Gertrude Stein’s notion of “syncopated time” in theatrical performance, defined as a “complicated tangle of reading, hearing, and viewing without determination of priority,” is used by Rebecca Schneider to describe the atemporality, or alt-temporality, implicit in Civil War reenactments (Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, 92). I can’t find a copy of the lecture in which Stein outlined this theory. Eventually I will, and then I’ll have more to say. There is an amazing time-travel aspect to reenactment events, but a weird confrontation of divisive and seemingly “out of time” beliefs and expressions.

In Buddhist tradition, one time organizing principle is called the kalpa. The duration of one kalpa can be “represented allegorically as the time that it would take to wipe away a mountain by stroking it with a piece of silk once every 100 years” (The Self-Creating Universe: The Making of a Worldview, 51). Wow. That’s, like, almost forever. :-0

[Go-Go drum beat.] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HYTBG7j1cc)