WHEN THE FUCK ARE WE?
The physical space we each inhabit has shrunk dramatically. Now, we must exist solely within the four walls of our homes, our horizons briefly and thrillingly expanded by daily exercise and infrequent trips to the shops.
Peter Basma-Lord
How we experience time has also radically altered. Days are no longer punctuated by twice-daily commutes, subdividing between work and pleasure. Hours, days and weeks blur together and expand, absent the rituals with which we used to mark the passing of time. We are aware - all too painfully so - of where we are, but struggle to work out when. Space has become constricted and depressingly repetitive; time has swollen, becoming distended and turgid. We find ourselves lost within it.
Yet our ability to locate ourselves in time has changed on a perhaps more fundamental level. ‘Before’, we did not consciously position ourselves within time. We knew the month, the year, but we didn’t expend much thought situating the present in its temporal context. ‘Before’, a decade had just ended without much in the way of cultural retrospection. If asked, we would have struggled to ascribe definitional terms to what we were living through, in the way we freely do to the past. At best, we could have half-heartedly parroted flabby thinkpieces on the ‘Age of Information’. On a personal level, we would count down days and weeks until Christmas, birthdays, holidays – immutable markers of time’s passing that we could approach and depart from at a steady pace.
Now all of a sudden, we are intensely aware of time – not just its passing or its seeming refusal to do so. We are obsessed by its stubborn indeterminacy. We do not ask ‘how soon is now’, but rather how long it is.
This obsession is about more than endless lockdown announcements and mooted exit strategy timetables. We are in the midst of an ongoing, slow-moving collective existential crisis. How much time has slipped by, since whenever the end of ‘before’ was, whenever ‘this’ began? And more pressingly, how much of ‘this’ is left until ‘after’? Devoid of a beginning and an end, ‘this’ stretches off into the distance of both our memories and our imagined futures.
This begs questions – ‘before’ and ‘after’ what? What is ‘this’ that we are living through? Not only is ‘this’ indeterminate in beginning and end, but it is incomprehensible in its very nature. Yes, we are living through a global epidemic, a public health crisis and unprecedented peacetime restrictions on our liberty. But we are also living through something much bigger than technical descriptors can capture.
‘This’ is surely not a ‘cultural moment’. We are too conscious that we are living within it, and nothing ruins any ‘moment’ like introspection. Cultural moments are enjoyed at the time and dissected later – frankly, people had better things to be doing during the Thirties in Berlin or the Sixties in London than musing on the cultural significance of what they were living through. Inversely, ‘this’ (like war) is something we can’t mindlessly experience – on the contrary, we seem to do nothing but think about it, read about it, discuss it.
Nor is ‘this’ an ‘age’. We are united by our stubborn refusal to see ‘this’ as normal. We refuse to conceive of ‘this’ as anything more than an aberration, which we experience in the shadow of ‘before’, and with the dawn light of ‘after’ held to be just over the horizon.
And so, Goldilocks-like, we might settle on this period being a ‘Time’. Substantial and consciously experienced, but exceptional and temporary (we hope).
Peter Basma-Lord
The global conditions which preceded this Time - and which provide its cultural backdrop - were hardly encouraging. Looming environmental catastrophe fast approaching a point of no return, a global political trend towards nativist populism and strongman leaders, deteriorating international relations, accelerating wealth inequality, unease regarding technological advancement: an unending list of problems without solutions in sight.
Certainly, there was little collective sense that ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, as Labour promised in 1997, or that ‘the arc of history… bends towards justice’, as Obama frequently quoted MLK as saying. Perhaps the Age within which this Time is taking place could best be described as the Age of Anxiety – one in which we have experienced (both collectively and personally) a nagging feeling that things might not turn out alright after all.
And how right we were. The turn of the decade which we might have hoped would mark a turning point in our global fortunes, instead ushered in massive disruption to our lives. How fitting for the Age of Anxiety, that the symbolic promise of a clean slate should so quickly metamorphose. What we are left with feels like the actualisation of that nagging unease that things would fall apart, a fever dream of proto-apocalyptic proportions writ large in our push notifications.
Whether or not this crisis can be causally linked to the multiple slow-moving other crises we were already experiencing (of the environment, of ‘late-stage’ capitalism, of technology), this pandemic is in any case ‘of its time’: in its uncannily timed arrival, in its unnervingly perfect fit for our collective psychological state, and in its effect of illuminating so starkly how we were living, simply by preventing us from living that way for a while.
Nowadays I mark the passage of time in a medieval fashion, by outside signs. The ginger lady who jogs past my window metronomically every morning. The nagging headache pulling me back to the kitchen for another coffee. The moment the sun hits my bedroom square on and I temporarily bask in the warmth, window open and eyes closed as I make believe I am outside. The exodus of families on their daily walk to the park once parents finish work. The weekly crescendo as Hackney applauds those keeping us alive. The slow unfurling of new leaves on my plants. These are my sundials, my changing of seasons.
This Time may not feel like it is going anywhere. But in our suspended animation, we can take solace from the ancient Persian adage, and know that like a river which drifts imperceptibly but inevitably onwards, this too shall pass.