Good afternoon, beloved -
We’re back in London after a trip to the Antipodes to see my dad – and what do you know, I appear to have brought a case of COVID back with me? It sucks, unquestionably, but the enforced break is welcome, and I intend to leverage it for everything it’s worth.
One of the things I’d like to do with this time is to think about just that: time. Time, along with with space and quiet and stillness, is one of the only actual luxuries in life, and it feels like most of our lives are set up in a way so as to afford us not very much of it to call our own. What I’d like to consider is how we might organize the way we are in the world so as to grasp more of it.
My interest is driven, in part, by the intuition that the creation of calm is a political act: that in a world that will never not be in crisis in the rest of our days, the time and space to reflect carefully and arrive at judicious assessments about that world and our place in it cannot be something that is reserved for a few and vended as a luxury product. But beyond the recognition that the question of calm and its creation opens onto a particularly wide and interesting range of considerations, from spatial interventions to acoustics to the design of bodily habits and practices, as yet there’s not much more here than a diffuse sense. There’s an inquiry here, but an inquiry into what, precisely? Breathwork? The ways in which the design of Shaker furniture, say, or of Zen temple gardens fold in and productively manipulate some given relationship between physical labor and the elapse of time? Duration itself?
I’m grateful to a philosopher friend of mine for explaining to me, not long ago, that philosophy disciplinarily makes space for intuitions like this. As she tells it, the working philosopher enjoys the consolation of knowing that their peers recognize this condition of living in and with inchoate intuition – sometimes for years on end. That in itself feels to me like a welcome intervention, and a way to improve the quality of our thought. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to know that you could work toward something, in pursuit of nothing more than a vague intellectual itch, and not be compelled to have that pursuit bear fruit in any particular timeframe?
Think of it as the equivalent, for the arts and humanities, of basic research. You’re not yet – or maybe ever – designing a better windshield wiper, or a more efficient showerhead. You’re simply giving yourself the time, space and permission to notice the way water runs down the window when it rains.
I want for all of us to have that kind of time and space, and to feel like we have that permission. The intentional evocation of environments in which these qualities can more generally be accessed feels like a political act to me, and an imperative.
There is another aspect to this inquiry, which concerns how we ourselves show up in the world, or apprehend the time and space and sets of relations our lives present to us. Here again, I don’t know quite how to express what it is I’m looking to underwrite – a certain quality of intentionality, or care, or even impeccability in our approach to the circumstances through which we move. Maybe one way to put it is: How can I carry a sense of stillness through this turbulent world, such that I may not merely draw upon it myself, when that resource is otherwise scarce, but offer it to others who might want to draw upon it?
So. A set of questions to think about, anyway – to feel my way around in, to work through with absolutely no guarantee that there’s any meaningful product or outcome. Maybe this is the next book project; more likely it’s something else, or even nothing at all. I’ll allow it, you know?
Until we speak again, know that you have
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 126 of Saturday, 27 January 2024, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