I’m in the middle of my last day of self-isolation.
I’ve been packing, cleaning, preparing to move to my more permanent residence … about to dive headlong into the next month of work. The first of two Spring Intensive in-person sessions for my MFA is about to start Monday morning.
It feels a bit dislocating … discombobulating maybe a better (certainly more interesting and theatrical) word for it. The way time has warped over the last 2 weeks, the speed with which things are starting to happen in preparation for the work to begin in earnest.
So, to … mark this shift into a new way of being, I offer here a brief meditation on the unreliability of the devices humans have used to mark time’s passage.
You don’t notice the miscues until they are what anchors you to the day. There’s something not quite right with the mechanism, you can hear it, but only sometimes. In those moments, the clock changes character completely; it’s no longer the drone of the day, the comforting rhythm that’s easy to ignore. Then it stops, or doubles up on itself, hiccups … becoming something more consuming … a nervous tick that reminds you of what you can’t fully grasp: the tiny, incremental changes all around you, that you can’t see and can’t hear, but are, nevertheless, more reliable narrators of change and time’s passage than humans will ever be.