated the life of flowers is Shakespearean. 
Blaise Cendrars 
 
I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect 
the qualitative equivalent of breathing—but of a breathing without return to 
a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from 
beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. 
Alduous Huxley, The Doors of Perception 
 
True imagination actually "sees" the "subtle" processes of nature and their 
angelic prototypes. It is the capability to reproduce in oneself the 
cosmogenic unfolding, the permanent creation of the world. . . . 
Maurice Aniane 
 
P h u sis, P o ie sis, a n d  th e  P re ‐H isto ry  o f T im e ‐L a p se  
Substance, Nietzsche argues in The Gay Science, has not always existed. Once 
mankind lived in the midst of a substanceless "absolute flow of becoming": "In order 
that the concept of substance could originate—which is indispensable for logic 
although in the strictest sense nothing real corresponds to it—it was necessary that 
for a long time we did not see nor perceive the changes in things" (171). Perhaps, 
Nietzsche speculated, we are not momentous enough beings to perceive change in its 
purest form: 
 
We are not subtle enough to perceive that probably absolute flow of 
becoming; the permanent exists only thanks to our coarse organs which 
reduce and lead things to shared premises of vulgarity, whereas nothing 
exists in this form. A tree is a new thing at every instant; we affirm the form 
because we do not seize the subtlety of an absolute moment. (Quoted in 
Barthes 61) 
 
The Collected Works of David Lavery 2 
A kind of epistemological natural selection, Nietzsche theorized, thus 
governed the rise of substance—the evolution of a common‐sensical, material, 
stable, vulgar world—and the elimination of a perceptual awareness of perpetual 
metamorphosis. 
 
The beings that did not see so precisely had an advantage over those that saw 
everything "in flux." At bottom, every high degree of caution in making 
inferences and every skeptical tendency constitutes a great danger for life. No 
living beings would have survived if the opposite tendency—to affirm rather 
than suspend judgment, to err and make up things rather than wait, to assent 
rather than negate, to pass judgment rather than be just—had not been bred 
to the point where it became extraordinarily strong. (171‐72) 
 
(Bergson meant much the same when he argued, in Creative Evolution, that 
"A man is so much more a 'man of action' as he can embrace in a glance a greater 
number of events: he who perceives successive events one by one will allow himself 
to be led by them; he who grasps them as a whole will dominate them” [327‐28].) 
But the human mind has not always turned its back on becoming, despite the 
adaptive, evolutionary pressure to do so. Phusis has had its 20th century 
reincarnations. 
 
It was Owen Barfield's contention, central to his whole understanding of "the 
evolution of consciousness," that Greek thinking—indeed Greek consciousness—"was 
in a certain sense alive" (Romanticism 51). Because the Greeks were more "at home . 
. . in the coming‐into‐being, or becoming" than we, whose thought is "built . . . on 
the secure but rigid framework of logic . . . and can only deal with the 'become,' the 
finished product . . . ," their thinking reminds us today of "a blossoming flower that 
is still moist, alive, in movement, becoming." Heraclitus witnessed the "universal 
flux"; we can only perceive and think the "is." The turning point, according to 
Barfield, came when "Anaxagoras set over against the for‐ever‐changing world of 
growing and decaying substance . . . the other principle of Onus or Mind" and 
"antithesis (hitherto unapprehended) between Spirit and Matter" became common 
sense, logic triumphing over logos and judgment over justice. 
Still immersed within the experience of becoming, "conscious in it," the 
"Greek mind could not at first be conscious of it as such." Thus, Barfield argues, 
those "laws" of nature which we now conceive abstractly were to the Greeks "still 
apprehended as living Beings." That aspect of nature perceptible by the senses "was 
itself the sum of the accomplished deeds of another invisible part—that of the 
'Forms' as we will call them. Indeed the Greeks tended to lose interest in the Nature 
which had become. . . ." It was natura naturans which captured their imaginations, 
not natura naturata. 
But we, in our static thought, have made such evolution‐in‐progress, such 
becoming, into a mere theory. We now have, Barfield insists (alluding to the thought 
of Bergson), no experience of evolution: "Now it is one of our four fundamental 
'Laws of Thought' that a thing cannot both be and not be, and so obvious does this 
appear to us that when we hear Heraclitus maintaining the opposite, we are inclined 
to stigmatize him as a verbal quibbler. This is because we can only think 'is'; we 
cannot really think 'becomes' except as a kind of cinematic succession of 'is's'." 
The very word "evolution," Barfield has observed, once had a very different 
meaning than the one infused into it by the 19th century mind as it changed the 
meaning of the older word (which still carried vestiges of the Greek awareness of 
becoming) to denote the cosmos it was then in the process of engineering, and this 
1
change reflects the modern loss of the experience of evolution.  For once the word 
had suggested an "unfolding, a gradual and uninterrupted process of change from 
one form into another, towards which it has tended from the start—from one form 
into another through a whole series of intermediate forms, the one imperceptibly 
merging into the other." Once "evolution" called to mind transformation (onto‐
genesis) not mere substitution (a succession of "is's," or phylogenesis) as it did for 
Darwin—a transformation in which could be witnessed "a change from potential form 
into actual and spatial form, the typical instance being a seed or an embryo evolving 
by growth into an independent plant or animal." 
 
Like Barfield, Martin Heidegger found the pre‐Socratic Greek mind attuned to the 
emergence and establishment of the "real" with a consciousness quite different from 
our own. In characteristic Heidegger fashion, he illustrates this difference through 
what might be called phenomenological etymology (a method which he shares with 
his British contemporary). The Greek word for our "nature," Heidegger shows in his 
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See Raymond Williams’ discussion of ‘evolution” in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (103‐
105). Barfield discusses the etymology of “evolution” in “The Evolution Complex” (8). 
Introduction to Metaphysics, encapsulates this change of consciousness which the 
western mind has undergone. 
For phusis really meant to the Greeks, if we translate it properly (avoiding the 
"logomorphic" imposition of our rational mind‐set upon what was in reality a pre‐
rational logos), nothing like the given, known, "natural" world suggested by "nature" 
(a Latinate word which, in typically Roman fashion, became routinized, obliterating 
2
the sense of wonder implicit in the Greek equivalent).  Phusis was, rather, nothing 
less than "self‐blossoming emergence (e.g. the blossoming of a rose), opening up, 
unfolding, that which manifests itself in such unfolding and preserves and endures in 
it" (Metaphysics 11‐12; my italics).All truth—to the pre‐Socratics aletheia, the 
unconcealed—was, Heidegger explains, the result of the "gathering in" (the root 
meaning of logos) of the fruits of this unfolding in a process they knew as poiesis, of 
which techne was understood to be only a sub‐set, a lesser activity. George Steiner 
has explained this difficult aspect of Heidegger's philosophy of being with admirable 
clarity. 
 
Once, says Heidegger, nature was phusis, the archaic designation of natural 
reality which he reads as containing within itself the Greek sense for "coming 
into radiant being" (as is still faintly discernible in our word "phenomenon"). 
Phusis proclaimed the same process of creation that generates a work of art. 
It was, in the best sense, poiesis—a making, a bringing forth. The blossom 
breaking from the bud and unfolding into its proper being (en eauto) is at 
once the realization of phusis and poiesis, or organic drive—Dylan Thomas's 
"green fuse"—and of the formal creative —conservative dynamism we 
experience in art. (137) 
 
The Greek awareness of phusis, in which a tree might be recognized in fact as 
"a new thing at every instant," could not long be endured, however. phusis became 
natura merely; becoming became become; what Heidegger calls the "ought" was 
imposed upon the world of perception, and truth became almost exclusively a matter 
of correctness, not revelation (Mehta 138, 147‐51). And whether we accept as 
2
The early Greek philosophers (as Aristotle explainsin the Metaphysics [1005]) were even known as the 
phusikoi—those who concerned themselves with the processes of growth and genesis. See H. F. Peters, Greek 
Philosophical terms: A Historical Lexicon (158‐60). 
explanation Nietzsche's Darwinistic historical epistemology, or Barfield's theory of 
the evolution of consciousness, or Heidegger's history of Being, 
Yet throughout the history of the West, it seems, certain individuals, despite 
the pressure to forget becoming and concentrate on the objective "is," have retained 
an atavistic awareness of phusis, have kept alive an "openness to the mystery" even 
in a time which Heidegger has characterized as the "oblivion of Being." (All great 
3
genius, Nietzsche had speculated, may after all be atavistic. ) For a distinct sub‐
species of the race, such a consciousness might even be called "species‐specific." 
After all, as Steiner observes, phusis and poiesis have always been united—and the 
"blossom breaking from the bud and unfolding into its proper being" always an ever‐
present reality of perception and imagination—for the artist. Artists, being the 
antennae of the race, have never forgotten their allegiance to the "self‐blossoming 
emergence" of things; artists have kept alive for the species an authentic awareness 
of becoming. 
 
E v o lu tio n , R e la tiv ity , a n d  th e  M o m e n to u s 
 
And would not the whole of history be contained in a very short time for a 
consciousness at a higher degree of tension than our own, which would watch the 
development of humanity while contracting it, so to speak, into the great phases of 
its evolution? In short, then, to perceive consists in condensing enormous periods of 
an infinitely diluted existence into a few more differentiated moments of an 
intensive life, and in the summing up of a very long history. 
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory 
 
Ordinarily, human experience of events is, like that of every creature, limited by 
what ethologists have deemed our "moment": by, that is, the innate biological pace 
at which we, like all creatures, are capable of perceiving the world. Since our 
3
In The Gay Science (84), Nietzsche writes: 
 
A kind of atavism—I prefer to understand the rare human beings of an age as suddenly emerging late ghosts 
of past cultures and their powers—as atavisms of a people and its more: that way one really can understand 
a little about them. Now they seem strange, rare, extraordinary; and whoever feels these powers in himself 
must nurse, defend, honor, and cultivate them against another world that resists themuntil he becomes 
either a great human being or a mad and eccentric one—or perishes early.” 
 
Another hypothesis for the source of time‐lapse consciousness in our time: Jung suggests that the “collective 
unconscious,” in its almost instinctual depths, possesses a “living sense of the rhythm of growth, flowering, and 
decay” as part of the accumulated psycho‐biological wisdom of mankind. See “Basic Postulates of Analytical 
Psychology” (paragraph 673). 
species' moment is approximately 1/24th of a second, any event which in its 
"presentational immediacy" (Whitehead) is more rapid cannot be consciously 
detected by us. 
A series of taps administered to the skin at a very rapid rate of speed will 
thus be perceived by us as one continuous tap. Or, to use a better known example, if 
motion picture film is projected onto a screen at a rate of twenty four frames a 
second, each image remaining on the screen for approximately 1/24th of a second, 
the image will appear to the human mind as continuous, thanks to "persistence of 
vision." Every movie is, in reality, a very rapid slide show, but the innate limits of 
our moment keep us from seeing it as such. Our inability to see any faster than we 
do "animates" the individual photographs and transforms them into a moving 
picture. Similarly, extremely slow events—for example, the blossoming of a flower—
are below our moment and likewise imperceptible. Thus every creature's moment 
locks it into the world at a particular frequency, allowing experience of only a 
limited range of tempos, though worlds upon worlds—dimensions which I will called, 
taken collectively, the "momentous"—continue to exist beyond its ken. 
Fascinated with the nature of the phenomenal or self‐world surrounding every 
living creature, including human beings, pioneer German ethologist Baron Jacob von 
Uexkull (18xx‐19xx), author of such works as A Stroll Through the Garden of Animals 
and Men and Theoretical Biology, suggested that every sentient being is governed by 
what he called an "Umwelt." A creature's Umwelt, Uexkull thought, is a biologically 
determined adaptation to a particular environment, the long term result of a lengthy 
period of evolutionary development and the immediate effect, in part, of a 
creature's very metabolism, of its moment. 
An Umwelt, Uexkull imagined, is like a soap‐bubble surrounding the individual 
being, filtering all that it sees and feels, and yet it is almost impossible to grasp and 
to witness, so close does it lie to the intrinsic, tacit nature of the creature, so much 
does it constitute the substance of its accustomed orientation. 
 
As the spider spins its threads, every subject spins his relations to certain 
characteristics of the things around him, and weaves them in a firm web 
which carves his existence. 
 
In Heidegger's ontological terms, the Umwelt is a "world" which cannot be easily 
observed because it is that "with which" we see, rather than "what" we see. (This 
tradition of thought has its origin, of course, in Kant's conception of the "categories 
of human understanding, a tradition to which Uexkull consciously attempts to add a 
biological and semiotic grounding.) 
The Umwelten of some creatures, Uexkull informs us, are rich, while those of 
others are exceedingly poor. For a cattle tick Uexkull describes, up to eighteen years 
may pass without a single accented sensation! (Bleibtreu 17). But for every creature 
the situation is, in one sense, the same: 
 
All psychic processes, feelings, and thoughts are invariably bound to a 
definite moment and proceed contemporaneously with objective sensations. . 
. . . Time envelops both the subjective and objective worlds in the same way, 
and, unlike space, makes no distinction between them. (Theoretical Biology 
15) 
 
But human beings, of course, can escape the moment. We alone among the 
species on this plant can come to know something of the "Momentous" itself. What 
other creature shows such concern, both scientific and artistic, with the inscapes of 
other living creatures? What other creature can transcend its own moment to 
investigate the duration of the cosmos itself? What other creature could realize the 
Theory of Relativity or propose the idea of the Big Bang? 
 
As the Dutch phenomenological psychologist J. H. van den Berg has shown, we have 
in the modern age nevertheless become increasingly oblivious to the "tempo" of the 
4
world.  Building on a Cartesian, quality‐denying philosophical foundation, committed 
ideological to the equalizing of all dimensions, epistemological as well as social, 
increasingly obsessed with domination, through speed and power, of a landscape for 
which we have little respect, convinced that time itself represents imperfection, and 
aided mightily the omnipresence of mechanical clocks designed to "restrain the 
changing of things, to camouflage this changing as much as possible" (113), we 
constructed from 1740 through 1900 an homogenized world almost devoid of tempo. 
"Time exists," van den Berg observes, "only when one takes the time"—a 
contemporary rarity. When he himself "takes the time" in Things: Four Metabletic 
4
By ‘tempo” van den Berg means the natural, innate reality of things in biological time, apart from humanly 
iposed structure and stability. 
5
Reflections,  he discovers that "each place has its own time," its own tempo: clouds, 
trees, plants, the whole of the surrounding landscape are filled with different times: 
 
In between the flowers a different time prevails than on the lawn. Times goes 
a little faster there. Above me, among the feather clouds, time goes even 
faster. . . . The sea has a different time than the land. A lake in a forest is a 
realm of a different time. Sometimes a single tree or bush can draw attention 
because of the distinctive time prevailing around it. There are flowers which 
disclose new times at certain moments of the day. When the thorn‐apple 
opens up in the evening, a new and faster time governs this flower. And the 
real reason isn't that the flower moves at that time, but just the opposite. 
Because a different time governs that flower in the evening, the flower opens 
quickly in that particular way and invites the hawk‐moth, which is endowed 
with fast time and flies precisely in that particular way. For what is speed if it 
isn't born by speedy, "time‐consuming" things, plants, or animals? 
 
