The Shape of Time

https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-shape-of-time/

“HERE’S MY THEORY,” I say, sitting on my heels in between rows of cabbage seedlings. “Time isn’t shaped like a line. It moves in one direction, maybe, but that’s all the line has going for it. I think time is iterative, nonlinear, subjective. Maybe it’s shaped like a river, a thing that flows and branches, you know? It has tributaries, goes at different paces, gets caught in eddies and whirlpools. Or maybe it’s tree rings. Or onion layers.”

It’s midsummer, and we’re seeding our last succession of cabbage, their plump predecessors yanked from the earth just the week before. Twelve generations of cabbage will live and die over each other here this season on our campus farm, and I’m thinking about the shape of time again.

Meg laughs, grabs a fistful of compost, and lets it fall into the hole I’m digging. She’s heard this rant enough times before, though I’m not sure I’ve convinced her. I’ve got a small audience, though, undergrad farm crew members to whom I haven’t yet proselytized the queerness of time. I’m on a post-structuralist metaphysical mission trying to tangle timelines into friendship bracelets, dirt under my nails, and daddy longlegs in my bra.

“I think it’s probably a spiral,” Annie says as she passes, dropping young seedlings into their freshly made beds. She thinks each new season feels closer to the year before than it does the season before, summers layered over summers. I think she’s probably right. I don’t say what else I’m thinking, that everything this season is happening sooner than the last, the hotter days arriving faster, the late-season crops blooming early. It feels like the spiral is tightening.

Here, at the edge of late-stage capitalism and climate catastrophe, our sense of the shape of time feels very important. We’re told it’s the end of the world, the apocalypse. And it often feels like it. I have to keep reminding myself that humans have often felt like the world was ending. I have to keep reminding myself that the world is still here.

I REMEMBER A college partner of mine who used to scoff at my eco-anxious windowsill gardening, composting, empty container–saving, machine-raging rampages. “It’s not going to change anything. We’re already past the point of no return,” he’d insist. “Why fight the inevitable?” Inevitably, we broke up. His preemptive resignation to the end of the world made it impossible to imagine a future, together or otherwise. He wanted to get a nice job at a big company, get rich enough to scrape through the worst of the disasters, to afford an apartment above the ground floor, away from rising waters. He couldn’t imagine anything else—it was the life our immigrant parents had led, the only story we had. Another ex chose nihilism over resignation, stayed in his room and got stoned, watched cartoons, and ignored the rising stormwaters outside his window. I’m pretty sure he’s still there.

I find myself resistant to this brand of Doomer Dude resignation, this vision of time as a straight line toward the inevitable end of the world. Maybe it’s a result of our generational moment—since kindergarten, we have been told our lot would be the ones to save the world, and yet the mass shootings, deadly hurricanes, global pandemics, record-breaking heat waves, acid rain, and hundred-year fires keep coming. I don’t know if I believe in saving anymore, the same way I don’t know if I believe in endings. And of course, I am one of the lucky ones, and of course, not everyone survives, and of course, we will live until we die. But death isn’t necessarily an ending, and a world without humans is not a world without life. The future—and more important, the present—is not a fixed and immutable thing.

This isn’t to undercut the severity of our current moment—but rather, it’s an attempt to move within it without getting paralyzed. And so I make my case for a notion of time that is layered upon itself, cyclical, without end. I’m no quantum physicist, nor do I want to be, so let it be known that the time we are shaping here is largely metaphorical. How can we imagine this current moment in a way that is both honest and useful? How do we continue to sit at the edge of the end of the world?

In Hinduism, we’re currently in what’s known as the Kali Yuga, a time cycle of war and conflict, but one that will turn, like a wheel, into something new. The Wheel of Samsara turns over like a dog rolling onto his back, angling his soft white belly to the sun. Potawatomi ecologist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer suggests that, instead of a river, time might be a lake, ancestry and futurity swirling together in the same soup. As I wade deeper into the depths of adulthood and spend more time talking to people younger than me, I’ve been reaching for more language like this. I’ve been thinking about how we can talk about our future without describing a brick wall, how we can walk toward it without crumbling under its immensity.

The root of emergency is “emergence,” meaning “come through.” Come out.

Here on this farm in western Montana, we plant crops in successions. Each generation transforms the land, both feeding and consuming, adding and depleting nutrients, nourishing (and decomposing) the insects, worms, and fungi who live there. Time moves in a cycle, loops over itself, sprouting and fruiting and rotting over and over in an ecological unfolding that couldn’t stop if it tried. The cycles ebb and change as time shifts along seasonal axes. The corn, choked out by wildfire smoke, takes longer to reach its full height. Winter squash grows plump by early fall—no, late summer. We adjust our harvests accordingly. Here, time is a relational thing, entangled with everything else—carbon in the atmosphere, weather on the horizon, the tilt of the planet, your hands in the damp, dark earth.

