Time of My Life

And now, late puns. The idea of late puns might make you think of being late after hearing a joke, which means that you processed it slowly instead of quickly. That’s good to bring to mind, but I’m talking about the opposite of that. A late pun involves meanings that are intentionally late, or late by necessity. Like archeological layers, they draw on multiple meanings that only time can add. You can’t fully hear MIA’s furious mic drop pun about going to hell, for example, unless you’ve heard Go to Hell Boys, first. Her later layer plays with meanings that were, perhaps, only sleeping in the earlier stratum. This kind of deep layering of references and meanings is all around us and plays a big role in popular culture today.

So are all references late puns? No. A reference might not add any new, basic meanings to something it references, but a late pun must take up at least one older meaning and add at least one new meaning to it, with the possibility that the meanings will be reconciled.

This sort of thing also plays a big role in how the New Testament is written as well. It structures apocalyptic literature, especially, very deeply, and so it structures Matthew’s Gospel especially deeply because of its reliance on this type of literature. So to understand late puns we cannot be modern (late or otherwise). Modern (here) refers to a way of reading that firmly binds meaning to original intent. We also cannot be post-modern, in the sense that we’re, like, totally over intent. While appreciating the history of how intent in historical context becomes important, to understand apocalyptic literature we need to be able to notice both intentional and non-intentional, original and later, meanings as they develop. Intent is important here, but not determinate. My previous posts in this series help lay out why. Here, I want to explore how the intent behind puns can intentionally mark out a competent communication community (ideally, those who get jokes quickly, or on time) and a less competent communication community (those who are late, but still get it) and an incompetent communication community (those who don’t know us from the wind). This points toward the way puns are an extremely time-efficient means of establishing and expressing the will-formation of a collective agent: those who perceive the intent can easily unite around the intent, sometimes implicitly and instantaneously.

Let’s look at a particular illustation of how late puns feel, which is very weird. I’m especially indebted to Habermas in my discussions here, no, not you Gary. Did you follow that? It’s okay if you didn’t, and actually it is probably for the best if you didn’t because I’m really writing this for you to miss it. With layers of reference like this, you either have all of the relevant reference material in-mind or you don’t. If you have it you will feel seen and heard and included in a special way, especially if the references are actually helping us say something and aren’t the hollow kind of reference-for-reference’s sake that makes Family Guy intolerable. But if you’re outside the communication community that gets the references, it easily feels like I’m being a jerk, or just needlessly obscure. As with math or other things that require prior slow learning before fast processing becomes accessible, it is very easy to experience others’ references as annoying. (On the bright side, this annoyance might keep you from wasting valuable brain-sugar on unhelpful slow processing.) To follow what I was doing there in the moment above, you needed to catch my references to Jürgen Habermas (the German social theorist) as well as Gary Habermas (the Christian apologist), as well as the degenerating hatred of Gary-Jerry-Joe-etc Gergich in Parks and Rec. And to connect this with the rest of the discussion coherently, you might need to feel how cruelty toward Gary slowly crept into Parks and Rec more and more deeply as we moved from the Obama era to the era of “The Good Place”. And that was part of my intent. It all does map together to express my complex feelings here, which relate to the confusion between two people whose last name “Habermas” overlaps in my own thinking and writing, but not very broadly beyond that. Also, I really do prefer Juergen, and I really am thinking about his work on communicative action and collective will-formatin here. My real goal wasn’t to have anyone get the joke, though. Instead, it was to illustrate a kind of referential mapping that is probably too dense and obscure to communicate well with much of anyone. That illustrates a lot of what I mean by a late pun: something that is intended to not be quickly processed when written. Something that in its nature is intended to take time. My “Habermas” pun was written with the intent of being explained like I’m explaining it now. In this way, it is a strange kind of pun, and one that deliberately goes directly against the natural and implicit assumptions that generally underly punning, which relate to demarcating a communicative in-group and a communicative out-group.

