Take Your Time
If you look around, wherever you are, you’ll see so many different distributions of time, different speeds, different rhythms. Some people digest the world slowly, others lightning fast; cars in varied states of urgency; clouds that sit, clouds that fly, clouds that smother; the sky’s eternity; the mosquito’s frantic flights; and so on and so on. Time is not a steady external force: time is immanent to bodies.
I found this folder in an old hard drive that had a series of connected essays. There’s something uncanny about finding things you’ve written that you don’t remember writing, when memory is materially external. To find traces of yourself that are at once you and not you—especially writing that stays the same, an anchor while the boat that is me has kept moving.
New Years Eve, 7:40 pm, I’m standing at the ocean’s edge which simultaneously marks the edge of this silly city of San Francisco. The ocean seethes as it will — it may be infinite and seem eternal but it’s not uniform as we see it fluctuate with the moon and the weather. We see — we sense — its mode of temporality, how it distributes time: waves are a kind of metronome, keeping a cosmic beat that’s more jazz than pop.
Out in the middle of the ocean are several barges headed for the East. They move so steadily, so defiantly, so mercilessly — like the ocean, in a way. But in much more manageable, human terms. Where the ocean is sublime, infinitely excessive, I can think barges. I can grasp weeks and tons.
Above, planets and stars wink from past millennia.
Those large rocks perched in the ocean budge, a tiny bit, over centuries. To us here, they just sit there, enduring. But slowly they are eroding and even moving. I wonder if, to them, time ever flies.
Dunes line one perimeter of the beach — a perimeter reinforced by a concrete wall that simultaneously reinforces the dunes, serving a legal and geographic purpose—coming and going with the winds over hours, months, years, decades, a relentless dance of sand and wind.
There are groups of people punctuating the beach, each huddled around a bonfire. They seem as though they’re in for the long haul, relatively speaking — until early morning, I imagine. The barges are in for a longer haul; the dunes and rocks, an even longer haul; the ocean, well, it seems to exceed the haul. Meanwhile, the wood of those fires are disappearing rapidly before our eyes.
These bonfire people enjoy a time different from the time of the commute when everyone moves with such purpose and speed. Those commuters will, and do, kill.
I can see street lights turning green, pausing; yellow, for a beat; red for a longer pause before returning to green. Stay here long enough, and the rhythm of that sequence changes, programmed to manage the time of collective human activity, namely, driving and walking.
Make your way through any city any day and see all the micro temporalities — the strollers, sitters, sleepers, coffee drinkers, runners, cars, the freeway. And then the roads and sidewalks, the building which can’t help but bear their historical provenance — Victorian, 70s, mid-century, modern often side by side. The infrastructure: cables, wires, cell towers, TV antennae, all signs of an historical technology. While all space is made of various temporalities, cities are wonders of temporal assemblage, rhythmic folds within folds.
I see Bergson’s duration so clearly: time is not outside of us, an abstraction that moves steadily and geometrically around its circle. Time is a dimension of things, not something added to matter but a fourth dimension of matter: length, width, height, time. To be clear, time is not another dimension of the universe; it is another dimension of every thing, physical and metaphysical. Just as each thing enjoys its own physical extension, each thing enjoys its own temporal extension.
The time of a thing is not its geometric duration—time of birth, time of death. That is one small aspect that constitutes one’s time. Your time is your rhythm—of thought, of understanding, of emotion, of language, of digestion, of aging. It’s not just speed, then, but the distribution of that speed, namely, rhythm.
Time is all the times of all the different things, each thing happening in its time, enduring as it endures. Time is not a neutral abstraction. Time is an infinitely variegated becoming. This world and everything in it — including invisible bodies such as moods and ideas — are in motion, happening, changing. Time as a general thing, then, can only be thought of as the times of every single thing. But not as a synthesis, not as a sum whereby my time + your time + the ocean’s time + (to infinity) = the time of the universe. If we want to think of time in general, it is my time and your time and the ocean’s time and…and…and to infinity—the and functioning as much as disjuncture as conjuncture.
Deleuze asks us to look at a film of, say, a man walking a dog by a river in the mountains. You see all the different times — the time of the man, of the dog, of the river, of the mountains. All images have multiple times as well as the general time of that image.
Standing here on the ocean’s edge on New Year’s eve, I see all these times moving in, around, through, and with each other.
My friend, the poet Lohren Green, takes time to think, to write — it’s as if he has bovine digestion, moving ideas through four stomachs in order to more thoroughly digest. Me, I’ve always been fast: I write fast, think fast, digest food fast, digest ideas fast. When writing Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze was the slow one, Guattari already having moved on to the next connection, the next node. Neither speed is better or worse: they simply (or not) mark our respective temporal tendencies. Our times.
In Burroughs’ The Place of Dead Roads, Kim Carson advises would-be gunfighters, “Always take your time.” It’s not necessarily about being the fastest; go faster than your speed and you’ll shoot your foot or fumble all together. Of course, if the other guy’s time is faster than your time, you’re done for. But then you were done for before the shoot out even began.