Compared with the toad, the frog is fast, even when it doesn't stir and, on the basis 
of its particular speed, the frog leaps, while the toad crawls by virtue of the time 
that is its own. 
 
Human beings, van den Berg reminds, are likewise governed by their own, often 
idiosyncratic, tempos: "Even people have a time of their own; each one, I suspect, 
has one for himself. The botanist is marked by a different time than the geologist. 
The zoologist who specializes in diptera is by virtue of his time, his tempo and 
duration, a different man than his colleague who prefers to limit himself to bumble 
bees" (123). 
All these tempos, van den Berg discovers, co‐exist, moments of the 
Momentous, in a marvelous ecology: 
 
An effortless unity governs what I see, a unity in time, strange as it may 
seem. For just now when I observed for the first time that in different places 
times move at a different speed, I thought that I therefore ought to conclude 
5
Things is comprised of phenomenological reflections on dimensions, colors, the shape of the earth, and 
time. “Metabletics,” a discipline which van den Berg himself invented, is the study of historical change, considered 
psychologically.” 
that the places of such different times couldn't possibly remain synchronous. 
One place would lag behind the others and be stuck with a surplus of time at 
the end of the day, while other places would run short. But I see my mistake: I 
was fooled by the idea of an absolute. Uniform, uniformly progressing time 
possessing only one speed. I must abandon that idea. (122) 
 
That very idea, however, has fooled, and continues to fool, most of us: "There is 
hardly anybody who still thinks that things change in reality" (114). 
 
Writing in the 1920s, Paul Valéry insisted that "we—who cannot even perceive our 
own growth—are unable to visualize a movement so slow that a perceptible result 
springs from an imperceptible change." The human mind, Valéry wrote, "can imagine 
the living process only by lending it a rhythm which is specifically ours . . ." ("Man 
and the Sea Shell" xxx). 
Thinking of the radical nature of modern knowledge—in cosmology, geology, 
evolutionary biology, physics—Teilhard de Chardin observes in The Phenomenon of 
Man that in this century our species seems to be acquiring new senses, the latest 
additions to a "whole series of 'senses' . . . whose gradual acquisition . . . covers and 
punctuates the whole history of the struggles of the mind." One of these new senses 
he describes will be one Valéry denies us: a "sense of movement, capable of 
perceiving the irresistible developments hidden in extreme slowness—extreme 
agitation concealed beneath a veil of immobility—the entirely new insinuating itself 
into the heart of the monotonous repetition of the same things" (34). 
Time‐lapse photography, as we shall see, may prove instrumental to the 
perfection of this sense, but the sense itself is not in essence instrumental but part 
of human potential inasmuch as we realize ourselves to be momentous, poetic 
beings. It would appear that ability to see "the irresistible developments hidden in 
extreme slowness" may have long been with us. 
"The sages," said the Taoist philosopher Chuang‐tzu, "contemplate ten 
thousand years and count them as a pure complete oneness" (Chang 73). The final 
effect of the acquisition of an evolutionary sense, from cosmology through biology, 
might be to make men into such sages. 
 
In Woman Warrior, in the chapter entitled "White Tigers," Maxine Hong Kingston, 
enthralled by her mother's "talkstory" versions of ancient Chinese myths, imagines 
herself as Fa Mu Lan, a fabled woman who apprenticed herself to an elderly man and 
woman in a mountain sanctuary in order to become a woman of power. As part of her 
archetypal training as a warrior, she learns from her mentors the distinctly Taoist 
aptitude for seeing "the Dragon," always, in ancient Taoist lore, a figure for the 
living Earth and its ways. 
"After I returned from my survival test," Kingston recalls, "the two old people 
trained me in dragon ways, which took another eight years. . . . 
 
You have to infer the whole dragon from the parts you can see and touch," 
the old people would say. . . . dragons are so immense, I would never see one 
in its entirety. But I could explore the mountains, which are the top of its 
head. "These mountains are also like the tops of other dragons' heads," the 
old people would tell me. When climbing the slopes, I could understand that I 
was a bug riding on a dragon's forehead as it roams through space, its speed 
so different from my speed that I feel the dragon solid and immobile. 
 
But she expands her moment to encompass that of the dragon. 
 
In quarries I could see its strata, the dragon's veins and muscles; the 
minerals, its teeth and bone. I could touch the stones the old woman wore—
its bone marrow. I had worked the soil, which is its flesh, and harvested the 
plants and climbed the trees, which are its hairs. I could listen to its voice in 
the thunder and feel its breathing in the winds, see its breathing in the 
clouds. Its tongue is the lightning. And the red that the lightning gives to the 
world is strong and lucky—in blood, poppies, roses, rubies, the red feathers 
of birds, the red carp, the cherry tree, the peony, the line alongside the 
turtle's eyes and the mallard's. In the spring when the dragon awakes, I 
watched its turnings in the rivers. 
 
"The closest I came to seeing a dragon whole," Kingston notes in passing, 
"was when the old people cut away a small strip of bark on a pine that was over 
three thousand years old. The resin underneath flows in the swirling shapes of 
dragons." 
So far advanced, in fact, is our current awareness of the "the entirely new 
insinuating itself into the heart of the monotonous repetition of the same things," so 
close have we come to contemplating nature and time as a "pure complete oneness," 
that at least one contemporary physicist has argued that we can no longer even be 
certain that "rocks, and even mountain ranges, do not react as living organisms with 
a reaction time so slow that to catch it with time‐lapse photography would require 
millennia between exposures . . . " (Zukav 46‐47). 
 
Einstein himself, the father of such relativistic thinking, was fascinated with the 
prospect offered man by the potential acquisition of new senses like Teilhard 
described. In his conversation with Alexander Moszykowski he speculated about the 
biological implications of his own theory of relativity and their effect on our 
perception. Since every creature's internal clock—its moment—gives it only a 
relative, subjective perception and orientation toward the multiplicity of tempos in 
the world, a drastic change in man's clock, Einstein hypothesized, would presumably 
alter our very measure of relativity; for as Moszykowski explains (paraphrasing 
Einstein): 
 
Only when compared with our own measure of time does an organic 
individual, say, a plant, appear as something permanent in size and shape, at 
least within a short interval. For we may look at it a hundred times and more 
in a minute, and yet notice no external change in it. Now, if we suppose the 
pulse‐beat, the rate of perception, the external course of life, and the mental 
process of Man, very considerably accelerated or retarded, the state of affairs 
becomes greatly changed, and phenomena then occur which we, fettered by 
our physiological structure, should have to reject as being fantastic and 
supernatural, although on the supposition of a new structure they would be 
quite logical and necessary. (163‐64) 
 
If, for example, our pulse beat were a thousand times faster, Einstein 
predicted, we would be able to see a bullet at each point of its flight as easily as we 
now follow the course of a butterfly's movement. Or, if our pulse were increased by 
a thousand times again, a flower would appear as rigid and immutable to us as the 
earth's crust now seems; and the motions of animals would be too slow to be 
witnessed and would have to be inferred, as the motions of stars are now. At an even 
greater acceleration, Einstein speculated, light would become audible. 
But if the human moment were, conversely, slowed 1000 times—if we 
acquired a time‐lapse vision of things—a year at present would become a third of a 
day: growth would spring up so rapidly that it would be scarcely perceptible; the sun 
would flash rapidly across the sky. Another slowing by a thousand times would result 
in the total elimination of the difference between day and night, and all changes of 
form would melt into a "wild stream of happening engulfed in its onward rush. ("In 
reality," Henri Bergson writes in Matter and Memory, "there is no one rhythm of 
duration; it is possible to imagine many different rhythms which, slower or faster, 
measure the degree of tension or relaxation of different kinds of consciousness, and 
thereby fix their places in the scale of being . . ." [xxx].) 
These breathtaking flights of Einstein's imagination—are they not, in a sense, 
the very accelerations and retardations of the human moment the "real" existence of 
which he took to be merely hypothetical, a "thought experiment"? For is not the 
human imagination the means by which man escapes, through the gate of the 
imagination, the biologically given boundaries of his own moment in order to explore 
and to understand, and even to empathize with, all possible moments—those of 
other creatures, for example, and the realm of time‐in‐the‐abstract which contains 
them all, what we might call "the momentous"—thereby discovering such momentous 
new perspectives on the world (new senses, Teilhard would call them) as the theory 
of relativity, or the idea of evolution? 
 
In this century, "the age of Einstein" and of relativity, in a time in which van den 
Berg detects "the mutability of things again [gaining] the upper‐hand" (117), when 
"we even hear of a discovery of time . . . held to be the essential mark of modern 
thought," when time has even come to be "recognized as the foundation of all 
existence," and "to renounce temporality is not to renounce imperfection but rather 
to renounce true being" (Zuckenkandl xxxx), art's faithful remembrance of 
phusis/poiesis has been aided by the advent of a new art form: the movies, the art of 
the 20th century and an art seemingly well suited to reminding us that things do 
change in reality. The "prison‐world" of the known, Walter Benjamin wrote in "The 
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936), was "locked‐up." But 
"then came the film and burst the prison‐world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth 
of a second." 
And along with the invention of this new technology of artistic seeing came 
the perfection of a specialized kind of "dynamite," a photographic technique which, 
it might be said, seemed virtually a modern reincarnation, a second coming, of the 
ancient consciousness of metamorphosis: time‐lapse photography. 
 
T im e ‐L a p se  P h o to g ra p h y : H isto ry  a n d  P ra c tic e  
 
When we were children, and were taught natural history, we were told about bees 
and how they lived. We looked at the motionless images in our books but all of that 
was very distant for us, a land open only to the imagination. With cinema, no more 
unexplored countries. No more barriers between us and things! No more barrier 
between our spirit and truth in its subtlety! Moreover, scientifically, cinema casts 
upon everything it records a clear light which banishes errors and distortions. 
The cinema is an eye wide open on life, an eye more powerful than our own 
and which sees things we cannot see. 
Germaine Dulac 
 
In "The Conquest of Ubiquity" (1928), a brief but suggestive essay on the response of 
the arts of this century to new technology, Paul Valéry argued that the future will 
see successful, and hitherto unforeseen, new marriages of form and technique. "Our 
fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established," Valéry reminds, "in 
times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things 
was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our technique, 
the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are 
creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient 
craft of the beautiful" (225; my italics). 
Keenly aware of developments in modern science—Einsteinian relativity, for 
example, or quantum physics—Valéry predicted that man's burgeoning scientific 
knowledge and technological command would, in altering the customary "sensorium" 
of the species (Ong 1‐16), bring about a kind of aesthetic future shock. "In all the 
arts there is a physical component which cannot remain unaffected by our modern 
knowledge and power," writes Valéry (continuing a century‐long meditation, begun in 
6
earnest by the romantics, on science's impact on poetry).  "For the last twenty years 
6
In a central early text of this tradition, the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” Wordsworth had declared the fond 
hope that “If the labours of Men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our 
conditions and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will skeep then no more than at present; he 
will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his 
side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of science itself.” By the time of Valéry, the question had 
become not whether poetry will actively follow science, but rather in what way poetry (and all the arts) are 
neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We 
must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby 
affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change 
in our very notion of art." 
The subsequent history of the arts in this century has certainly proven Valéry 
correct. The well‐documented impact of sound recording on music, or the influence 
of cinematic narrative on fiction might be cited as prominent examples. And yet not 
all the changes inspired (forced?) by new technique have brought about radically 
new notions of art. In at least one instance—the specialized photographic technique 
known as time‐lapse photography—the result has been the atavistic re‐emergence of 
seemingly lost powers of human consciousness and imagination. 
 
Time‐lapse photography is a cinematic technique, similar in principle to animation, 
in which the exposure of “individual frames of film at pre‐determined intervals” 
results in a “compressed visual record of events occurring over long periods of time” 
when these frames are later projected at normal speed (Katz 1135). Ordinarily, film 
is projected on a screen at the rate of twenty four frames per second: the same rate 
at which the photographs are recorded. But a time‐lapse camera modifies this 
tempo—as Field and Smith, themselves time‐lapse pioneers, explain. 
 
Supposing, now, that we modify our taking camera to photograph one picture 
per second instead of twenty‐four; it is obvious that the whole of the 
incidents of a twenty‐four second period will be crowded on to a length of 
film which will pass through the projector in a single second. We therefore 
have movement depicted on the screen at twenty‐four times its actual rate of 
speed. If we take one picture per minute we increase the speed in proportion, 
that is to say to 1440 times. 
 
(While climbing plants—peas, beans, etc.—can be captured through acceleration of 
only one hundred times, most plants require much more; an average of one picture 
per hour is common: a speed‐magnification of 96,000 times [Smith and Field 137‐
38].) A second example: in order to show the unfolding of a rose—a roughly twenty 
hour process—in time‐lapse, it would be necessary to "sample" its progress by 
transformed, almost against their will, but technology. Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Space and Time 1880‐1918 
presents an excellent oveerview of the historical development of which Valéry speaks. 
exposing one frame every fifteen minutes. The ninety six frames thus photographed 
would take only about four seconds to project. 
According to Herbert Zittl, time‐lapse as a photographic technique has several 
distinctive aesthetic features. Time‐lapse has "relatively few 'at' positions." "Much 
like strobe photography," Zittl explains, "film photography also seems to validate his 
theory. For film photography involves taking a great number of snapshots of a 
moving object. Each of the snapshots, or frames, shows the object at rest, so that 
when you hold and enlarge a single film frame, you cannot tell whether the object 
was in motion when the picture was taken or was stationary" (259). Every frame of a 
film—each showing an object seemingly at rest—captures "an 'at' position of the 
time continuum, a snapshot of part of the motion" (260). As "at‐at" positions 
increase in number, the faster the movement we perceive as viewers. The less 
"position change," the slower the movement. While in slow motion the frame density 
is quite high, in time‐lapse (and other forms of accelerated motion) the frame 
density is low" (Zittl 270). Movement revealed by time‐lapse is thus more erratic and 
"jumpy." Objects shown in accelerated motion, Zittl observes, "objects sometimes 
seem to be self‐propelled, shooting unpredictably through the low‐density 
atmosphere that offers little, if any, resistance to their movement" (271). 
Watching time‐lapse, the viewer, fascinated by the sudden concreteness of an 
invisibility to which he has miraculously become an eye‐witness, feels his own 
thinking aesthetically transformed into something like "a blossoming flower that is 
still moist, alive, in movement, becoming" (Steiner xxx). It is as if, with the "uncanny 
discovery of a new living world in a sphere in which one had of course always 
admitted life existed but had never been able to see . . . in action" (Arnheim 115), 
the "implicate order" of nature, into which—as physicist David Bohm informs us—all 
existing and potential phenomena are infolded, were suddenly unfolding before us, 
7
displayed.  
In the imaginal science of Leo Lionni's delightful Parallel Botany, we learn of a 
type of plant which "grow[s] in the rhythm of our subjective time and eventually 
take[s] the form of a long and intricate conceptual process." Having long ago lost 
their existentiality, these plants can now be perceived, Lionni explains, only by "the 
principles and methods of phenomenology" (13‐14). The revelations of time‐lapse 
7
Bohm has argued that the word “display” should, in fact, replace the word “imagine” in our understanding 
of mental functioning. See Ted Peters, “David Bohm, Postmodernism, and the Divine” and, as well, Reneé Weber’s 
interview with Bohm, “Of Matter and Meaning: The Superimplicate Order.” 
photography are, of course, quite real, technologically enhanced visions of palpable 
realities, and yet for the viewer, at least, it would be easy to believe they share a 
family resemblance to the chimeras Lionni describes. 
 
