The problem is chronic.
Tell me does life exist beyond it?
Super-Sonic, Bad Religion
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Elizabeth Freeman presented a talk on "Chronicity" the other day at Georgetown University, which I was fortunate to attend. The project at hand was to imagine the queer temporality of those bodies experiencing "chronic" conditions such as depression, lupus, addiction, etc. Freeman proposed that rather than existing with consistent intervals of day and month on a line towards a teleological end or a circle of repeated events, Chronic-Time (no longer a redundant word) exists in a sort of pulse. Intensities increase and decrease along a spectrum, which produces its own unsymmetrical rhythm. Contrary to the terminal or the recovery models of illness, chronicity is something you live with and in, without the sense of simply waiting or remaining stuck.
Chronic bodies turn away from the progressive time of capitalism, which compels you be as productive as you can be until the totality of your life-time is consumed. Literally your life, time, and body are sucked dry and sold. We set our clock by capitalism. We need to get up at this time, so we can get ready for work, we take an hour lunch break, we go home and rest for so many hours before we head back to work. Vacations become a kind of required maintenance period to keep your machine in good working order. Even our hobbies are questionable if they do not produce, develop skills, or somehow tie us back in to spending money.
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In the words and world of Peralandra, part of CS Lewis's imagining of an oceanic planet in which time & space is not linear (tied to fixed places) but chronic, how is it that we imagined standing sideways from ourselves to see time pass us in a consistent line? This Garden of Eden variety world which Lewis pictures does not have industry and only two humanoids. As such, the first inhabitant experiences time/place as always something new appearing before her, as if by surprise. It is a life of perpetually transforming oceanic geography, and time chronically comes in waves.
Chronicity looks towards the next wave of intensity, aware that it may come faster and larger than the last, or else not. Often times you don't know if you can swim it, but you dive into it all the same. Sometimes you can't swim through this period of water, and you get turned and lost. Every so often the water may calm enough for you to see the horizon, maybe even the world beyond the ocean of time in which you swim. You may even wonder how these people living on dry, fixed land, can stand existing in such a place where time is so tied down.
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In writing Peralandra, Lewis was thinking through the work of Henri Bergson, who imagined time as "duration" rather than cut up into linear, measurable segments. We experience life, Bergson writes, as intensification. Temporal objects are thus said never to "be" because they are constantly transforming. Things don't sit still from this persistent change through time in order to exist concretely in any specific form. The imagined frozen moment in which things do exist one way, before time brings about another freeze frame which is slightly different (like a film at the cinema) may be a tempting way to think, but is not how things exist, argues Bergson.
Things constantly become, not be, themselves. Rather than existing in a series of locations, an arrow shot through the air instead follows a "line of flight" through those locations without existing in or as them. It is no confined by space or time, form or being, but passes through it like water. Bergson's work was subsequently adopted and adapted by Gilles Deleuze (A Thousand Plateaus; Bergsonism), Elizabeth Grotz (The Volatile Body; Chaos, Territory, Art), and Manuel de Landa (A Thousand Years of Non-Linear Time).
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The importance of non-productive chronicity (as opposed to the antithetical un-productive time of capitalism) hit me last week when I was attending the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA). In this island of time away from the forward moving calendar of home & work, my colleagues and I sat in the pool, drinking fruity cocktails, discussing temporality (you can take the scholars out of the University, but you can't take the University out of scholars). We talked about how vacations are a great time to break habits or form new ones, because the usual markers which signal responses are not present. Maybe that is part of why vacation is so useful, even for capitalism which sort of admits it as a controlled break in its machined rhythm: time is in part spacial. For me, Florida became a kind of "Chronic-city" in which I was able to feel like with the sense of intensity and duration, rather than deadlines.
Time becomes how long I can endure the hot-tub before I need to cool off. It becomes how long I can lay out tanning before either the sun moves or else I wake up feeling burnt. It becomes how long it takes before I realize that my drink is finished, or else how long it takes to no longer notice the drops of water running down the glass and across my hand. It becomes a series of naps, which bleed into one another, and a series of panels which do likewise. It becomes laughter and secrets. It becomes a series of events or antics which don't count, because we are on vacation. It is discovery, duration, surprise, and as the flight back evidences, also ached, sleep-deprivation, stress and disorientation.
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Sitting pool-side with my trusty companion, "Little Penguin" pictured above, I thought about two things which give me a lot of temporal joy: the Online Penguin Cam (produced by Sea-World) and the dream of defying gender norms and religious conventions to become the first Catholic Bishop to the Penguins. Usually at home, the Penguin Cam is considered a "waste of time" which nonetheless draws me in as I minimize my word documents, article pdfs, and e-mail, to watch & listen to the constant bustle of penguins as they run around their habitat. When I more fully give into Penguin Time, I do begin to experience a giddiness that amounts to feeling time as duration/intensity and forget the clock as it ticks away.
Likewise, my dream life back up plan, to rise through the ranks to become an auxiliary Bishop to an Arch-Bishop, and then when they give me my "uninhabited" portion of the globe (because even Bishops that are only meant to help another, need to have their own designated Bishopric in order to be official; and since they don't want them to actually have to "tend the flock" in that area, they give them "uninhabited" portions of the ocean or the antarctic) I would insist as much as possible on being given a slice of the antarctic in which penguins live. Then once I am a Bishop, I would go off and "tend my flock" among the penguins, leaving the world's time behind. Like Frankenstein's monster, I would watch the icy-world slide, bend, wash, and freeze as my penguin companions tend to their own temporality, removed from the normative sense of day/night and seasons which us closer to the equator take for granted. The planet and the antarctic would pass through its own flow of time, duration, and intensity; and our bodies would speak to one another of the chronicity of our conditions.
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