Ear | Wave | Event (Issue 6)

<p>There are unfelt textures, unseen colors, and unheard sounds that ring in a mind when presented with their lack. During this time of internal twisting, where forms become visible in an unearthing of ancient systems, when the water clocks of our hearts become standardized into the widths of pixels and we perceive our world as if we are exiles, there is finally enough distance to hear it clearly: that something taking root in our innermost bellies, a type of growth that seems to fill out and up inside of our throats and into the words we speak, a loosening and unraveling of time. Drip drop drip. One of the first things that my friend Candice says to me as we shine our newly anointed faces unmasked into the NYC sun like mole rats unearthing and flinging themselves into the vaccinated promise of a new social life: <em>Oh, how time feels so compressed.</em> Did we change? If not, we feel a sense of missed opportunity. If we did, we throw ourselves onto the concrete haven of stuff, things, music, bodies, and say, yes! We are here. We did something.</p> <p>In the United States, for most of the 19th century, time was told through the sun, the railroads, or the clock at the center of town. The clock, usually located in the highest tower, was a fulcrum around which the town appeared. Before a shared electrical grid, sewage, or school district, there was time, in its most physicalized object (a giant clock) that connected people in a shared geographic community. This local time, for those that could see or hear the clanging of the bells announcing the hour, was a mechanism of power and control. All the air penetrated by the sound wave emanating from the bell of the clock was under its precise domain. Diiiiiiiiiiiiing…</p>