This is the beginning of John Milton’s On Time:
FLY, envious Time, till thou run out thy race:
Call on the lazy leaden-stepping Hours,
Whose speed is but the heavy plummet’s pace;
And glut thyself with what thy womb devours,
Which is no more than what is false and vain,
And merely mortal dross;
So little is our loss,
So little is thy gain!
And here is the beginning of John Ashbery’s Uptick:
We were sitting there, and
I made a joke about how
it doesn’t dovetail: time,
one minute running out
faster than the one in front
it catches up to.
That way, I said,
there can be no waste.
Waste is virtually eliminated.
Time in both texts is personified as speed spurred by inequality and insufficiency, a “race,” a “running-out.” Milton casts it as an appetite resulting in accumulation of waste (“dross”); Ashbery describes it as a perpetual imbalance, like two overlapping runners, that “virtually eliminates” waste.
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These texts interest me because we often see time referred to in poetry and rhetoric in a cohortative manner (gather your rosebuds, carpe diem), taking time as synonymous with narration or urgency. Rarer is it in the form of a meta- [phorical / physical] examination that reminds us that we don’t really know what time is, or even how we talk about it.
In the Milton we read a hierarchy: sprightly, transcendent Time who can muster slower Hours. So this is a metaphor reconciling the stark, decrepit, oh-shucks-we-got-old nature of time with our tedious experience of moments. But lines 4–6 are more ambiguous. There’s a reference to the Greek god Cronos, who gobbles up his wife Rhea’s children (gods of soil and harvest) in envy — but then why does Cronos have a devouring “womb” in line 4? The womb can also mean a gender-neutral abdomen or bowels. So the “womb” is here doubly a site of creation and digestion.
But how does the argument then proceed in line 6 that the appetite is false and vain, aside from the valences of “glut” and “devour”? The argument turns on “more” — line 5, which basically means “and eat what fits your guts,” makes the consumption of food a tautology, an autarky, instead of nourishment and satiation. This sense is reinforced in the anaphora in the “So little…” ending couplet. As the rest of the poem goes, as time makes us consume our material bodies, we’re answered with an “individual kiss”: a beatific vision that addresses our peculiar doubts.
Superseding the virtual by the units of its measure is not new to readers of Ashbery. Take the opening of The Skaters:
These decibels
Are a kind of flagellation, an entity of sound
Into which being enters, and is apart.
In here and Uptick the introduction of units (minute, decibel) is comic because digesting an abstract thing (time, voices) into a scientific system of measurement is meant to decompose it; distance ourselves from the subject. But everywhere in Ashbery this alienating study always turns up with “being.” Each unit of time is racing for more time. (There’s another comedy of scale: Ashbery’s “minute” is laggard when modernity ticks by at the millisecond.)
Whereas Milton argues motion’s displacement as self-annihilating economy of consumption, Ashbery sketches it lightly: each minute goes faster, tagging onto the last. Everything is askew; see, for example, the perfectly awkward subject enjambment in “how/it doesn’t dovetail, time.”
So why is there “no waste?” The comparison with Milton elucidates this: as excrement is a by-product of consumption, waste is the product of consumption which has no use but to fulfil the appetite. Ashbery’s answer to the dogma isn’t to labor, or to await redemption, but to manipulate that given parallelism with askance, diffidence, and self-deprecation. This turns on waste being “virtually” eliminated — from the preceding line, “it is eliminated in the sense that it never existed”; in colloquial terms, “almost”; as an opposite to the “real,” “not really.”
Of course, we never got to hear what Ashbery’s joke was. Here is the joke:
A farmer arrives at an old sage’s abode. “I have worked among the fields for many years,” says the man, “yet I am no closer to truth and beauty. Please give me lessons so I can understand how to spend my life.” “Wait here,” the sage says, “and I will think about your request for a year, and give you my answer.”
The farmer waits for a year outside the sage’s door, and then some, but the sage never appears. Furious, the businessman raps at the sage’s door, and shouts, “It has been seven years, and I have received no answer. Is it not that a sage should keep his word, to a king, to God, as to a humble man as me?”
“It has been seven years since you asked,” the sage replies, “but I haven’t thought about your question yet.”