H isto ry  
First envisioned theoretically by physicist Ernst Mach in 1888 (Darius 18), time‐lapse 
was not implemented until a decade later. In 1898 the first time‐lapse film, a record 
of the growth of beans over an eleven day period, telescoped 12,000 times so as to 
last but a few seconds, was created by the German botanist Wilhelm Pfeffer. The new 
technique was soon coupled with the microscope by the French cinematic innovator 
Jules Etienne Marey in order to capture, by means of "photographic alchemy," the 
motion of blood corpuscles. 
In the 1890's the Biograph studios filmed the demolition of the old Star 
Theater by exposing a single frame of film every thirty minutes. In a mere thirty 
seconds, the audience watched amazed as the building disintegrated before their 
very eyes (Macgown 16). In 1904, Pizon used a form of time‐lapse he deemed 
"biotachygrapy" to record the growth and development of a colony of bacteria 
(Darius 18). 
By 1911 the general public was already witnessing theatrical presentations of 
the "secret life of plants" by means of time‐lapse photography. The French writer 
Colette has left a record (in an essay called "The Cinema") of a 1920 Parisian 
screening of such films. In a memorable passage, she describes her fascination with 
slow‐motion photography: 
 
last Thursday at the Musee Galliera, there were two moments when all the 
young hands clapped, when the mouths exhaled and then immediately cut 
short their "Ahs" of respectful ecstasy. In the first one, a "slow motion" shot 
rose from the ground, immobilized itself in the air, then held on a sea gull 
suspended in the breeze. The undulation and the flexing of the wings, the 
mechanism of guiding and direction in the tail, the whole secret of flight, the 
whole simple mystery of aviation, revealed in an instant, dazzled everyone's 
eyes. 
 
But it was time‐lapse photography, shown on the same program, which most 
captivated her poetic imagination. 
 
A bit later, a "fast motion" documentary documented the germination of a 
bean [Pfeffer's 1898 film perhaps?]. . . . At the revelation of the intentional 
and intelligent movement of the plant, I saw children get up, imitate the 
extraordinary ascent of a plant climbing in a spiral, avoiding an obstacle, 
groping over its trellis: "It's looking for something! It's looking for 
something!" cried a little boy, profoundly affected. He dreamed of a plant 
that night, and so did I. These spectacles are never forgotten and give us the 
thirst for further knowledge. (61) 
 
So favorable was the response of early film audiences, in fact, that in one recorded 
instance a crowd in Lewisham, England insisted that the film "The Birth of a Flower" 
be rewound and re‐projected for their enjoyment (Field 139). 
In the first half of the century time‐lapse pioneers like the British naturalist 
Percy Smith and the American inventor John Ott continued to perfect the new 
technique. In a series of films made before the First World War—The World Before 
Your Eyes—and in two later series—Secrets of Nature and Secrets of Life, Smith and 
his colleagues developed "cinebiology" as a scientific tool that allowed audiences to 
bear witness to previously invisible and yet entirely natural zoological and botanical 
events. 
And Ott, who as a teenager had re‐invented time‐lapse photography in order 
to pursue his curiosity about the exact moment when the buds on his family's apple 
tree would open, further refined the technique for use in the precision study of 
8
effects of different wave lengths of light on the process of photosynthesis.  In the 
early days of television, Ott even became a "personality" regularly appearing (in the 
same way that zookeepers do today) on such shows as "Today," "The Home Show," 
"Out on the Farm" to show his most recent time‐lapse films, many of which had been 
created on commission as advertisements. His time‐lapse films of plant growth—one 
of the most famous was of a pumpkin's gestation—were a special feature of Disney's 
Secrets of Life series. Ott's "show stopper" was usually his film of blossoming 
primroses, in which the flowers appear to dance—an effect created through the use 
of special, synchronized lighting and rotation of the plants to emphasize their 
natural phototropism—a film that lasts only two minutes but which took five years to 
8
For an account of Ott’s achievements, see Thompkin’s and Bird’s The Secret Life of Plants (203‐205, 207) 
and his own My Ivory Cellar. 
complete (Ott 23, 43). In the 1970s, N.A.S.A. used Ott's film in planning horticulture 
for the first space station. 
Beginning in the 1960s the "wizards of odd" at Oxford Scientific Films—a 
private company founded original by university scientists—have continued to perfect 
9
time‐lapse technology to a degree a Pfeffer or Marey could not have dreamed.  In 
their innovative attempts to photograph what co‐founder Sean Morris has called—
echoing the metaphor of Colette—the "fairy tale land" of time‐lapse photography, 
they have expanded our 20th century consciousness of the world's tempos by 
enabling us to perceive, through their photographic "alchemy," such events and 
processes as (a partial list merely): 
 
a) the unforgettable decimation of a mouse's corpse, consumed with 
telescoped, disgustingly vivid rapidity by swarming blow‐fly maggots —an 
event of several days duration, captured in a film which lasts less than a 
minute; 
b) the development of a bird embryo; 
c) a year's movement in the Grindewald Glacier; 
d) cell division in a rabbit egg; 
e) the swarming life in a pile of elephant dung; 
f) sand dollars bedding themselves into the sea bottom; 
g) the comings and going of sea creatures like limpets, which ordinarily 
appear entirely stationary; 
h) the slow progress of a watch's inner workings; 
i) the expansion of microscopic yeast cells. 
 
In a time‐lapse astronomical photograph (48 exposures on a single frame of 
film) which won several major awards and has been reproduced world‐wide over ten 
millions times, Dennis de Cicco captured the figure eight—commonly known as an 
"analemma"—traced by the sun in the sky over the course of a single year: February 
1978 to February 1979. (See Darius 178‐79.) 
And, using time‐lapse, photographer Ted Spagna has completed ten years 
worth of "sleep portraits": scientifically valuable records of the sleep behavior of 
9
Here and throughout I have drawn on the typescript of a 1980 Nova episode broadcast on PBS entitled 
“Moving Still,” a documentary history of photographic techniques used in capturing “behavior and processes too slow 
or too fast for the human eye to perceive.” Unless otherwise noted, references to the history of time‐lapse 
photography in these pages are drawn from this pamplet, published by WGBH, Boston, MA. 
men and women—individuals, couples, parents with babies—and zoo animals—
gorillas, flamingos, bears. (His future plans, he claims, include portraits of 
schizophrenics, sleepwalkers, whales, and astronauts.) In the late 1980s, Spagna's 
work, exhibited in galleries, even came to attract the attention of the art world as 
well. 
 
Contemplating (in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek) a 17th century thought experiment in 
which a mirror shot into space, traveling at the speed of light, would allow us to 
"watch all of the earth's previous history unfolding as on a movie screen," Annie 
Dillard thinks of time‐lapse photography. 
 
Those people who shoot endless time‐lapse films of unfurling roses and tulips 
have the wrong idea. They should train their cameras instead on the melting 
of pack ice, the green filling of ponds, the tidal swing of the Severn Bore. 
They film the glaciers of Greenland, some of which creak along at such a fast 
clip that even the dogs bark at them. They should film the invasion of the 
southernmost Canadian tundra by the northernmost spruce‐fir‐forest, which is 
happening right now at the rate of a mile every ten years. When the last ice 
sheet receded from the North American continent, the earth rebounded ten 
feet. Wouldn't that have been a sight to see? (145). 
 
Time‐lapse practitioners have not yet completed all of Dillard's agenda, but they 
have hardly limited themselves to roses and tulips. They have already fulfilled 
Dillard's request for a glacier portrait, and in the last year alone, we have been able 
to watch a time‐lapse film of the Earth's rotation shot from space. 
 
P ra c tic e  
 
Despite Walter Benjamin's fond hope that in the art of film a new unity of art and 
10
science might be engineered,  time‐lapse photography has remained to date 
10
”Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye,” Benjamin writes. 
offering us an “unconsciously penetrated space” in substitution for “a space consciously explored by man,” the 
movies introduce us—by means of the camera’s “lowerings and liftings, its extensions and accelerations, its 
enlargements and reductions”—”to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses” (236‐37). 
Time‐lapse vision, it would seem, is a hidden power of our own “unconscious optics,” a power released through 
poetic imagination and recreated by the technique of time‐lapse photography. 
essentially a scientific tool, putting in only an occasional appearance in films for 
theatrical release. Jean Renoir's The Little Match Girl (1928), with its time‐lapse 
footage of flowers in bloom, was one of the first to demonstrate (as Arnheim noted 
at the time) "that such a device is usable for the artist" (116). But the response was 
hardly overwhelming and time‐lapse was rarely used. 
In his Le Tempestaire (1947), director Epstein employed time‐lapse to show 
clouds moving at a magician's command. 
The Swedish documentarist Arne Sucksdorff (1917‐19xx), in The Open Road 
(1948), juxtaposed shots of gypsy dancers with time‐lapse close‐ups of blooming 
flowers. 
In his widely‐praised Farrebique (1948) the French filmmaker Georges 
Rouquier (1909‐19xx)—a disciple of the American pioneer of cinema verite Robert 
Flaherty—lyrically portrayed the seasonal round of a French farm family, counter‐
pointed with images and scenes from nature captured in microphotography, slow 
motion, and especially time‐lapse. 
George Pal's science fiction film The Time Machine (1960) employed time‐
lapse as a special effect in its depiction of a journey into the future. As the Time 
Traveler leaves his London home on the eve of the 20th Century on his way to the 
year 802,701, we witness the rapid passage of clouds overhead and the accelerated 
transformation of day into night among the signs of the progress of time. 
Contemporary avant‐garde filmmakers, not surprisingly, have sometimes 
implemented time‐lapse techniques. Andy Warhol's Empire (1964, for example, 
telescopes the passing of day into night in an eight hour filmic record of the Empire 
State Building shot from a single, stationary camera. (According to Gregory Battock, 
Warhol speeded up the action at this point in his documentary, despite the film's 
overall commitment to distorting time by not distorting it in expected ways, so that 
"the major 'event' in the film" could be "summarily disposed of in order to clear the 
way for the timeless 'real' time of the unchanging image of the building." [236]) And 
Michael Snow's Wavelength (1967), a forty five minute long excruciatingly gradual 
zoom journey across a studio loft, utilizes time‐lapse to reveal the passage of time in 
a film designed to demonstrate that "motion is the only phenomenon that allows 
perception of time" (Youngblood 122). 
Fred G. Sullivan's whimsical, independently produced autobiography, The 
Beerdrinker's Guide to Fitness and Filmmaking (1989) employs a time‐lapse camera 
with humorous intent to capture twenty four hours—"One Day in the Magical 
Years"—of the director's family's hectic life, its frenetic to‐ings and fro‐ings, from a 
stationary position across the street from their Saranac Lake, New York "bungalow." 
Time‐lapse has even had a cameo role to play in mainstream Hollywood fare. 
The opening credit sequence of On a Clear Day You Can Say Forever (1970) is 
comprised of stunning time‐lapse shots of blossoming flowers —created especially 
for the film by none other than the time‐lapse pioneer John Ott. At the end of John 
Badham's Saturday Night Fever (1977), a time‐lapse shot of clouds moving rapidly 
over the New York City skyline is used at the movie's close to counterpoint Tony 
Manero's (John Travolta) dark night of the soul after the accidental death of his 
friend. In Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) time‐lapse is used 
with menacing effect—again in the credit sequence—to show spores from outer 
space gestating into parasitic flowers essential to the invaders' plot to conquer the 
earth. And in Steven Spielberg's E.T., the top grossing film in the history of the 
movies, a dead flower is brought back to vibrant life in time‐lapse by an extra‐
terrestrial's magical powers. More recently, the credit sequence of Brian De Palma's 
Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) used a Robert Greenberg designed time‐lapse, morning 
to night, panorama of New York, with the Chrysler building's famous gargoyles screen 
center, as its credit sequence/establishing shot. 
 
Time‐Lapse in Koyaanisqatsi. Certainly time‐lapse's most prominent contemporary 
film role—at least "best supporting" if not "leading"—is in Koyaanisqatsi (1983). A 
wordless documentary film, sometimes described as a cinematic tone‐poem, 
Koyaanisqatsi is the collaborative creation of Godfrey Reggio, a former Catholic 
monk (once a member of the Christian Brotherhood), cinematographer Ron Fricke, 
and minimalist composer Philip Glass. Originally Reggio's brainchild, the film was 
twenty years in the making and finally saw the light of day only after Francis Ford 
Coppola lent it his financial support. Since its release it has gone on to attain cult 
status and Reggio has continued work on a trilogy of documentaries about the 
modern world. 
The film's title comes from the language of the Hopi Indians of the American 
Southwest, perhaps the most visionary of all Native American tribes, whose ancient 
prophecies foresaw the coming of the United States, the creation of space stations, 
and the eventual death of white civilization. As we are informed at the movie's close, 
Koyaanisqatsi means: 
 
1. crazy life, 2. life in turmoil, 3. life out of balance, 4. life disintegrating, 5. a 
state of life that calls for another way of living. 
 
