It's Mine

It’s funny doing research about lost time in a period of your life where time sometimes feels well and truly lost. Poof, gone in a cloud as soon as you reach out to touch it.

Yesterday Boris Johnson announced that English lockdown would continue until early March. I knew that was coming but hearing it on the news just gave me this sinking feeling in my heart. More time to kill. How was I going to do it?

It felt especially hard since I’ve been feeling a bit more anxious and easily aggravated recently. Stuff around control and time are top of my mind. For example — I’m living with my parents at the moment, and this morning my Mum came into my room to ask for some help with a work problem. I had literally just woken up but I spent an hour on it with her. We would also have a work meeting in the afternoon. Just as I got up to get dressed, she suggested I walk into town and buy some fish for dinner. My jaw tensed as I realised that I had now just had the bulk of my day planned out for me within a matter of minutes. I felt like I wasn’t in control of my time.

We worked it out and I didn’t go to the fish shop. The annoyance around the exchange is still lingering, just because it’s something I also felt when I was back in London. One of my flatmates would be keen to drink or have dinner with everyone one evening, or someone would invite a friend round that day or not tell me about it until that day, and boom, all of a sudden I’m obliged to socialise and change my plans last minute. I know it’s not terrible, but it’s just… I care so much about my time and being in control of it. Knowing what’s going to happen next. And in these stretches where it might seem to people that I have a whole expanse of time at my hands, using time the way I want to use it becomes even more important.

It’s like asking a busy person to do a job for you. Sometimes its easier when you’re busy to fit other people in. But when your time is like a vast, empty open landscape, and you’re trying to make sense of it and figure out how to build it, if someone just plonks a castle in the middle of your landscape, it’s gonna piss you off. I know I haven’t got anything going on here just yet, but I need to make this mine.

All of this might sound like whining but I think that cataloguing my feelings around time as I pass through this phase of lockdown is very important. Being stuck in the house, only having one friend to socialise in person with, not being able to travel further than 5 miles from my city, being on furlough and trying to feel purposeful at the same time, having very little money, being apart from my boyfriend as our relationship becomes long distance… these are all human things and the feelings I feel around them might actually help me figure out some ideas with lost time. Even my anxieties around creating this project are helpful clues, too.

That’s all for today.

The Boring Billion

I’ve just finished reading Marcia Bjornerud’s Timefulness as part of my research, recommended to me by a friend. This has set me off on a geology trajectory which I’m finding hard to get off. I don’t want to get off!

Timefulness was an attempt, in my eyes, to show non-geologists the real depth of time in our planet’s history. There is so much more than dinosaurs. For example, there were about a billion years where unicellular organisms just floated about in the sea, pre-Cambrian Explosion. Some geologists call that time the “Boring Billion” which I think is pretty funny, because if it lasted a billion years, then it must have been VERY BORING. But boring for who?

I like to imagine just walking along the seashore somewhere on whatever the continent du jour might be, listening to what I imagine would be complete and utter silence. The waves of the ocean might be bigger since the moon is closer. The ocean might also stink because of a possible hydrogen sulphide or iron content (not enough oxygen!), I could tolerate that for a glimpse at what the world would have been like back then. Just… nothing going on.

Of course there are still many many gaps to fill in our deep timeline, and geologists are working hard to put together the pieces of that eon to see if the Boring Billion was a little less boring than it seemed.

As I’m doing some extra reading, I saw this quote from an article by Simon Poulton:

I would now argue that the “boring billion” is every bit as exciting and important to understand as anything that happened in the past 500m years of Earth history. If we do not understand periods of relative stasis, then what hope do we have for understanding times of monumental change?

Here we are, most of us at least, living out a few pandemic-induced months of inconvenience. But part of me is looking at the Boring Billion thinking, “ah yeah, they know what it’s like.” How do they know what it’s like!? Was anything even sentient at that point!? (…does anything need to be sentient for me to relate to it?)

But that’s a digresson. My main point is:

A billion years is a long time. The year 2020 was much, much shorter. A billion times shorter! I think our fear of wasting time partly stems from our inability to think long-term. Not like “next year” long term, but maybe even longer than that. If you spend a year of your life not moving from your bedroom — will that matter in 7 years’ time? There might be some lingering regrets or effects, but for the most part, it’s not going to be a huge gap in the geology of your life.

