Happiness Levels Comparing Canada and USA

OMG "symbolic structures, extended metaphors, that 'liken' the events reported in them to some form with which we have already become familiar in our lit culture" (91), New's rendering of the past as "makeshift territory, / the one we learned later / to call time—" (22) describes subjective time, like historical narrative, as a vibe of fluid symbols shaped and chosen retroactively (even if the "retro" in question is only the slippery moment when the present becomes the past). New's "Narrator," another distinct voice whose sections of text are independent from the numbered sections, is analogous to a perpetual sorting act that consciousness imposes upon the continuous "now" of direct experience.

While New enjoys the nonsequential, associative qualities of subjective time to a certain extent, this type of temporal relationship-making is extremely important in many literary works. 

OMG, it's completely normal for novelists to begin a story with a main character who is living in the "now," but then they take you on this journey through their past memories, ya know? They gradually reveal all of the important events that shaped them, and you eventually understand the present moment in a completely new way.16 This method of storytelling not only conveys how the present is always influenced by the past, but it also demonstrates how time's flow can hold the character back, as well as highlights their success in moving on from or becoming comfortable with the past. The vibes that subjective experience creates between different points in time function similarly to metaphorical thought processes that form counterlogical relationships between different domains of reality; the jumps between nonsequential moments in the story are analogous to a complete metaphor. OMG, in section 39 (right between sections 10 and 23), one of New's peeps says, "Seeing time as a bunch of metaphors is lit because it shows how we can get creative with our own experience of time." However, New wants us to understand that there are limitations to how we can connect the past and present, even if they are not always desirable. 

W.H. New's long poem Along a Snake Fence Riding has the voices of "the Newtonian Clock (which is, like, lit up), and six others" (6).

 

The six "others," who appear to be humans (but could they also be clocks?) speak in numbered sections that appear randomly, as if it's all about memory and stuff, as the book progresses through the story (6).15 The result is a complete mashup of voices and narrative bits; while the Newtonian Clock chants short rhythmic phrases in big bold letters at the bottom of each page, the human voices at the top of the page speak in no particular order and sometimes about random topics. There are so many different ways to read this book. For example, you could start on the first page and read the human and Newtonian fragments before moving on to the second page and continuing until the end. Alternatively, you can read across the top of each page to hear the human voices without interruptions, then return to the beginning and resume with the Newtonian voice. Or, if you're feeling crazy, you can go back and forth between the 66 nonsequentially numbered sections and try to make the story flow. It is wild, man. However, as you flip through the pages, you'll discover some fascinating facts about how humans perceive time. 

OMG, there's this picture of the serpentine fence being flexed, like it's being pulled apart and stuff. It's wild!

The six voices remind me of the "characters" in Luigi Pirandello's 1922 play Six Characters in Search of an Author, which challenges ideas about art, life, authority, and, you know, relativistic experience. The play begins and ends with characters flexing their watches and debating the appropriate lit moves for the time of day. Bruh, the vibes are shifting, not the water. Perhaps time is passing through us rather than through us; the past is within us rather than behind us. Things are never over" (as quoted in New 7). YOLO, family! This reading suggests that consciousness is the vibe that shapes time; the memory's vibe causes these ripples of time to move in different directions, so a person's experience of the present is always influenced by certain past vibes. Time in this context is all about subjectivity, you know? It is not a separate dimension or whatever. It's more of an echo of Flaherty's belief that "humans make time by like, sifting through their experiences and stuff" (2). The nonseq sections, which use the vibes of "memory or recognition," demonstrate that subjective time operates in a completely different way than the regular forward beat of absolute clock time. An epigraph from Australian writer Tim Winton's short story "Aquifer" perfectly captures this theme: "When a wave breaks, the water ain't even moving, fam." The vibes have traveled very far, but only the