And the film is best understood as an extended description of this insanity. 
"According to one Hindu legend," The Romanian essayist E. M. Cioran has written, 
"Shiva, at a particular moment, will begin to dance, at first slowly, then faster and 
faster, and will not stop before having imposed upon the world a frenzied cadence, 
in every respect opposed to that of Creation." "This legend," Cioran notes, "includes 
no commentary, history having assumed the task of illustrating its obvious truth." 
This dance is Koyaanisqatsi's subject. 
Koyaanisqatsi has been criticized as hypocritical. The film's "double vanity," 
as one commentator puts it, is "that it partakes of the very hysteria it decries." 
Another has complained that though "it may invoke the spirit of Hopi belief, . . . it's 
as much a contemporary artifact as a video game." Reggio has defended himself 
against the charge by insisting that he deliberately chose to avoid the ugly in his 
depiction of our "crazy life." As David Sterritt has noted, summarizing Reggio's 
justification, "In the Bible and elsewhere, . . . the message is plain: The most 
dangerous tendencies in modern life may seem to be the most seductive." The film's 
primary objective was thus to depict "'the beauty of the beast'"; to convince us that 
"what we consider our crowning jewels—our technologies and machines—may be the 
very things that cause all our difficulties." The oblivion of Being, after all, is itself 
terribly seductive. 
In the "fascinating images" of the opening sequence of Koyaanisqatsi, the eye 
of the camera opens on an Earth without man. Although as viewers we are aware of 
the artifice—conscious of the helicopter in which the camera rides, of the use of 
slow motion and time‐lapse photography, and the special filters—still the images—of 
clouds, caves, light, flowing water, steam, sand, and geological wonders—haunt us, 
we who have convinced ourselves in the modern age that the world would be devoid 
of all quality if it were not for man's consciousness, by their seeming lack of a human 
presence. They offer us the opportunity to imagine the Earth as it might have been 
before we emerged from it, or after we have been extinquished, or departed. 
If, as Lewis Thomas's conception of the Earth as a single cell and Lovelock's 
"Gaia hypothesis" suggest, the Earth itself is a kind of giant organism, with its own 
metabolism, respiration, and atmosphere, Koyaanisqatsi's first sequence offers us a 
portrait of this being in all its wonders. 
A geo‐logic, not a human logos, governs this world. We see a river (the 
Colorado) meander through a chasm (the Grand Canyon) which it has itself cut. We 
explore a deep cave out of which birds and bats move at random. We watch the sun 
glisten across the waves of the ocean. We witness cloud banks mounting up in such 
density and turbulence that the very sky seems an ungovernable ocean. We peer 
down over a waterfall as it plummets to the depths below. We are present as night 
and day in quick succession move rapidly—captured in time‐lapse photography—
across the face of an immense cliff. Mesmerized, we look on as sand undulates in 
timeless patterning. And none of these comings and goings, toings and froings —the 
"sensitive chaos," as Theodore Schwenk has described it—of the being called Gaia 
need us in the least for their enactment; none take place in a time we would 
recognize as human. This is phusis we watch, not nature. 
But beginning with images of explosions and then, in rapid montage, shots of 
an earth mover, a long pipeline, electric lines, a power station, a huge dam, an 
immense crane, oil rigs, a tank farm, a mushroom cloud, and, finally, women and 
children sunbathing in the shadow of a nuclear power plant, Koyaanisqatsi moves 
abruptly into the realm of the stored‐away. The remainder of the film memorably 
portrays this new "setting to order" of things. 
If Koyaanisqatsi's first sequence captures a world without man, the 
remainder—especially a key central sequence known on the Glass soundtrack as "The 
Grid"—depicts a world filled to overflowing with men and their things, a modern city 
world. Exploding buildings; the South Bronx in decay; immense glass skyscrapers that 
mirror the sky above; boulevards, malls, bowling alleys overrun with human beings; 
impossible intersections, criss‐crossed by thousands and thousands of cars and 
people choreographed by some invisible hand; interlocking freeways which, shot 
from above and in time‐lapse photography, appear to be some kind of circulatory 
system for the city; human beings by the thousands crossing Grand Central Station 
and entering and exiting escalators with the determination of ants, and hot dogs, 
automobiles, TVs, computers, jeans, and Twinkies in counter‐pointed, match‐cut 
mass production. The world of Koyaanisqatsi is clearly one in which "all that is solid 
melts into air." 
Near the end of Koyaanisqatsi, as a transition to its last somber sequence, we 
find ourselves, after a jump cut, looking down upon a city from above. Experienced 
air travelers immediately recognize the image. In another cut, the camera moves to 
an even higher altitude, and it takes the viewer but a moment to discern exactly 
what he or she is seeing. The world of urban sprawl, eight‐lane highways, grid‐lock, 
and skyscrapers to which the early scenes had so accustomed us becomes 
momentarily disorienting, seen from this high perspective, but some recognizable 
forms are still apparent: highways, bodies of water, parks, stadia. But then, in fairly 
rapid montage (a total of over a dozen shots), this extreme aerial long shot view is 
match‐cut with extreme close‐ups of what appear to be computer circuit boards and 
the intricate weave of Hopi Indian blankets. 
This montage brings to a culmination a theme that has run throughout. For 
much of the film, we have looked down upon the world. In the early natural scenes, 
such a point of view had expanded our vision of the immensity of the world, of its 
geological and meteorological sweep. But in these aerial views of cityscapes, the 
effect is to offer us an Archimedean perspective on human affairs, a perspective 
which, as Arendt foresaw, actually belittles human achievement. For as Arendt writes 
in "The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man," 
 
If we look down from this point [of Einstein's "observer freely poised in 
space"] at what is going on Earth and upon the various activities of men, that 
is, if we apply the Archimedean point to ourselves, then these activities will 
indeed appear to ourselves as no more than "overt behavior," which we can 
study with the same methods we use to study the behavior of rats. 
 
"Seen from a sufficient distance," Arendt writes, "the cars in which we travel and 
which we know we built ourselves . . . look as though they were, as Heisenberg once 
put it, 'as inescapable a part of ourselves as the snail's shell is to its occupant.'" 
Consequently, Arendt insists, "the overview effect" decreases human stature: 
"All our pride in what we can do . . . disappears into some kind of mutation of the 
human race; the whole of technology, seen from this point, in fact no longer appears 
as the result of a conscious human effort to extend man's material power, but rather 
as a large‐scale biological process." From such a perspective, simulation seems 
inevitable, seems almost to be God's will. (From such a perspective, it is possible for 
Freeman Dyson to hallucinate today's purely technological spacecraft transformed, 
less than three decades hence, into a living creature able to explore the cosmos. "It 
is reasonable to think of the micro‐spacecraft of the year 2010," Dyson claims in his 
Gifford Lectures [Infinite in All Directions], "not as a structure of metal and glass and 
silicon, but as a living creature, fed on Earth like a caterpillar, launched into space 
like a chrysalis, riding a laser beam into orbit, and metamorphosing in space like a 
butterfly.") 
Much of Koyaanisqatsi is shot from the Archimedean point. As we watch the 
transformation of rivers into pipelines, sheer cliffs into skyscrapers, river canyons 
into the valley boulevards between New York's mammoth buildings, superhighways 
into the circulatory system of the megalopolis, and Indian blankets become cities, 
become circuit boards, we recognize that we are witness to an quantum 
metamorphosis in the conception of human destiny enacted by the adoption of an 
Archimedean perspective. 
But in the end the film does not sanction the Archmidean perspective. Its 
closing shot is of a missile launch, the same missile we had witnessed during the 
film's title sequence as it slowly lifted off from its pad. As it soars skyward, it 
explodes in mid‐air, and for over two minutes we watch a large piece of its hull fall 
slowly, slowly back to Earth before the final credits remind us of the Hopi prophecy 
of White civilization's inevitable collapse. 
 
Time‐lapse photography was the product of what intellectual historian Stephen Kern 
has called "the culture of space and time." "From around 1880 to the outbreak of 
World War I," Kern shows, 
 
a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive 
new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space. Technological 
innovations including the telephone, wireless telegraph, x‐ray, cinema, 
bicycle, automobile, and airplane established the material foundation for 
reorientation; independent cultural developments such as the stream‐of‐
consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, and theory of relativity shaped 
consciousness directly. The result was a transformation of the dimensions of 
life and thought. (2) 
 
As a prime agent of the "culture of space and time," motion pictures, Kern observes, 
"thickened the present." "Any moment could be pried open and expanded at will, 
giving the audience seemingly at once a vision of the motives for an actions, its 
appearance from any number of perspectives, and a multitude of responses. A man is 
shot in an instant, but moviegoers saw the event prolonged and analyzed like a 
detailed case history. The present was thus thickened by directors who spliced time 
as they cut their film" (88). Time‐lapse photography thickened becoming, made it 
visible. 
 
T h e  T h e o ry  o f T im e ‐L a p se  
 
The cinema is an eye wide open on life, an eye more powerful than our own and 
which sees things we cannot see. 
Germaine Dulac 
 
The cinema is substantially and naturally poetic. . . . it is dreamlike, because it is 
close to dreams, because a cinema sequence and a sequence of memory or of a 
dream—and not only that but things in themselves are profoundly poetic: a tree 
photographed is poetic, a human face photographed is poetic because physicity is 
poetic in itself, because it is an apparition, because it is full of mystery, because it is 
full of ambiguity, because it is full of polyvalent meaning, because even a tree is a 
sign of a linguistic system. But who talks through a tree? God, or reality itself. 
Therefore the tree as a sign puts us in communication with a mysterious speaker. 
Therefore, the cinema by directly reproducing objects physically . . . is substantially 
poetic. This is one aspect of the problem, let's say pre‐historic, almost pre‐
cinematographic. 
Pier Paolo Pasolini 
 
Theoreticians, historians, and scholars of the film have usually noted—but only 
noted—the intriguing nature of time‐lapse photography. Had not Benjamin stated 
that "To demonstrate the identity of the artistic and scientific use of photography 
which heretofore were separated will be one of the revolutionary functions of the 
film"? (236). For the few who contemplated its meaning at all, time‐lapse seemed to 
promise just such a fusion of the "two cultures." 
Convinced that "the modifications of spatial and temporal experience 
provided by slow, accelerated, or reverse motion will provide fresh access to the 
true, concealed nature of the phenomenal world" (Michelson xliii), Jean Epstein 
(1897‐1953), French pioneer of the avant‐garde, praised time‐lapse as one means of 
preserving the medium's early, phenomenal sense of wonder against the stultifying 
development of narrative cinema. But a technique like time‐lapse was for him as well 
the tool for scientific revelation. "The revisions of perception and judgment impelled 
by that access" Epstein was convinced, "would confirm scientific discovery and 
redirect epistemological inquiry" (Michelson xliii). Despite "its startling physics and 
strange mechanics," time‐lapse, Epstein hastened to remind, should be understood 
as "but a portrait—seen in a certain perspective—of the world in which we live" 
(quoted by Kracauer 53). 
Writing in 1925, Bauhaus designer Laszlo Moholy‐Nagy, while praising 
cinema's aptitude for scientific research into the metamorphosis of "zoological, 
botanical and mineral form" and condemning its lazy utilization for dramatic 
purposes, spoke most eloquently of time‐lapse as a wonderful vehicle for the 
revelation of character. Imagining a time‐lapse film of "a man daily from birth to his 
death in old age," he describes the probable effects of such a film: 
It would be most unnerving even to be able to watch only his face with the slowly 
changing expression of a long life and his growing beard, etc., all in five minutes; or 
the statesman, the musician, the poet in conversation and in action; . . . Even with a 
proper understanding of the material, speed and breath of thought do not suffice to 
predict all the obvious potentialities. (36) 
In her essay on "Visual and Anti‐Visual Films," Germaine Dulac (1882‐1942) 
contemplating the ability of film to "decompose" movement, thought of time‐lapse 
as a quintessential example. 
 
A grain of wheat sprouts; it is synthetically, again, that we judge its growth. 
Cinema, by decomposing movement, makes us see, analytically, the beauty of 
the leap in a series of minor rhythms which accomplish the major rhythm, 
and, if we look at the sprouting grain, thanks to film, we will no longer have 
only the synthesis of the moment of growth, but the psychology of this 
movement. We feel, visually, the painful effort a stalk expends in coming out 
of the ground and blooming. The cinema makes us spectators of its bursts 
toward light and air, by capturing its unconscious, instinctive and mechanical 
movements. (32) 
 
And in "The Essence of the Cinema: The Visual Idea," Dulac again returned to time‐
lapse in a consideration of the "educational and instructive power" of film as a "sort 
of microscope": 
 
In a documentary, in a scientific film, life appears before us in its infinite 
detail, its evolution, all that the eye is normally unable to follow. 
Among others, there is a slow‐motion study of the blooming of 
flowers. Flowers, whose stage of life appear to us brutal and defined, birth, 
blooming, death, and whose infinitesimal development, whose movements 
equivalent to suffering and joy are unknown to us, appear before us in cinema 
in the fullness of their existence 
 
Benjamin, in his "A Brief History of Photography" (1931), noted that it is "a 
different nature which speaks to the camera than speaks to the eye: so different that 
in place of a space consciously woven together by a man on the spot there enters a 
space held together unconsciously." We know, or think we know how people walk, 
but our common sense knowledge, Benjamin insists, is always inexact, for "we know 
nothing definite of the positions involved in the fraction of a second when the step is 
taken." Photography, however, offers us a new knowledge. Through its "methods 
[time lapses, enlargements, etc.] one first learns of [the] optical unconscious, just as 
one learns of the drives of the unconscious through psychoanalysis." The camera, 
Benjamin suggests, is in fact "more closely related" to concerns with structure, to 
the forms of cells, to microscopic revelations than its to "the moody landscape or the 
soulful portrait" (202). 
Rudolf Arnheim (xxxx‐xxxx), in his seminal study The Film as Art (1933), 
provided a definitive phenomenology of the viewer's experience of a time‐lapse film 
(with I. G. Farben's Miracle of Flowers (xxxx)—a film he judged to be "certainly the 
most fantastic, thrilling, and beautiful ever made"—as his test case): 
 
The swaying rhythmic breathing motions of the leaves, the excited dance of 
the leaves around the blossom, the almost voluptuous abandon with which 
the flower opens—the plants all at once come alive and show that they use 
expressive gestures like those to which we are accustomed in men and 
animals. Watching a climbing plant anxiously groping, uncertainly seeking a 
hold, as its tendrils twine around a trellis, or a fading cactus bloom bowing its 
head and collapsing almost with a sigh, was an uncanny discovery of a new 
living world in a sphere in which one had of course always admitted life 
existed but had never been able to see it in action. Plants were suddenly and 
visibly enrolled in the ranks of living beings. One saw that the same principles 
applied to everything, the same code of behavior, the same difficulties, the 
same desires. (115) 
 