Various interpretations of the shape of time sketched by the author, as inspired by conversations, existing text and theory, lived experience, and vibes

AND HOW DOES time feel? When you brush past a stranger and they smell like the first person you ever loved, and suddenly you’re back in that high school gymnasium and your heart has never been so full, raw, unbroken? When you pass by the house you used to live in, and you can practically see your old roommate on the porch, can just about smell their cigarettes, and know that some version of you is still inside, sautéing garlic on the stove, dancing to Elton John?

I picture Einstein’s diagram, the one with the big ball of matter sitting on a picnic blanket of space-time that has warped and sunk around it. Except it’s not just warping space and time and cosmological mass, but also emotional mass, like how entering your childhood bedroom sucks you into a wormhole of time and you find yourself crammed into a too-small bed with all your inner children, elbowing each other for space. How you can’t walk past that one pizza place without tearing up. We can’t move through space without getting sucked into time, meaning time has a relational component.

All this to say, time certainly doesn’t seem like a line to me. And it’s becoming clearer that the way we shape time isn’t neutral, that often our sense of time is shaped for us, by someone else.

I FIRST STUMBLED onto the idea of queer time when I read José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. “We are not yet queer,” Muñoz writes. He views queerness as a destination always just out of reach, an ever unfolding practice of becoming, a “longing that propels us onwards.” I’d never resonated with a theory-sodden piece of academic text more.

It helps that Muñoz found me amid my own coming out, or coming into myself, or however we phrase that odd churning of queerness that is never complete. I had just blown through a handful of well-intentioned, poorly executed relationships with sweet, simple boys, always finding a way to leave, always feeling like I was playing a part of someone I didn’t know, following the steps. I was confused and reaching for new stories, for a future I could not yet see.

If, as Muñoz suggests, queerness is a horizon, then perhaps it is through the act of teetering over the edge that the anticipatory hope of queer utopianism finds balance. Queerness is unable to wallow in the “here and now,” seeing it for the unstable ground that it is. “The present is not enough,” writes Muñoz. “It is impoverished and toxic for queers and other people who do not feel the privilege of majoritarian belonging.” This present can burn us, watch us crisp and crumble under the unblinking eye of an orange sun. It is affirmed and reinforced by power—the state, the market, our parents, the police—rewarding some of the ways we relate and outlawing others.

There’s a word in queer theory for these expectations—heterotemporality. Translation: straight time. The steps we ought to follow and the order we do them in. Come of age, start dating someone. Move in together, get good jobs, get engaged. Get a pet. Then a house. Kids, a white picket fence, and a tax benefit. Watch those kids grow up and do the same. Roll credits. Heterotemporality is why all the thirty-something white women in rom-coms from the 1990s (that I still secretly love) are afraid they’re unweddable, are concerned with being “weddable” at all. It’s the subtle understanding of what “settling down” means, something that, if we don’t do, we might disappoint our parents, feel ostracized from social circles, get left behind. It’s the nuclear family and all its underpinnings of gendered capitalism. A set of steps to complete to live a “successful” life.

Straight time carries (and encourages) a complex history of power and exploitation. It sees only itself in perpetuity, repeating the same track, ad infinitum, unless somehow derailed. Of course, love is love, and there is beauty to this pattern—but only and especially when it is chosen. With the knowledge that, if we wanted, we could choose something else.

There’s more than one way to measure the movement of a life through time. Life is not only a linear succession of steps, but also a tension of pluralities and contradictions, negotiations of new terrain, accidental evolutions, attempts to relate differently. All of us are reaching, becoming, unfolding, emerging. Because the present is so unstable, we must constantly balance on new ground. Standing still would mean sinking below the current.

Queer people are adept at these emergences, always coming out and coming through in myriad iterations. Many queer folks will compare coming out to a second puberty, the rush and thrill of finally feeling fully yourself, fully actualized in your own desire. As put by a social media user, “Gay culture is being a teenager when you’re thirty because your teenage years were not yours to live.” We are always having to start over, try again, try something different—and, better yet, we get to. I don’t know what that might mean to you, but to me, it meant, in the most tender and pressing voice, a small urgency that said—Cut your hair. Kiss her. Quit that job. Leave the city. Trust that feeling.

