Too fast, too slow.

The deluge of days passing form a dull wet film over life now. Waking in a choir of sighs, the hours ahead stretch out in silence but for the echoing monotony. The stench of stagnancy. Doors remain firmly closed as the occupants conceal themselves carefully into the safety of shut spaces. Disappointment and frustration are held tense in the air, as the fabric of a family continues wearing.

Somewhere I recall reading about the Heideggerian notion of time, where past present and future go on simultaneously. Obviously many ideas similar to this have grown in recent years with the development of quantum physics and other theories such as the block universe. Yesterday, today and tomorrow are dissolved into one. In actuality, all that can ever exist is the present moment, as to conceive of passing time is to immediately sink into concept. Everything that ‘is’ brings forward the unerased past, extending, reaching toward the future to continue into it: developing or deteriorating

Our perspective of the current shifts, but the moment itself never does. To look at a star is to look back in time, the light beginning its journey long before there was life on this planet. To look at a rock is to look into the future, the flow of its existence will outlast all that it lives among now. Look at your hand and feel its presence.

We do not pass through time but rather, time passes through us.

Benjamin’s idea of historical time implies the simultaneous presence of different layers of time, all present in the actual moment. A historical chain of events appears as progress because these events are represented in a certain narrative that makes sense of the ‘piles of wreckage’, as Benjamin puts it. The illusion of continuity is produced by linking the events causally.

Yet still, it can prove to be a useful concept in our navigation of the world. As Tsing attests to:
‘The ghosts of multispecies landscapes disturb our conventional sense of time, where we measure and manage one thing leading to another. Lichens may be alive when we are gone. Lichens are ghosts that haunt us from the past, but they also peer at us from a future without us. These temporal feats alert us that the time of modernity is not the only kind of time, and that our metronomic synchrony is not the only time that matters.'

Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

Tsing et al, Arts of Living on A Damaged Planet: G9-10

‘For deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: millennia, epochs and aeons, instead of minutes, months and years. Deep time is kept by rock, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Seen in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains rise and fall. We live on a restless Earth.'

Macfarlane, Underland

Space is not just what lies between things, but a fabric of connectivity, objects affect one another at a distance, just like people do. The web of spacetime is not retractable to a point and they are not separable. Time is not sequential, serial, narrative; nor is space shrinkable, expandable, or measurable. Instead of streaming from one past point of origin, they originate in a continuous enmeshed becoming that is curved and bent by matter.

Moment of stillness, ticking clock accelerates.

I feel myself growing older in inertia. My face in the mirror sags, skin drooping as lines furrow themselves across my forehead. Small rolls folding and unfolding in upon themselves with the weight of time and gravity.

I am vibrating and wriggling, atoms elastic.

‘When I go toward the door of the lecture hall, I am already there, and I could not go to it at all if I were not such that I am there. I am never here only, as this encapsulated body; rather, I am there, that is, I already pervade the space of the room, and only thus can I go through it.'

Heidegger, Basic Writings: 358-59

As I stand at the edge of the rock and plunge into the swirling green and greys of the forty foot, I stand where my grandmother stood, I dive into the same place that my grandfather dived, and my father after him. Feet placed on the same rock, bodies immersed in the same water, eyes looking out at the same view. In those moments I become them and they become me, endlessly connected. Each moment playing out simultaneously. I hold their DNA in my body, I’ve inherited their habits through my hands.