Remarking on the ability of the cinema to "extend . . . certain of our means of 
perception and . . . throw out bridges beyond the impassable zones of our senses and 
our skills," the great modernist architect Le Corbusier singles out scientific 
documentary's "miraculous films on the growth of seeds and plants" as proof that 
"nature and human consciousness are . . . two terms of the [same] equation" (112‐
13). 
In his Theory of Film: Growth and Character of a New Art (1952), the 
Hungarian cineaste Bela Balazs noted that while "only pictures of nature without 
men bear the convincing stamp of unquestionable, authentic reality," such films 
"often appear fantastic." And "nothing could be more like fairy tales," writes Balazs, 
with time‐lapse photography in mind, than "the scientific films which show the 
growth of crystals or the wars of infusoria living in a drop of water." He even goes on 
to briefly develop a theoretical explanation of the uncanny nature of such 
cinematography. 
 
the farther away the existence presented . . . is from the possibility of human 
interference, the less it the possibility of its being artificial, faked, stage‐
managed. . . . For although what we see is a natural phenomenon, the fact 
that we can see it at all strikes us as unnatural. . . . In watching such things 
we feel as if we had entered a territory closed to man (172‐73) 
 
When a technique like time‐lapse photography shows us "something that human 
beings cannot see in normal circumstances," Balazs concludes, suggestively, "then, as 
we nevertheless see it, we have the feeling of being invisible ourselves. . . ." 
Siegfried Kracauer, in his Theory of Film (1960), likewise praises the technique 
as contributing to what he saw as the project of film: "the redemption of physical 
reality." "Pictures of stalks piercing the soil in the process of growing up open up 
imaginary areas" for the human mind, Kracauer argues, and he includes time‐lapse as 
a cinematic approach which "lead[s] straight into 'reality of another dimension'" (52‐
53). 
And Stephenson and Debrix, in The Art of the Cinema (1965), note that time‐
lapse photography seems especially well suited to this age of Einstein, for it 
"demonstrates in the most forceful way the relativity of time": "a speeded up 
documentary on plant growth may introduce us to a universe whose rate of 
movement is fifty thousand times faster than the one we know, a temporal universe 
as incommensurable with solar time as ultra‐microscopic worlds are 
incommensurable with visible space" (92‐93). 
Though time‐lapse photography has no doubt helped to develop our 
characteristic modern sense of time, making us alert in new ways to the world's 
varying tempos, ever effecting "profound"—if limited—"changes . . . in the ancient 
craft of the Beautiful," it has nevertheless, affected its native medium very little. 
Even Arnheim, who had lavished such praise on Miracle of Flowers, went on to admit 
that the film was probably a "lucky strike" and suggested, quite accurately as it 
turned out, that "Not much more is to be expected in this line" (115). Time‐lapse, in 
fact, has never really been assimilated successfully into main‐stream cinematic 
language. Why? 
For the French film theorist Edgar Morin "scientific" techniques like time‐
lapse lie at the heart of all contemporary controversies about how we are to "read" 
movies. In Le Cinema ou l'homme imaginaire (1958) Morin shows how, in the words 
of J. Dudley Andrew (on whose account of Morin's book I have relied heavily), 
 
the cinema began as an instrument of popular science, as a perceptual 
machine he calls the "cinematographe," whose function was to provide views 
of things formerly unseen or unseeable. Hence the fascination with slow and 
fast motion, with extreme close‐ups and unlimited repetitions giving our eyes 
access to the world of nature. (Concept 22) 
 
But almost simultaneously the movies became an entertainment industry "catering to 
a voracious public appetite for 'curiosities,'" and, in the hands of filmmakers like 
Melies, the semiosis of the movies was rapidly transformed: "the cinematographe 
quickly became that phantasmagoric language we know as the cinema." The "tension 
between perception and signification" which still lies at the heart of our experience 
of film began. But in the process, the cinematographe's capacities for revelation 
have been largely forgotten. 
 
T h e  M a n  W h o  S a w  T h ro u g h  T im e : L o re n  E ise le y ’s T im e ‐L a p se  V isio n  
 
We can make fast‐motion films of the growth of plants and flowers in which they 
seem to come and go like gestures of the earth. If we could film civilizations and 
cities, mountains and stars, in the same way, we would seem them as frost crystals 
forming and dissolving and as sparks on the back of a fireplace. The faster the 
tempo, the more it would appear that we were watching, not so much a succession 
of things, as the movement and transformation of one thing—as we see waves on the 
ocean or the movements of a dancer. 
Alan Watts, Tao: The Watercourse Way (94) 
 
In an intriguing B‐movie of the 1950's, The Man With the X‐Ray Eyes, an individual 
becomes miraculously able, due to a freak accident, to perceive behind the visible; 
his vision penetrates through mere appearances and probes at the very heart of 
things. Where others see flesh, he sees internal organs. Where others see a finished 
city, he sees through its walls to the girders and beams and rivets which uphold its 
seeming solidity. Where others merely gaze in wonder at the night sky full of stars, 
his vision, knowing no limits, reaches to the heart of the universe and beholds the 
mysteries of the cosmos. His "gift" turns him into a near mystic, but the perspective 
on reality which it offers to him becomes, in time, a curse. For the world as it is 
revealed to him is too much for one man: he feels himself lost in the unfathomable 
immensity of space—a sci‐fi Pascal who has come to know the terror inherent in the 
silence of the infinite—and by the movie's close he has been driven to the edge of 
madness. 
Like the "man with the x‐ray eyes," Loren Eiseley likewise seemed to see 
behind the visible, and like that film's hero, his powers caused him torment, but to 
Eiseley's x‐ray eyes, it was time, not space, which appeared illusory. "My sense of 
time," he explained, "is so heightened that I can feel the first frost at work in stones, 
11
the first creeping advance of grass in a deserted street (NC 158).  Eiseley once 
claimed to have known a distinguished (but unnamed) 20th century physicist who 
took his discipline's conception of the nature of ultimate reality so seriously that he 
began wearing oversized rubber boots in the hope they would somehow keep him 
from falling through the interstices in things into the inner "quantum" space of 
matter (ST 280). Eiseley took the discoveries of modern biology and anthropology 
with equal literalness, and his frequent sense of vertigo before the phenomenal 
world stemmed, it would seem, from the dizzying prospect on physical reality offered 
11
Eiseley may have acquired this sensitivity to time, in part at least, from his study of the eighteenth century 
Scottish geologist James Hutton, one of the major proponents of “uniformatarianism” compare the following 
description of Hutton’s world view to the above quotation from Eiseley: “Hutton’s perception of the minute processes 
of decay is as keen as his eye for the movements of continental upheavel. So preternaturally acute was his sense of 
time that he could foretell in a running stream the final doom of a continent . . . (DC 72‐73). 
him by evolutionary time. As the result of his unceasing exploration and 
unquenchable, Faustian pursuit of ultimate knowledge, modern man, Eiseley feared, 
has finally "intruded," with the discovery of the true immensity of time, "upon some 
gigantic stage not devised for him" (IP 12). The drama of Loren Eiseley's intellectual 
life, however, was enacted on that stage. 
"One exists," Eiseley explains, "in a universe convincingly real, where the 
lines are sharply drawn in black and white. It is only later, if at all, that one realizes 
the lines were never there in the first place. But they are necessary in every human 
culture, like a drill sergeant’s commands, something not to be questioned" (ASH 
100). Yet questions remain, foremost among them, two interrelated ones: "How 
should we see? In what world are we?" These doubts constituted for Eiseley "the 
very terror of our age," for "we have fallen out of nature and see sometimes more 
and sometimes less" (ST 249). Eiseley saw more; he possessed a visionary 
"archaeological eye" (FT 168) through which he witnessed everyday reality with 
"terrible deja vu of the archaeologist" (NC 156): 
 
a man who has once looked with the archaeological eye will never see quite 
normally. he will be wounded by what other men call trifles. It is possible to 
refine the sense of time until an old shoe in the bunch grass or a pile of 
nineteenth‐century beer bottles in an abandoned mining town tolls in one's 
head like a hall clock. This is the price one pays for learning to read time from 
surfacces other than an illuminated dial. it is the melancholy secret of the 
artifact, the humanly touched thing. (NC 81) 
 
The effects of Eiseley’s vision are thus double‐edged. Although his archaeological eye 
is a medium of potential revelation capable of overpowering the attraction of the 
archaiological, and the very means by which to acquire the evolutionary sense, it is 
also the wellspring of his Mark of Cain in its phylogenic aspect; for it provides a 
profoundly sobering perspective on human and personal destiny—one to which 
neither he nor the species has yet become accustomed—in which all of man’s longing 
appears to be for nothing and all hopes of establishing faith in the distance seems 
futile. 
Because the archaeologist uncovers as remnants of the vanished civilizations 
"both our grocery bills and the hymns to our gods" (UU 29), he looks on with an 
acute skepticism at human endeavors, knowing that all projects, whatever their 
momentary efficacy, will one day become merely fodder for the investigation of 
future archaeologists. All of mankind's good and all of our evil, the archaeologist 
knows, finally amount to nothing; for they are all swallowed up by time again and 
again in "terrible deja vu." As a result of his archeological eye, therefore, Eiseley 
seems to always hear, like the nomadic people of Old Testament times, behind all 
ordinary occurrences that “voice howling over the mounds of dead and vanished 
civilizations” that they called “Lillith—Adam’s first wife and a scoffer at all male 
vanities (Thompson, Darkness and Scattered Light 46). In a poem entitled 
"Confrontation," Eiseley explains that as a teacher and leader of men, he "had no 
followers/but the wind that fills abandoned cities with dust . . . (NA 98). He found it 
not at all unusual to "in some unwary instant . . . telescope fifty thousand years," 
but often his archaeological eye saw but a short distance into the past, "looking 
through a little window in time . . ." (NC 85), as in this instance recorded in All the 
Strange Hours (150): 
 
Man is a strange creature. I look upon this great building with its inner 
fountains and amenities and though it is well over ten years since it was 
constructed, I see right through it to the bare field left by the demolition of 
the slum. 
 
It is essential to understand that Eiseley does not mean here that he remembered the 
vacant lot. He insisted that he saw it, as if he were, like Sir Francis Bacon in the 
ambiguous title of his book on him, a "man who saw through time." Through the 
power of his archaeological eye, the "long centuries wavering past" are never 
entirely lost. For to his vision they still retain a sense of presence, "with the curious 
distortion of things seen through deep sea water" (NC 154). As the epigraph of his 
first published book, The Immense Journey, Eiseley had quoted the words of Henry 
David Thoreau: "Man can not afford to be a naturalist, too look at Nature directly, 
but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her" (2). Eiseley's 
archaeological eye made it possible for him to heed Thoreau's admonition. 
Bacon, a man Eiseley admired above all others, once noted that "He that 
cannot contract the sight of the mind as well as disperse and dilate it, wanteth a 
great faculty" (TMWSTT 76‐77). Able to contract and dilate his vision and 
understanding to an extraordinary degree, Eiseley possessed as a result an 
instrument whose unique power enabled him to "see" with an almost mystical clarity 
the interconnectedness of man, consciousness, and history with cosmic, geological, 
and biological evolution. "That which exceeds a single life span," customarily only 
available to man in the eye of collective memory, became for Eiseley an ordinary 
object of his vision. 
Even as a child, Eiseley insists, he had already learned the ultimate lesson 
which the study of time could teach: that time is in reality "a series of planes existed 
superficially in the same universe," that the tempo which we perceive "is a human 
illusion, a subjective clock ticking in our own kind of protoplasm" (IJ 183). But 
experience, and his knowledge of evolution, taught him as his mind matured that 
although man is, in a sense, only one "subjective clock," one moment, among many, 
"he is the most curious of all; he fits no plane, no visible island" (UU 161). For in 
man all the planes interpenetrate; he dwells in the momentous; that he does so is 
part of his mandate as a Primate Autobiographer. 
As the result of his archaeological eye, Eiseley is like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt 
Vonnegut, Jr.'s Slaughterhouse Five, a "time tripper." But while Vonnegut's anti‐hero 
can only jump back and forth between the events of his own life span, Eiseley often 
found himself transported out of the present moment into past and future eons. In 
its simplest form, Eiseley's time‐tripping merely catapulted him back into moments 
of his past life so vividly real in long‐term memory that they eclipse the incident 
triggering them in the present. In “The Rat That Danced” in All the Strange Hours, for 
example, the flash of camera lights during a lecture he is trying to deliver becomes a 
railroad switchlight and triggers a memory of a time during Eiseley’s hobo days in the 
1920s when a security guard tried to push him from moving train. As a result, the 
talk he intends to deliver becomes confused, “lost in the incoherence of a split 
personality . . . (ASH 12)—split between past and present. 
The human mind, Eiseley recognizes, is an unfathomable compendium of 
experience, memory, and instinctual knowledge. It is an artist's loft, where "pictures 
. . . hang askew, pictures with outlines barely chalked in, pictures torn, pictures the 
artist has striven unsuccessfully to erase, pictures that only emerge and glow in a 
certain light." During Eiseley's time‐tripping this light becomes, for the moment, 
constant, and pictures which have been "teleported, stolen, as it were, out of time," 
become vivid. It is, he senses, his duty as a writer to give these pictures a voice—to 
"drag them about, magnify or reduce them as . . . artistic sense dictates." But he 
cannot destroy them (ASH 151). Their presentation to his mind remains random; his 
time‐tripping is uncontrollable:  
 
Make no mistake. Everything in the mind is in rat's country. It doesn't die. 
They are merely carried, these disparate memories, back and forth in the 
desert of a billion neurons, set down, picked up, and dropped again by mental 
pack rats. Nothing perishes, it is merely lost till a surgeon's electrode starts 
the music of an old player piano who scrolls are dust Or you yourself do it, 
tossing in the restless night, or even in the day on a strange street when a 
hurdy‐gurdy plays. Nothing is lost, but it can never be again as it was. You will 
only find the bits and cry out because they were yourself. (ASH 3). 
 
