Tag: Time

Picture It

When I picture

Acid Communism, it’s

being-with-others, it’s

becoming-with-others

beyond laboring, beyond

reproduction, it’s

us

RUNNING RIOT

reclaiming Time,

claiming,

“There seems to be plenty of it,”

as does Huxley

in his mescaline book,

The Doors of Perception.

And in this picture, I

picture as well

a sexual component.

Visions of Red Plenty invite

dreams of Red Love.

What might that mean? How might we

practice that?

I imagine

multi-partnered

many-headed

combinations &

encounters;

“time together”

kissing and giggling,

co-living, co-parenting, if we wanted, and

if wanted or

when needed,

“time apart”

amid.

Add to Olson

Haraway’s “response-ability”

and arrive at

“Terra-

polis is this.”

Returning to Shady

Clock reads 5:55. Across the street from my apartment — indeed, visible out my window — an office tower with its street address printed in large lit signage upon its side:

500

W5TH

Time to visit Shady Blvd, thinks the Traveler. He pictures the current tenant, hopes they meet. Hope begins by returning to the site of the story. A friend recommends Chris Ware’s Building Stories. Traveler resolves to grab it. That and House of Leaves. For the Shady story, if it is to be made into a book, must be of that sort: the story of a house. Tenants of multiple eras in the home’s history interact with the home’s energies, repeat the home’s patterns: the time loops impressed there. Unless it isn’t a repetition. Time is like aletheia: an unfolding, a revealing. A process of disclosure. Let each one’s story be told.

Time-Space Compression

“I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming away,” sings Poly Styrene. “Didn’t you see the thin ice sign?” she asks. What I hear instead, though, is “the thing I signed.” How is one to beware if the message is always misheard?

A Raincoat follow with their spooky funky glam jam, “It Came in the Night.” What is one to do with this energy? Should I unplug myself from Spotify, as Neil Young has done? That would deprive me of much of my library. The problem is, my apartment lacks space for objects that store sound. Hence my dilemma this morning: I woke up wanting to listen to Sonic Youth’s Sister, an album I own on CD. It and the CD player on which I would play it, however, are elsewhere. Should that prevent me from being able to listen to it here and now?

Spotify replies to this dilemma by compressing space-time.

“Time-space compression”: that’s what communications technologies do. Marxist geographer David Harvey writes about it in his book The Condition of Postmodernity. Paul Virilio calls it an essential facet of capitalist life.

Spotify achieves this effect of time-space compression through an act of remediation. The consequences of this act are only just now entering consciousness. Initially, it seems rather simple: an algorithm selecting and streaming recorded bits of sound based on past listens. But not just your listens, by which I mean your listens to it. That’s where it goes strange. For Spotify forms a cybernetic system with its users, each element revising itself into subsequent iterations or becomings based on the other’s feedback — meaning listens occur both ways. Users of course listen, both actively and passively, to Spotify. But Spotify also listens to its users.

A friend plays me a tune — Fassbinder collaborator Monique Zetterlund’s “Ellinor Rydholm” — and the next day it shows up in my “Discover Weekly” playlist. Spooky, eh? What can I say? I love it. Without it, I might not have heard Yoko Ono and John Lennon. Yoko’s voice might not have whispered in my ear, “Remember love.” Buddy Holly might not have entranced me with his version of “Love is Strange.” Thurston Moore wouldn’t have told me, “Angels are dreaming of you,” as he does on “Cotton Crown.”

Bricoleurs can’t be choosers: but here I am imagining in the faces of those angels glimpses of you. I picture us eyeing each other on a dancefloor, approaching as in a circling manner ‘round an invisible pole. Pouts give way to smiles; fingers trace forearms; lips graze lips. By these means, distance is eradicated and contact reestablished, hope reborn.

Drawings II

Frankie’s watercolor and colored marker drawings are my heart’s delight — fields of color into which I gaze. The stained glass of this new temple wherein I dwell. The Time Traveler, though, feels forlorn, shorn of home and family. Perila’s “Fallin Into Space” soundtracks his evening as he re-reads The Time Machine. “Please let the future be otherwise,” he prays, a prompt of sorts entered into the dialogue of days. Some movement forward through time akin to John Dwyer’s “Greener Pools.” “Marijuana tells you what you want to hear,” says a friend. “Ayahuasca tells you what you need to hear.” Another friend recommends ketamine.

Retrocausation

The hyperstition I’ve imagined draws upon the process of “retrocausation.”

Like a descendent reaching back and saving an ancestor, as in Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred, the fiction I’m writing arrives from the future to affect-effect the past.

At the center of the story are the journals trance-scribed at the height of my high in years prior. “Words came to me as if whispered to me by a me of the future,” mutters the Narrator. “I was so attentive in those days. And I encountered near-zero need to edit or cross out. The pages of the journals are pristine.”

Science writer Eric Wargo explores the topic of retrocausation in his 2018 book Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious. To know more, one must be like Batman descending to his Batcave. Let us to our memory palace go, there to converse with Wargo.

