“In ruin-time, some have proposed to call the period that precedes the ruin’s reclamation as a symbol the interval of neglect. Collapse happens in an instant, after years of slow rot due to negligence. There’s just not enough time, and we’ll get to it tomorrow. Maintenance is deferred, surfaces slowly chip away, sites are abandoned for decades, left to fall apart. Small issues — details, really — are ignored, but over time, build and become heavy. Yet, these intervals don’t have much to do with a static sense of time. Nuclear explosions are measured and documented to the millisecond, but unfold for hundreds of thousands of years. The underlying preconditions for collapse can be set for decades. Where do we mark the “beginning” of a collapse, and where and how do we mark the end?”
– Andrea Stevens, Works Fall: On Ryts Monet and Ruins
“My favourite definition of the body is that it’s a thing that needs support. A social body, a body of work or water, a body of laws, or organs, tissue, bones – none of these can stand, withstand, on their own.”
– Johanna Hedva, Notes on Need
I realize I am behind on this project, and I have decided that the difficulty I have in maintaining any kind of regular working rhythm is actually part of the point. For at least two months, nothing is moving like it should, including time. All of this seems stilted. I’m trying to tell you something important but I can’t get the words out. Instead they stay circling endlessly inside my head: repeating repeating repeating.
I haven’t been doing great. It feels too public to write that here so directly, even in this very small corner of the internet frequented by almost no one. There is that ever present pressure to be clever, deep, polished, on, honest-but-make-it-stylish, earnest-but-don’t-be-too-much. Whatever you do, do not allow all of these needs to spill out of your gasping mouth unscripted and onto the page - how embarrassing that would be.
Anyway, the point I’m trying to get to is, today I came across an article on the differences between abled and disabled mutual aid and finally felt like writing something here again. In the article, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha takes on the sudden prevalence of ‘mutual aid’ groups and ‘collective care’, and their sudden discovery/takeover by abled folks in light of the pandemic.
Piepzna-Samarasinha writes: “Crip mutual aid doesn’t think the pandemic is going to be a short-term thing, that the worst is over and we’re on our way back to “normal.” I’ve seen so many mainstream mutual aids scale back or close up shop because of a sense that the pandemic is over, right? I haven’t seen any of the underground or overground, informal crip networks and projects stop. We were sick and disabled before the pandemic and we know all about how things don’t go according to plan, how timelines stretch out, how people stop calling after the 2 weeks which is the longest they can conceive of a body/mind emergency happening. We know about not ever being able to go back to “normal.” We know crip needs stretch out long like horizon, like forever.”
Time might be a clever abstract concept to be brought out to play around with, or speculated on in an avalanche of clever essays and artist statements, but the moment it does collapse into itself, the moment the forever actually becomes the now, the too-muchness of those not held in its linear grasp is immediately clear.
Where do we mark the “beginning” of a collapse, and where and how do we mark the end?”
The truth is, I have been deferring all the necessary maintenance for months, knowing it would catch up with me but hoping to squeeze out just one more week, just one more. Unlike uranium decay, this interval of neglect is maddeningly unpredictable and irregular. Sometimes I really can eke out just one more whatever, until I can’t, and just one more sends me over the edge. This is one of those second times. The endless now stretching into forever times. So right now, I read these words with gratitude, and hope to keep remembering that the low-key, quiet, private acts are the work, and that the need of support is not shameful, but also timeless.
This post is part of a two month series exploring neurodivergent experiences of (non)linear time, supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. Some of the thinking of this blog series has been translated to the risoprint zine, How to Build a Kaleidoscope.