Wild East Time
Weird loops
Every other Monday, I swim in the San Solomon Springs. It's a water oasis on the northern edge of the high-altitude Chihuahuan Desert that has flowed for 11,000 years. Originally a sizeable natural cienega, or desert wetland, it's now the largest spring-fed pool in the world. Only turquoise water, turtles, fish, my friend, and me bubble up from the arid plains.
After laps, we check in and share the same idea. "I wanted to forget everything else and just be in it, just thinking about the tempo of water." I swim for what seems like hours. But in reality, I've only been swimming for ten or twenty minutes.
Image: Bill Nino
Describing 11,000 years is almost a waste of words. To impress readers, writers might attach abstract appendages to expressions of time: time-scale, deep-time, big-history, and time-span. The only word needed is time, distinctive enough. In like manner, convincing someone of the desert's spatial intensity and the horizon's absoluteness is not easy. By exasperation, I can draw on descriptive absurdities like enormous dead ancient ocean reef or simply ...vast. Further down the explicatory path, there's very big. On the very big range, our Jeep is a trinket.
The social memory of just thirteen years ago, when wildfires etched West Texas and San Solomon Springs was evacuated, barely registers as a cautionary blip. "That was a long time ago." Broods of cicadas, singing insects that emerge periodically en mass, have lived underground since well before the last West Texas fire. The 17 year brood will emerge in 2024.
The parallel categories of old wildfires and young cicadas trickle into a puddle of what we consider recent or long ago.
The rivalry between city and rural time, or places where time proverbially slows down, is generally imagined via caricature. Rural time might be regressed, reverted, or even directionally backward. The parodies work: we understand the legend of the New York Minute, women's time, decolonized time, me time, military time, being off the clock, and so on. I've heard timing is everything, but I can only decipher that in a practical sense to mean being situationally aware and responsive. Whatever time is seems disconnected from the thing being mobilized, like moving my body to swim a lap.
Well before 2023, the high desert where I live would remake itself into its weariest version each summer. The temperature forces a physical and psychological deceleration. But in 2023, the expected relief of cool nights didn't happen. To cope, I got into a late-night routine of watching what I called futures films; science fiction meditations and cinematic interpretations of change.
Rather than imagining time, the future, as hyper-caricatured and linear, the best films told a story through glitches.
Sometimes as subtle foreshadowing, sometimes as a drastic intrusion in a faithful normal. Normal was understood to be timeless, and this gelled with watching futuristic films in rural Texas, where the preferred future is an eternal present.
It wasn't only the calamity of heat but also the scope, shape, and prospective —at times, violent— nature of the glitch that invited reflection. While my neighbors, drinking in their backyard late one night, might have seen Total Recall through my open window, I could hear them discussing being express kidnapped in Mexico a few days earlier. An express kidnapping, typically, involves being released from a snap abduction by handing over a small ransom or cash from an ATM. Secuestro exprés marries urgency, abduction, and forced payment. My neighbors chatted about it like this: what happened? What was different than normal around the border? What was changing? I couldn't decide if that summer was a glitch or an inflection point.
Either way, no extraordinary criminal intelligence was required to abduct my neighbor. The kidnappers only needed to overpower with immediacy.
The more compelling thing was that my neighbors held a post-mortem conversation comparing experiences. They were trying to locate themselves, alarmed, in a superstructure —the immense architecture of competing systems where the US and Mexico run together. We live intertwined with more scale, temporal or spatial, than we can grasp.
Progress Again
Running out of time, timetable, and delayed effects articulate the link between time, safety, and conflict. The language of war and messy violence render time a clinical sequence of events: response, escalation, evacuation, and deflection. Midnight becomes math: "zero-hundred."
A strange combination of time, power, and control came together ten years ago in Ukraine. In March 2014, Moscow annexed the Black Sea region. After a questionable popular referendum resulting in reunification with Russia in the same month, Crimean leaders announced local clocks would jump two hours ahead to Moscow Standard Time (MSK).
Consider all the factors at play: national and ethnic identity, suspicious voting, conflicting media narratives, intelligence gathering, military clashes, and violence. Despite all this, top-down forced time travel was considered an essential instrument of control and partition. Reporting from 2014 captured a person named Tatiana celebrating in the square in Simferopol when 22:00 became midnight in a fraction of a second, saying, "We have returned home. We were born on Moscow time and we are back to it again." In this scenario, time was a symbolic ancestral home and an institutional lever, not a standalone entity.
Any suggestion of a "dawn of a new era" is a time reconfiguration with an agenda. A juncture is invented to arrange some desired cultural dynamic. This is not so much about creating the future but, like in Crimea in 2014, a divorce from a past. Other examples are Year One of the French Revolution in 1792 and The Khmer Rouge's Year Zero in 1975. In a revolutionary context, it's a stabilizing move. As in rural Texas, the preferred future is an eternal present, but in the cases above, one that is thoroughly engineered.
This tells us there is a peculiar type of power derived from calendar gesticulations. In 2021, Texas leaders banned abortions after six weeks, or roughly 1,000 hours, of pregnancy. We can imagine the ideological arguing behind the scenes quickly reduced to bartering and trading days or weeks for various controlling clauses and concessions.