Queerness is trans-formative—the word itself meaning “to make strange, unusual, and to hold paradox”—and our odd relationship to time is just one of the ways we are constantly recharting new territory, new ways of being. The act of extracting ourselves from stories that no longer fit—that are in fact not ours at all—is a creative one, one that requires enough confidence to believe in a future beyond the language we have to shape it. We unearth new and ancient stories from the soil under our feet.

I still struggle sometimes to imagine a future outside of what I’ve been given the language for. Be it heterotemporality or the end of the world, at my most apathetic, I can only envision the future people say we’re locked into, hurtling past a tipping point into inevitable chaos. In my fear, I forget that life on Earth is long, creative, and weird. As I navigate the unfamiliar territory of being openly queer in a small town and the odd entanglements and complexities that come with it, pulling sticky slurs out of my hair like bubble gum and confusedly googling the difference between polyamory and ethical nonmonogamy in a bathroom stall on first dates, I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t be simpler to just do as I’ve been told and settle down into a simpler story. At least then there might be a clearer script. Change is terrifying, and sometimes imagining a future, even a bleak one, is more comforting than not knowing what’s coming next. Hope can be exhausting.

But that’s no way to live a life. And if the story doesn’t fit, we can change it. When I feel overwhelmed and find myself searching for different kinds of stories, I usually encounter them in ecology. I think about Mary Oliver and Alex Carr Johnson’s wild geese—migratory, seasonal, living their lives in cycles, following the light, always leaving and coming home. A life in iterations. I think of Sabrina Imbler’s immortal jellyfish aging backward, reverting to a juvenile body whenever they encounter an ailment, growing up over and over again. I feel a prickle of gratitude for all the mistakes I’ve made, watery wounds bringing me back to the start to try again. When I text my sister that I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, she replies “don’t worry, growing up is never-ending.”

I think of queerness beyond gender or sexuality, but as mutability, transition, opposition to the norm—a curiosity to try things differently, even if we can’t quite see how they will turn out. A reminder that there is no ‘out’—only turning.

WITH POLLEN ON OUR eyelashes and hands gnarled by sticky tomato resin, our queer little farm crew works. When Sage and I have a pumpkin-heaving contest, hollering and chucking gourds as far as we can toward the pigsty, we roar and yawp like the impish teenage boys we used to be afraid of, rosy-cheeked Peter Pans, triumphing over gravity. When I ask them questions about top surgery as we wash cabbages by the shed, and they tell me how they had to plan for months, be able to do fifty push-ups, and cross state lines to become the person they’ve always been, a massive grin spreads across their face. Beautiful, evolving earthling. Immortal jellyfish. Unfurling butterfly.

Different ways of being are wriggling in the dirt beneath our feet, if we dare to turn over the rocks. I think of queerness beyond gender or sexuality, but as mutability, transition, opposition to the norm—a curiosity to try things differently, even if we can’t quite see how they will turn out. A reminder that there is no “out”—only turning. Entropy, the increasing complexity of an unfolding world, is an unnerving truth, but also an exhilarating one. There’s a thrill in participating in the creation of something new.

And yeah, worlds are always ending. But there are still children. Whether or not they come from our own bodies, they are here, and they will continue to come. And someone’s gotta show them how to stick their hands in the dirt. And there’s gonna be seedlings. And tadpoles. And sunrises. And neither my grief in the way things have been going lately nor the intensity of the destruction will change this. But something has to keep us coming back to tend the same soil again each day. Hope does not need to be true for it to be useful. The sun will rise tomorrow whether or not I am there to see it, and maybe the best we can do is try to die and rot in a way that leaves something good for those coming next. There comes a time when we must get over ourselves and get on with the task of living and dying well. I believe in life after death as an ecological fact. When we rot, we feed into the endless churning of ecology, just as, when we eat, we are sustained by the deaths of others. Worms have taste buds all along their fleshy pink bodies. Other lives are pushed forward by our own delectable rot, these mutual encounters a biological chorus of creativity and generation. Endings, also, are beginnings.

One of the last things done during the fall season is garlic planting. Over the fallow and rotting corpses of a season’s harvest, and under the looming clouds of a dark winter, we kneel in the cold soil and bury bulbs to sleep under the frozen earth. When the frost breaks in spring, they’ll germinate, hopefully—the first fresh life to reach for the sun next season, alongside whoever among us is here to greet them. A queer thing, planting fresh life before the impending winter, green potential lying in wait. An anticipation of a delicious future, yet unseen, in spite of the darkness ahead.