Time Changes. Time is Eternal.

                  Time.             What it is?                 What it does?                   What it means?

            How it governs us?                                   How it transforms us?

                                                                                                    How we capture it?

                 How we deal with it?                                         How we perceive it?

Why is it there?                     Is it more than just a construct?                   Is it out of our grasp?

                        What can we do to capture something like time?

They said this was a hard prompt to address.

                                                                                   And so far, it is.

Time just happens to be one of the most complex things probably any human being can understand, yet not really understand. As an intuitive concept we can all grasp it. An action does not only take place, it also takes time. One can’t be there without the other. And this is a notion that almost everyone has, and yet trying to define time is something that always eludes us.

            But asking what time is might just be the wrong question.

                        It is likely something that lies beyond our grasp.

                                    Or rather, beyond the grasp of words.

We all know what time is, even if we can’t put it into words. And that might just be enough to get by.

But if asking “what is time?” is beyond us, how can we show that we all understand time?

We can all understand the effect that time brings about.

                                    Change.                                  Things change over time.

Now take Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance 1980-1981. A man with a clock in a room who would punch the clock every hour for an entire year, which would cause a picture of him to be taken.  

He always wore the same suit.

He was always positioned on the same side of the clock.

He always kept the same facial expression.

He was always in the same room.

But he started his performance with his head clean shaven, and let his hair grow out as the year passed by. And when one looks at the images that he took of himself in a rapid slideshow it is impossible not to notice the spinning handles of the clock, a motion that has come to symbolize the passage of time for any individual that knows how to read a clock with handles, as well as to many others who don’t.

To me, the elements of the piece are in conflict.

Firstly, we can “see” time passing by (or at least a quasi-universal symbol of it). Secondly, we can see it’s effect in Hsieh: his hair growing out. Thirdly, his position is not always perfectly the same; when watching the slideshow in rapid succession we can see that he shifts position, which is a reassuring sign that the pictures are real. Fourthly, he actually missed punching the clock 133 times. (http://www.tehchinghsieh.com/)                     All these elements reassure us of the passing of time. We see change, the principal effect of time on us. And we can see that Hsieh the human is still unable to really keep up with time. His piece is not perfectly clean. He missed punches. He isn’t always in the same exact place. This is because he too gets tired. 94 out of the 133 times he missed punching the clock were because he was asleep. (http://www.tehchinghsieh.com/) Just how I’ve been late to class because I oversleep, Hsieh was late to punch his clock because he overslept. He is human too! He too is unable to fully capture time!...

In a sense, the piece is about Hsieh’s struggle against time. A struggle that we all feel, against this “thing” that we cannot see, feel, hear, or fully comprehend. And yet it binds our life. We cannot keep it from moving forward. And if we don’t keep up, it’ll leave us behind. Only that you cannot be behind, because time is always sweeping you along. Only that because you haven’t kept up, you are in an uncomfortable position. Sort of like losing your balance on the metro because you aren’t able to hold onto anything. Or like falling asleep in the metro and missing your station, and being in a worse position because of it. No matter how hard Hsieh tried to keep up with punching the clock every single hour, no matter the fact that “to [him] […] art is not like a career, it’s [his] life” (https://vimeo.com/16280427) he still did not succeed in fully avoiding the fundamental challenge that time poses to us: that we must always keep moving.

But then there’s the conflict.

Things in Hsieh’s piece do not always change.

His costume. His face. His orientation from the clock. The room.

Time does not change these things.

He has succeeded in taming time, even if just a little bit.

I said that Hsieh did not succeed in avoiding the fundamental challenge of time, but maybe that was not his main objective.

Many things in Hsieh’s piece represent change, time in motion.

Many things in Hsieh’s piece also represent permanency, time in stillness.

The permanency is just as important as the change. They are both things that affect the way we see time. While nothing is permanent and neither Hsieh nor I are trying to state that, there is a certain element of the eternal that exists in the way we capture time. “La pasión eterna que duró unos días.” (Las Rosas de Ayer, Astor Piazzolla)

As soon as we experience a moment it has entered our memory, and that too is an important part of how we perceive time. The permanency of things gives us a sense that bodies are more than still images of a given instant. They remain through time. And so things that remain for a long time feel as if they will remain forever. “Nothing lasts forever” I heard somebody say somewhere. But that doesn’t mean we can’t believe it will. It isn’t conflicting with our observations, even if it is conflicting with logic, to assume that something may last forever.

            And so, the fact that several elements of Hsieh’s performance remain constant gives us a sense that that is the way things had always been. It can be easy to imagine that Hsieh – or at least the Hsieh in the images from the performance – had always existed in that room and will always remain there. It does not change with time. Maybe for the universe it will. Maybe we know it eventually did change. But in the moment, some things simply seem permanent, and it is not until we decide to consciously think about their end that we realize that nothing is eternal.

            Except for time.

                        Whose handles just keep looping and looping.

                                    Promising that the next day will come.

                                               That the next hour will come.

                                                           That there’s a future.

                                               That the handles will keep looping around the clock.

                                    And that we will keep moving through time.

                        For even if we change.

            Our existance remains.