Joanna Newsom, Kantian; and is idealism a consolation to loss?

25 Nov, 2023

On her 2015 Divers, Joanna Newsom sings that

Love is not a symptom of time,
Time is just a symptom of love. (Time, As a Symptom)

Curious fans often ask what this means. Here is my reading.¹

Either time is fundamental and gives meaning to the distribution of our lives across it ("love is ... a symptom of time"), or our lives, our love, is fundamental, and time emerges to mark differences among parts of our lives ("time is a symptom of love"). The latter is true. It is the experience of love that brings time with it rather than vice versa. That is, the experience of love "and the nullifying, / defeating, / negating, / repeating / Joy of life." Time is the organizing structure that is implicit in love and joy, rather than an independently existing field in which we find love and joy.

This is a cousin of the Kantian idea, developed in the first Critique, that the concept of time is a condition of the possibility of experience, rather than a content of experience. To have experience at all (or an experience like ours at least), means to array sensations in temporal order. Because of this, we bring time to our experience rather than coming to know it from experience, and accordingly we can't claim to know about any absolutely real or transcendent time. Kant's view is called "transcendental idealism" because our thoughts of objects beyond our experience are in this way just our thoughts; they don't make contact with any thought-of object. (The only "time" that we can really think about is the time that conditions our experience.)

To my knowledge, Kant never draws any existential consolation from this idealism, but Newsom appears to have some to offer. That time is a symptom, rather than a transcendent fundamental, may be able to soften the pains that it seems to bring to us. If time is fundamental, it seems that, once our lives are past, it's as though they never existed: "we believe it erases all the rest / that precedes." But if time is not fundamental, it seems to downgrade the reality of this loss. In the next verse, Newsom offers: "stand brave / time moves both ways." I am not sure if time moves both ways (and I assume this would be a departure from Kant). But this at least means that the apparent inexorability, the one-way passage of time, is not quite real. The fleetingness of love in time is part of love rather than a cold metaphysical truth. And this seems to open up the imaginative possibility of an eternal and timeless perspective (even though of course no such experience is possible). A love in one moment in time is thus in one sense fleeting, but can also be thought outside of time. From this perspective, the love "sustains":

The moment of your greatest joy sustains:
Not axe nor hammer
Tumor, tremor
Can take it away, and it remains
It remains

Joy sustains, and remains; loss is not real in the way that we are tempted to apprehend it (although of course it is also not escapable).

The last verses become very romantic as they imagine a love lost, past and gone, but also sustained. For example:

And every little gust that chances through
Will dance in the dust of me and you
With joy-of-life
And in our perfect secret-keeping:
One ear of corn
In silent, reaping
Joy of life

The very end seems to imagine the deaths of the stars themselves, stark scenes that no one can actually ever see.

A shore, a tide, unmoored -- a sight, abroad:
A dawn, unmarked, undone, undarked (a god)
No time. No flock. No chime, no clock. No end
White star, white ship -- Nightjar, transmit: transcend!

But some kind of hope is held out. There is a "white ship," a means of conveyance, and a Nightjar is heard at the end of everything, and there is a possibility of transcendance. The song ends on "transmit, trans-", which then resumes back at the beginning of the album with "Sending."

What's interesting is that this hope for transcendence is on its own terms per impossibile. If time is given to us as a condition of experience, then we can't experience the reality of time pure of experience, or vice versa; if time is a symptom of love, we won't be able to have the love outside of time. Nonetheless, there is a natural tendency to form these purportedly transcendent thoughts. Kant briefly discusses this "natural predisposition":

For human reason, without being moved by the mere vanity of knowing it all, inexorably pushes on, driven by its own need to such questions that cannot be answered by any experiential use of reason and of principles borrowed from such a use; and thus a certain sort of metaphysics has actually been present in all human beings as soon as reason has extended itself to speculation in them, and it will also always remain there. (B21, trans. Guyer / Wood)

Reason naturally tries to extend beyond what can in fact be known or experienced. To try to think an experience as timeless and eternal is surely this. The thought is suggested by a dialectical path, but it is a thought beyond the possible. What the song offers, though, is that this thought beyond the possible can nonetheless console us. Is this a false consolation? Or is the path it travels somehow a path of truth even if the destination is not real?