Chronos & Kairos
chaos at the heart hospital
I learned today (really, weeks ago now; I was poolside at the time, whereas this morning, similarly reclined, I’ve shed my lavender, ribbed two-piece for a cotton one, quite chocolate in color) that there’s an emoji on my phone, one I never use, that’s not what I thought it was.
Let’s begin again.
An emoji on my phone that I never use, one of many that I never use, is not what I thought it was. There are more emojis than I can think of, more than I ever wish to need, and very many more than I would remember to use in the flow of regular conversation.
Today (the before) I learned that one particular emoji, one I have actually seen and passed over, like a [metaphor], wasn’t what I thought it was in casual scrolling, and I was surprised by what turns out to be because I don’t know people using it that way. I don’t know if people are using it that way and I’m in the dark because they knew what it was and I didn’t. Perhaps people are not using it correctly, or perhaps they are using it regularly, but with the meaning I’d ascribed, and thus: wrong, in which case, futile.
It’s one of the buildings, a tower building, with windows that I think are blue, and it has the letter H in pink on top. I think the building is pink also, but the letter is darker, and there’s a pink heart floating above, and it might be a balloon. The above-heart might be a balloon. There is no greenery outside, like a(n emoji) house. I thought this was a hospital. Not quite a heart hospital, but a place of repair, from which you’d leave feeling loved or cared about. I read it as “all better.”
(This morning, I’ve gone back to look at this emoji and now I wonder if I’ve ever seen it at all. I couldn’t possibly have, although I know I scroll past the houses quite frequently in particular because something I use lives nearby, probably magic or space. I know this emoji completely, knew it instantly, and yet, maybe really never have seen it before.)
Now, (then) I learned it is “Love Hotel.” Not even “Love Doctor,” which I would have accepted on principle because it’s, like, an actual phrase I’ve heard anyone say fucking ever. But, no. Love Hotel. As verified by an emoji glossary. I don’t like this as much.
I’m not sure I like this at all.
I’m keen to swallow up the horrific, the massive, the epic, the sweeping and call it ‘life.’ Grief and bellowing by the side of the road and scars everlasting I can take in stride, but these minor insignificances brutalize me. The paper cuts of life wound me endlessly for they seem the busy work of humans in the face of such monstrous, unending humanity. It seems more administrative than necessary to be present.
I mean to say: I’ve yet to figure out why, when life gives every lesson, we make so many more.
I should update the description of after/hours. I think I’m providing a [noun] of sorts, but is it a place or thing? (And have I always been capitalizing? It seems quite formal, to me, for me.) Regardless, the description of this should include “lots of thoughts on time.”
That is, after all, what’s happening now. Again. As ever.
The Greeks, who were theorizers if nothing else, bisected concepts of time: chronos and kairos; the former the old standby, the familiar, time as measurement, as uniform. Importantly, its time as serial order, as quantity of duration. The latter isn’t quite polarized; not definitively binary are they, but juxtaposed. Kairos is charged time, significant time, as promised time. Not predictable. Time that saturates time/s, full time, a kind of pending, fulfilled time, to be made anew through change or even rupture, where what follows is unlike what preceded.
Paul Chan writes/makes things I quite like sometimes. Case in point:
At a glance kairological artworks look no different than other works. They use the same materials and show in the same shows. They say and mean nothing in particular. But is is how they say it (and mean it) that sets them apart. They embody a desperate immanence, as if what is given is not good enough but will have to do. They seize time the way a beat holds a song, to evoke the vertiginous feeling of seeing something emerge by being made and unmade at the same instant. They last as experiences by not staying whole as forms. They radiate an inner irreconcilability about what they are and what they want to be with serious and unrestrained abandon, which is as close as it comes to an honest insight about the plight of living today. This radiance is what makes them pleasurable. Lively.
And this. They break time out of joint.
Sometimes I’d watch Esther in the hallways. Her hair refrained the verse that you pin where the curl wants to move, you dance with it. All twist and observe and secure, in fluid motion. I’d watch her watching, gliding, armored in A-line thrifts and button-downs of contrasting patterns, a slow and measured dah dah dah across the wood-paneled floor of the old New Orleans school. I’d watch her, eyes unblinking, presence just so, held, unflinching, almost perched, like an owl might be; her eyes didn’t settle, exactly, as if her gaze held electric force, and so it pulsated. Held, for a moment, and then she’d alight. There was a manner. Hers was a way of tutelage. Of being at one with preparing. She was peerless.
