non-linear living
Something should be said for moving in circles. I remember being a kid and spinning in my mom’s office chair as fast as I possibly could for as long as I possibly could. During the dizziness that followed such spinning my sister and I would challenge each other to see who could stay standing the longest.
The use of an office chair then versus now is drastically different. The chair I sit in now has no wheels, has a straight wooden back, and a narrow seat that seems to barely accommodates my wide hips. I slouch close to my computer screen unless explicitly thinking about working on my posture.
And somehow, this is the straight path. It is the path with a slight incline that keeps me just shy of out of breath but teases me with the promise of an eventual break.
I saw a speaker today who talked about thinking of the past spatially and visually rather than just temporally. He talked about the invention of the railways as the destruction of real time because they introduced universal time.
I think I prefer his notion of history, and I’d like to think about the future in the same way. I have a stack of interests and I can hardly separate one from another, let alone choose which one I most like. How does it change things if I think about making space for all of the things I’d like to do rather than making time for them?
i think this is sort of how i felt about things this time last year, only i was way messier–and it took a bit of therapy for me to get it straight. the postermaking session was the launch of a series of attempted thesis proposals that never did pan out…and this year my poster is so much more accepting of the process, it’s sort of hilarious to me. even visually, last year’s was frantically trying to be about some topic, and this year’s is being really organized and creative about being frantic. (sorry for sending you all of my admin email lately, too. can i buy you a drink soon?)
Here’s an interesting addition: The invention of the railways was a monumental influence in the creation of the National Parks Service. So, not only did it introduce universal time, it also introduced access to certain types of space that are unique to American history and identity; spaces that relate to humans’ sense of real time and corporeal experience.