timescape

The purpose: to keep time together. Everything is working against this.

"The lived duree is not a question of length but of depth or density."
---J. Berger.

Fractured times. Return, again and again, to the small things and places you know, against the tide of what you don't. 

There is a locked-in quality to the day. I sit all day reading about the dissolution of time and before I know it the morning has passed and it is late afternoon. I sit all day without a cinnamon roll (yes, hard to believe, Roxana!) and am oblivious of the quality of light outside. 

No-one believes in walls any more and yet still we stand naked to one another as strangers. 

When time is money...I realize I'm very poor.

Keep it together. Time is abstract, empty, quickening and thinning by the day. Watch the trailer, read the review, get the gist of what's going on, skim an article, get to the bottom dollar, "keep it brief and simple", read a guide book, a guide book for dummies...Marx in less than 100 pages, cut & paste, chicken soup for the soul, instant coffee, scroll down or fast forward to the good bits. Is there such a thing as soft-core porn nowadays? Send an sms, receive a "like", every site trying to grab my attention, flog me something. Plug in, tune in, get with the flow.

....

....

....

You walk slowly down from Monkham's Place, down past the leafy chestnut trees and the cricket field at the corner. The summer dust is mixed with sweat. Up again past the one-storied houses, flat and painted pale blue like temporary shelters. Up to the old railway bridge with its darkened stone near the Roding and you look out for miles ahead, see the land parceled out (by capital?) into an abstract pattern. The land, time out of mind. A church spire. The church empty, no doubt. It is hard not to think of other people before you who have stopped at this point and caught their breath or how others will walk on with heads down in the future. We walk in places nowadays without any sense of continuity or connectivity.

The high summer grass, the light from your childhood which blissfully never changes, the golden light from 1976 like cells or seeds of time itself. The way the light and the seasons change, the moon finding its old position every number of years or so, the ancient sway of the universe and down here in this corner too. One finds in a narrower perspective a wider perspective. As if to say, by being nothing everything can be seen, reported. A bit like Walser or Pessoa, those artists of the small zero.

"Wider, too, the passage of time, the turning seasons, all the lush liveliness that comes and goes and comes again, nature that abides."

---Lawrence Weschler.

You wonder about the lives of your readers, the people who have come and gone from the black sun. How do their lives go on; have they aged, for instance? And what do they have for breakfast? I shall try and remember.

The purpose of time is to keep us together as companions. But, in truth, if that happened time would be timeless, time would cease to be time; time would be space and I would find your name.

~~~

Everything that is good is perfectly still.
(after Zeno)