Mending Time
Strange to think of finding time.
Of time needing to be found,
perhaps hiding in plain sight, or hiding out,
time in hiding.
Time foxy, eluding its pursuers,
hunters of time, blowing their bugles, hounds baying,
closing in.
Time out of luck,
cornered, up against the canyon wall.
There’s “time’s up,” the accursed “time out,"
and “this time,” and “next time,” and,
hands on hips, “for the very last time . . . ”
Too often one has, or doesn’t have, time.
And how mournful is the proposition that
one can never make up for lost time.
When you find time,
of what does it consist?
And in this instance where do you, where does it, tend to be?
Certain bars and cafés serve for some. They will
offer many things beyond alcohol and coffee.
Love. Company,
But also solitude.
And gossip, hearsay,
as a participant or as an eavesdropper.
On the menu is the expected, as well as the surprise.
But above all —if you play it right— there is time,
sumptuous and stretching out,
alacrity’s antithesis,
a reprieve from haste.
A buffer from life’s bovinities.
Stare down evanescence, or at least
cast it that sidelong glance.
Take in the stoppage, the goading of fate,
the gathering of all kinds —people, journeys and stories—
brought inside for awhile.
Asked to wait. To be patient.
Camus’s Jean-Baptiste Clamence frequents a sailors’ bar in Amsterdam called Mexico City.
He goes there, it seems, to narrate, to extrapolate.
To buttonhole, horrify, and perhaps entrance.
“Debauchery,” Clamence opines, is a “substitute for love . . .
[and yet, at the same time it] quiets the laughter [of judgement, of derision from others],
restores silence,
and above all, confers immortality.”1
Not bad for a bar.
You might listen in to the likes of Clamence. Or elude such figures.
Read a book, play a game,
think about words. And misheards. Or birds, or
just look over who(ever and whatever) happens to appear,
or see anew, out the window and across the street.
How doggedly we measure it, Time.
Carving it up,
so as to consume it, in bite-size pieces,
number it,
cross it in vast chunks, like time (zones) we traverse.
To “call time” is to recognise its fervent on-rushing nature,
and try to suspend it however temporarily.
To need a breather, to cry for
a kind of cease-fire amidst the numbing numeracy, the tyranny of measurement,
a truce in the quantifying hostilities.
Free time.
The amatory arts aren’t to be rushed.
Love takes time.
Love begs time, and also begets it.
When I draw and paint. And when I mend my beloved things
I lose track of time.
An escapist from time, not surprisingly, enjoys sex.
And takes flight in other ways besides,
makes her clean getaway.
She goes off the clock,
plays truant,
makes herself absent from here, but not there.
Yet if this escaping from time offers haven for one,
for another, such flights wreak havoc,
summoning the chaos of unpredictability.
It’s tempting to fetishise time, to create and collect instruments
that elegantly measure and keep it.
When I was young, some kids showed up early
for the honour of serving as time-keeper
at minor ice-hockey games in the local arena.
It was 8 am on a Saturday, and their prize
was helping out, showing passion for the game.
But also authority, a petty but undeniable power.
They’d huddle, freezing, in a plexiglass booth at ice level,
paying fervent attention, to have
the pace of a game at their fingertips.
Baseball, mind . . . It's about time.
About waiting for this and that. Then waiting again.
Players (and aficionados) of baseball are, just now, in Spring Training,
contemplating the grip of time in amplified ways.
“Dancing to the tune of digital timers,”2
positioned here,
there,
and everywhere in the ballparks.
‘Like The Game, time can’t stand still;
speed it up,’ says the Commisioner with his commissariat.
‘Generate more action, press the envelope, re-attract the young.’
Stare downs between pitcher and hitter, you say? ‘Sure.’
Heighten the suspense of these showdowns? ‘Ya, ya, it’ll be fine.’
Allow time, to set up and then make that certain pitch?
Permit time to contemplate what might have happened?
‘Hmmm, a bit much . . .
But (for the cameras), why not?, yes of course.’
‘Yet don’t forget to hurry, hurry.
Soak it in, folks, but
Time is money.’
It’s not as if athletes in other sports
(already governed by limits and divisions of time)
haven’t learned to grapple with time,
to work with what’s provisioned from on high.
They run down the clock.
It begs reflection that “extra time,” in global football,
is partly a recovery of “injury time.”
And that there’s arguably something both exhilarating and not quite right
about winning in “added time.”
Not to mention ice hockey’s “overtime,”
in its newish “four-on-four,” its “sudden death.”
Still, anything’s better than settling matters in a “shootout,”
which is nearly timeless.
Is it the hidden point of time —if not to be turned back, then at least—
to be in play?
In flux?
Out there somewhere. Sought after, glimpsed
(not trembling like that hunted fox in some canyon’s recess,
but rather) Ever desirous.
Time is expecting you, awaiting your embrace,
thinking: “oh, if only I could be found.”
Oh to be timely!
To be a manual typewriter, or a precision phonograph,
standing the test of time.
One convicted of crime is said to serve time.
And you can mark time, watch the time,
and tell time too.
What’s arguably most telling is that time can ravage,
and be stolen.
Even when the real Time Bandits
are surely highwaymen you least expect.
Living on borrowed time
has a lot of psychoanalytical answering to do.
As for making time
—surely the loathsome, late capitalist cousin of “doing lunch”—
heaven help its creator-practitioners.
Raised (or so it seems) in the manicured gardens
of the hustling, protestant-worky Anglosphere
bidding still to be the best of all time . . .
The suburban development, however spiritless in aspect,
imitates the cloister and village. Its essence?
