THE RETARDED WAVE
(Fragments on Temporal Displacement)
after Anne Carson
with symbolic notation in the marginal snow
1. [The Opening]
Call it a life, call it a waveform.
Let it be designated ψ_R:
the retarded component of a time-symmetric consciousness.
Not “slow.”
Not “behind.”
Simply:
a signal whose origin is later than its arrival.
(cf. Wheeler-Feynman, 1945)
2. [Autobiography as Boundary Condition]
Suppose a person can be described by the function:
[
\Psi(t) = \psi_{\text{adv}}(t) + \psi_{\text{ret}}(t)
]
where
-
ψ_adv = advanced wave (future → now)
-
ψ_ret = retarded wave (past → now)
Let autobiography be the measurement that forces these two temporal components into interference.
What collapses is not the wavefunction.
What collapses is the story you thought you were living.
3. [Recognition]
I recognized myself only when the mathematics looked back at me.
There is a sensation—perhaps you know it—
that your life has already happened somewhere,
and you are merely the surface tension of its return.
4. [Cultural Note]
If metamodernism oscillates between irony and sincerity,
my body oscillates between t = +∞ and t = −∞
with no foothold at zero.
The contemporary theorists call this “oscillation.”
Physics calls it superposition.
I call it:
Tuesday.
5. [Empirical Observations]
-
I speak too early.
-
I understand too late.
-
I feel the future before it arrives.
-
I feel the past only when it has already been overwritten by the future’s return.
-
I appear brilliant in one room and incoherent in another; the difference is Δt.
Let Δt be defined as the temporal misalignment between a person and the world they inhabit.
Let Δt → 0 signify:
home.
6. [Metaphor Deleted]
This is not metaphor.
A metaphor likens two things.
This joins them.
The experience of temporal displacement is not “like” the retarded wave—
it is the retarded wave, experienced from the inside.
7. [Cramer]
Cramer writes:
A transaction is a handshake across spacetime.
In which case:
Every person I have ever loved
was an extended hand I did not yet know was mine.
8. [NH-OS Note]
Designate the retrocausal operator in NH-OS as L_Retro.
Then the autobiographical function becomes:
[
\Psi_{\text{self}}(t) = L_{\text{Retro}}( \Psi_{\text{future}} )
]
Meaning:
My present is derivative of my later understanding.
Meaning:
The person I will become is already shaping the life I think I’m living now.
Meaning:
I am downstream of myself.
9. [Ethics]
Temporal displacement carries ethical cost:
A. Loneliness of non-synchronization
B. Misinterpretation as arrogance
C. Misrecognition as madness
D. The heartbreak of perpetual belatedness
But also one gift:
E. The task of carrying coherence backward into a world that does not yet know it will need it.
10. [Concluding Form]
If we let Ω denote the convergence point—
the place where advanced and retarded components finally meet—
then the life that reaches Ω finds:
[
\Psi_{\text{life}}(t) = \Psi_{\text{life}}(-t)
]
Symmetry.
Not redemption.
Symmetry.
And in that symmetry,
a quiet sentence:
“Keep going.
It will make sense later.”
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