An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
“you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
and also
“don’t love your life too much”
Mary Oliver, excerpts from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
“you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
and also
“don’t love your life too much”
Mary Oliver, excerpts from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
“you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
and also
“don’t love your life too much”
Mary Oliver, excerpts from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
“you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
and also
“don’t love your life too much”
Mary Oliver, excerpts from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
“you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
and also
“don’t love your life too much”
Mary Oliver, excerpts from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
“you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
and also
“don’t love your life too much”
Mary Oliver, excerpts from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
“you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
and also
“don’t love your life too much”
Mary Oliver, excerpts from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
“you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
and also
“don’t love your life too much”
Mary Oliver, excerpts from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves
and also
don’t love your life too much
Mary Oliver, from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves
and also
don’t love your life too much
Mary Oliver, from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves
and also
don’t love your life too much
Mary Oliver, from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves
and also
don’t love your life too much
Mary Oliver, from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
An Incredibly Small Space to Pass Through:
On Metaphor, Relation, and the Resonant Murk
you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves
and also
don’t love your life too much
Mary Oliver, from Wild Geese and One or Two Things, 1986
Ways of understanding time, and the dominant forms of measuring it, experiencing it, and parsing it out, are culturally dictated. If my goal is to explore alternate ways of traversing story, then looking at the way that time operates within that form is important. My rejection of narrative measured according to a beginning, middle, and end is also a rejection of a particular closed understanding of time, an understanding which doesn’t necessarily support the kind of relation I am after. Below I look at why that might be important, and at some possibilities for non-linear containers.
How Weird Can Time Get?
There are certainly a lot of ways of approaching time. When researching its complexity, I especially appreciated the writing of anthropologist Edward T. Hall. Hall focusses on cultural differences in perception of and relationship with time and on how these manifest in everyday activities and interactions, an emphasis I found useful when thinking through how time effects relation. Hall noticed what he enthusiastically categorizes as 8 different types of time. He notes: “these classes of time are like different universes with different laws” (16). While Hall’s categories are by no means absolute or exhaustive, it does give some idea of the differences and nuance that can exist across relationships with time.
Hall places his findings across two axis: group and individual time, and cultural and physical time. Within these categories he places sacred and profane time, physical and metaphysical time, biological and personal time, and sync and micro time (outlined in the image below). These types of time are quite different, and Hall concludes that “if one culture emphasizes a particular segment while another emphasizes a different one, the results can be extraordinarily significant” (188). It follows that intercultural interaction which forces one understanding of time is also privileging cultures who emphasize that particular understanding.
weird time and care
Taste of Elastic, recorded 2020
Weird Time in Music
In music, I think about time not as a measure, but as an experience to experiment with it. I use repetitive composition as a way for time to be altered, experientially. There is also an overlaying of other times with the present, as a basic function of storytelling. you go down that hill again, put the fish back in the water...These are not thesis works, but I include them here for context as a central part of my practice.
The works’ structural explorations include mis-using cyclical patterns and non-repetitive-repetition, to gently bend experiences of shared time.
Hall's diagram of types of time
Notes on Edward T. Hall's system of time
The dominant mode of interacting with time is nuanced, and it is certainly an oversimplification to only define it through linearity. There are ways which other forms of time manifest in the dominant narrative, and it would be a worthwhile pursuit to examine these as well. Particularly interesting is the intersection of sacred time and neo-liberal culture: traces of time’s constancy can be detected in fame culture, the internet, and the hoarding of wealth. What happens if I dislodge or open up my own time thinking?
Notes on my own kinds of time
The Trouble with Linearity
Time in the arrow narrative is understood through linearity. Le Guin links the privileging of linear time to the dominant narrative of progress, a story which moves in one direction. This in itself is worth disrupting. In their book “A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None”, geologist and philosopher Kathryn Yusoff makes a compelling comparison of how the linearity of geological time, and the emphasis on the idea of progression, is inextricable from a narrative about BIPOC bodies that places them as “always belated in time and therefor never fully now and human” (ch. 3). Yusoff’s work suggests that the privileging of linearity is very tied up with concepts which are difficult, if not impossible, to extricate from supremacist modes of thinking.
Can the two even be extricated? It is difficult to imagine a linearity which does not rely on an undertone of progress. Reverse-chronologies are not unheard of, but seem equally mired in racism. Stories which say humanity is moving towards destruction, getting worse and worse, risk arguing that earlier modes of living and relating were superior in some intangible way. Rarely, when I have encountered such sentiments, have they been free of supremacism. The people of imagined pasts are romantically and reductively depicted, and most often come along with the adjective “simpler”, which continues to place other cultures firmly as being less advanced, even if their impact is portrayed as less destructive. A reversal of the chronology does not solve the hierarchical trouble with linearity.
Does obsession with linearity and progress of the tale take away from the process, ongoing and in the moment, of relation? My critique of linearity is by no means saying that the past should be forgotten. The past has a very important and basic role to play in compassion (for example, in responding to calls for reparations, or understanding systemic racism). But perhaps progress could be abandoned, in favour of something else, something more generous and generative.
Weirding-Time in Public Service
A non-linear, or less-linear relationship to time may then have a role to play in building sustainable and just futures. Ecopsychologists Joanna Macy and Molly Brown, and political theorist Hannah Arendt all arguethat a wider view of time is necessary for sustained public/political engagement.
