The Metaphysical Shapes of Time - Softcover

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‘What shape is time, is it a circle or a line?
What sound is the wind, is it a howl, a curl or a hiss?
‘And my being, who am I really, When I am so close to hand but so hard to know?’
Primo-Conti 1978

Primo Levi and his book "the drowned and the saved" was the starting point for my thinking for ‘The metaphysical shapes of time’. Many writers commentated that his survival became his suffering, with the constant ‘why me’. I was sure if I believed but I wanted to look at survival as offering us possibility. They say time is a healer, but I have found that memories never let you forget, and that time spins us back to moments of remembrance. ‘What shape is time, is it a circle or a line? When September encroaches and we remember the September when we loved, or losses, the colours of the leaves, the hiss of the wind as it blows against those same leaves. What sound is the wind, is it a howl, a curl or a hiss? Our minds battle to understand whether time is circular or linear, September comes around again and again, each laying on top of the other in a richness that linear time has no awareness of, yet we can never step on the same path again, the actual now is never the same, even in Déjà vu there is the added sense of knowing.

I have never forgotten Heidegger for given language to the universal problem how can we not know who we are, how can we not understand our relationship to the world, when we are here, so close, there could be nothing closer. ‘And my being, who am I really, When I am so close to hand but so hard to know?’ Yet Heidegger somehow was connected to something so inhumane, I am left with an enormous question, how can someone who knows so much about being became connected to something that sought to eradicate so many beings Jewish, blacks, radicals, gypsies and disabled people and so many others considered to be detrimental to a functional Europe? When you know so much about humanity how can you not see the humanity of others? We must be interested in each others stories, and fiction is a perfect way to do this as we can distil some many aspects of people’s experiences into to characters we invent.

Two stories, two versions of time. Joi’s story is his journey along the path of the optimist as he moves from the suffering of the disappearance of his parents to the hope that he finds in painting-the love he has from Isabelle and the courage from her Grandfather Primo-Conti. Isabelle dances to the circles of love that surround her, and learns early in life that recurrence in the most significance aspect of time. When these two very different paths connect there is the prospect of great possibility. But tragic events centering around Treviso in Italy reveal that there is a cult, the eden dream project, which is sinisterly connected to the nazi and fascist survivors of the second world war. Through Phillip Marx they have made the project to have a perfect society a utopian nightmare. Isabelle finds herself involved in the cult and Joi has to dig deep inside himself to find the courage to help Isabelle escape and uncover the sinister secrets of Treviso. He finds hidden his tragic childhood the seeds of possibility for strength, friendship and tremendous courage.