But among those "billions of neurons" Eiseley sometimes finds stored pictures that 
teleport him far beyond the few decades of his own actual experience of time. 
In "The Crevice and the Eye” (also in All the Strange Hours), Eiseley tells of an 
archaeological expedition into an underground cave in New Mexico, during which 
Eiseley and a companion descended into a hidden subterranean chamber and nearly 
became lost without a light. But this journey down through geological strata is to 
Eiseley (as is a similar adventure in “The Slit" in The Immense Journey) really a 
journey back into time, for as he emerges from the mouth of the cave into the open 
air, he realizes that his "angle of vision" has somehow become twisted underground, 
and he finds himself "time‐tripping" over thousands of years, not decades: 
 
I was looking at life [Eiseley realizes], at my companions at the traffic below 
on the road, as though I had just arisen, a frozen man from a torrent of 
melting ice. I wiped a muddy hand across my brow. The hand was ten 
thousand years away. So were my eyes, so would they always be. . . . (104; my 
italics) 
 
So distant does the present moment then seem to him, so dwarfed by the 
awesomeness of time, that he remembers the experience as being "like a glimpse 
through the slitted bone with which Eskimos protect their eyes from snow blindness" 
(ASH 105). 
Yet, among Eiseley's forays into time, even this "trip" cannot count as his 
longest. In "The Cosmic Prison" in The Invisible Pyramid he recounts yet another 
time‐trip, this time into the future. While attending a lecture in a planetarium he 
falls asleep in a seat in the back of the room, eventually awakening to an empty 
auditorium. On the planetarium's ceiling, however, a last image from the lecture 
remains: a picture of “the conformation of the heavens as they might exist in the 
remote future of the expanding universe.” Like a cosmic Rip Van Winkle, Eiseley at 
first wonders how long he has slept; thinking that he is really out‐of‐doors and 
gazing at a real night sky, he feels a "queer sense of panic" come over him, "as 
though transported out of time. n Even after he realizes what has actually happened, 
he remains under the spell of the illusion, lost in reverie, "waiting upon the 
inevitable, the great drama and surrender of the inward fall, the heart contraction of 
the cosmos." Like H.G. Wells' time traveler, he finds himself a witness to the end of 
the universe, watching in his archaeological eye stretched to the limit of its capacity, 
the "first faint galaxy of a billion suns race like a silverfish across the night and 
vanish" with no more commotion than "the slightest leaf movement on a flooding 
stream . . . (IP 37). 
Often Eiseley's journeys through time took on another less disorienting, less 
alienating form in which things appear, as in time‐lapse photography, as if they are 
"gestures of the earth”—as part of an unbreakable unity, an unfolding which is time. 
Eiseley often tends to envision any given objects as if it were the last frame of a 
moving series of images in which the object's entire emergence into being is 
somehow instantaneously revealed. 
In its simplest form, this time‐lapse vision caused him to see a childhood 
episode (recalled in All the Strange Hours)—in which a nearly dead woodpecker 
comes back to life under his care—as his "first glimpse of unconsciousness, 
resurrection, and time‐lapse presented in bright colors" (151‐52). But more often 
this unique capacity of his archaeological eye alters the very appearance of things, 
so that the "scratched pebble" beneath his feet comes to denote an "ice age, n and 
an ordinary summer cloud "changes form in one afternoon as an animal might do in 
ten million years" (UU 106). 
The possibility of such time‐lapse vision always lay implicit in the theory of 
evolution. George Bernard Shaw noted long ago in Back to Methusaleh that inherent 
in evolution is the startling realization that species are 
 
an illusion produced by the shortness of our individual lives, and that they are 
constantly changing and melting into one another and into new forms as 
surely as the hand of a clock is continually moving, though it moves so slowly 
that it looks stationary to us.13 
 
And so, like Einstein, he recognized, "if our tempo of seeing could be speeded, life 
would appear and disappear as a chaos of evanescent . . . forms, possessing the 
impermanence of the fairy mushroom circles that spring up on our lawns at 
midnight" (UU 134). Because he possessed an evolutionary sense, there were times 
when Eiseley was, in fact, a witness in the flesh to such chaos. 
 Eiseley's visionary gift, I hasten to add, need not be thought of as a solely 
"mystical" power (although Eiseley, it is true, did trace its source back to the 
"clairvoyant" artistic eye of his mother); his time‐lapse eye was, in a sense, a natural 
outgrowth of his scholarship, especially his study of evolution, as the above passages 
make clear. “Certain knowledges,” Hugh Kenner has observed, “have simply become 
so central we need to stop evading them, so as to get free from not knowing what we 
are doing. . . . We need to know all the time certain things we know doing. some of 
the time” (9). Because Eiseley knew all of the time what many other evolutionary 
thinkers have taken to be only "idols of the study,” he saw differently. Once, 
Geoffrey Hartman notes in The Unmediated Vision, mysticism was believed to be 
excessus menti; now, it seems clear, it is instead an accessus menti, the product of a 
panentheism in which the mind becomes fully conscious of its own life (172). 
Eiseley's mysticism was, clearly, an accessus menti, but it accessed not just his own 
subjectivity but the external world, the physical reality that science knows. His 
understanding of evolution, as it colored his quotidian perception of things, brought 
him to understand privately a truth which, lamentably, has not become common 
knowledge for either Darwin's contemporaries or for us: the realization that, as a 
result of the discovery of evolutionary emergence and descent through modification, 
 
creation and its mystery [can] no longer be safely relegated to the past 
behind us. It might now reveal itself to man at any moment in a farmer's 
pasture or a willow thicket. . . . The common day had turned marvelous. ‐
willow thicket. Creation—whether seen or unseen—must be even now about 
us everywhere in the prosaic world of the present. (FT 58; my italics) 
 
This peculiar capability of Eiseley's vision can be thought of as having, moreover, a 
physiological source. 
Like Karl Marx, Eiseley knew that "the development of the five senses is the 
work of the entire history of the world up to now (quoted in Rothenberg, America 
486), and thus within those senses must lie—potentially recoverable by the mind—
the record of that history. Eiseley's time‐laspe vision resulted in part from his ability 
to raise this buried record to the level of consciousness. Man, Eiseley knew, has 
brought "almost the same body through two realms" (IP 151)—the natural and the 
cultural—and the primordial knowledge the body thus contains came to provide for 
him a major source of insight. The paths which his perception, and consequently his 
thinking, followed were not those of his contemporaries. Because “the roots of our 
phylogenetic tree pierce deep into the earth's past," human consciousness in 
general, and his own consciousness in particular, are, Eiseley recognizes, "similarly 
embedded in, and in part constructed of, pathways which were laid down before man 
in his present form existed" (IP 22); as Eiseley was fond of saying, man is, in reality, 
a “palimpsest,” on which the marks left by the history of his and life's evolution have 
not been and can not be entirely erased. His own eye remained faithful to these 
prehistoric paths and not to the routes of the present. 
Following these paths to their source, Eiseley was able to see, as he did once 
in the Badlands of South Dakota, that the birds he observed flying over such a 
lifeless place are, like all living things, the miraculous reincarnation of chemicals—
carbon, calcium, and iron—which lie on the ground around him devoid of the spirit 
which then animated their flight (IJ 171‐72); to imagine himself able to "drift into 
the lower cadences of the frost, or the crystalline life that glistens in pebbles, or shi‐
nes in a snowflake, or dreams in the meteoric iron between the worlds" (IJ 185); to 
realize that a museum hall of various Crustacea, all with the "sea change" upon 
them, are really "one, one great plan that flamed there on its pedestal in the sinister 
evening light, but . . . also many and the touch of Maya, of evening light, but illusion, 
lay on them" (FT 82‐83); to grasp that "birds are intense, fast living creatures—
reptiles, I suppose one might say, that have escaped out of the heavy sleep of time, 
transformed fairy creatures dancing over sunlit meadows" (IJ 185); to notice that, "if 
you look closely," you can not only "see the singing reptile in the bird" but "some 
ancient amphibian fondness for the ooze where the child wades in the mud" (FT 57); 
to understand that although one billion years of evolutionary development have gone 
into the construction of the technological eye of Mount Palomar's 200 inch reflector 
telescope, its function may really be no different, as the ultimate eye of the slime 
mold colony of human history, from the primitive eye of the Philobus fungus: both 
scan the territory ahead into which the "spores" are about to fly as the "spore cities" 
die—for somehow, Eiseley sees, "in the mysterium behind genetics, the tiny 
pigmented eye of the Philobus and the rocket capsule were evolved together" (IJ 45; 
IP 76); to think of the impersonality and general confusion of a modern bureaucracy 
as "merely the giant background noise of the universe . . .” in its present earthly 
manifestation (ASH 203); to accept the humbling realization that "someone in 
another galaxy, watching the evolution of the Earth would have observed only one 
significant change in the color of light emanating from it—with the advent of plants, 
the light turned green" (IJ 61‐62); to perceive boulders as "beasts . . . of a kind man 
ordinarily lived too fast to understand" which appear inanimate because the tempo 
of the life in them [is] slow" (FT 173); to be always aware of "some dark and passing 
shadow within matter, [which] cups out the eyes' small windows or spaces the notes 
of a meadow lark's song in the interior of a mottled egg," a "principle . . . [that] was 
there before the living in the deeps of water" (IJ 26). 
Perhaps the most stunning instance of Eiseley's time‐lapse vision appears in 
"The Flow of the River" in The Immense Journey. There Eiseley tells how on a 
scientific expedition in Nebraska he became possessed by a spirit of adventure and 
began to float, lying on his back, down the Platte River. But in his time‐lapse vision 
the scene is transformed and he feels himself becoming one with the river itself. He 
identifies himself with "the meandering roots of a whole watershed," senses his 
"outstretched fingers touching, by some kind of clairvoyant extension, the brooks of 
snow‐lined glaciers, n while he flows "toward the Gulf over the eroded debris of 
worn‐down mountains" (IJ 16): 
 
I was streaming alive through the hot and working ferment of the sun, or 
oozing secretively through shady thickets. I was water and the unspeakable 
alchemies that gestate and take shape in water. (19) 
 
And he begins to realize that 
 
Turtle and fish and the pinpoint chirping of individual frogs are all watery 
projections, concentrations—as man himself is a concentration—of the 
indescribable and liquid brew which is compounded in varying proportions of 
salt and sun and time. 
 
Finally emerging from the river, he feels 
 
the body's revolt against emergence into the harsh and unsupporting air, its 
reluctance to break contact with that mother element which still, at this late 
point in time, shelters and brings into being nine tenths of everything alive. 
(20) 
 
But man, Eiseley knows, has not really left the water; men, he perceives, are really 
"myriad detached ponds with their own swarming corpuscular life," and he himself 
remains "a microcosm of pouring rivulets and floating driftwood gnawed by the 
mystery of his own creation" (IJ 20). He under‐ ious animulcules of my stands, like 
the Italian fiction writer Italo Calvino, that "once we swam, now we are swum” (T‐
zero 49) that, like the pickerel Thoreau observed in Walden Pond, we are only 
"animalized water.” 
Eiseley's time‐lapse vision thus made it impossible for him to see himself as 
permanently separate from the natural order, his emergence from it being an 
everyday perceptual fact; through it he sees, in effect. his previous reincarnations. 
But it reveals to him more than just ceaseless change in a world of total flux. For at 
the heart of the writhing, metamorphosing, seemingly chaotic forms of Earth he 
detects, in the "subcellars of the mind," an underlying unity: 
 
a little green in a fulminating spring, some strange objects floundering and 
helpless in the ooze on the tide line, something beating, beating, like a heart 
until a mounting thunder goes up through the towering drum that ever was 
can produce its strata, until no rhythm, until no mind can contain it, until it 
rises, wet and seaweed‐crowned, an apparition from marsh and tide‐pool, 
gross with matter, gurgling and inarticulate, ape and man‐ape, grisly and 
fang‐scarred, until the thunder is in oneself and is passing—to the ages 
beyond—to a world unknown, forever being born. (FT 55‐56) 
 
The world revealed in his archaeological repetition" (NC 154). For there exists,  
as "Mendel had learned from those tiny intricate units that shape a flower's heart . . 
. [an] elemental patience that holds a living organism to its Seeing through course 
while mountains wear away" (DC 231). time, Eiseley sought to discover this 
"elemental patience," but not just for scientific purposes; he sought to emulate it. 
And this stability, this timelessness, he knew, is exemplified best not by the organic 
world but by the geological.  
 
T h e  P o e try  o f T im e ‐L a p se  
 
As their talent develops guide your pupils toward Nature—into Nature. Make them 
experience how a bud is born, how a tree grows, how a butterfly unfolds so that they 
may become just as resourceful, flexible, and determined as great Nature. Seeing is 
believing—is insight into the workshop of God. There, in Nature's womb, lies the 
secret of creation. 
Paul Klee 
 
For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, 
you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gestures which 
small flowers make when they open in the morning. 
Rainer Maria Rilke 
 
"Every great writer," Borges has noted enigmatically in an essay on Franz Kafka, 
"creates his precursors" (108). But does not every new art as well? If it can be shown 
that time‐lapse photography has contributed to poetic inspiration in our time, 
expanding and deepening the consciousness of poets, enriching the possibilities of 
metaphor, it likewise might be argued that the particular "door of perception" known 
as time‐lapse photography may have opened long before this century and that the 
writers I have discussed are in fact the second generation of time‐lapse poets. For 
the Romantics likewise seem to have possessed time‐lapse consciousness, a vision 
which was instrumental to formulation of that organic poetics which has been their 
greatest legacy to modern thought. Any complete "psychic archaeology" (the phrase 
is Theodore Roszak's, in Where the Wasteland Ends) of time‐lapse should really 
include them as well (though space permits here only a brief, preliminary survey). 
 
I. The Romantics 
 
When William Blake, in Jerusalem, imagines the emanation of the cosmos (as if 
foreseeing the Big Bang of 20th Century cosmologists), he describes it in time‐lapse 
fashion: 
 
The Vegetative Universe opens like a flower from the Earth's center 
In which is Eternity. It expands in Stars to the Mundane Shell. 
And there it meets Eternity again, both within and without. . . . (633; 
Plate 13, ll. 34‐36) 
 
And in Milton does not Blake suggest that all poetry is in fact the product of a new 
orientation in time, the transcendence of normal biological rhythms and an ordinary 
metabolism, made possible through poetic imagination's time‐lapse photography? 
 
