More Like Herahightus Amiright

It’s possible that we misunderstand time so fundamentally that the same moment can happen more than once, or that what we mean by a moment is something closer to the star we are orbiting than a dot in the constellation of our life’s night sky. But since it’s early in the morning let’s say for now that there really is something linear about it, and that Heraclitus was right about us not being able to step into the same river twice.

To start, I wanted to look into this a bit from a material point of view which ended up with me spending about an hour running Penman equations with ChatGPT based on average summer climate variables in Turkey for the Küçük Menderes river (which Heraclitus lived near in Ephesus) to see how quickly that river actually changed compositionally and what the likelihood of it replicating in some way would be, but I ran into some problems with trying to figure out what the hydrological model would have been around Ephesus during his lifetime and it broke down a bit from there. If you’re curious though, it’s likely that the chunk of the river visible to him during his visits (roughly about 300ft wide and 500ft long) would have evaporated 37,831 gallons of water a day, give or take. If you match that up with a simplification of the rate of cellular renewal in the human body (it does not completely renew every 7 years, but it’s not unfair to use that as a median value as long as you include that a few parts of the body basically never renew and other parts renew every few days or few weeks), you’re stuck with a conclusion that largely the same person can visit a mostly similar river many times over the course of a few days, and the Venn diagram overlap between the two thins out over the course of say the next week or two.

Anyway, the natural state of flux we live in is undeniable regardless of what the larger model for reality ends up being (if we ever really figure it out in a thorough way). And I’ve always loved self-assembling or self-managing pieces of art in their various forms, ranging from Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s heartbreaking and darkly hilarious Can’t Help Myself to Brian Eno’s Discreet Music, and it’s certainly a path I’m interested in wandering further down with my own work. But this morning I stumbled across an Eluvium album I wasn’t aware of, or don’t remember being aware of, from 2017 named Shuffle Drones that took some of this in a slightly different direction. Weighing in at 23 tracks and 13 minutes, it’s intended to run on shuffle forever and I’ve been loving it over the first hour or so of it. You can read more on it from the artist himself here, and you can find it on Spotify here. There are 8.06 × 10^23 possibly arrangements of it, so it’s technically not infinite and you could return to the same album twice, but it’s pretty unlikely and it’s worth stepping into a few times regardless. Wittgenstein would probably scream something to the effect of “just play the fucking album or don’t, dude” right around now, so I will leave you to it.

As a quick technical note, if you listen to it on a streaming platform you’ll want to turn on Crossfade in your settings (I set mine to 1 sec) so you don’t have to suffer through the little clips in between tracks. Alternatively, I’ve found a version of it on Youtube that’s a couple hours long made by an Eluvium fan who wanted to make it easier for everyone to listen to it the way it was intended.