Introduction
Time is the
material with which we construct our waking experience.
If the
fountain of youth; eternity itself, lands up at our doorstep, what would we
make of it? Surrounding ourselves with our things, we try to make meaning
through them. We exchange the time on our hands with things we desire.
Jung's Alchemist sought a spiritual process to occur within the world of
things. Things rising above their thingness to be all things and nothing at
the same time, were the hope and desire of many. If that chase should be cut
short, what would it be replaced with? Time. Empty time. Void. A thing
falling into an infinite abyss. For now, to stay with the process of knowing
this abyss better, we will refer to it as “sidereal”. The sidereal in a way
sidesteps our knowing of multiple realities and universalities, but still is
a part of our experience.
“How do
you plug a void plugging a void?”, R. D. Laing
What do we do
after we de-shackle time from its commodity exchange value? Few can bear the
weight of naked time. We seek ways to dullen, fragment and diffuse our
awareness of it. Media creates a dream world for our waking selves. A dream
world in which we are told that we have agency to reconfigure the worlds
around us. A dream world that placates us when we cannot do so, offers us
periodic piecemeal victory and hope to keep us engaged, keep us locked-in,
prevent our “sidereality” to come alive.
Catharsis is
only achieved from a liberal pollination of desires and use-values for our
“sidereal time”. Camouflaging a personal theatre on the inside with boredom
and disengagement is a tactic of defense from the onslaught of reality TV
and the tabloid newspaper. The everyday and the mundane hide a performance
space of passion, adventure and poetry in private envelopes of time.
This
“sidereal time” and its voice can transform into anything it seeks. Desire,
confusion and recklessness are tools which can be used towards this. With
time made open to an alchemical manipulation and transformation, space
invariably will be persuaded to take on other contours as well. And spaces
will dream with all the things that they contain. This brings us to the
Wheel of Time - the packet within which all else floats. The Ouroboros. The
reason why time can be cast in no permanent mould - except nostalgia maybe,
for some time.
“Life is
what happens to you while you're busy making other plans,” Double Fantasy,
John Lennon
As we live,
we witness our experience fracturing; into the time that we sell to earn our
keep and the time we don’t. Time spent working and leisure-time. For many
cognitive laborers, a separation such as this doesn’t exist. All time is
work time, what is the “sidereal”?
“If all
time is eternally present, All time is unredeemable,” Buirnt Norton, T.S.
Eliot.
