I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately, especially the big kind. The kind that sets distance that is beyond what makes sense. Like a star, or a planet, you might not see it but at this point your knowing has transformed into trusting. A long time ago, a long time ahead, forever, never. I’m curating two projects this year which each deal with that moment when time becomes abstract, and I’ve realized that in the tug-of-war between space and time for human attention, space is so much more showy. When we think of scale, physical is first and foremost brought to mind. To be big means to overtake the rational senses. Tall, wide, loud. But big time requires imagination. That means its size can be infinite. To scale deep means to challenge the self to go big time, to exist within deep time, to recognize that all time is something that will never be contained within our ability to manifest a notion.
I’m reading Timefulness by the geologist Marcia Bjornerud, who describes the dramatic movement that mountains make, which is forever invisible to us because our lives are too short and our minds are too impatient to see them. But we project sentience onto things based on whether they move when we poke it with a stick, we’ll never recognize how literally everything around us pulses, migrates, matures. Maybe that’s all that truly defines the living. We’re all just out here going through shit, and that’s all it really is.