Tracing The Curve/Erotics Of Time

Someone asked me what I would define as luxury, after a few seconds of wanting to come up with a mysteriously complex non-answer, I could basically only come up with this:

luxury is being able to spend time as you desire.

Over the past months I have noticed a shift in how I’m seeing + experiencing time. There’s been a keen awareness to the texture of it:

silky and aerated when I use it for my favourite things, sharp and abrasive when I want it to go by quicker, dense and coagulated when I am forced to lend it, elastic when I am hopeful, viscous and corrugated when I am in fear.

A lot of how I perceive time is directly linked to what my time consists of. What it holds and the weight of its constituents. And more often than not, they boil down to measurable, quantifiable activities. Actions that have tangible and real results: work, exercise, learning skills, keeping up with relationships, buying things, selling things. But what about time spent in our inner worlds? Time spent forming opinions, making judgements, building identities, dreaming.

If doing these things doesn’t yield results, does our time count? The market for time is vast and if we don’t buy into it, are we relevant?

What follows is a candid sketch of how moments in my time shaped moments of the self. We try to negotiate the texture of time with its ability to leave a lasting impact. So, the softer the better.

Some photos, links and reccs that have been circling in my thoughtmosphere:

‘The predominance of linear time is the result not of its primacy as a temporal conception but of the primacy of Western modernity that embraced it as its own. Linear time was adopted by Western modernity through the secularization of Judeo-Christian eschatology, but it never erased, not even in the West, other conceptions of time such as circular time, cyclic time, glacial time, the doctrine of the eternal return, and still others that are not adequately grasped by the images of the arrow or circle. That is why the subjectivity or identity of a given person or social group at a given moment is a temporal palimpsest. It is made up of a constellation of different times and temporalities, some modern, some not, some ancient, some recent, some slow, some fast, and they are all activated in different ways in different contexts or situations.‘

— Boaventura de Sousa Santos from Epistemologies of the South (2014), p. 176.

This post has shifted my definition and fascination with the word “eros”. It’s been sitting in my archive of saved material for a few months and it is one I find myself returning to intermittently to get a whiff of the ecstatic joy I felt when I first came in contact with this concept. The fundamental desire of matter to live, the energetic distance between all living organisms, the entire ecology of life— is eros. This poetic understanding of existence has ignited a shift in how I perceive my eyes’ lens, experience sensorial stimulus, listen to music. It’s a profound awareness of distance between myself and the world that makes me feel closer to what is around me. To understand better check out Minna Salami’s “Sensous Knowledge”.

‘From birth, and probably even before it, we experience the fundamental erotica of being touched by the world, and of touching it in return, as a life bestowing power… we long to connect to an other – be it word, skin, food or air – in order to become ourselves.’ Andreas Weber

Yoni Mudra
Below is a read you want to experience with patience and curiosity. How do spaces negotiate power? Is it problematic to associate softness with femininity? Does the curve and bend denote yielding or submissiveness?

“Architecture is not simply a platform that accommodates the viewing subject. It is a viewing mechanism that produces the subject. It precedes and frames its occupant.”

Sketches

The Intersection of Lines and Spaces: Tracing The Soft Curve of Femininity

“I am not attracted to straight angles or to the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man. I am attracted to free-flowing, sensual curves. The curves that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuousness of its rivers, in the waves of the ocean, and on the body of the beloved woman. Curves make up the entire universe, the curved unive…

2 years ago · Eleanor Ding