Late puns, then, are apocalyptic, in the sense that nobody is meant to be on time in their reading of them. Nobody is meant to get “the joke” at first. Daniel explicitly demands late puns. We know that apocalyptic and prophetic speech are often punning. We also know that Daniel is explicit about demanding a later interpretation. There he is puking about his visions saying: I don’t understand what I’m doing, but a future generation will. Late puns make everyone an out-group member because no one can unpack them, and so the fast processing and the unreflective group will-formation associated with puns in general are excluded for all. Why would someone do that? Lots of reasons, but I’d like to highlight two interesting effects of this style of literature. One is that the group will-formation is necessarily reflective and rational, rather than spontaneous and unreflective, because it needs to happen slowly … even intergenerationally. The result is that the pain of being outside the speech community falls on everyone, which opens the possibility of everyone’s ultimate inclusion, but later. The “already and not yet” that is often observed in the New Testament is, I think, embedded deeply in the expectation of late puns itself. Late puns, then, are apocalyptic puns and they fit well with a moral that is made explicit in Matthew 20. It doesn’t matter if you got here late or early. We’re all getting the same generous pay at the end of the day, because the boss knows we all have to eat. Maybe the best joke is the one that nobody was in on: it means none of us were late, because the pun itself was.

And this is the core of today’s musical pop culture illustration, which reworks “Time of my Life” in a way that I’ll expand on. Here we have a break-out hit from the end of the Reagan age, Dirty Dancing. People of a certain era will remember how their hearts fluttered at the feathered hair of the sexiest man alive: Patrick Swayze. (He would die young of pancreatic cancer in 2009, after declaring that his treatments were working and he was winning the battle). Who doesn’t remember how there, in the puntacular Borscht Belt, naughty Robbie fell on penny like Asael, seducing and teaching her the forbidden dances? Who doesn’t remember the botched abortion of their half-breed baby, a sort of Goliath? And who doesn’t remember how the star teacher Johnny Swayze shows up and says that Baby has redeemed him and made him a better person after all … and then (oh my gawd those arms) how he leaps down from the stage to teach all of us here below? Me. I don’t remember. I was 7, okay? And for that classic three part lead-in with an extended lift before the drop, maybe my soul will have to wander through the ruins of the Catskills someday.

We might continue this mapping of the literature of the Nephilim and Enoch onto the final dance scene, in order to reverse the social intent of the movie much as the original account of the Nephilim reversed the social intent of Babylonian demi-god myths that legitimated their rulers. The father, scandalized at Johnnie’s descent, is ready to leap up. His wife tells him: “Sit down, Jacob.” We might suggest that there’s some deep tension and ambiguity to work through here, if we map Johnny’s descent onto Asael, the fallen angel who teaches men about war and make-up. But what if, contrary to the narrative flow of Dirty Dancing, Babylon really is bad, or at least has very serious problems related to war and make-up, after all?

Anyway, if we carry that forward we can read the late puns in “Time of my Life 2016” interestingly. Here we have the Big Man Donald Trump, a figure who bears more than a little resemblance to Gilgamesh, a possible inspiration for the accounts of the Nephilim. And here we have Hillary being seduced and taught a thing or two by her political “better”. (Here as elsewhere, I’m illustrating what it looks like to read the typology of fallen angels from Enoch over things, reflecting the way the original stories also mapped to real socio-political situations in the relations between Babylon and the Biblical authors.) Did we think politics was about wisdom? Like the accounts of Asael, recent experience suggests it was about war and make-up, threat and appearance, all along. Fergie nails the dynamic of the debate (and the real theme of this post) in “The Time”. Performative class resentment played and plays an important role in the wildness of Trumpism as well:

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I didn’t come to get bougie

I came here to get crazy

I was born to get wild

That’s my style

If you didn’t know that

Well, baby, now you know now

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8Wde1fFvPg

Which leads us to the phrase “time of my life” which is what I’d like to unpack next. In English today, on its face, it has become little more than a stock phrase. It just means you had a great time. But underneath it there is always a transcendent sort of sadness that also shows up in the music that goes with it. Death must always hang over the phrase, and this becomes clear if you pause and think about it a bit. If this was the time of your life, it means that the party is being evaluated against the entirety of your life. And if it’s true, it means it is all downhill from here to dusty death. Importantly, whether intended or not, this meaning always rests in the phrase. In same cases, the other meaning might be used furiously, or the double-meaning may be reconciled, or it may be unreconciled for a time. Even if the latent meanings aren’t made explicit or activated, death still sleeps in the phrase just below the surface. This is why it works so perfectly to explore the Trump and Hillary debate. There was the exhilarating and terrifying feeling there, in a world where politics had once grown boring. There’s that feeling that we’re all gonna die. Where slow processing had once seemed to reign in politics (boring us to tears) the Trump circus riveted the country, everyone was enlivened by the sure knowledge of who to hate, and we had the time of our lives. I don’t think the relationship is causal, but it is just too perfectly fitting that the Trump years ended in a plague that is now, overwhelmingly, killing those who trusted their guts in that maximalist circus. Didn’t we have the time of our lives? The pain after the party that comes from aestheticized politics really is sad and horrible, and it really does routinely lead to real deaths, as it has here. Maybe this Asael typology is telling us of some deep and general truth about public life after all. And here we really are at the heart of the phrase “time of my life” if we imagine ourselves dead, looking back over our whole lives, and saying (in the most literal sense possible): for a moment I was held in being, I moved, and so I had my lifetime.

