There's No Time Out When Time Is Over
A JAM FOR YOU - WHAT WOULD CAROL BASKIN DO?
I had a dream that I was preparing feverishly for school only to remember that I had not enrolled or applied for it. But I thought, fuck it--I'd just float around school and work on my art and enjoy the inexplicable timelessness that seems to come with education. (That seems to come with routine.)
For the last year I've been unable to shake off the sensation that time was speeding up, as if it were heading toward an inevitable end. Many of my spookier friends shared a similar skittish feeling. The technospiritually inclined might point toward the singularity, the paranoid to 5G towers, the prepper to nuclear war.
In retrospect (insert 2020 joke) it's evident that this feeling was some sort of subconscious preparation for current days, which has simultaneously made time essential and meaningless. While the globe fights a war in which every day counts--whether by slow, cautious reduction of the economy or a simple kamikaze of the working class--I find that my own days are blurring together like the lines drawn by an industrial lathe slicing in a constant circle.
personnage fictionnel, Raymond Lemstra
Time exerts a constant pressure which we either bend around or bow to, pressing our foreheads and our bones and our minds to the earth. Inexplicably, that same pressure can throw us out of time completely where everything seems the same while time (the world) moves on without us.
Being jobless in this climate brings a strange sense of openness and timelessness that alternates between existentially horrifying and liberating. I'm sure this isn't a sensation limited to my personal situation. Almost every single one of us is staring down the transformation of our assumptions, our futures, entire industries, economies, social realities, cultures, ideas of what we were based on what we did or who we talked to.
Even if you are in the least dramatic situation--maybe a boring 9-5 that can be done remotely with little likelihood of workforce reduction--you are doubtlessly confronted with the inexplicably limitless possibility of the future, for better or worse. Where lie destruction and limitation also wait creation and invention, and I sometimes feel, physically in my body, the unnerving potential that exists in the world just around the bend.
Because that's what we're looking at: this isn't the plodding, I-wonder-what-comes-next-ness of the 2010s but the very real millions-of-lives-hinge-on-the-next-6-months of the first four months of 2020. Ah, fuck. Have an art. (Thanks for the submission, V//Tomo!)
It seems like the simplest of choices--where we decide to exist--is laden with responsibility. But the beauty here is that it shunts us into the rest of our lives, unexpectedly and suddenly forcing us to get weird and confront ourselves in all of our personal difficulty. As individuals, we are experiencing an unusual cruelty of freedom. I think this is a time when it is wise to slow down significantly to watch where you step emotionally and psychically. Especially when it seems like people are leaving their shit everywhere.
There are things I'm looking forward to, though: the coming, inevitable renaissance in communications, art, and internet culture that we're already seeing inklings of. A deepening of value of the connections we do have and can access. A necessary slowdown as we begin to realize that we never really had to be quite as "excellent" as we thought we did, despite what the psychopathy of the technocap spirit tries to will upon us. A golden age of thoughtful care and attention toward systems thinking and fault tolerance. (Not this age, probably, but the Zoomers.)
While being confronted with choice so forcibly and inexorably can be aggravating, it also can have a grand, immense, magical energy. In between those moments of resting and biding your nonexistent-infinite time, you can occasionally find places to pluck potential and power out of the air. It's everywhere.
A Vista (01) /// canon s90 .cr2 databending ///, sabatobox
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P.S.
Oh shit! I can just add sections like a person who does what they want! Anyway, next week I may talk more about my projects involving trying to predict the stock market using astrology or maybe some other stuff, who knows. If you'd like me to write about something in particular, feel free to shoot me email.
Be well! <3