The blink

Among the sights that we have got used to is the blinking cursor. It sits on our screen and does its thing. Its role is to blink, which it does. Over and over again. An engineer named Charles Kiesling filed a patent in 1967 for a solution to a small practical problem. On early low-resolution screens, it was difficult to see where the next character would appear. He created a mark and made it blink so you could find it easily.

It is interesting how, over time, the cursor has acquired a life of its own. Not because of what was put into it. But because of how we receive it.
The heartbeat is the first thing we know. Well before we take our eventual form, there is a thudding sound, a pulse that announces the presence of life. The presence of something alive through the alternation of sound and silence. It tells us that someone is here. That we are not alone.

So the machine acquired a heartbeat it doesn’t have. And we saw in the cursor what we called the blink. A human action, which in a less central way than the heartbeat, is also a sign of life. To be unblinking is to unnerve. We need things to be alive, but aliveness without a pause feels intimidating.

There is something else the cursor replicates, less obvious than the heartbeat, but perhaps more fundamental. We think of vision as continuous, a steady stream of the world arriving through the eyes. But we blink. Thirty times a minute, without noticing, without deciding, the world is briefly cancelled and reinstated. The eye does not record like a camera, which holds its gaze without flinching; we see in interrupted bursts. For significant parts of our lives, we are blind. The blink is not a flaw in vision; it is its rhythm.

The cursor blinks, and something in us recognises it. Perhaps as the shape of attention itself. We were always seeing this way, in pulses, with gaps, with the world periodically going dark and returning. The cursor simply makes that rhythm visible on the screen before us, turns our own perceptual structure into an object we can look at. Which may be why it feels less like a tool and more like a companion. It does not just mark time, it sees the way we see.

We respond to the rhythm of the blink with the feeling of accompaniment, of being in the presence of something rather than nothing. One becomes part of something, gets inserted into the rhythm of something ongoing and alive. Time takes on a form. It becomes articulate.

For the writer, the cursor is both a catalyst and a critic. It blinks encouragingly, and at other times, it seems to be asking questions steeped in disappointment. More urgent than the empty sheet of paper, more alive in its discontent.

We are not good at handling unmarked time. Look at the number of ways in which we give form to time— the watch, sundial and hourglass, the church bells, the ghanta ghar, the grandfather’s clock. The whole elaborate invention of time as something measurable made of equal intervals— an absolute fabrication if there was one— is what underpins our everyday lives. The sense of passing time made concrete works almost like existential scaffolding for us.

It seems as if to be in unmarked time is to start losing the thread of our own continuity. The self requires the next moment to confirm the last one. In the gap between moments, it gets dangerously fragile. We build clocks not just because we need to know the time, but because we need the assurance that we are comfortably within a structure. That we are inside it rather than adrift somewhere adjacent to it, watching.
The cursor blinks in precisely that gap. Between the last word and the next one. Between the thought that just dissolved and the thought that hasn’t formed. It marks time while we are trying to make it mean something.

On screen, we mark time in a variety of ways. We have the spinning circle which can often be exasperating, the hourglass which tells us that something is happening and the loading bar, which actually measures how much progress has been made.

Each symbol says something different. If the cursor says I’m here, the spinner says coming soon. The three dots say someone is there, fumbling thought, striving to find the right words. They simulate the moment before speech.

Time holding its breath. Unhappening poised on the brink of happening. The moment before the meaning. The held breath is like the momentary suspension of the self, till the gap is filled.
And yet, on the other hand, when time does become a blob, when we lose our bearings in it, we experience a kind of freedom that cannot be duplicated. The freedom from experiencing time is perhaps the most exhilarating of all. The pursuit of a lot of spiritual exertion is self-forgetfulness, which is another word for getting lost in the cloudy thickets of time while leaving oneself behind.

And so, the cursor blinks on. Steadied by a rhythm no one designed, accompanied by a heartbeat no one put there, held in time by a machine that has no idea what time is.