Throw Away Your “Calendar” Right Now
Time is this beautifully complex thing.
Time is this mammoth beast, this incontrollable force, this glowing static of change.
Some people look at clocks and calendars to understand time. They think about their age. They think about PM and AM. They think about the years that pass.
… Holding a dead body will tell you everything you need to know about time. This is time, the awesome emptiness in the eyes of a corpse… that universe which seems to have departed but remains…
Time is funny. Because it’s really the most subjective thing in the world. But we have all these tricks to make us feel like it is objective.
Clocks, calendars, seasons, birthdays, holidays, etc… These illusions of objective time.
The Earth is about five billion years old. Imagine that a movie had been made of the universe from its beginning five billon years ago to today, and that film was shown in fast motion, speeded up so that the five-billion-year-long run is crowded into two hours, the period from the first domestication of animals and plants to the present would occupy only about the last two minutes. The time period from the death of Christ to 2013 would be something like 28 seconds.
I got a tattoo the other day that says “time is so stupid.” And that’s an exaggeration, time is so helpful, but it’s also so harmful the way it organizes and condenses all of being. The way it concerts us into conformity, and standardizes everything.
We talk about the violence of financial capitalism, the workers in the assembly lines, the toilers in the cubicles, and the endless Sisyphean and dehumanizing task of their data and physical economies. We say the government makes this possible. Time is the government.
Why do you organize your life around that calendar? Why do you wear that stupid clock on your wirst? Why do you carry that device in your pocket?
It’s my resolution. Break out of time. Live without it. Just be a wave, a foaming, a fold, a body without organization or biology – a lighting strike, an elipse… a floating cloud instead of a ticking clock.
This memory, this old, dead moment: Day by day: night by night: we wait… Loom of the moon.
I must essay the task, must lean over the cliff, and fly.
Another day; another Monday, another 1st of July, January, March, November, December, June.
Another general awakening.
The stars draw back and are extinguished.
Now,the light strikes upon the tree, making one leaf transparent and then another.
The day explodes like war.
The spaces deepens. A redness gathers on the roses.
An implosion.
A bird chirps. Spring, now winter, a billion years forward, a hundred years backwards, a whirlwind of voices, a dawning night, the sea breathes from its depths, growling, growing small, I disappear in the immense, more and more free.