Out of Time (Time: The Fourth Incitement)

The other day I was dropping into Hopscotch, one of our local cafes, and as I was leaving I noticed a be-right-back Post-it Note at the ready, stuck to a bench by the door. It made me happy, not only for the blue Magic Marker, all caps, slightly crooked, though quite legible, but because it was an indication of, indeed an artifact of, a human—by which I really mean creaturely, by which I really really mean life-ly—relationship to so-called time, which is a phrase we can argue about later. The implication of the note is that, you know, the calling of nature, or a phone call, or a cigarette, is more important at this moment than my oat milk cortado with, on some special days, a dot of maple syrup. The calling of a walk around the block, or of  looking up at a power line in the cold flummoxed at the three eastern bluebirds swaying on a power line, or of, you know, a quick daydream away from the register. Away from the whir.

It’s true, I could sometimes get pissy about such notes, or about the mass-produced plastic-clock version of the be-right-back note (at X time, courteous!), especially if I’m running late for work and didn’t have time to make my own cup of coffee.

But when I am in my right mind—which, incidentally, maybe means I am not on the mind of the clock—the world of the be-right-back note, which is also the world of the words Usually or Most often or If there’s not waves or If it’s not morel season or If the runs at the court are so-so before an establishment’s hours, is the world I want to live in.

It probably goes without saying that the be-right-back note in the cafe is extra delicious (ironically delicious, I mean) given caffeine’s obvious utility to industrialized, mechanized life; i.e., “The best part of waking up” is my coffee so I can get to and tolerate and knock outta the park this miserable work, if you’re lucky eight hours of it, if you’re not, a lot more.¹ Michael Pollan’s book This Is Your Mind on Plants suggests caffeine is more instrumental—and instrumentalized—than I had previously considered, a significant part in the machine of the industrial revolution (along with greed, cruelty, slavery, empire, the theft of the commons, genocide, and a few other little things). Small evidence of which is the institution of the coffee break in factories, which helped keep workers on track, on pace, on time, on the clock. Or helped keep the clock on us.

I wonder what came first: this brutal innovation, the nonsun clock, or the Puritan adage about idle hands. Either way, there is a barbed wire tether between time and virtue, by which I mean, probably obviously, the proper usage of time in this regime, i.e., not fucking off, is considered virtuous. And why wouldn’t it be? Our bodies, maybe someone has already said this before, are cogs in a machine that can’t stop won’t stop, and to step out of cogness— which means, often, simply stepping out of time, or rather, out of productive time (e.g., sacks of cotton per day—You come from these people? Probably you do, one way or another)—is in fact an assault on capitalism; and capitalism is an assault on life, that’s putting it mildly, so it seems to me we ought to follow this thread a little more.

When I mentioned to my friend Bernardo that I was going to write about joy, he suggested I do an essay on the hang,² by which he means hanging out with no discernible purpose or goal, with no discernible end in sight. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that the conclusion of the hang will be bodily—having to eat or sleep—or relational—Gotta go home to make dinner for my lady—or even earthly—Damn, it’s getting dark and I’m on my bike, I better go, but before I do, lord, these fireflies. Yo, have you ever heard Nina’s version of George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord”? C’mon, let’s do that first, put it on the record player, it was Don’s, you won’t believe this.

Let me tell you, I know few people as good at the hang as Bernardo. When dude sits down on our porch, sometimes after we’ve worked out, sometimes after we’ve played ball, sometimes after we’ve gone over some poems, he will cross his legs and topple into the first of several stories. It is a study in associational narrative logics, and the last thing he’s thinking about, I have to tell you this, is that you or he maybe has to be somewhere. The last thing he’s looking at is his watch. Everyone’s got everything to do, but when you drop into the hang, that’s all there is to do. Or, how my (Filipino) friend Patrick Rosal says in his tract “On the Lateness of Filipinos,” “Flavor is a function of time.” ³

If I told that to my mother, whose eightieth birthday it is today (happy birthday, Mom!), if I said, Man, this dude can stretch out into time, through time, this is one clockless motherfucker (I am sorry to confess I am now a guttermouth even in the presence of my dear now-octogenarian mother), I guarantee you she would say something along the lines of, or maybe verbatim, must be nice. Inside that apparently benign phrase—mind you, she is now retired, and the only clock she is on has to do with her grandchildren, her walk at the Y, and whatever TV show she can’t miss, there are several, whoever is now Charles Kuralt is one of them, whoever Falcon Crest another, one of the eight shows about solving murder cases, terrordome news, the Philadelphia Eagles—is her own experience of being, until she retired, always on the clock. And the clock always on her.