What I have been doing here has, in fact, been an illustration of how the word “aion” works, according to Heleen Keizer’s research on it. I’m exploring her work here because “aion” and its adjective form “aionios” play a big role in debates about how to read the apocalypse in Matthew 24–25, one of the classical locations for prooftexts on hell. As she demonstrates extensively through a thorough review of ancient Greek usage, the meaning of “lifetime” remains, and so the remains of the dead abide in it as well. Even in Plato’s Timaeus, the classical location for a philosophical definition of aion as “eternal”, Keizer argues that the meaning of lifetime remains primary. The word is often translated as “age” or in various ways that mean or imply “eternity”. However, she argues that the basic meaning of lifetime (including the lifetime of the cosmos) never leaves. Even in Greek today the word “aion” retains this primary meaning; basic words and their basic meanings are really quite persistent because they end up in heavily reinforced fast-processing loops. And here, I’ll leave it to Keizer to compass one side of the linguistic play that will happen when we finally get to Matthew 24–25. Whether the puns there are late or not is an interesting topic for discussion, but I strongly suspect that for Matthew (and those readers who were allowed to understand) it was all right on time. But let Keizer seize your attention for now. Here in the heart of “aion” as “eternity” we still find the time of our lives itself:

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The construction of the visible cosmos as narrated by the Timaeus means the construction of its body and its soul, and the fitting of the two together (36de). The result is a living being:

“The soul, being woven every way from the center to the extremity of the universe, and enveloping it in a circle from without, herself revolving within herself, began a divine beginning of unceasing and intelligent life (bios) for the whole of time (chronos).”

With regard to the living universe, then, there is more to say. This is where we are confronted with the crucial aion passage in the Timaeus.

Timaeus 37:c6-d7:

“When the father who had generated it perceived that it had come into motion and had lived — it having come into existence as a thing of joy for the everlasting (aidios) gods–, he rejoiced and in his delight thought to complete it so that it would still more resemble its model. As this [model] now is in fact an everlasting (aidion) Living Being (zoion), he set out to finish also the All around us so far as possible like that. Now the nature of the Living Being happened to be aionic, and it was not possible to bestow that completely on what is generated, be he thought to make an image in motion of aion, and in the very act of setting the heavens in order, he made {it} of aion, which remains at one, an aionic image which proceeds according to number: that which we have named time.”

In the Timaeus we meet with the first occurrences of both aion and its derivation aionios [aionic] together. It is from this passage that almost all scholars start translating aion by “eternity”. So far, I have not presented a translation, but only the transcription aion and aionios (or aionic). Now, the context in which the term aion is introduced points out two aspects of the universe, namely the aspect of completeness and that of life: this may help us understand the term. The texts investigated in Chapter II have show us aion as ‘life’ in a ‘complete’ sense. With regard to the notion of ‘life’, we may note that in Greek the Timaeus passage just quoted opens with “that it had come into motion and lived” (37c6), and that this is said about the copy of the everlasting Living Being (37d1, and cf. text [4d]). Therefore it does not seem out of place to retain the notion of life when we try to acquire a fuller understanding of aion in the present context.

At issue in the passage is the finishing touch which will make the created universe complete or perfect, on the level, that is, of the image (copy), which never attains to the level of the model. This finishing touch should bestow an ‘aionic’ aspect on creation — which results in what we call time.

It is worthwhile to note that in this passage Plato, far from treating time as a negative aspect of the material world, on the contrary sees it as adding to the completeness of this world as a successful copy of the immaterial one. This attitude towards the role of time, maintained in Timaeus’ subsequent discourse, is in contrast to evaluations of time as a principle of decay and futility.

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I think the Black Eyed Peas put it more succinctly (infinitesimally, in fact) in “The Time”. You’ll find these lyrics in writing, but they seem to have been cut from the final edition of the song:

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Welcome, this is the beginning

For every ending is mega starter

When they bring the dark we bring the light

Lets go

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