Kairos. The flash in which a spirit catches a glimpse of itself, like a shock in reverse – love at first sight. Kinship. Sisterhood. Big breaths of full air like learning to swim, like taking flight, like catching stars, like touching lava. Being there. Bright white toothy grinning being there. Alive. Alive together.
This season of quiet has been one of exhumation; I’m unburying my sister-friend. I write to her in studio sculptures and see her in every color and draw the shape of time’s broken joint across beaches, choreographing a future archive, and I don’t know if I’m meant to. That is, she wasn’t mine and all claim I lay on my love for her guts is shared amongst a bevy of women and hundreds of students and a widow and his new family and her people & amongst all else who loved and soaked and were comforted and schooled and emboldened and, just, I guess, engulfed by her gaze and immanence and unmaking and irreconcilability.
I mean to say, summer reeks of the unbearable. The unsustainable. It screams of sweltering, floating liminality; like getting a cavity filled and suspecting you’ll stay numb forever only to forget the familiarity of feeling when it returns. She cannot last.
I’m never more aware of my grief and grievances than pressed against the slow and supple deliciousness of summer’s taunting unendurable eternity. Every paper cut ruinous, every cold drink miraculous, death everywhere you look, chaos animating sunsets, the heat of unbearable being refracting off every surface, my weary body included. These are not complaints; or, these are the last gasps of summer’s extremities — melancholy everywhere, and all of us on the brink.
Chicago was categorically brilliant; what follows are some notes that I’m willing/wanting to share:
interrogate the sublime.
first permission/s;
What’s between + beyond unspeakable v. unsayable?
“I want to, but cannot separate…”
What is our persistent shock with the depths of human horror?
Sobo Glue (16 oz.)
irreconcilable, incomplete, indistinguishable, irreducible;
scent, scent, smell;
Is there a groovy unspeakable?
“Confusion gets a bad rap.”
Meanwhile, days of burning air and monument-building to my rotting sister-friend and schlepping and delighting and toggling some egregiousness against instances of magic; the audacity of juxtaposition, the hilarity of summer, her improbability, how precise her aim to my guts.
I don’t know.
Hello, hello, I am alive. I am very alive, tingling even, and reveling, grieving, wielding my aliveness like a heaving tool. I am alive and hurling my aliveness against others haphazardly, messily, brilliantly. Sometimes at walls. At bodies. At air, at ether, at water, at space, at time, at temperature, at feeling, at idea.
Hello, hello. I am thick with unpromised, invisible aliveness and third drafts and I am very tanned, nearly caramel, despite a summer half-buried beneath the fluorescent promise of studio machinations, which is such a relief because I couldn’t afford another hopelessly long, high-yellow winter. Anyway, I work better soaked in my own sweat from my own chaos with all my own edits. I like my supple belly full and filled and my bed is mostly made and we keep kicking underwear and stacks of black and whites to the floor as it is, so hello, I am alive and nearly gagging on it and replete in this two-pronged circus act we call miraculous witness, and I’m gonna let my seasonal shade fade out on the back of my voice’s return.
Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello. To whom and wherefore and whence and why and yes yes yes. I am alive, and it seems interminable and somehow perilous, and what splendor. What merriment. What ache. What oddity. What abject confusion.
I am alive and women I love are not. Many hundreds of souls I’ve never known or always imagined or maybe dreamt or purely manifested or totally, literally worked with and befriended and fucking miss daily are not. I’m just alive and twisting days and making making making my very loud work silently.
Anyway, I am dreaming of a very yellow, exceptionally crisp tomato sandwich I ate two weeks ago at a block party. I ate it with bacon from a home-raised and slaughtered pig and I don’t know if that’s better or merely Virginian. I also had mayo, pepper, and salt + vinegar chips on homemade bread. Quiet, cacophonous ease all around, and gargantuan earthly, bodily, sacrificed deliciousness abounds, and me, steadily alive — I’m sure there’s a lesson in that.
All this to say, I wish you some silence. I wish you some distance. I wish you not knowing where they ended and you began. I wish you long lists of what seizes your attention and chasing after that, shadow in tow. I wish you time time time, however it lands across your doorstep. I wish you a love doctor.
Hello, I am alive, and out here living. It has been good to be seen and to be seeing.
Until next time, (a)live, from the heart hospital, xx Adrienne