I did not know in 1983 that I was walking into an argument that was already sixty years old.
I made the piece at the dawn of the computer art genre, on a machine with thirty-two columns and no lower-case letters. It was unusual at the time in using an equation from physics as a vehicle for poetic metaphor. What I did not know was that the two halves of that metaphor had been formally separated, in public, by two of the most famous men in Europe, six decades before I typed a line of it.
The room in Paris
On the sixth of April, 1922, Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson sat in the same room in Paris, at the Société française de philosophie, and disagreed about what time is. So many people wanted to be there that attendance had to be by invitation. Bergson had spent his career on what he called la durée — duration, time as it is actually lived and felt from the inside, which he did not believe could ever be reduced to the reading on a clock. Einstein spoke for less than a minute. He said there was the time of the physicists, and there was the time of the psychologists, and there was therefore no time of the philosophers.
Bergson went home and wrote Duration and Simultaneity, trying to show that relativity and lived duration could be held together in one account. He got the physics wrong, specifically the reciprocity in the twin paradox, and he was judged to have lost. He eventually withdrew the book. After that the two kinds of time stopped speaking to one another. Physics kept the clock. Philosophy and psychology kept the feeling. That divorce is still more or less in force today.
Where this piece sits
As for the metaphorical mappings employed in this piece, we have ontological correspondences in which entities in the conceptual domain of psychological duration in our mind correspond systematically to entities in the conceptual domain of the physical measurement of time — specifically that measurement used in Einstein’s special theory of relativity.
What interests me about this piece, looking back at it after forty years, is that it sits in the room those two men walked out of.
It uses Einstein’s equation and it computes Bergson’s duration. It does not claim that they are the same thing, and that is the whole difference. Bergson made a claim about physics and was wrong about physics. I am making a metaphor, and a metaphor is not required to be a proof. It is required to be illuminating. The mapping here is poetic rather than scientific, and that is precisely what lets it do the thing that Duration and Simultaneity could not.
A contradiction I have decided to keep
There is one more thing, and it is a contradiction rather than a defense. Bergson’s central objection to science was that it spatializes time. It takes something lived and flowing, lays it out as a line, a row of positions, and in doing so loses the very thing it set out to describe. And this program now asks you to drag duration along a slider. It puts lived time on an axis. It is guilty of exactly the charge Bergson brought.
I find that I do not mind. What is laid out along that line is not clock time. It is your time, and your mother’s time, and the distance between the two. If the only way to let you see that distance is to commit Bergson’s sin, then I will commit it.
I would not say this piece settles the argument from 1922. It declines it.
Provenance
Psychronometrics was written in 1983 for a Radio Shack Color Computer. The source was rewritten in 1988 for an IBM PC with an 8088 processor, and rebuilt for the web in 2026.
The concept appeared in print in Foist 7, edited by Scott Dohring in Rochester, New York. It was reviewed in July 1988 in PhotoStatic no. 31 and Retrofuturism no. 4, a joint issue edited by Lloyd Dunn and the Tape-beatles in Iowa City. The reviewer set out the idea — that people at different ages have different senses of what constitutes a long time, and that Einstein’s time dilation could be brought to bear on it — and noted that it was illustrated with worked examples. That issue carries ISSN 0893-4835 and is archived at psrf.detritus.net.
The same sixty-eight pages carry the first installment of Bob Grumman’s column on visual poetry. That is worth recording only because it locates the work: this was not adjacent to the mathematical poetry conversation of the late nineteen-eighties. It was inside it.