this flesh will melt by night in the full moons gaze

lunar light seeping through my cells

honey drenched death

bleached golden

beneath the

soggy sky

it was

sticky

and

so

sweet

she sang

to me in

luminous

melodies

The world is always in a state of becoming as we become-with it. All is temporal, all is entwined.


How can we really experience time? I hear a ticking clock. It cannot be made directly present. Evanescent and intangible to the point of appearing ungraspable, it nevertheless permeates and, in a sense, governs everything that takes place.

It dissolves into things, processes, and events as the mode of their becoming, and yet is typically represented by means of space and spatiality, as though time were a mere medium of movement.

time is the thing a body moves through*

time is a thing that the body leaks

Matter is temporal and immortal in various ways, constantly undergoing states of transformation, it can never be understood outside of a temporal perspective.

Ideas of temporality make us face precarity as a key feature of life today, in the face of ecological degradation we are forced to confront it, sit within it and let it permeate our ways of being with the world.

'Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others. Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves. Unable to rely on a stable structure of community, we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as our others. We can’t rely on the status quo; everything is in flux, including our ability to survive. Thinking through precarity changes social analysis. A precarious world is a world without teleology. Indeterminacy, the unplanned nature of time, is frightening, but thinking through precarity makes it evident that indeterminacy also makes life possible.'

Anna Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World: 20

‘But the storm is not a coherent, self-contained mass that displaces from point to point across the sky. It is, rather, a movement in itself, a ‘winding up’ that creates a point of stillness at its eye. As it winds up on its advancing front, it unwinds on the retreat. Might we not say the same of living things?'

Tim Ingold, Lines: 54

*T. Fleischmann