“Every morning I woke Thomas and explained what had happened. I told him that he had to help me. That I had slipped into another time. Maybe my brain had been rearranged, I said. I needed help. I could not think the whole thing through by myself. We had to find an explanation”

“I leave the day open. I go with the day. I flow with it wherever it may go. I let myself be carried along by the current. Now I swim. Dive.”

thxxxx for reading

Two quotes from Slovej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume. The first, from pg 80, explains what’s happening. Tara Selter has fallen into a fold of time. A Groundhog Day of sorts: she alone has become caught in the 18th of November, each day is marginally different but it remains the 18th November, day after day after day. Everyone in her life is blissfully unaware, and her attempts to communicate her strange fate become a form of further dislocation. A growing madness. The second quote are the last lines of the novel. A form of tiny resolution.

On the Calculation of Volume wasn’t a book I particularly enjoyed reading but it struck into a theme that I return to routinely in my own grappling with life: our perception of time. Towards the end of January I found myself lying on the floor of the Neue Nationalgalerie in the darkness with Cristian Marclay’s The Clock playing out to a few hundred people around me. I’m going to presume most people here have had the chance to see this work, and it has been written about so heavily over the last ten years that I’ll keep this description brief. It is a 24 hour long film that is a perfect collage of film clips each with a clock or a reference to the time that is synchronised to the actual time. It is a clock in itself, as well as being a kind of cinematic commentary through its choice of clips and the editing within. Ten past four in the morning in The Clock is ten past four in the morning in real life.

Watching The Clock you are so acutely aware of the time we are literally watching it tick past, yet the clips are often so enjoyable that we suddenly realise thirty or forty minutes slipped by. The one effect it always has on me, and why I love it so much, is that it immediately plunges you into the eternal truth: our perception of time is elastic. Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s definition of happiness was a sunny afternoon lying in his rowing boat on lake Geneva, with his fingers dipping in the water and his eyes shut. The water on his hand kept him awake, but time slipped by. Happiness is relief from time. Drudgery is the remorseless awareness of the grind of time.

Those moments in nightclubs where five hours swallows itself and is unaccountable for, and then a single five minute track suddenly opens up a dimension you weren’t aware of and somehow, magically, lasts for hours. The collapsing of time in club spaces for me has often served as one of the proofs of why these spaces are worthwhile. Time is, of course, the long arm of the capitalist economy. Without the ability to quantify time it becomes difficult to extract profit from people. The more metrics we can apply to people’s lives, the more can be extracted. The tyranny of the quantifiable, the tyrant of the success demon, hovering in our consciousness from childhood for eternity, it guts the creative sparkle of ideas for ideas sake and transforms every idea into something to use for economic gain.

The bliss of deep immersion in something becomes pushback on this. Nowadays switching off and losing ourselves in an act that has no discernible benefit to anything beyond our own pleasure is a form of systemic pushback. It is often repeated that we enter a club for the freedom to be our true selves, whatever that may mean. We also enter a club to be free from the strictures of time. This is a form of getting lost, even if it only lasts for a while. In this system it is of course temporary. Fleeting visions of what could be beyond an economy that wasn’t so rapacious in its greed. One of the reasons certain cities and times have felt more open in their possibilities was precisely because people did not have jobs that reeled their minds in every waking hour of the day.

It was this point that lay at the heart of a memory that returned watching The Clock last month. Some years ago, at some point on a Sunday afternoon in a building that thrummed with the misty liquidity of a party well into its second day, I watched a friend close her eyes and duck her head between her legs. She vomited. Head still between her legs she opened her eyes and stared intently into the sticky liquid around her boots. She saw what she looking for, fished it out, popped it back on her tongue and gulped. The image of Chloe retaking an E came back to me lying in front of the film. A comic memory of a moment in a place when time truly did not matter, two or three days were worth going out for and two or three days were worth it on the recovery side. None of us cared where we were going because where we were - in a general sense - felt good. Existing like this was enough and eeking it out on part time jobs that were flexible to cater to such an existence was also a perfect balance. Later on, as success in some forms crept into my life I wondered if I had wasted any years of my life when I could have been more productive, but that is what economic striving does to our minds. It eats away at the moments of bliss, when time doesn’t matter. There really should never be any regrets around what people call ‘wasted youth’. To express such regrets is another form of neo-liberal dogma.

As children we feel the elasticity of time almost painfully. One of the primary reasons for this is that we are experiencing new things every day. New feelings and new understandings pour in abundantly. When we age we do more by rote. Whole months go past where we are in complete routines. It is the routines that make time feel as if it has sped up, as if the years are shifting into a kind of fast-forward that is multiplying alarmingly. Trying new things, learning, and again switching off, play a strange paradox here. In themselves, zoomed in, time slips by, we are absorbed and, most likely enjoying ourselves. But zooming out they can help us feel as if time is actually full and this, conversely, helps us to feel like time isn’t just slipping by but is also a richer struggle.

A little tribute to The Clock on callsuper.net has appeared - the recording of my all night long set at The Island in Bristol last month has been looped so it will always be the same point of the set playing at every moment in a 24 hour cycle, just hit PLAY <3

Thxxx for reading