Time
Canal Walk
Does anybody really know what time it is?
Does anybody really care?
If so I can't imagine why
We've all got time enough to die
“Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?”
- Robert Lamm, Chicago Transit Authority,
Man invented the clock to measure time. Time, that uncomfortable concept we can’t manage, only measure; we track its passage and dislike our inability to control it. We resist the “immeasurable” and consequently invent myths, superstitions, mechanics, and algorithms to understand time’s romance, mystery, inevitability, and seething reality. Cliché alert: We can’t stop the march of time. Many try. Cryogenics? The frozen faces of Hollywood’s aging elite? Time machines? Peels, botox, supplements, and on and on and on?
To compensate for fuzzy thoughts on time I think we objectively measure its passing by counting something…generations, circles around the sun, deterioration of nuclear material, revolutions on a clock, etc. The “big measure” might be our individual life spans…each of our lives. The aggregate of our lives in the community doesn’t seem important, at least in western culture. I think Asian culture might take a longer view, one that doesn’t rely on meaning to a single individual. But, that’s not my story.
Westerners erect monuments, dedicate university buildings, and create tangible “things” to defy time and mortality. Sometimes the things are without further merit beyond the thing itself, an expensive place for pigeons to land. Once in a while endowments are created to carry someone’s legacy into medical or educational institutions. Sometimes racism and hate are built into the legacies.
Art tends to freeze time, capturing an instant of memory or fantasy…one nano-nano-second of life captured with oil, or watercolor, or film, or some other medium…a single data point in an unbelievable mega-verse of life’s data points. I am puzzled about showing time’s passage in a photo. Motion is certainly an option but sometimes overdone. Aging patina is a symptom of time’s toll. India’s Ragamala artists showed the passage of time in a variety of ways, for example, several lotus blossoms falling to the ground from a woman’s hands. The individual blossoms hint at the time that’s passed since the woman has seen her lover.
My time passage images are also not literal, I’ve wrapped my own sense of time’s movement into each image. For instance, the first of a young man walking next to the canal beneath the streets of Richmond is a story of decades. That’s my son, walking on, curious, heading to things I can’t imagine. How do I describe time’s measure of him…one day, one generation, two decades? The time is different for each of us; for him, I’ve always been there. For me, he’s new, I met him just yesterday and yet he’s moved my sense of time immeasurably.
The second image is a young lady on a bike about to disappear along the canal. I watched her ride away from me and thought, hey…there’s another microcosm of time’s march. To her and to my son, it’s probably about moving through the space or getting to a destination. Mayibe. But also more than a data point, it’s an entire time capsule.
Going