In passing

Cyclamen on Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, Rebecca Solnit

Orchid on Numbers in the Dark, Italo Calvino

The hush of the falling flowers in the hour before dawn. You've been gone, way too long. Time has passed. Time passes. Relentlessly. Every gesture plotting its escape. Moments flee rapidly. Time is past. But this is the present.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
–– excerpt from Burnt Norton, by T. S. Eliot (Four Quartets)

Light Constant

Last years flowers sit in a mason jar by the desk side. A drop of sunshine falls on the elegant decay and fractures into tiny fragments. For a brief moment in time bits of light get caught between the frail stems and the brittle petals. Everything is subsumed by this burst of light and matter.

It is 1988. Miquel Barceló is in Africa. It is his first trip. In his studio in Mali he is studying light. He is drawing shadows. “The light in the desert is so intense that the things disappear, and the shadows are more intense than the things themselves…What isn’t has more intensity that what is. Because in Africa light isn’t colour. Light is much more stronger than colour. Colour is almost corroded by the light.”* In the night he paints the river. Scratching the paper to obtain the effect of light reflecting from the water. The foam still white in the thick African night.

Barceló is concerned with the passage of time.  The tomatoes, the melon, the skulls, the river, his friends– time spares no one. Each is captured in a state of inevitable transformation. In his studio back home flowers placed in a jar are slowly decomposing over time and the consummate artist doesn’t miss a thing.  Back in Africa the elephants herd is slowly moving towards the river while the skulls in the studio, with their motionless eyes, wait for the sun to go down.

Afterword: Einstein's theory of relativity states time and space aren't as constant as they appear. The only true constant is the speed of light. Time can seem to run faster or slower depending on how high you are, and how fast you are travelling. That's bad news for those who own a penthouse.

*‘The earthly cycles’ by Enrique Juncosa (An essay from Miquel Barceló: works on paper 1979-1999).

You can see Miquel Barceló's art at his fan site here. To see his paintings from Mali click the year 1988 and scroll down the page.

Feeding time

Once there was a time when bird song heralded the beginning and the end. Of days and nights. As resolutely as the hands of a clock, but much less painfully. All that remains now are ghostly wisps. And a memory slowly unraveling, thread by thread. Did the robin sing that tune? Did the titmouse sit on this branch? Once we were so young and green. Where did the time go?

It is not quite an attempt to catalogue what time has done to us but a measure of what we did in our time.