North American Time Capsule 1967

More to my liking is John Cage.

Where the architect-composer Iannis Xenakis used probability, game theory, group theory, set theory, Boolean algebra, and computers to produce his scores, thus pioneering “stochastic music,” Cage composed “aleatoric music.” While stochastic and aleatoric forms of music both rely on chance procedures, aleatoric music eschews mathematics in favor of ancient divinatory devices like the I Ching.

Readied by Cage for further weirding, I tune in and listen to Alvin Lucier’s “North American Time Capsule 1967,” a 10-minute composition that neighbors a track by Cage on Side A of Extended Voices. The Lucier piece uses a vocoder designed by Sylvania Electronics Systems “to encode speech sounds into digital information bits for transmission over narrow band widths via telephone lines or radio channels.” Lucier says of the piece, “The performers are asked to prepare material using any sounds at all that would describe for beings far from our environment, either in space or in time, the physical, spiritual, social, scientific or any other situation in which we currently find ourselves.”

Thinking of 1967 as “situation,” I relate the song to the psychedelic consciousness of that year’s Summer of Love. Lucier worked at Brandeis, directing the University Chamber Chorus there from 1962 to 1970. While dwarfed in scale by hippie meccas like Berkeley, Brandeis was nonetheless an important independent nexus of sorts for 1960s consciousness. Abraham Maslow taught there during the 1950s and 1960s, as did Herbert Marcuse, who served as a faculty member at Brandeis from 1954 to 1965. Future Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman studied there, too, under both Maslow and Marcuse. Through Lucier’s time capsule, one becomes entangled again in that scene.

Time-Travel Literature and the Joy of the Eternal Now

Time travel turns up in the day’s bouquet of signage. Tiana Clark tells of “books by Black authors / about joy and pleasure and time travel.” Not just books that tell of pain, like the pain of “temporal displacement.” Rasheedah Phillips’s essay “Black Timescapes, Time Travel + Temporal Displacement” is one I hope to share with students in my course “Rabbit Holes, Time Machines, and Doors in the Wall.” We could also watch Phillips’s short film Recurrence Plot: The Family Circle. “Time feels layered in Afrodiasporan traditions,” writes Phillips. “The past is always layered over the present moment — our ancestors reside with and within us, even if on a different temporal plane / scale.”

The Narrator, the Traveler, the Gay Wizard, and the Ghost

Our cast can be imagined as three parts of a single psyche, plus one.

The first three—imaginable, perhaps, in relation to categories like present, future, and past—nevertheless share time in a single home, like users sharing computing time on a mainframe.

Who, though, is the Ghost? The alleged “plus one.” Not quite mind-at-large, certainly. The whole person? The unifying soul? An author-function self-fashioned into being via hyperstition? That which presides in each?

***

“It might be helpful,” quips the Narrator, “to map these characters onto a Greimas square.”

“But my preference,” he adds, “is to do as Iris DeMent suggests, and let the mystery be.”

Back to the Future / By Way of Recursion

“Next on the block is ‘recursion,’” says the Narrator, “a concept discussed at length by philosophers Armen Avanessian, Pete Wolfendale, and Suhail Malik in Christopher Roth’s 2016 film Hyperstition.

“Recursion explains how the New enters existence,” says Avanessian. “Where reflexivity is a sequence of stacked meta-reflections, as in a pair of mirrors, recursion involves an integration of parts into a whole, changing in the process both the part and the whole.”

Roth employs cinema both recursively and dialectically. Parts of Hyperstition are thus able to speak to one another via montage in the style of Eisenstein, Vertov, and Godard.

So it is that Suhail Malik appears in the wake of Avanessian, arguing from the year 2026 that recursion is how those of us who code encounter time. “Recursion,” he states, “is what the operation of coding does when, meeting up against the inexorability of time, it tries to compensate for that inexorability and produce memory.”

HYPERSTITION from Christopher Roth on Vimeo.

The Structure of the Device

It’s an odd thing, this device, is it not? With its levers, it’s like a clock or a timepiece. Spun or turned, the levers grant the Traveler safe passage through forthcoming years as counted by Western calendars. The future is reified, captured in a count by an imaginal technology that converts time into a measurable dimension.

Wells’s Traveler assumes in the very structure of his time machine an imperial temporality: the Western linear temporal orientation, with its obedience to “the Master’s Clock.”

But for more recent Travelers, especially people of color, travel is undertaken not so much in obedience to the clock as in exodus from its dictates. Travelers consult stars and return to sidereal time. Or they create music. They keep time with drums rather than clocks. As Moor Mother notes, “Music created by Black people has been used throughout time and across space as an agent of time and memory” (Black Quantum Futurism: Theory & Practice, p. 9). She and the other members of the Black Quantum Futurism Collective take this longstanding practice a step further, their self-professed goal being “to collapse space-time into a desired future.” Tracks of theirs are self-creating, self-causing sound-events from the future made to happen in the minds and bodies of those who listen.