The Physics of Crip Time and imagining a better Time - Anna Starkey
Shadows Loop by Anna Starkey, January 2024
What does time mean to me? It’s mystical and existential. Fascinating, frustrating, full of questions. Thinking about time lifts me out of trivial daily nonsense and problems. It feels floaty, expansive.
I can tell you a bit about time informed by my rusty old physics degree, and how it doesn’t really exist. Not like we imagine it does anyway. My watch on my wrist where I’m writing this in Bristol will be running slower than your watch if you’re reading this in La Paz at 3.6km above sea level. There’s a different time at pretty much every point in the universe. I like the wobbly feeling of trying to wrap my brain around this.
Universal time steadily ticking by is not a thing. That’s just a clock. We confuse the medium for the message. Or vice versa. The mechanisms and objects we’ve invented to keep track of time, are really only keeping track of one thing changing in relation to another thing, and neither of those things are really time itself - like the Earth moving around the Sun, or the motion of water, sand or a pendulum in a gravitational field.
Whether it’s intricate mechanical movements or miniscule atomic oscillations, however beautiful and brilliantly conceived these ‘timekeeping’ objects are, and how convincingly accurately they ‘tell us the time,’ it’s still one of those things that if you stop to really think about it or try to describe what it is, it vaporises and vanishes. Like trying to describe the colour blue to someone without referencing other things that are blue.
And yet somehow, we’ve managed to flatten and strangle this wonderful concept of time. We’ve squished it into spreadsheets to measure productivity against it and we use it to exert power and control over others. And when I say we, I mean dominant capitalist culture. The thing we’re really keeping track of when we say we’re measuring time, is ourselves. Or more precisely, people that the system wants to control.
I could also tell you about time informed by my body, living in the ‘crip time’ * of chronic illness.
I have fallen out of Time. Or at least, I have fallen into a different sort of Time from most people around me. I am floating away from the hands of the capitalist clock, and from the values assigned to our bodies primarily as sites for work. According to the dominant cultural temporality, I am slow. Slow to get up in the morning, slow to shower, slow to reply to your email, slow to get up the stairs. Some days I am so slow, none of this happens at all. And this culture hates slow. If you look it up in the thesaurus, nearly all the words associated with slow are negative - lazy, unwilling, hindering, tedious. Why? Could slow not also be interesting or stimulating? Has the Thesaurus never laid on its back in the grass and watched a cloud slowly morph in the sky, or had all the cinematic feels watching an epic slow motion sequence in a film?
Sea Sparkles Loop by Anna Starkey, January 2024
Interestingly, crip time has plunged me deep into the physics of time, where I find it reassuring to be reminded that I’m part of a universe where everything is relative, and where we might not even need time to be written into our fundamental equations at all. For me, crip time is an embodied experience of scientific reality - where multiple temporalities; cosmic, planetary, geological, biological, overlap, flow in and out of each other and loop round in cycles, co-existing, just Be-ing. Except of course it’s incredibly hard to just Be in the twisted version of time of the society I live in. It is literally Do or die. The irony of this is the Earth doesn’t need a mechanism for the financial markets to open with nanosecond accuracy, any more than I need a clock to tell me what my body needs. And yet the two things that the dominant temporality brutally excludes, are the needs of Earth and our bodies - the most precious things we have and our only means of being and staying alive.
Language is so powerful in shaping perceptions and re-enforcing behaviours and ideas. So in my slow time, I’m wondering, what if we could rewrite the language of time? And what happens if we use this reclaimed language to tell different stories. Chronic illness uncomfortably challenges the way we in Western culture have been conditioned to respond to the temporality of stories. There’s no clear progression over linear time, no neat ending - neither tragically expiring nor heroically ‘battling’ a disease to recover.
Ursula K Le Guin’s essay on the Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction so brilliantly observes our conditioning to the Hero’s narrative, and offers us alternate containers, carrier bags, for the type of stories we can tell. I love it, I come back to it all the time (ha!) and it’s amazing how much of her essay could be a manifesto for remaking our lives to be better for everyone. Interestingly, she places Time central to this, suggesting we need to avoid “the linear, progressive, Time's-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic.”
“Because the good news is, we’ve entirely made time up. So we can re-imagine it.”
Crip time and the physics of time point to the potential for re-imagining our lives with different values of time. Professor Keri Facer has written about the need to ‘sensitise our temporal imaginations’ in order to open up new possibilities, enliven our attention and provide the type of education we need for navigating the climate crisis. This phrase makes me want to jump into slow action and invite people in to explore this together.** Because the good news is, we’ve entirely made time up. So we can re-imagine it.
Time as we experience it is a technology rather than a fundamental part of the Universe.
Dr Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
So if a technology is something that humans create from the knowledge we have, to address a specific human need, then let’s remake this technology to serve our current, urgent need, to live better with our planet and each other. And let’s include everyone, enable our collective temporal imaginations - the slowest of us, the horizontal beings, the indifferent and the fastest.
What if we could build clocks that measure different sorts of things that change against other things, to serve a new need, to be containers for time decoupled from endless productivity? We could track how kindness ebbs and flows between full moons, have a second hand that ticks every time someone is generous, look to more than human intelligence to shape new timepieces with dimensions beyond our current imaginative boundaries - anyone got the octopus time?
What does time mean to me? Possibility. Hope. We have a chance for it to be reassuring, change making, liberating.
‘Crip’ is a term that some of the activist disabled community are reclaiming. ‘Crip time’ is a name for the disabled experience of time. With endless thanks to artist Raquel Meseguer Zafe and the Cloudspotters Cafe crew for creating a space where my slow self can learn and listen and try out crip time thoughts with others.
* I’m slowly developing ideas for art experiments that might sensitise our temporal imaginations and thinking about what a Slow Show might be, an exhibition to refresh our relationship with time. Plenty of cultures around the world live in very different relationships to time, with much wisdom to look to - and there are slow movements, in food, film, design - what if we could bring all this together…. Get in touch if you’re interested and I will see how slowly I can reply to your email…