The clock tower (and bell?) at its putative heart.
Mystics, like happy children (become engrossed and), lose track of time.
Bong, bong, the call to prayer and reflection, to choir and community.
Bong, bong, the cry for harmony and calm, for order and discipline.
Taking time (in spite of the acquisitive verb
and its effortful connotations)
suggests a modicum of respect for,
even a gift to one’s self.
And a re-gifting (of self) back to time.
Although it must be added that time, when wielded
by the high-handed and self-absorbed,
inclines dismissive, exclusive,
brutal and violent.
Caught in the gaze of one set on impinging, on recording and ruling,
take a gander at who gets to have
a dynamic past, present, and future?
an existence that was, is, and will be overspilling with surprises and possibilities?
“Others,” in various moments and settings, described in the abstract,
caricatured from afar,
are yanked out of time,
or else rooted in, or utterly lost to, it:
Time’s victims? . . .
Oh if only it —this Making-Others-Past— were Time’s fault.
Is time a friend and faithful accomplice?
Or the adversary, a hooded assailant?
Just what constitutes “slow,” and what “fast,’
is a matter of perspective and temperament.
Time drags —an expanse to traverse, a problem to solve— or it opens deliciously.
One person is happiest active, while another is run off her feet.
Playing with time, the time-slip
is a favourite literary device, and not only in science fiction.
Time smashes genres with delightful abandon. Tick tock,
and the daring knight-errant
becomes the dashing new marshal in your god-forsaken town.
Time is a force to conjure with in painting too.
Through positioning, and “background detailing,”
and an abstraction of complex things, but above all, through
his incremental modulations of colour, overlapping wet-into-wet,
the contours growing soft and softer,
think of how Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675)
requires us to adjust our eyes and our minds.
How he confounds expectations
about what matters (and can be seen distinctly) and what might
(by being rendered blurrily) become an “unfocused focus.”
Vermeer creates dreamscapes
in which time stops. And people need to pause, see and think.3
Memento mori, because in seventeenth-century Delft
(as in your living room) it’s nearly time,
because time is short, it’s nigh . . . .
By looking in optically peculiar ways into the sealed-off, interior tranquilities
of the seventeenth-century Dutch élite,
domestic insides that Vermeer largely invented,
inserting and assembling to whim and purpose, the human refrain gains force.
Memento mori.
Because it has got (and gets) so late,
because there’s so little time in the tempestuous world at large,
the copper pot is precious.
So’s the shaft of light from that open window,
and worthy, too, is that flaking baseboard, that deep fold
in the rug laying across the furniture.
If only the viewer can take heed,
slow down
and enter Vermeer’s studious stillness
long enough to dwell upon the details, to take in the effects of light,
to look along the cracks, and into the furrows and nail holes
in those carefully discoloured bits of wall.
Only then will the human subjects,
at their curious removes —bit players alongside light
and furnishings and many other things—
truly draw one in.
Distanced, distorted, yet, because time has been halted within,
also newly contextualised,
in such a way
as to render them anew, and more intimately explored.
Do you endure an order, a system,
in which the time most difficult to find
has become not just rare, but rarest of all?
Fugitive, fleeting?
A world in which time is spent.
To spend time
is to occupy yourself, even as you put time in your employ.
Everybody knows that time spent might just be time wasted,
time allowed past, drifting on by.
Memento mori, again.
“You know the nearer your destination,” wrote Paul Simon,
“the more you’re slip sliding away.”
It’s a world in which time passes.
Or in which one hopes to pass the time,
in a pleasant manner, like some patient guest
in the vestibule of our one and only world.
“Time is on your side. Yes it is,” wrote Jagger and Richards.
Or is time just nonplussed? Perhaps spectacularly impatient?
For it “waits for no one” (the same writers sang)
Not for Mick Taylor. And not for you or me.
*Watercolours and photographs by Kenneth Mills (in/of favourite haunts and vantages in Amsterdam, NL, and in Dunedin, FL, USA, though Heidi was photographed in Northampton, MA, USA).
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Albert Camus, The Fall, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Vintage International [1956] 1984), 102.
The phrase is William B. Taylor’s.
On what Vermeer does and how he appears to have done it, Zirka Filipczak, “Vermeer, Elusiveness, and Visual Theory,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 32: 4 (2006), 261, 264, 266; 259-272; E. Melanie Gifford and Lisha Deming Glinsman, “Collective Style and Personal Manner: Materials and Techniques of High-Life Genre Painting,” in Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry, ed. Adriaan E. Waiboer with Arthur K Wheelock Jr. and Blaise Ducos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 66, 68; 64-83, and the wall panels gracing “Vermeer,” The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam NL (10 February - 4 June 2023), with the synthetic essays of Gregor J. M. Weber in particular, in Vermeer: The Rijksmuseum's Major Exhibition Catalogue, eds. Pieter Roelofs and Gregor J. M. Weber (Amsterdam, The Rijksmuseum; and London: Thames and Hudson, 2023). For getting me to Filipczak, Gifford and Deming Glinsman, I am grateful to Angela Ho, and, not for the first time (and for much else besides), to Megan Holmes.
Juxtaposition of text and sketch and photograph. Nicely done. The use of gathering places to measure time. Cafes to stop and slow down time and where there is never enough of it. And of course baseball, historically timeless, but to save itself from itself, now with a constant measure of time.
And of course, the bizarrest of all, across sports and culture: the timeout. One of my favorites of yours, my friend, and read on the same day as I heard Ron Gallo’s “San Benedetto” — and the same theme!