It’s not going to be a billion years of unicellular organisms floating in the ocean.

Out Of Bounds

A couple years ago I played through Kingdom Hearts 1 & 2. The soundtrack is something I still listen to when I want something cosy on in the background — it has a mix of magic and nostalgia and weirdness to it that I really love.

Something I’ve been thinking about is the videos on Youtube that show you how you can break out of the boundaries set by the Kingdom Hearts games to explore parts of the maps which aren’t meant to be explored. I really love the settings of these games, especially Hollow Bastion with this sublime (in the terrifying, eerie yet beautiful sense) castle which haunts the horizon. You can’t ever reach that castle, you can only progress through to another part of the game where you’re in the castle. If you walked right up to that castle as you see it, then you would find a warped, lo-resolution version of it with nothing inside.

Here’s a video where the player does just that:

The weirdness and beauty of being somewhere you’re not supposed to be… that doesn’t even truly exist, or so you told yourself… Diving headfirst into an illusion so much that you run right up to it and peek beneath the surface. I like that. It’s a kind of trespassing, isn’t it? But how can it be trespassing if nobody exists on that plain to police you?

How does this relate to Lost Time? I think it brings in ideas of the Sparkling Dark, for sure. The gorgeousness of being lost, outwith your loop. The isolation of it, too. The videogame wants you to follow a certain path and has boundaries and limits. It’s designed to lead you in a certain direction. Sometimes you have to absolutely glitch out and jump into thin air to reach a place where you’re inside yet outside the game. Do you want to be there? Maybe not… but the view is beautiful, and the chance to explore is so inviting.

How could art create that feeling? How could a performance do that? Could you show the bones of a song being made and performed and allow the audience to veer it away from the intended conclusion? Could you let people get up and walk around, on to the stage, as you are performing? Could you do a live poetry-writing session where people add directly to your words and contribute as you write, changing the intended outcome?

And animism. That castle is talking to me. It being there is saying something. Always when I played the Kingdom Hearts 2, there’s a place you can walk to, to see this burnt-down castle on the horizon that can’t be reached. When I would take my avatar there to look at it, it would feel so significant. An image that spoke very clearly. What it was saying, I’m not entirely sure. But it was being said.

Songwriting as Fairytale

I had a thought today as I continue reading Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology.

He mentioned at one point getting lost in the dark forest and finding our way again, and I wondered how that pattern might be reflected in the common pop song structure.

Songs are built on this pattern of repetition and deviation — the deviation makes the repetition all the more sweet when it returns. I thought about how verses could be seen as straying off the forest path into a darker realm, and then the chorus comes in when we find the path again — let’s celebrate! We found the path!

Then I thought about the middle 8 — what some people also call “the bridge.” This is the part where we come across an entirely new melody and total deviation from all we’ve heard before. It’s at this point we’ve strayed so far off the woodland path that we’ve actually put ourselves in danger. We fight our way out (sometimes bridges in pop music end with a cry-out high note, think of Taylor Swift’s ‘Blank Space’) and the return to the chorus is hugely sweeter after that ordeal.

Another interesting thing is that the coda of pop songs is sometimes the combination of the chorus and the middle 8. Which gives the impression that the darkest part of our journey has also become an intrinsic part of it— in fact, it adds to the chorus: it imbues greater meaning and complexity, and adds to the bittersweet taste of the final sing-a-long. It’s like we’ve taken what we’ve learnt in the dark forest and applied it to our path.

Calling this place a “bridge” also makes me think of crossing over. Like a symbolic act of self-sacrifice in the hero’s journey which leaves them utterly transformed, but stronger than ever. Think about when Harry Potter decided to let himself be killed by Lord Voldemort. He crossed over to death, and then came back renewed to sing his final chorus, full of awareness about what lies on the other side of this existence.

Here’s a passage from Dark Ecology which reinforces this idea of how darkness and joy live inside each other, and we need that in order to create a world where the future is sustainable:

"within the melancholia is an unconditional sadness. And within the sadness is beauty. And within the beauty is longing. And within the longing is a plasma field of joy."

I think I could argue that this is a loop — lingering deep within joy itself is also sadness, which within lies joy, which within lies sadness, ad infinitum.