Let’s Plot to Make the Moon Jealous
There is a small window of space between certain appositional properties that when you turn your palm over, it is the size of the nail bed that peeks out from the tip of your index finger. It is the space between the bands and wrinkles on your fingers and on your thumb. The width of time that distinguishes between what feels like present/memory, movement/stillness, freedom/liminality, there drawn out on your hands as reminders of what feels like precarity. Precarity here defined by insecurity, a lack of stability, transitionings and transition.
I think of all the ways I have been conditioned to think of time as both a concept of regeneration and stillness, as a means to fill space. When I feel empty, I have a habit of staying very still. I close my eyes and concentrate on the thousands and millions of atoms that make up the tiny cells and microorganisms that are a body. I like to believe that if I stay still long enough, still enough, maybe I can hear the hum. maybe I’m reminded of their movement. maybe I transition. maybe, I am full. maybe we are, maybe we are in, maybe this is space.
I wonder how many times I may have mistaken space for emptiness, movement for fullness and transitions for precarity. I wonder if the ticks on our palms are reminders of the passing of time or passages of the present.
The Haitian Anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot once wrote:
“. . . The past does not exist independently from the present. Indeed, the past is only past because there is a present, just as I can point to something over there only because I am here. In that sense, the past has no content. The Past -- or more accurately, pastness -- is a position. Thus, in no way can we identify the past as past."
If we all began to understand time as a constant state of transitionings and transition of no finite ends, I think we would begin to understand that we are but infinite insistances. It is what Christina Sharpe will later define as both living in the wake as well as wake work.
"How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXeh742_jak&feature=emb_title
"Sometime in your life, you will have occasion to say, “What is this thing called time?” What is that, the clock? You go to work by the clock, you get your martini in the afternoon by the clock and your coffee by the clock, and you have to get on the plane at a certain time, and arrive at a certain time. It goes on and on and on and on.
And time is a dictator, as we know it. Where does it go? What does it do? Most of all, is it alive? Is it a thing that we cannot touch and is it alive? And then, one day, you look in the mirror — you’re old — and you say, “Where does the time go?"
anyways, here are some other readings that touched my heart:
Hafiz, Too Beautiful
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake (PDF)
Vanessa Taylor, Leaving No Others Behind This Ramadan
Lauryn Hill, I Gotta Find Peace of Mind
Lauryn Hill, Forgive Them Father