Every time less than the pulsation of the artery 
Is equal in its period and value to Six Thousand Years. 
For in this Period the Poet's Work is done. (Keynes, p. 516; Plates 28 
[ll. 62‐63] and 29 [l. 1] 
 
The work, that is, of cleansing the "doors of perception" so man can see every thing 
"as it is, infinite." 
In the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge—both his poetry and poetics and his 
natural philosophy—we find a vivid second example. The theory of creative 
imagination, for which Coleridge was a major progenitor, held (according to James 
Engell's recent authoritative study) that "it is not simply that the imagination 
perceives the development of nature; it generates a similar process in the self." It 
was grounded in the faith that the "imagination contains within itself a potential 
which, uniting with external influences of nature, leads the mind to a new stage of 
growth" (Engell 347). (Nature, as Goethe put it succinctly, is "a model of everything 
artistic" [quoted in Verdi 225].) And Coleridge's conception of the origin of such 
imagination in the individual suggest a knowledge of metamorphosis of form which 
(as Owen Barfield has argued in his interpretation of Romanticism's place in the 
evolution of consciousness) harkens back to the Greek awareness of phusis, and 
ahead (as I would like to suggest) to becoming as revealed in time‐lapse 
photography. 
In Biographia Literaria, for example, Coleridge writes: 
 
They and only they can acquire the philosophic imagination, the sacred power 
of self‐intuition, who within themselves can interpret and understand the 
symbol, that the wings of the air‐sylph are forming within the skin of the 
caterpillar; those only, who feel in their own spirits the same instinct, which 
impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in its involucrum for 
antennae yet to come. They know and feel, that potential works in them, even 
12
as the actual works on them! (Chapter XII)  
 
In time‐lapse photography's latter‐day organicism, the potential and the actual—
natura naturans and natura naturata (in Coleridge's terminology) are revealed 
intertwined: what to Coleridge are poles in man's organic relation to nature 
become—in a marriage enacted via technology—a living unity. 
Both Wordsworth and Shelley also seem to have possessed time‐lapse vision. 
The many "spots of time" passages in The Prelude, for example, suggest a momentous 
sense of the world's becoming, a becoming which seems about to engulf the poet's 
growing sensibility. The famous account of crossing the Alps in Book VI, with its 
mystical revelation of the natural world as manifesting the "workings of one mind, 
the features/Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;/Characters of the great 
Apocalypse,/The types and symbols of Eternity,/Of first and last, and midst, and 
without end," is a particularly striking example (269). 
Is not Shelley's "Mont Blanc," in its similar depiction of a mind which "renders 
and receives fast influencings,/Holding an unremitting interchange/ With the clear 
universe of things around," a poetic precursor of time‐lapse? It is, after all, a poem—
redolent with images of a nature seemingly still and yet eternally active, of a world 
"Where waterfalls around it leap forever,/Where woods and winds contend, and a 
vast river/Over its rocks ceaselessly burns and raves"—which presents us with a 
perfect scenario for a time‐lapse film. In a time‐lapse medium, the essentially 
geological imagination of Shelley's great poem would no longer need tax the limits of 
language. 
12
The following passage (from the Statesman’s Manual), a quintessentially Coleridgian description of a 
growing plant, also demonstrates well Coleridge’s time‐lapse sensibility: 
 
Lo!—with the rising sun it commences its outward life and enters into communion with all the elements, at 
once assimilating them to itself and to each other. At the same moment it strikes its roots and unfolds its 
leaves, absorbs and respires, steams forth its cooling vapour and finer fragrance, and breathes a repeairing 
spirit, aat once the food and tone of the atmosphere, into the atmosphere that feeds it. Lo!—at the touch 
of light how it returns an air akin to light, and yet with the same pulse effectuates its own secret growth, 
still contracting to fix what expanding it had defined. Lo!—how upholding the ceaseless plastic motion of 
the parts in the profoundest rest of the whole it become the visible organismus of the entire silent o 
elementary life of nature, and therefore, in incoporating the one extremes becomes the symbol of the 
other; the natural symbol of that higher life of reason, in which the whole series (known to us in our present 
state of being) is perfected, in which, therefore, all the subordinate gradations recur, and are re‐ordained in 
some abundant honor. . . (quoted from I. A. Richards’ edition of The Portable Coleridge [394]). 
 
Shelley's "The Sensitive Plant" likewise seems a fit subject for time‐lapse, 
though on a smaller scale. The pathetic fallacy to which the poem so often succumbs 
as Shelley describes the life of a garden the "lovely mind,/ Which dilating, had 
molded her mien and motion/Like a sea‐flower unfold beneath the ocean . . ." of the 
lady who tends it would not seem quite so precious if we understood it to be the 
result of poetic diction's attempt to capture in progress an essentially invisible world 
of transformation. All the "sweet shapes and odours" of the garden, as Shelley tells 
us in the poem's closing stanza, never really pass away; for there the potential and 
the actual ebb and flow. And "For love, and beauty, and delight,/There is not death 
nor change." But men forget this fact, Shelley explains, because "their might/Exceeds 
our organs, which endure/No light, being themselves obscure." Time‐lapse vision, 
poetic or photographic, lessens the obscurity and brings illumination through the 
imaginative enhancement of merely biological organs. 
And was not Goethe's obsession—pursued in both his poetry and science—
with the "metamorphosis of plants," his discovery, by means of the "exact concrete 
imagination" he sought to perfect, of the "Urpflanze" (the archetypal Plant), a 
13
longing for and an imagining of a kind of time‐lapse vision?  When, in his legendary 
1794 encounter with Schiller, Goethe was told by his fellow poet that the Urpflanze 
was not a product of experience at all (as its discoverer claimed), but only an idea, 
he had replied, "Well, so much the better; it means that I have ideas without 
knowing it, and can even see them with my eyes" (quoted by Heller, The Disinherited 
Mind 7). For Goethe, that "Greek born in the North" (as Schiller himself called him), 
phusis was evidently still a reality. 
"Nature has neither core/Nor outer rind," Goethe was convinced, "Being all 
things at once" (from "Allerdings: Dem Physiker" ["True Enough: To the Physicist"], 
Selected Poems: 237). This conviction lead to an awareness of metamorphosis in 
nature (as Erich Heller has observed) "far nearer to Aristotle's entelechy than to 
modern genetics." It inspired a method of approach toward the study of natural 
phenomena which (in his own words) did not "tackle Nature by merely dissecting and 
particularizing, but shows her at work and alive, manifesting herself in her wholeness 
in every single part of her being" (Heller 6). Unlike his contemporary Kant, who 
13
Of Goethe’s method, Frederick Amrine has written: 
 
Like an artist painting the same still‐life day after day. the Goethean scientist gradually restructures his 
intentional faculty and thereby evolves new ways of seeing. Goethe goes so far as to speak of awakening 
new organs.” (23) 
denied that the phenomenal provided access to the noumenal, Goethe (like 
Coleridge) found the two forever mated, and he thus never lost faith that through 
"our contemplation of incessantly creative nature" we might "become worthy of 
some intellectual participation in her creativeness" (Heller 29). Thus he could 
counsel, in a poem which distills the theory of organic imagination into four lines, 
 
If it is the greatest, the highest you seek, the plant can direct you. 
Strive to become through your will what, without will, it is. (The 
Eternal Feminine 129) 
 
Goethe, of course, had derided the effect of microscopes and telescopes on 
human vision, preferring the "true illusion" of our actual, subjective experience of 
nature, unaided by any enhancement—save that provided by "exact, concrete 
imagination." But surely he would have embraced the techne of time‐lapse 
photography as a means, at once scientific and poetic, of publicizing the 
Urphanomena; as a singular revelation—both idea and experience—of that "holy 
secret, clear as day" (from "Epirrhema,” Selected Poems 159) which his own great 
work had discovered and celebrated. 
 
II. 20th Century Poetry 
 
Understandably, given the ancient, primordial rapport of phusis and poiesis, it has 
been 20th century poetry which, it would seem, has taken time‐lapse's vision of 
becoming most to heart, incorporating its methods and revelations into its form and 
substance as if the technique's enhanced revelation of phusis were "almost a 
remembrance." 
When the French poet Cendrars first witnessed time‐lapse photography in a 
Parisian theatre, he was moved to exclaim, flabbergasted by the experience, that 
"accelerated, the life of flowers is Shakespearean" (quoted by Munier, 93). In the 
new cinematic technique Cendrars had evidently recognized a sister art. So, too, 
have other 20th Century poets. 
Like many of his contemporaries, Cendrars was inspired by what Monique 
Chefdor has called "the general craze" for the cinema. "The fragments of L'A B C du 
cinema (1926) which [Cendrars] published in various reviews in 1919," Chefdor 
observes, "testify to his enthusiasm for the seventh art, which he eulogized at times, 
to delirious heights. In his typical blending of scholarly erudition and fantasy he 
proclaimed with prophetic intensity that the cinematographic arts were to become 
the language of a race of new human beings, the Gospel of tomorrow, the fourth 
revolution after the three previous ones of the importation of the Phoenician 
alphabet by Cadmus to Greece, the discovery of printing and the invention of the 
radio . . ." (68). 
Cendrars' enthusiasm for time‐lapse was pronounced. In a side excursion into 
the cinema in his autobiographical A Night in the Forest, for example, time‐lapse 
figures prominently in his theorizing and in his metaphors. Considering the manner in 
which film reveals the mysteries of human character, he insists that "There's no 
reason today why we cannot unravel the complex skeins of a human character on the 
screen, in the way slow motion [sic] shows us the germination, burgeoning, budding, 
blooming, and death of plants." And though, he admits, we may not recognize at first 
the portrait of man which would thus emerge, we will come to accept our cinematic 
likeness as "second nature," as phylogeny and ontogeny, phusis and nature, poiesis 
and techne. 
 
This thick blood, this suspended flower, this diamond ballet, this smile full of 
stops and starts like the traffic in a big city, this new shadow in the light, this 
kernel, this black eye, this dark streak, this crack in the microscopic analysis, 
this bean—it's you—it's you. Don't hesitate; move! You are dead; move! You 
are curled in a spiral; unwind! You are born into the reality of the cinema; 
move! Jump! and watch out for the matrix! . . . 
You, yourself, you, anonymous as you are to yourself, alive, dead, 
living dead, wild rose, angelica, hermaphrodite, human, too human, beast, 
mineral vegetable, chemistry, rare butterfly, the residue in a crucible, the 
root of the voltaic arc, a plummet to abysmal depths, two fins, an air hole, 
mechanical and spiritual, full of gears and prayers, aerobic, thermogenic, 
winged foot, ion, god, automaton, embryo, seal with peyote in his eyes. 
 
It is you in instaneity. 
It is you in eternity. 
In full becoming, 
You in the flow of time. 
 
The "future role of the cinema," Cendrars would thus prophecy, "will be to 
rediscover man, ourselves, to show us up, to make us accept ourselves without 
resentment and without disgust, such as we are, with the lives of our ancestors and 
our children within us, with no humbug, beyond all conventions, in all fatality, in all 
atavism, in full becoming, like animals, whether drunken or good or reasonable or 
wicked." 
At about the same time in the century that time‐lapse photography was being 
developed as a tool in the study of organic life processes, the German poet Rainer 
Maria Rilke had come to understand the poet's true task to be as witness to all acts 
of blossoming. In his "Gesang der Frauen an den Dichter," for example, a group of 
women beseech the poet, pleading with him to understand and describe their growth 
correctly and alluding to the burgeoning natural world of which they are inextricably 
a part, "Sieh, wie sich alles, aufut: so sind wir" ("Look how everything unfolds; we 
are like that") (quoted in Hartman 74). 
Rilke's whole poetic achievement, it might be argued, was the attainment of a 
means for capturing such unfoldings in progress—in time‐lapse, if you will. The 
anemone he describes in Die Sonnette an Orpheus, II, 5 (1923), a flower fully, 
synchronously open in tropism to "das polyphone/Licht der lauten Himmel" ("the 
polyphonic light of the loud skies") in a way Rilke thought man himself should be to 
earthly experience, was, after all, a central symbol for Rilke of true poetic 
consciousness. 
what he wanted to learn to be a poet 
allude to epigraph 
 
Rilke's conception of time‐lapse even took on evolutionary dimensions. 
"Alongside of the most rapid movements," he wrote in "The Young Workman's 
Letter," 
 
there will always be slow ones, such, indeed as are of so extreme a 
leisureliness that we shall not live to see the course they take. But that is 
what humanity is for, is it not, to await the realization of that which exceeds 
a single life‐span?—From its point of view the slowest process is often the 
quickest, that is to say, we find that we called it slow simply because it could 
not be measured. (Where Silence Reigns 74‐75) 
 
We find the Irish poet and mystic AE (George Russell) thinking of his 
relationship to time and memory, and consequently his source of poetic inspirations, 
in terms of time‐lapse photography. In Song and Its Fountains (1932), a book which is 
as much spiritual autobiography as a theory of poetry, he tells of a form of 
meditation he began to practice as an aid to creation, in search of the wellsprings of 
poetry. 
 
I began to practice a meditation the ancient sages spoke of. In this meditation 
we start from where we are and go backwards through the day; and later, as 
we become quicker in the retracing of our way, through weeks, through years, 
what we are now passing into what we did or thought: and so we recall a 
linked medley of action, passion, imagination or thought. It is most difficult at 
first to retrace our way, to remember what we thought or did even an hour 
before. But if we persist the past surrenders to us and we can race back 
fleetly over days or months. The sages enjoined this meditation with the 
intent that we might, where we had been weak, conquer in imagination, kill 
the dragons which overcame us and undo what evil we might have done. 
 
Able to see his life whole, to understand that all its seemingly disparate events are 
of a piece, he can thus see it as a becoming, an unfolding in time: 
 
I found, when I had made this desire for retrospect dominant in meditation, 
that an impulse had been communicated to everything in my nature to go 
back to origins. IT BECAME OF MYSELF AS IF ONE OF THOSE MOVING PICTURES 
WE SEE IN THE THEATRES, WHERE IN A FEW MOMENTS A PLANT BURSTS FORTH 
INTO BUD, LEAF, AND BLOSSOM DWINDLING INTO THE BUD. MY MOODS BEGAN 
TO HURRY BACK TO THEIR FIRST FOUNTAINS. (xxx; my italics) 
 
Could AE have conceived of his life, imagined the unity of it, in this way without 
time‐lapse photography as the vehicle of his metaphor? 
 
