Yet Untitled 071 - Various Experiences of Time

A reflection powered by the craziness of shoot

Dearest Yet Untitler,

Shoot is on again, so here’s a quick reflection.

On shoot, I’ve been chasing time. For shots, to make the day…constantly running against the clock. It’s as if I’m seeing the world through air of a different density that’s constantly in flux. Perhaps air, here, is a metaphor for time, and time - here - is an indication of the constant acceleration and deceleration between shoot days and gap days.

It had me looking at how I’ve experienced time in other parts of my life as well. For instance:

I glance at the time before admitting that I’m hungry

My wife has pointed this out to me - saying that it’s as if it’s more the time of day deciding whether I’m hungry or not rather than the physical sensation of hunger.

I wonder where that comes from. Boarding school?

I remember reading at a Yoga institute…

“If you can hold sirsasana for 3 hours, you have conquered time.”

Sirsasana = headstand; a pose I love to hold. Breathing slows down when in a headstand, simulating the slowing down of time. If you’re lucky, there comes a moment of perfect balance - of a fantastic dynamic tension holding the body perfectly still and long on one fulcrum. Your eyes close automatically and you want to remain in the pose indefinitely.

If holding the pose in this state even for a few minutes feels like a new understanding of time, holding it for three hours must definitely feel like conquering it.

Maybe someday.

Plastercine time through school and college

As a child, I only knew sleep in full-night blocks.

In school, while rehearsing for theatre, we were allowed to work late into the night and excused from P.T in the morning. The newness of functioning late into the night was a new experience of time - seeing for the first time that the day could be stretched like plastercine in many ways. In college - the experience of not sleeping at all - again a new experience of seeing myself in relation to the transition of day and night.

And then, I read about Keith Richards’ recount an experience of staying awake for four nights on a row, amped on all manner of stimulants. I remember him saying that after a point, there was no sense of the passage of time - that a conversation that had started on the first day was picked up very naturally on the third day without any sense of time having passed.

Martin Amis does acrobatics with time in his book, Time’s Arrow. My experiences above definitely tell me that time is definitely not a solid entity, but stretchable, malleable.

I haven’t even read Proust yet.

And Dali painted those link clocks, because he felt that time had a “camembert quality”.

So we’re all onto something - Marcel, Martin, Salvador and I. What company!

Time is elusive on shoot

I allay the stress by telling myself this:

“There is enough time.”

A part of me is aware that this may be a lie I’m telling myself. But another part of me knows that I can get more from time if I prove elusive to my fear of running out of time.

Makes sense?

Time can suddenly appear out of nowhere

When I lived in downtown Mumbai years ago, I used to experience something magical at traffic signals - a hush used to fall on the city when the traffic lights all the way down a long arterial toad become red all at once. Suddenly, engines cut in synchronicity and it felt as if the city had drawn a long breath and was poised between inhale and exhale.

Gap days on shoot feels like this. It’s jarring - to suddenly have a whole morning free after chasing time like a headless chicken for five days consecutively. Sometimes, these spaces in between come as a surprise - on finishing early, or on a reshuffling of schedules.

I’m no stranger to free time, but this - experiencing free time with the dynamo of forward momentum still whining in your chest…is different. The sleep in it is different. I end up using that time differently. Because I am - by virtue of the magnetism from the momentum on both sides of the gap - different.

This reflection, you may detect, is bubbling through the energy I’m describing above. Does this installment feel different to you as it does to me? Drop me a comment.

I see the passage of time via the rapid whitening of my beard

I already wrote about this in an older installment:

Yet Untitled 025 - Heatwaves been freakin’ me out..!

Apple keeps throwing up memories onto my phone’s photo gallery and all I see in my own photos is how quickly my beard is graying over such a short span of time. It’s a shock and a jump.

I mention it here is because it’s change seen over time, and since time is a concept contingent on one thing in relation to another, it actually gives me an experience of time outside day to day temporality. It shows me that life - this lifetime - in its corporeal finiteness, is moving from one point to the other, the other being the Voldemort of end-points.

Death. I mean death. Death death death. The whole paragraph above is a round about way of saying that one experience of time for me is from the perspective of life’s finiteness - revealed from everyday banalities like Apple photo memories that try to belie their profundity.

I remember Andrew Marvell saying in To his Coy Mistress:

But at my back I always hear 
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; 

I hear you Andy. You had your shy girl. I have my beard.

Anthony Bourdain

I saw a great documentary about Anthony Bourdain, a man who exited the world when he felt that his time was up. I highly recommend watching it.

Bourdain fired through life as a searcher, looking for meaning. The documentary presents him as someone who was always racing against the finiteness of life to find meaning. To me it felt like he was verifying more than searching, and everything he saw of life somehow was failing his test.

But Bourdain kept up his search for a long time. He endured a lot of pain and kept looking. I admire him for this. I genuinely felt gutted that he didn’t fine something that give him comfort. I had the sneaky feeling that he could have, had he searched a little longer, but who’s to say? He ran out of time on a clock where he set the alarm himself.

I mourn his loss.

Time is weird

My time, my days, are filled currently. I catch myself thinking of times when my days weren’t so full and on memories of being dissatisfied with that. I sense I will shuttle back to that state of being again when this shoot madness is over and I will actually miss the madness…which is weird but likely true.

Nichiren Daishonin, a Japanese Buddhist priest and philosopher from the 13th century said in his writing “Happiness in the World”.

Suffer what there is to suffer, enjoy what there is to enjoy. Regard both suffering and joy as facts of life, and continue chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, no matter what happens.

Nichiren, believe me - my prayers are targeting this well known conundrum in my life. Time and its passage has orbited me around these diurnal corollaries of existence - sufferings and joy - multiple times, as it has had us all. Time is teaching me, in its weird ways. Time itself is weirdly wonderful and full of mysteries. Time holds my interest. Time beckoned to be written of in this installment.

Thank you for reading.

Lots of love

V