TIME. PROGRESS. DEATH.

PLENTY & LIVE.

Jessica  Piovan

12  from December  2020

"King time, king time, king time

Transform the old ways of living"

Gilberto Gil - Time King

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Time is not time. It's space.  

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And the definition of space is comprehensive. It can be from the ideal extension, without limits, which contains all finite extensions and all existing or possible bodies or objects, or even emptiness. We see time in a hardened, rigid and unyielding way. Only time is destiny. Space is an accident. Time is logic and space is paradox.

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Gil is punctual in his time: transform the old ways of living. If we don't transform our relationship with time, we die. And mortality is something that surrounds our imagination all the time and, starting from the space-world we live in, the external one also exalts the scarcity of life.

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Life.

Time.

Plenty.

Death.

Clock.

Scarcity.

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Since when has time become synonymous with haste, disorder, dependency and chaos in our lives? The text starts out pessimistic and tragic, but I promise that in the end it brings a breath of life. However, it is undeniable:

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Time has become trauma as it is flooded with the principle of death.

Time became trauma, as it was annihilated by the idea that time is production.

Time has become trauma, because the human being does not treat time as something divine.

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When we relate deadly to time, we live in scarcity and lack of vitality. This lack of vitality that haunts us is the result of the immense need we have for production. If you end another day of life tired, mortx, exhausted, but somewhere in your ego you feel that you have finished all your tasks, that you have fulfilled the day's mission and your daily production, you are totally offering your time to that which is external and not to what is internal to it. Well, I tell you, this is the principle of death.

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And this principle of death presents itself in a serious, pathological, sick way. Anxiety and depression are diseases of time. The apex of anxiety is projecting itself into the future in no small way and that we create a chain of monstrous thoughts that engulf our life. The prism of depression here is the lack of care in such a distant past, where it is not possible to deal with burning losses and grief for the individual's emotional body. Both are engineered by the destructive logic of production. This production was born in a post-modern era, full of suffocation, ironies and incongruities with what life is.

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The idea of progress contaminates time. Progress for who? In our giant subjectivity, everyone watches progress according to their bubble. And look, the progression is based on linear time, where I have a straight path to be followed and I arrive at a finish line with a trophy, prize and money. What if we shift our thinking to a possibility of circular-time?

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Leda Martins offers us a perspective of time that is less pathological for me. In spiral-time, events are stripped of a linear perspective, they are in constant transformation, where there is the possibility of experiencing time inhabiting a curvilinear temporality: what happens now will return later. It does not end. He doesn't die. It just thrives. He is plenty because he returns. And he doesn't come back like a time machine, he comes back in humanity. And here is where I would like to bring the culture of syncope, which Professor Luiz Antônio Simas, present in this edition with great reverence, presents us with a way to break the rhythm of linear time and allow us to enter a spiraling time.

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Paraphrased the master, "the rhythmic basis of samba is syncope. And syncope is an unexpected change in rhythm, caused by the prolongation of a note emitted in a weak beat over a strong beat. In practice, syncope breaks with constancy, breaks the sequence predictable and provides a feeling of emptiness that is soon filled unexpectedly".

Are you there. It's experiencing emptiness. And if we playfully experience emptiness, inserting something unexpected in our time, we break the linear optics and enter its spiral, because what happens now may return later. But experiencing the playful void is necessary.

Excellent. But what about in practice?

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Practice is subversion. Between meetings: play. Between one problem and another: laugh. In your lunch space: dare. Syncope. Beat the drum of life, because it's a space for life, it's a space to transform. And here I play with the limit we put on spacetime. In practice, syncope breaks with constancy, breaks the predictable sequence and provides a feeling of emptiness that is soon filled unexpectedly.

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I write for you playing with space, in play. Remember, Space is limitless. There is no rush in the ritualized life of knowledge. Time can be a deprivation of freedom, but it can also be a space to play.

Axe.

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Are we going to the next Peak?