time and space Archives

From the Lighthouse

Watching for time.

At night we watched the water, but her depths revealed nothing of themselves, all reflection and tides and unknowns. But once we looked and like a jumping fish it showed itself. We gasped to see Time. You! We almost said, but he was gone again.

What could we do with that? Dark and cold, she would neither be caressed nor worshipped, features afforded by our creatures, mountains, monuments. The mirror of her, looking back, knew us, and she held what we had meant to catch.

It was hard to face, our faces. We went back to carving our names. We carved them in stones that looked solid enough to hold them. To last, as the saying went, the test.

What test? We wondered, and the answer was Time. But time was submerged again, and the sea, seeming to see us, had always been more than we could take in. Now it was more still, and rising.

What Spills

Chasing Time.

Hurried notes claimed our footsteps, dancing us to the next moment.

Quick, the chorus called, Time is running. We, ever after it, had never known stillness. Do you mean, we wanted to ask, that once we stayed, and Time with us? What would that be like, we wondered, to climb the craggy rungs of his beard, tethered between once and will? Instead, we spilled into Space––into spaces, flooding.

Something was off, or all of it. If stillness came again, we meant to ask. We thought we knew the flood story: an ark, the saving rainbow, dove of peace, but in an age on the run the known ones would not hold. How could we be the flood, the water itself, the coming storm? What did this mean for the rainbow, the dove, no longer of us?

Who floats, then, into the next dawn––or what?

Lines of Inquiry

Ancestries in spacetime.

The children of Time and Space had questions. These were about certain unknowns and uncertain knowns.

For example. Does this blind spot have to do with the invisible time in known spaces, or with the unseen spaces in measured time?

Well, one of us sighed. I guess you never really know your parents.

Space seemed to be always smoothing her voluminous skirts, welcoming us into her lap or brushing us off, laughing. When she stormed, she raged and we hid, but our shelters were only deeper folds of her.

Time was off somewhere. Running, she said. We wondered if he would come back, and she laughed a quake to cut the earth outside the window. When the dust settled, we would hide there, too.

The Making of History

With Hanne Darboven.

You could start by listing major events, key figures, compare best-of lists across the decades. But this has been done enough. What would happen if you omitted accepted distinctions between important and trivial, if you omitted the idea of progress itself?

You could try writing without an alphabet, using only numbers. These are democratic, unfettered by the weight of the ideologies of domination. With numbers, you can celebrate a belief in permutations.

Try it like this: fill room after room floor to ceiling with tiny panels: postcards, city views, tourist sites, greeting cards, illustrations from children’s books, photographs of artworks, of artists, of unnamed people. Present constellations of images instead of a neat line.

There will be no way to summarize what it is. What will matter about it will have to do with what happens between the images you present.

What happens?

Something breathes. It isn’t progress.

***

Inspired by Hanne Darboven’s “Kulturegeschichte 1880–1983” (“Cultural History 1880–1983”).

Holding the Beat

Anchoring breath to breath.

If time is the rhythm of a group, breathing, consider the befores an inhalation. When tomorrow comes, we will exhale; and again, and again.

How different this is than the model of the pointed arrow, to pierce the next flesh of its landing.

If time is the rhythm, it is now, an anchor point that moves nowhere, holding the beat of our breath.

Notes in Space

Between dreaming and waking.

The original void, they called it, and we thought like a womb and imagined ourselves a sort of placenta but who can say. We might have been the baby or the amniotic fluid, because where in that space do you find enough context for measurement?

What grows here cannot happen outside of time, they said, and we had no reason to argue; besides, who would listen? We couldn’t even name ourselves beyond we, beyond here, beyond you, and we used these interchangeably, depending on what fit the mood. Our words were the music we held between us.

All movement begins here, they said, and we had only known ourselves to be ever floating with it, in this space that only exists because it is empty enough to hold whatever comes. One evolving over time might decide to call the growth a contract between years and intentions, and who can fault them for this? It’s easy to forget this space, where the names of what we are keep sliding between us.

Time and Attention

When the veil thins.

A lit match in the dark and a family museum in flames. Removed of these objects to ground us, we start slipping from our assigned roles. Without the grain of a dated photograph, who will draw the borders between what happened half a century ago and what is in our midst, right now? At a certain age, it doesn’t matter; it’s all here again.

As the veil thins, she sees. The past was always right here, but it was too much for us to hold and still go on with the living. She’s releasing the burden now, and vision returns. Time to call the names of the ones no longer here and be moved by the volume of their answers.

In the end, we become our grandmothers, caring for our mothers, forgetting who is who as we walk in and out of one another’s dreams. Now, with the smoke in our eyes, we are singing.

***

Inspired by consideration of this announcement of Rea Tajiri’s film Wisdom Gone Wild, exploring themes of collective memory.

Relativity

What happened when the light changed.

The ants were marching one by two, hurrah, and from a chrysalis came particles of light. The old light waved from the shores we had left, and there was no going back. Clocks melted in these new sands at our tentative feet and soon after, the bodies on canvas began to separate from themselves and from any of the forms we thought we knew. It became possible to be neither in or out of being, but both at once, and above it as with dreams. The ants were going somewhere but here was another unknown among the unseen worlds, now in catch of our breaths.

Straight Talk at the Oasis

As it was in the beginning, is now, and––

Show me a straight line in nature. And yet, this insistence on the fastest means from point A to point B. Not to mention, the idea of this continuum: Then, Now, Tomorrow. As if.

Well, there is the horizon, as seen from anywhere on water.

Touché.

Come to think, it was the seafaring people, wasn’t it, who so ardently embraced the linear alphabets and syllogisms and systems for organizing space?

True. Inland, its all curves and oases, mountains and arabesques, and everywhere space fracturing into its heavens and black holes, not to mention time and alphabets, and when the temple veil tears the shelter from the old masters, so do notions of antiquity shift away from what is solidly past to include what also was dreamed and may yet be, and there we are in it, singularities before our own consciousness and the moment among us, these mortals chanting to our own heartbeats and also to the the origins of time, insisting at each beginning, World without end.