It was a strange time to be writing. All my circles had converged on each other and patterns I had never dreamed of became apparent. A new line was being drawn and although I could not yet see it clearly I could feel it growing. It was a strong line, like a songline it had come from the deep past. I caught glimpses of it in the winter sky and frozen leaves.
I had been moving fast like a ray of light. Sharp and precise at first, but then something happened like a prism that intercepts and scatters visible light into separate wavelengths. And so I entered the new year thinking about time, speed, light and darkness. On the linear timeline it looked like a storm was gathering.
“A clearing, a desert plain. Against the skyline, if you knew the land as they did, you could see, in your mind, the black silhouette of where the trees used to be. One guava tree remains in a deforested waste and from a branch a twelve-year-old girl in a sundress hangs dead in the moonlight, dying in a vanishing time”.
Jay Griffiths
The future built on rectilinear propagation seemed opaque and brittle. But time was never straight like an arrow and all my circles did not fit on a line. I remembered, linear time and progress are not objectively there. They are something we manifest. Make. Call into being. We experience time in many different ways. Each one real in its own right.
New questions arise when the future breaks down and all that remains is a chaos of circles. What happens when the mental and physical infrastructure of the linear future collapses? What fills the vacuum of a broken future? This question, and my answer, seemed to mark the difference between the darkness and the light.
“When questions about the future become futile and spatio-material methodologies no longer grip, norms and values enter the analysis. Old questions need to be replaced with new ones that are more appropriate to the contemporary condition. ‘What will happen?’ and ‘What does the future hold? need to be supplemented with ‘What should happen?’ and ‘What is the right thing to do?’ This means we find ourselves in the realm not of science and empirical analysis but in the public domain of morals and ethics.”
Barbara Adam
In a different kind of future where the past does not run through the present out onto a point on the horizon, where the future and the past are here already as closed doors or potentiality, what matters is presence. When the solid has melted into the air, been deconstructed to pieces, or collapsed in on itself, are we left paralysed like birds loosing confidence in their ability to fly? Hanging breathless in a stormy sky can we hear our own heart beat?
If all my different relations, thoughts and projects move in circles – if I jump from one cycle to another and partake in or continue different circles as I change my context – can I not learn to surf between the circles, to juggle all the different relationships? Like a master juggler bringing as many skittles into play as he pleases, tracing a much larger circle as he sends them into the air.
Having come to a standstill after traveling near the speed of light, the goal on the horizon now appear as a Fata Morgana: here it is present with me as a multiplicity of different roads that take me in its direction. Standing still, my dispersed circles have found their own wavelenghts and colours. Observing them silently they shine in their own light, I need only to watch them like someone who tends to a fire.
A circle came to a close, the full revolution revealed a spiralling pattern. A songline appeared. Born under the light of the full moon tracing my circles like a rainbow.
Ragnarok and the fate of the Danish soul
has to have constellating images to pull together all these tendencies to separation,...