“Rehearsals of disengagement from the frenetic pursuit of the new are necessary if one seeks to see beyond the slicing of time into past, present, and future and to relate to actions classified as outdated and impracticable as concrete, common options. Rehearsing disengagement is the practice of doing potential history. Rehearsals begin by replacing the imperial impulse to innovate with a shared right to participate in the common.” - Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism
Abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore has often referred to the abolitionist project as “life in rehearsal”. She says that two of her favourite types of students are artists and athletes because these groups “understand that practice makes different. They understand that repetition is differentiation,” an essential skill for building abolitionist worlds.
If we are to rehearse disengagement as strategy I would add another group to Gilmore’s: those who live in non-normative body-minds; the disabled, the neurodiverse, those who do not or cannot choose our relationship to disengagement, pattern seeking, non-linearity, other time scales.
I study people to learn patterns, gestures, scripts. I don’t remember a time when this wasn’t true. It is through conscious, studied effort and repetition that I have trial and errored my way into landing on some successful patterns of socializing. For many years, I got a lot of these scripts wrong (I still do, especially when I am exhausted or overwhelmed) but like the muscle memory I have developed through countless hours holding a pencil or paintbrush, it has become to some extent, second nature to deploy them. Whether or not we have a choice in learning and then utilizing these scripts, and the immense effort this costs us is another question, but either way I guess, my bodymind knows very well that practice makes different.
When I was first learning to paint, I remember clearly my intense frustration one day with my inability to mix a specific shade of blue I was trying to match to a photo. No matter what I added, the colour veered first too far into green and then too far into purple. I could understand the underlying patterns, but could not direct them to shape the outcome I wanted. After watching me grow increasingly frustrated for some time, my art teacher came over, took a brush, and in a few quick strokes expertly pulled the exact shade I was searching for from the mess of my palette. The speed of this gesture made me instantly angry – what was it I had missed that was so obvious to her? I knew the same colour theory as she did, but still could not translate it – whatever I added was either too much or not enough. “It’s just experience,” she told me, “that’s all it is. You will get there.” And with mixing paint, I have. But despite studying these patterns all my life, so much seems to remain outside of my grasp; my efforts either too much or not enough.
I realize I started this project with the goal to be much more practical. Initially, I proposed to come up with a series of prompts, nonlinear meditations, or actions inspired by these reflections to answer the question: if we make time through practices, what are the entangled practices we need to counter a linear, capitalist productivism? The title of the series, Making Time Through Practices, comes from Maria Puig de la Bella Casa. So what are the practices? The truth is, when it comes down to it I think there is only really one: repetition.
When she writes that time is made through practices, Bella Casa is talking about what we might learn about care, maintenance and repair from our understanding of soil[1]. Bella Casa makes the obvious connections between our relationship to soil and to one another under capitalism: that “what soil is thought to be affects the ways in which we care for it, and vice versa”, and how “a logic of production over-determines other activities of value” and “transforms care from a co-constructed interdependent relation into mere control of the object of care”. She also makes this short note on repetition:
“The repetitive character of ongoing observation of soil cycles enables care. Care work becomes better when it is done again, creating the specificity of a relation through intensified involvement and knowledge. It requires attention and fine-tuning to the temporal rhythms of an ‘other’ and to the specific relations that are being woven together.”
Repetition creates specificity, relation, an ecology of presence. This is not an innovation, but obvious to any of us who have ever tended a garden or seem to be wired to find patterns in everything around us. There are so many things I want to unlearn, but my “restrictive interests and repetitive behaviours” or “imbalanced pattern related perception” are not among them (even if that were possible). Instead, I go back to my original teachers, the plants, the soil, the rivers who have always known the complexity of relations built on repetition.
[1] Puig de la Bella Casa, Maria. “Making Time for Soil: Technoscientific Futurity and the Pace of Care.” Social Studies of Science: 45(5).
Dendritic pattens: frost, drainage pattern of the Tsangpo River in Tibet, fern fronds, manganese crystals found in limestone
Kaleidoscope: Broadleaf Plantain
Kaleidoscope: Yarrow
This post is the final entry 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.