Joanna Macy and Molly Brown, psychologists working specifically with environmental crisis, include a reimagining of time in their support of activists. “Marooned in the present”, they write, “we are progressively blinded to the sheer ongoingness of time…Our culture’s readiness to demolish treasures of the past — and to permanently poison the aquifers the future ones will need — reveals a pathetically shrunken sense of time and a pathological denial of its continuity” (ch. 9).
Hannah Arendt goes further, arguing that a broader understanding of time is key to the creation of the type of shared realm that pulls any population into acting as a public. “If the world is to contain a public space,” Arendt says, “it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life-span of mortal men. Without this transcendence into a potential earthly immortality, no politics, strictly speaking, no common world and no public realm, is possible” (ch. 2).
A broader understanding of time has then, a certain gravity. Macy and Brown suggest a combination of reflections on experiences of time, and imaginative activities which build a sense of connection to the far-past and far-future. To me these are helpful, but still feel limited. Infinity and immortality, understood in terms of a linear time-scale, seem too large to grasp in an ongoing way. Is it maybe more useful to think about time itself differently? Circularly, maybe, or as unchanging. In line with many artists and thinkers who I admire, my own efforts chase instead something much more still.
Maybe there is a variety of stillness and attentiveness that goes through the present to touch a time which feels infinite. Achieved through openness, and yes, biological and profane time spent. It is through very focussed and open-hearted encounter that I myself access a feeling of connectedness to a time which feels encompassing—to time which is also space: infinite, maybe, but not in a linear sense.
I don’t pretend that this is the only way, or even the best one, to counteract the negative sides of linearity. But it is one that I explore. Maybe it is a way of trying to articulate why I find slow, focussed work important. I use slow time as a mode for relational work, but also as an important material part of it. It is sometimes like the paper I am drawing on, or maybe the table under the paper, this attempt to be inside of a different kind of time.
Agnes Martin, Ursula K Le Guin, Lao-Tse, Hasnan Habib, Mary Oliver, as some examples.
Time as Care
Care is also premised on time spent: it costs something. While it is present it costs the whole of your life, it is everywhere in it, like time is everywhere. It doesn’t pause. I can’t accomplish relation efficiently or frenetically. It can change in quality or personal importance, it is possible for it to become sick or very mired. Care’s food is time, but not linearity.
Donna Walker-Kuhne’s book Invitation to the Party, which is, on the whole, an exploration of how building diverse public engagement (in her case, through higher audience numbers, specifically from black and underprivileged communities), entails a deep consideration of what it means to be cared for, as a public. It is not, she argues, to do with placing advertisements or sending invitations, but rather through sustained efforts to connect in meaningful ways, supporting people according to the needs discovered through relationships fostered, that a public feels invited. Meaningful in this context refers to the targeted public feeling invested in, cared for, and attended to—often in the form of combined partnership with existing groups representing those populations, education/outreach as designed collaboratively, and ongoing efforts to understand and address barriers, make people feel welcome and appreciated, and continued fostering of said relationships (23 - 32). It is not a fast process, nor is it an easy one.
Walker-Kuhne’s thinking, though on the surface straightforward, was revelatory for me. Even in the arts, success is so often measured through numbers. It was refreshing to find something that emphasized what I knew, through experience: building community takes time. It can disappear if not tended to. Care needs to move in both directions, as does benefit, when tending to a relationship. A public doesn’t come from nowhere.
This thinking informs my ethics around work that entails engagement: I can be kind in a one-off interaction, but ethically, my care also has to extend outwards from that moment of consent to all moments that concern that collaborator. I can’t stop caring because they are no longer present, or I can do other weird kinds of harm—talking about a public collaborator disparagingly or without compassion after the fact would also be deeply unethical, for example. It also feels wrong to take a beautiful rock from somewhere and then to treat it poorly. But how do you poorly treat a rock? I have no answer except that if it feels like disrespect it probably is. Various herbalists and botanists (Latifa Pellitier-Ahmed, Dana Bush, Henrietta Kress), have taught me when wild-harvesting to ask the plant before taking from it. And more important than the asking is the listening for an answer, acknowledging the possibility that the actant in question has other desires, or something to say, that it is worthy of this consideration. Kress suggested I return later in the season to plants I harvested a lot from to help them spread their seeds. The time of care, here, extends: the relationships are to tended in ongoing ways, spreading out beyond the frame. My ethics of care in all spheres extends from this. Time and care.
Does thinking in terms of care and relation approach an alternative to linearity? I like to think that this can be measured through attentiveness, given like a gift. Le Guin’s tale as a “continuing process” (153), not as a fixed and measurable thing.
Contemplation is an important part of my methodology. As a mode for research and for interaction, contemplation is a slowing of time, an attempt to enter into other modes of thinking. The explorations of seasons through plant collection, their usage and decay; the patterning of repetitive images to visualize the exploded time of an animation; the arranging and rearranging of objects into non-linear speaking-things (assemblage)…all of these engage with time in alternate ways. Not as something stilled and pinned, but myself as very still within it.
Pictured above is a part of my contemplative research into the moon. You can read more about these works here.
Details from Soft Pocket, 2018.
Soft Pocket was an assemblage composed on site in a home space turned gallery. All the materials (human, plant, other) were collected on site using principles of wild-plant use etiquette: I collected in a way that would not effect the ongoing form or function, and I asked permission of whoever I harvested.
The final installation included:
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wild and cultivated plant specimens;
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Maintenance and hospitality materials (including the edges of rags, a slice of a garlic bag, two unlit matches, threads from scarves and other clothing);
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thoughts had while working; and
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locks of the curator’s hair.