Duration Without Reference

The universe does not begin with order. It begins with a duration that does not yet know it exists. We are no longer in the singularity. We are no longer in the time that could not be named. We have advanced — slightly, almost imperceptibly — into a region of the real where matter begins to insist on remaining. The universe expands, cools, decelerates. And this deceleration is not absence: it is the minimum condition for the first persistence.

It is no longer the collapse without form. Now, certain combinations do not immediately dissolve. Elementary particles — quarks, electrons, neutrinos — cease to be pure instability and begin to constitute brief, fragile nuclei, but durable enough for something else to become possible. There is no language. There is no symbolic form. But there are processes that no longer vanish in the next instant.

This duration is not human time. There is no marker, no subject, nor counting. But there is relation. Relation without formal stability, without symbolic inscription, but already with minimal internal organization. The first light nuclei form — hydrogen, helium. The universe continues to expand and cool, but it already carries a non-reflective material memory: certain patterns repeat themselves, certain configurations persist.

It is a material memory without inscription: it does not retain, it does not represent, it does not project. But it repeats, insists, sustains — as if matter began to remember without language.

There is still no visible light. Photons collide incessantly with matter. But the epoch of decoupling is slowly being prepared — the moment when matter will allow light to detach and follow freely. This moment is not instantaneous, nor even evident. But it exists as a growing possibility, inscribed in the very duration of the real.

To think this stage is to think of time as a fabric of material reorganizations, without center, without form, but no longer indifferent. It is no longer the pure instability of the beginning. It is a real that begins to maintain itself, to maintain certain conditions that repeat without becoming completely fixed. There is no clock — but there is diffuse, non-inscribed memory, which allows matter, for the first time, to stop dissipating without a trace.

This duration is not waiting for an observer. It is the blind observer of itself. It does not represent itself. It does not narrate itself. But it sustains the expanding universe as an operational field of slow and anonymous differentiation. Time has not yet entered the symbol — but matter is already beginning to experience the difference between persisting and disappearing.

When we speak of time, we often speak of measure, cycle, return. Here, there is no return. What there is is an irreversible traversal from instability to pre-form — that zone where matter does not yet assume figure, but already preserves internal relations that resist immediate dissolution.

Later, the first neutral atoms will form. Then, diffuse clouds condense. Only much later, the first galaxies emerge. But here — where there is still no figure, mark, or name — something is already sustained. Something already endures with minimal material consistency. This is enough for thought to settle. Not to measure, but to recognize that the world began by not ceasing to be.

"The world did not begin to be.
It began by not ceasing to endure."

—— David Cota — Founder of the Ontology of Emergent Complexity ——