The Spark Crew - December: Playing with time (01)

An invitation to experiment, to learn, to create

This post is for paying subscribers but I’ve done my best to be generous, and hopefully not too frustrating, with the preview. The Spark Crew is an interdisciplinary community for folks who want to expand their creative practice while gently stretching their comfort zones. It’s led by me, Christina Golian, a Scotland-based writer, coach and positive psychology practitioner, with a penchant for poetry, sloths and 90s power ballads.

If you missed the first instalment (The Spark Crew launched on Substack in November), you can catch up here (Ideas & inspiration - part 1 - this one is available to all subscribers to let you see what it’s all about) and here (Conversations & creations - part 2 - this is for paying subscribers as we’re creating an intimate space within which to share our words and artwork).

And if you’re thinking, this sounds fun / interesting / slightly scary, and you’d like to join our cosy space, you can become a paid subscriber via the link below. I’d love to welcome you in!

Photo by Jiroe (Matia Rengel) on Unsplash

Today time can be measured with precision. But this was not always the case. Long before accurate time-pieces were invented, writers and artists were fascinated by notions and experiences of time. As we still are today.

Literature and art are peppered with time-based symbolism. From the White Rabbit’s pocket watch in Alice and Wonderland to Salvador Dali’s melting clocks. This year’s Booker Prize winner, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital is set on the International Space Station (ISS) and takes place over the course of 24 hours. Time moves differently for the ISS crew, with 16 sunrises and sunsets experienced in this time. The novella’s structure reflects this, with each chapter marking one orbit of the earth. Meanwhile, the knowledge that we are running out of time to reverse the devastating impact of climate change, drips through the pages.

Time can be a theme, a structure, a constraint, a contradiction. It can be deep or fleeting, Chronos or Kairos. It is relative. We’ve all clock watched, feeling the painful drag of the minute hand, mentally willing it to move faster.

In psychology and neuroscience, time perception studies explore our experience and awareness of the passage of time. During flow experiences, when we are deeply engaged with an enjoyable yet challenging task, the texture of time changes. I remember scuba diving in Thailand and being surprised when the instructor indicated that it was time to surface. What felt like just a few minutes, in which I marvelled at clownfish and experienced the awe of stingrays, was in fact closer to an hour.

During the days of Covid lockdown, time took on a different tone. Without the usual markers and events - days out, time spent socialising with loved ones, trips to new places - the weeks and months began to blur. Artist and writer, Jenny Odell describes this phenomenon as “temporal weirdness”. In Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock she argues for a move away from the destructive corporate clock and towards a more humane and more hopeful concept of time:

“Maybe ‘the point’ isn’t to live more, in the literal sense of a longer or more productive life,” she writes, “but rather, to be more alive in any given moment.”

(Extract from Saving Time by Jenny Odell review – clocking off by Rebecca Liu, published in The Guardian.)

The passing of time formed the basis of a powerful piece by Taiwan-born artist, Tehching Hsieh. Based in New York in the 1970s, he created year-long performance pieces including Time Clock Piece (One Year Performance 1980–1981). Described by The Tate as a “physically and mentally gruelling” work, it involved punching a time clock every hour for a year.

Our orientation towards time is influenced by the cultures we experience. Some of us spend too much time in the past, others living for the future. Sometimes we ponder when we would travel to, if presented with a time machine. And whether it would irreconcilably alter everything if we course-corrected history. Like the ISS on its endlessly orbiting course, the big questions keep circling. Did Back to the Future get it right?