And this is true as welclass="underline" at present one can observe everywhere in the world that fruit-bearing plants in particular often bloom several times a year and produce fruit all year round, even in wintertime. Whether it be elderberries, rose hips, or strawberries: next to the dark-black, heavy, sweetly ripe bunches of elderberries, in fall or summer you have surely noticed, against a barn wall, at a crossroads, by an electric pylon, April-like cream-colored clusters of bloom or still unopened buds.
And the mountainous regions are even more favorable to this magical transformation of one season into another. And the village of Hondareda, with this chaos that does not merely create blockages or obstructions but also has a dynamic or propelling effect, enhances this phenomenon, acting like a glass bell in some places and spaces, independent of the seasons. The budding, blooming, fruit-setting, greening, darkening, and ripening, the shriveling and wilting of an elderberry cluster can be seen all at the same time on the bushes.
Thus Hondareda-Comarca is both the natural glacial chaos as well as a protected enclosure, used as such by the settlers and unobtrusively enlarged by them, sheltered from the surrounding mountain wastes, and if exposed, then primarily to the stratosphere above: perhaps more related to it than exposed.
All of this could have provided fertile ground for the time-economy project. At least there were some points of departure in the speaking style and sayings of Hondareda, which seemed extremely odd when one first heard them.
Thus a verb tense in current usage again was one that had disappeared almost everywhere else, the pre- or postfuture or future perfect tense: “We will have met each other. We will have exchanged clothing.” Or we often used the equally archaic prepositional phrase “at the time of”: “at the time of our evening meal,” “at the time of his life,” “at the time of your absence,” and we used this phrase more frequently than “with,” “before,” “after,” and “during,” and also in bizarre expressions such as “at blackberry time,” “at book time,” “at brother time,” “at grain-of-rice time,” “at the time of your lips,” “at night-wind time,” “at our deal-making time,” “at apple time,” “at grass-blowing time.”
Yet for the most part the project remained limited to this: in our thinking and speaking, our action and inaction, we rejected, often filled with anger at ourselves, the bad forms of time that had a destructive effect on being.
It was even more beautiful then, and an even more powerful reality, when, as happened all too rarely, one became aware of a time more in tune with existence, and one could finally give “time” full play as a noun: “sand-between-the-streetcar-tracks-time,” “sky-in-the-treetops-time,” “night-blindness-time,” “Orion-and-Pleiades-time,” “eye-color-time,” “steppe-roaming-time,” “baby-carriage-pushing-time,” “Death-and-the-Maiden-time,” “crumple-letters-in-the-fire-time.”
Time beyond counting and measuring? Yes, and also, in an expression found in the book that accompanied me on my journey, my vanished child’s Arabic anthology: time “beyond weighing.” Away with those ugly standard times that anger us, and distort reality — and bring on the uplifting, inspiring time beyond weighing.
Does this mean that the immigrants to the mountains despise numbers and figures? On the contrary: they worshipped numbers for their imperviousness to all dodges and tricks.
And naturally — in the sense of a law of nature — the group of new settlers in Hondareda must have aroused worldwide indignation with this new time-management plan? no, time-management initiative, like a dangerous sect? no, even more passionate indignation than the most notorious sect, engaged in abducting children, emptying bank accounts, and practicing human sacrifice. And yet those who sent you and the others here, my dear observer, will not even step forward to oppose the impending attack, intervention, or whatever up here in the Sierra de Gredos. They see nothing wrong with it. They also have nothing against the people here, and when they assert that, they are almost pure of heart.
They think nothing at all when the intervention, as they say without lying, “forces itself” on them. What will happen up here is completely independent of their thinking, their decisions, their will, their person. As far as they are concerned, and this is believable, the Hondarederos are not their enemies. That the Hondareda enclave must be wiped off the face of the earth has nothing to do with two different worldviews, economic systems, concepts of morality and aesthetics, but rather with the laws of nature. Hondareda must be eliminated simply on the basis of the laws of physics. Motion produces countermotion. Every action produces an equal and opposite reaction.
A vacuum — and in the Hondareda region one of these voids that, as we know, are abhorred by nature, has developed, simply as a result of the negative thinking here, a widespread “not that!” “not that way,” “not him,” etc. — a vacuum provokes, attracts, and creates fullness, in this particular case a violent fullness, in the form of a natural pushing, penetrating, overturning, rushing from all sides into the vacuum created here, which brought on this purely physical violence by keeping this space open.
And if there is any physical mass here in the basin, it is almost negligible, and furthermore hardly moving and heterogeneous, while the mass all around, to the borders of the ecumene, as far as the Arctic and Antarctica, in the meantime seems completely homogeneous, thanks to its exclusively positive signs, “that way!” “precisely so!” “you, you, and you!” etc., a constantly moving and expanding mass, and above all one infinitely larger and more powerful than the one here.
As the laws of nature dictate, energy and matter — as you will soon be able to observe here — produce motion and force. To speak of aggression, therefore, of hostile actions, forays, violations, war, or even planned liquidation, in connection with what is in the offing for the people up here is inaccurate and inexcusable anthropomorphism in view of such purely physical processes. Sweeping Hondareda from the face of the earth will be neither an act of revenge nor a punitive operation. It is imposed by the laws of nature and inevitable.
In your reports, however, although you, the observer, may not have likened the immigrants of Hondareda to a sect, you have described them, particularly in the context of their attempt to achieve a different relationship to time, as “on their way to something like a new world religion.” According to you, the Hondarederos are in unspoken agreement that everything to be revealed, from A to Z, has already been revealed, once and for all, and captured in the writings of the most diverse peoples in the most diverse ways, yet always with the same meaning, where it can be read and used as a guide to life. In the settlers’ opinion, as your report will have it, no new revelations of any sort can be expected, and none are needed — for which reason this is no sect, according to your observations.
As far as any essential or thought-provoking contrary notion of time goes, they think that anything that needed to be revealed has been revealed, from Isaiah to Buddha, from Jesus to Muhammad. Except that what you call these “unintentional founders of a religion” distinguish between uncontested religious revelations, which they accept without reservation, and prophecies. Of all that is prophesied in the revealed religions, they believe that only the prophecy of a different kind of time is a promise that has gone unfulfilled — that indeed, in the current era it has perhaps even more prophetic force for each individual and solitary person than ever before, precisely because it does not aim to be extracted from one’s thinking, one’s innermost feelings, one’s self-awareness, and imposed on the external world, to conquer or achieve power over others. As your report puts it, “What for the Jews remains the promise of the Messiah, is for them, though quite different and above all different in focus, the promised time.”