In Hart Crane's "Repose of Rivers" (1926), an account of the poet as he stand 
enraptured before the Mississippi delta—"That seething steady, leveling of the 
marshes"—time‐lapse is again the controlling metaphor. Remembering back to an 
earlier time when his present visionary state—a kind of time‐lapse view of geological 
and biological processes working their effects over great expanses of time, yet seen 
in the imagination as instantaneous—was an everyday occurrence for him, the poet 
recalls how his mystical vision of cypress trees as they "shared the noon's/Tyranny" 
once had the power to fascinate his innocent attention so totally that it drew him 
"into Hades almost." He summons up again that earlier consciousness in which he 
looked on possessed as "mammoth turtles climbing sulphur dreams/Yielded, while 
sun‐silt rippled them/ Asunder." This difficult, surreal, drunken imagery is, of course, 
quintessential Crane, but "Repose of Rivers" is not merely the dregs of Crane's now 
legendary drinking bouts in search of inspiration. At the heart of the poem's 
dreamlike, vatic vision lies a time‐lapse consciousness of nature, as the poem's 
closing lines make apparent. Lost in that "memory all things nurse," Crane equates 
his former vision with his present one—like AE finding his end in his beginning—and, 
reclaiming his lost powers as a seer, realizes that then as now he is able, in a kind of 
time‐lapse hearing, to listen to "wind flaking sapphire. . . ./ And willows could not 
hold more steady sound" (xxx). 
Or consider Richard Eberhardt's often anthologized "The Groundhog" (1930). 
If it had not been written over forty years earlier, the poem might be misjudged as a 
poetic plagiarism of Sean Morris' time‐lapse record of a mouse's consummation. For 
like that film, Eberhardt's poem telescopes time (three years) to present a vivid 
moving picture of a small mammal's corpse eaten by maggots. But the poem is no 
mere recording; it is not a disinterested, scientifically valid account. It is a poet's 
subjective eye, not an objective, time‐lapse camera, which captures the unfolding 
scene. 
It is the poet who in mid‐summer, "Half with loathing, half with a strange love 
. . .", bears witness to "nature ferocious in him [the groundhog]"; who detects "his 
maggots' might/And seething cauldron of his being . . ."; who experimentally pokes 
him "with an angry stick," only to see the "fever" of the maggots' meal become "a 
flame." It is the poet who falls to his knees, "Praying for joy in the sight of decay," 
his faith in the meaning of things momentarily shaken by the "senseless change" he 
confronts, reminded of his own mortality by this time‐lapse momento mori. 
It is the poet who returns in autumn to discover, in a year which has "lost its 
meaning," "The sap gone out of the groundhog" and only the "bony sodden hulk 
remaining"; who comes back to the scene, like a war veteran compulsively attracted 
to the spot where he lost a limb, finding only a "little hair left,/And bone bleaching 
in the sunlight/Beautiful as architecture." 
And it is the poet who comes back once more, three years later, unable then 
to detect even a trace of the drama to which all along he has been the only witness. 
Eberhardt's subjective, poetic, time‐lapse record of the groundhog's recycling 
makes vivid for the reader the conjoined feelings of awe and revulsion provoked by 
viewing the Morris film. For Eberhardt cannot achieve the aesthetic distance 
necessary to find the scene beautiful, nor can the viewer of the film detach himself 
sufficiently to appreciate objectively the richly patterned transformation, perhaps 
beautiful in and of itself. Poetic time‐lapse, it seems, is the product of a 
consciousness which is itself still within time, still embodied, still sympathetically 
linked in imagination with all that it perceives, still the eye and the voice of the 
natural world's coming‐into‐being, its "blooming, buzzing, confusion." 
The poetry of Dylan Thomas, whose synaesthetic, hallucinatory imagery has 
often been called surrealistic, has a distinctly time‐lapse quality. No poet of our time 
has been more attuned to the ongoing flow of time and its effects. In "Death Shall 
Have No Dominion," for example, he records a vision of the transmigration of souls 
which equates it with the water cycle, culminating in the return of those souls to 
nature, described in a powerful image: 
 
Heads of characters hammer through daisies; 
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down. 
And death shall have no dominion. (77) 
 
And it is a time‐lapse sensibility, is it not, which allows him to see that, in the midst 
of the world's becoming, creation and destruction are one: "The force that through 
the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of 
trees/Is my destroyer" (10). 
In Theodore Roethke's "Transplanting (1948)," the poet's vivid description of 
a gardener's act becomes, in Roethke's imagination, a time‐lapse vision of the plant's 
whole burgeoning. The poem's first stanza is a careful record of a greenhouse 
transplanting. as careful hands make the plants "Ready for the long days under the 
sloped glass." But the second stanza is witnessed by no physical eye. 
In yet another poetic return to time‐lapse's primal scene, Roethke grows the 
plant, sampling moments from its "long days" in its bed: 
 
The sun warming the fine loam, 
The young horns winding and unwinding. 
Creaking their thin spines, 
The underleaves, the smallest buds 
Breaking into nakedness, 
The blossoms extending 
Out into the sweet air, 
The whole flower extending outward, 
Stretching and reaching. 
 
Later in the century, time‐lapse poetry continued to be written. For example, 
when William Carlos Williams, in "Asphodel that Greeny Flower" (1955), looks back 
over his life, his marriage, and his career as a poet from the vantage point of his 
seventies and grasps for the first time their essential reciprocity, it is as if he were 
watching a time‐lapse film of his own individuation: 
 
As I think of it now 
      after a lifetime 
         it is as if 
a sweet‐scented flower 
      were poised 
         and for me did open. (182) 
 
Underpinning W. S. Merwin's "Unchopping a Tree" (1970) is a time‐lapse 
vision of natural growth. A prose poem, written in the form of an instruction manual 
intended to assist in the reassembly of a felled tree, Merwin's ironic lines explores 
the complexity of living systems and man's inadequacy in the face of the natural. The 
poem's voice is that of a Swiftian, cold‐hearted expert, who speaks matter‐of‐factly 
of an infinitely complex, step‐by‐step process: the reattachment of each leaf and 
branch, the replacement of nuts (he instructs the reader to place those already 
opened back into their shells), the labyrinthine reconstitution of each spider web. 
There will, he admits, be some difficulties of course: "With spider webs, you must 
simply do the best you can. We do not have the spider's weaving equipment." Nor, 
lacking "any substitute for the leaf's living bond with its point of attachment and 
nourishment," will the foliage be easily put back. 
As Merwin's expert goes on to describe the rest of the tree's "resurrection"—
the replacement of the bark, the gluing in of innumerable splinters, the erection of 
the trunk—it becomes clear that this process, which the speaker proudly calls "men's 
work," is in fact beyond human means. The work, we are told in understatement, may 
cause us to wonder "to what extent it should be described as natural, to what extent 
man‐made." 
 
Indeed, rechopping a tree "will lead . . . to speculations about the parentage 
of beauty itself, to which you will return." And at the poem's end, we learn, the 
process is not yet finished. 
 
Others are waiting. 
Everything is going to have to be put back. 
 
In effect a reverse‐motion time‐lapse prose poem, "Unchopping a Tree" is time‐lapse 
in an ironic mode. 
Or think of May Swenson's "July 4th" (1972), a vivid description of holiday 
fireworks and of the reactions they provoke in an Independence Day audience, but a 
poem for which time‐lapse photography is again clearly the vehicle. Swenson's 
source of inspiration is apparent in the poem's first lines: 
 
Gradual bud and bloom and seedfall speeded up are 
these mute explosions in slow motion. 
From vertical shoots above the sea, the fire 
flowers open, shedding their petals. (xxx) 
 
The poem goes on to develop this analogy between the organic growth of a flower in 
bloom and the "fire flowers" opening‐out above her. 
For A. R. Ammons, a time‐lapse aesthetic is central to his very concept of his 
art of appearance and reality, nature and culture, as is apparent in his "Poetics," one 
of several attempts by Ammons at an "ars poetica." "I look for the way/things will 
turn/out spiraling from a center," Ammons explains. Hoping to give them unselfish 
poetic expression, "being available/to any shape that may be/summoning itself 
through me/from the self not mine but ours," he seeks, without interference,  for the 
forms 
 
things want to come as 
 
from what black wells of possibility, 
how a thing will unfold. . . . (61) 
 
Like "The Groundhog," Robert Hayden's "The Night Blooming Cereus" (1972) 
seems almost a conscious imitation of a time‐lapse film. For the poem is, like 
Swenson's, an account of a flower coming into bloom—a staple of the time‐lapse 
repertoire, part of its Tudor Code. But like "Groundhog," "Cereus" is no mere record 
but a subjective account of a natural process as experienced by a particular human 
consciousness. 
The poet tells, in a first person narrative, of how "for nights/we [the speaker 
and a companion] waited, hoping to see/the heavy bud [of the Cereus, a cactus] 
break into flower." We see that bud's "neck‐like tube/hooking down from the 
edge/of the leaf‐branch/nearly to the floor . . ." and take notice of how the Cereus, 
"packed/tight with its miracle swayed stiffly on breaths/ of air, moved/as though 
impelled by stirrings within itself"—all‐in—all as accurate a picture of the Cereus as 
any time‐lapse camera could capture, given the limits of specificity always inherent 
in language. 
But the speaker confesses—as if about to succumb to those still‐alive 
pressures of natural selection which teach men not to see so precisely—that, face‐to‐
face with such becoming, he feels "repelled as much as . . . fascinated." As if before 
his very eyes the Cereus' shape mutates, metaphorically, into something else, and 
the speaker sees in the plant "snake,/eyeless bird head,/beak that would gape/with 
grotesque life squawk." His companion, however, more impressed than the poet with 
"the imminence of bloom," and ready to celebrate the "archaic mysteries" they are 
about to behold, redirects his attention to the "rigorous design" of the unfolding the 
hold of that vision of the natural grotesque which nearly possesses him. 
The poet recalls recent experiments which have recorded the "secret life of 
plants"—a "philodendron's fear," for example, as registered on a polygraph —and 
realizes that he too confronts "tribal sentience/In the cactus, focused/ energy of 
will." But he needs no polygraph, or time‐lapse camera, to capture it. For thanks to 
the marvelous technique of a poet's imagination, he has access to a process no 
technology could touch: "That belling of/tropic perfume —that signaling/not meant 
for us;/the darkness cloyed with summoning/ fragrance." 
Waiting patiently for the precise moment (for a Cereus' bloom lasts only a 
very short time), the time‐lapse watcher "marveling/ beheld at the last the 
achieved/flower." And even then, in poetry's faithful commitment to becoming, the 
blooming does not stop, is not terminated in freeze‐frame last words; for in the 
poem's closing lines we learn "Its moonlight/petals were/still unfold‐/ing, the spike 
fringe of the outer/perianth recessing/as we watched" (24‐26). I can think of no 
better demonstration of Archibald MacLeish's contention that poetry "gives 
knowledge of the chaos and confusion of the world by imposing order upon it which 
leaves it still the chaos and confusion which it really is." 
Jorie Graham's "How Morning Glories Could Bloom at Dusk" (1980) will serve 
as a final example of 20th century time‐lapse poetry. A meditation on the reasons of 
the heart, Graham's poem takes the circadian rhythm of blossoming vegetation as its 
controlling metaphor. "Left to itself," the poem begins, 
 
     the heart continues, as the tamarind 
folds it leaves every night and the mimosa, 
even in perpetual darkness, opens and shuts 
with the sun. 
 
The heart, Graham explains, is patient, in sympathy with natural process, well aware 
(as Rilke knew) that "everything unfolds," including the self. 
 
It is moved by such delays: 
cat's eyes open at six, african marigolds, lilies 
at seven, at eight the passionflower. 
 
For Graham, the "correspondences" of heart and nature are precise; the heart's 
growth, the coming into bloom of the natural world are homologies, sharing a 
common bestiary, transpiring in a shared geography. The heart's "light awaits the 
souls of the living"; its "birds" long "for the branches to unfold in song"; 
 
the end of its year awaits each noon the opening 
of the chicory of the meadow, and its meadows 
imagine other sleepless flower beds. 
 
Seen in time‐lapse, taken to heart, the blossoming, the metamorphosis which 
dominant the scene satisfy her need for the miraculous, replace the need for the 
supernatural. 
 
If there is another world, then this is it: 
the real, the virtual, the butterfly 
over the evening primrose. 
 
In a June 13, 1871 journal entry, Hopkins would note 
 
The Horned Violet is a pretty thing, gracefully lashed. Even in withering the 
flower ran through beautiful inscapes by the strewing up of the petals into 
straight little barrels or tubes. It is not that inscape does not govern the 
behavior of things in slack and decay as one can see even in the pining of the 
skin of the old and even in a skeleton but that horror possesses the mind, but 
in this case there was nothing in itself to show whether the flower were 
shutting or opening. 
 
C o n c lu sio n : T h e  N e w  P h u sis 
 
True imagination actually "sees" the "subtle" processes of nature and their angelic 
prototypes. It is the capability to reproduce in oneself the cosmogenic unfolding, the 
permanent creation of the world. . . . 
Maurice Aniane 
 
"To perceive consists in condensing enormous periods of an infinitely diluted 
existence into a few moments of an intensive life, and in the summing up of a very 
long history," wrote Henri Bergson at the beginning of this century (in Matter and 
Memory, 1911). "To perceive," Bergson concludes, thinking of the Western mind‐set 
under the auspices of science, "means to immobilize." Elsewhere (in Creative 
Evolution) the French philosopher had wondered aloud why another alternative kind 
of perception did not evolve: 
 
parallel to this physics [in which perception immobilizes the world‐in‐
process], a second kind of knowledge ought to have grown up, which could 
have retained what physics allowed to escape. On the flux of duration science 
neither would nor could lay hold, bound as it was to the cinematographical 
method. 
 
Bergson goes on to imagine for us what this "second kind of knowledge," free 
from the tendency to dissect the world into frames of thought, conscious instead of 
the "absolute flow of becoming," might have been like: 
 
It would have called upon the mind to renounce its most cherished habits. It 
is within becoming that it would have transported us by an effort of 
sympathy. We should no longer be asking where a moving body will be, what 
shape a system will take, through what state a change will pass at a given 
moment; the moments of time, which are only arrests of our attention would 
no longer exist; it is the flow of time, it is the very flux of the real that we 
should be trying to follow. 
 
Our normal knowledge of the world, Bergson observes, allows us to be "in 
some measure masters of events" (a fact which Nietzsche comprehended as well); it 
allows the world to be manipulated, to be used as an instrument of human action. 
But we pay a price for this increase in power, for our ordinary knowledge "retains of 
the moving reality only eventual immobilities, that is to say, views taken of it 
["snapshots," as Bergson was fond of calling such excerpts] by our mind. It 
symbolizes the real and transposes it into the human rather than expresses it." 
The "other knowledge" which Bergson imagines, would, in stark contrast, be 
"practically useless"; would not "extend our empire over nature"; and would "even 
go against certain natural aspirations of the intellect." It would, in fact, offer no 
advantage to an evolving being but one: the perception of "reality itself . . . in a firm 
and final embrace." Completing the rational intellect by "install[ing] itself within the 
moving," it would "open a perspective on the other half of the real." 
Does not time‐lapse photography, paradoxically enough, offer us, through use 
of a "cinematographical method," a glimpse of what it might be like to experience 
nature through this anti‐cinematographical "second kind of knowledge" for which 
Bergson longed? Whatever the technological basis for time‐lapse photography, our 
experience of it would certainly seem to be phenomenologically close to this 
sympathetic vision of becoming. It is as if evolution were once again an experience 
for us and not merely a theory: it is as if time‐lapse photography offers us our initial 
lessons in "exact, concrete, imagination." "In biology and in geology," writes the 
historian of religions Schwaller de Lubicz, "Time [under the hegemony of modern 
science] is made to intervene as the factor measuring evolution, when in reality, 
Time is this evolution" (91). Does not the world seen in time‐lapse hint of this 
ultimate, yet forgotten, wisdom? 
In the "true metaphors" of time‐lapse photography's visual poetry we again 
see phusis, again quicken into life the forgotten relationship between the mind of 
man and the "absolute flow of becoming" of which he, his imagination, and his 
poetry are both the momentary expression and the only means of revelation. Time‐
lapse photography reminds us that we are momentous beings. 

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