Man has wooed and won the world, and has fallen weary, and not, I think, for a time, but with a weariness that will not end until the last autumn, when the stars shall be blown away like withered leaves.
∆ W.B. Yeats, 'Ideas of Good and Evil' (1903)
In the ‘60s one either believed that America was being greened or that America was being morally defoliated. You either believed that this was the dawning of the age of Aquarius or you believed that we were on the eve of destruction.
I sometimes think that the most malignant aspect of the period was the extent to which everyone dealt exclusively in symbols. Certain artifacts were understood to denote something other than themselves, something supposedly abstract; some positive or negative moral value. And whether the artifact was positively or negatively charged depended not on any objective reality at all but on where you stood, where the polarization had thrown you.
Marijuana was a symbol. Long hair was of course a symbol, and so was short hair. Natural foods were a symbol – rice, seaweed, raw milk, the whole litany. I found myself in situations during the late ‘60s where my refusal to give my baby unpasteurized milk was construed as evidence that I must be “on the other side.”...
I next came to San Francisco at the time of the flower children, when everyone, young and not so young, was freaking out on whatever came to hand. The flower children were all up and down the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco—and they might have been everywhere else, too, but for the vigilance of the cops—with their long hair, their beads, their robes, their fancied resistance, and, in spite of a shrewd, hard skepticism as unnerving as it was unanswerable, really tormented by the hope of love.
The fact that their uniforms and their jargon precisely represented the distances they had yet to cover before arriving at that maturity which makes love possible, could not be considered their fault. They had been born in a society in which nothing was harder to achieve, in which perhaps nothing was more scorned and feared than the idea of the soul's maturity.
∆ James Baldwin
Perhaps I can put this differently. Beyond the negation of the biography of millions of people, the phenomenon of the perceived disappearance of time is uncanny precisely because it is the fiercest attempt by revolutionary politics to master and posit its own production of the temporal. Yet this production is not the production, not even at the simple level of an ideological or theoretical construction, of a simple or unique time. On the contrary, it is the positing of a multiplicity of times already from the side of the state. Thus, the biography of millions is not the only thing that is sacrificed if we neglect to take note of this. We also negate the complexity of the repressive apparatus that is made possible through this temporal refraction. This is remarkable on a different level, for it is also the indication, though on a purely negative level, of what a 'time' that avoids the dialectic of modernity would entail if we are to begin thinking it.
It is the political...
In English, consciousness and unconsciousness are part of a vertical plane, so that we wake up ↑ and we fall ↓ asleep and we sink ↓ into a coma. Chinese uses the horizontal line, so that to wake is to cross a border towards consciousness → and to faint is to go back ← . Meanwhile, time itself is vertical so that last year is 'the year above' ↑ and next year is 'the year below' ↓. The day before yesterday is the day 'in front' ↑ and the day after tomorrow is the day 'behind' ↓. This means that future generations are not the generations ahead, but the ones behind. Therefore, to look into the future one must turn around…
∆ Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing
I love this time – the in-between time, the time after all the gatherings and lights, the time before we swing back into the regular routines of the new year. It is the crack between the worlds, the place where dreaming can unfold and then spiral into being quickly and quietly. It is a place where, if we want them to, solitude and silence can surround us and the soul-hungers we have abandoned can find us once again. It is a time to listen deeply, to stay with stillness open to the impulse to move from the deepest part of what we are.
∆ Oriah Mountain Dreamer, (Oriahmountaindreamer.com, December 30, 2013) (via Make Believe Boutique)