We impose similar power upon our lives when we aspire to "start fresh." Punctuations such as these are sometimes decorative, while sometimes they demand an aspirational, purified normal where we relate to time as if it exists as a magical independent force. Case in point: I've restarted Day One of a 75-day running program every morning for two weeks until I make time to run. Day one comes infused with symbolic power, perhaps why we know the famous phrase for those recovering from substance abuse, one day at a time. Day eight or nine has no supernatural allure.
Delay
Twenty-two years ago, I embarked on an extended camping trip in the Kananaskis forest. After spending a couple of weeks in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, my sense of direction and familiarity with my calendar subdued, especially since, in 2002, I didn't yet have a cell phone or internet in my pocket. My ambition with time was the same as today, like swimming; I wanted to "be in it," thinking about the tempo of the mountains and forest.
The glitch was the sudden appearance of CF-18 Hornet fighter planes in the sky, announced with the sound of high-pitched compressed air. A group of Griffon military helicopters followed, with low rumbling. I glimpsed tanks down the trail.
I had unknowingly hiked up to a security perimeter and was quizzed by soldiers. While they asked me questions, a convoy of sleek black vehicles moved along the highway some distance away. There was Vladimir Putin. And the heads of state of the richest industrialized countries at the time: Jaques Chirac, Gerhard Schröder, Silvio Berlusconi, Junichiro Koizumi, Tony Blair, Jean Chrétien, and George W. Bush.
I watched the powerful men. The highest concentration of the world's governing power was meeting in a remote location to claim their future paths, essentially working unobserved. Being interrogated by officers felt like it took a long time but was probably only a few minutes, just like swimming in San Solomon Springs.
The soldiers and I had the same goal of locating me in a bewildering power complex.
This was the largest peacetime security operation in Canada's history. Anti-globalization protests and violent clashes with police occurred at the previous summit in Italy. Kananaskis was chosen due to its isolation. Patrolling by jet fighters was non-stop, supported by air-to-air refueling aircraft and helicopters. Major roads were closed. My friends boarded up their shops and restaurants.
Total Recall (1990)
Canadian Armed Forces in Kananaskis
From a historical standpoint, in 2002, Putin was negotiating power with oligarchs and reconstructing the impoverished condition of his country. A reasonable observation is that he has been transmuting grievances, collecting information, and generally operating for decades. In other words, the long game.
Nearly a quarter century later, I sat with a small group of seniors at a Texas community center. They wanted to talk about Putin critic and opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in a remote penal colony February 16th, 2024. The official cause of death was “sudden death syndrome” (an inflection point disguised as a glitch). Navalny had been serving a decades-long prison term.
Listening to the group of seniors take turns letting their frustrations out, I thought about time as a kind of bearability. I have only a static, superficial image of what a quarter century is. If Putin is an autocrat, 25 years is a problem to be solved.
Dots and Loops
In Artificial Earth, J.Daniel Andersson observes that the global phenomena of the 21st century suggest a fragmentary assortment of systems operating in disconnected concert, "connecting, by way of weird loops, the microscopic worlds of algae, bacteria, and viruses to the mesoscopic worlds of aquatic ecosystems, international travel, and global agriculture, all the way up to the macroscopic worlds of ocean food webs, atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, and global carbon and nutrients cycles." He's very nearly describing the phenomena in and around San Solomon Springs. And, by extension, my neighbors trying to locate themselves in a complex space or me stumbling into a global summit in the woods.
The extent and force of the systems Andersson describes trigger a conceptual and communicative crisis. Conveying 11,000 years is hard enough, so how do we articulate this uncertainty, scale, and tension?
A virus spreading around the world in 2020 arguably marked the moment where this challenge asserted itself. Time couldn't be neutral. Duration meant a climb in intensity and harm. Forecasting and future risk models mattered to the extent they explained something or prompted action. A nightmare blob, the Flatten the Curve symbol, was promoted to the position of predictive generalist and enforcement agent. The goal was public obedience; only an oval could do the job.
Ovals, loops, and dots, as graphic devices communicating time, appear in Lakota Winter Counts. These counts, or pictographic calendars, make use of circles to symbolize a cycle of time. A linking line indicates the continuance of time. The line is interrupted by the yearly circle at regular intervals. The elegant visual explains sophisticated systems of cycles relating to many other cycles —simple organization of a simple symbol to communicate the same gruelingly complex “weird loops” Andersson mentions.
"They tried to bury us. They didn't know we were seeds", is another, more encouraging instance of a long game, and closer in spirit to the rhythms of cicada cycles than to Putin’s bureaucracy. The phrase comes from Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos and was used by activists organizing in response to the disappearance of 43 students in Iguala, Mexico, in 2013.
There’s a wide gulf between thinking of time as an abstract, natural phenomenon and time as contingency and process. I think of it like this: it’s the gulf between time and timing. Relatedly, trading space for time is commonly called Fabian strategy after the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, nicknamed The Delayer, who sought to avoid a conflict in the present but seek a decisive outcome in the future.
To say we need pluralism in regards to time or to emancipate time is so lost in abstraction it's unhinged. What is obvious is that time is politicized. The clock or calendar is an instrument of abuse or liberation; therefore, the clock or calendar can be a domain for reckoning and time can be mined for political power.
Andersson, Johan Daniel. Artificial earth: A genealogy of planetary technicity. Goleta, CA: punctum books, 2023.