Although it’s true my mother grew up on a farm, where the clock was the needs of the system, which included dairy cows and chickens and hogs and corn and alfalfa, feeding and milking and calving and weaning and egging and slaughtering and combining, which also included harvesting rhubarb and strawberries and cherries and raspberries and chokecherries and apples, and involved getting in your onions and potatoes and leeks and spinach and lettuce and squash and then harvesting your onions and potatoes and leeks and lettuce and squash, all of which is to say although she came up on a more seasonal, a more earthly  time, she spent her adult life on the factory or factory-adjacent clock, she was always getting her hours in, extra hours now so in summer she could take a few hours off on Friday, or Saturday hours for which she was paid a few bucks more so maybe she could afford a week off to see her folks, who were retired now from the farm and living in town, with a beautiful garden, probably more flowers this time around.⁴

The last five months of my father’s life, my mother has now let me know, she was constantly terrified of being fired, and she was constantly terrified she was going to get sick (and fired)—the company she worked for was, hard to believe, I know, in a period of downsizing, rearranging, cutting the fat, outsourcing, excising—because she was the one with good insurance, and they needed the insurance. She knew what we all know, which is that worrying about getting sick, and worrying about what you will do if you get sick, will make you sick. And so she worked as many hours as she could: she went in early, she came home late, she even worked overtime, not only to prove she was worth their time, she was devoted, a devotee to their clock, but as a way to bank hours for when my father would be convalescing, recovering, which did not happen. His time ran out while my mother gave her time to the factory.

And believe me, my dad would’ve done the same thing, because though that dude enjoyed a glass of wine or a truly doofy movie or an Eagles game or gently and patiently caramelizing an onion for something he was going to feed to people he loved, being broke-ish as he was, he was also always looking for clocks to get on. I hate to admit, but when kids who live where there exist lawns are broke in the summer, I’m like, Yo, go mow a lawn. Or if kids where there exists snow are broke in the winter, I’m like, Yo, go shovel a walk or a driveway. The adjoining clause is and get out of my face with that shit. Partly because that’s who I come from. Just like my mom, my father worked his main job sixty or so hours a week, on top of which, just like my mother, he had a paper route. When I was talking to my mother about delivering newspapers, she exhaled hard and said, “Quitting that stupid route was the happiest day of my life.”

Which perhaps explains the difficult conversation my old man and I once had—though it was but one example in a genre of conversation between us—the summer after my first year of college, when I was living with them for the break, and had taken over for the summer my father’s paper route (this was in exchange for them covering my car insurance), which he had taken over from me. But first: as my mother always reminds me, and makes me proud of myself when doing so, although I received a real-life $750 four-year college scholarship from the Bucks County Courier Times for my nearly a decade of service, aside from my stick-to-it-iveness, I was in my mother’s opinion the single worst paperboy in the history of the occupation. Not because I didn’t get the papers mostly there mostly on time, but because—and this got my folks’ goat—I treated the route like an ATM, and only collected when I needed gummy bears or money for the arcade or comic books or a new skateboard, etc. I was undiligent, disorganized, and trifling. I probably did not collect all the money owed me, but I always had spending money for the movies. I did not want to be the richest paperboy. I wanted enough for A Nightmare on Elm Street and Twizzlers.

Anyhow, I came home, and though I was working forty hours as a lifeguard, some other gig came up, another sixteen hours at a pool or something, maybe it was twelve, which I declined. Forty was enough for me by far, besides I was putting in work at the gym, hours, training for football, which was the way I paid for my higher education—pumping iron, speed workouts, playing catch, readying myself to endure and dish out all those subconcussive blows to the head. When my father caught wind of this money left on the table, these hours unutilized, he kind of lost his mind. Why I have retained the precise scene and setting of the conversation, I do not know, but it is summer, my father is returning from work, dark blue polyester pants, a light blue button up shirt with a tiny red lobster on the breast pocket, coming into the house as I am on my way out to play basketball. Perhaps it’s a threshold conversation. Anyway, as I am holding the ball on my hip, T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, the super big and a tad droopy shorts we wore at the time, my kicks still unlaced, my father tells me, per the hours, loud, disgusted—I swear I am not paraphrasing—that I am going to be a beach bum, and that your little friends are not going to come hang out with you when you’re a beach bum, when you’re a bum living on the beach. And as though to punctuate, because my mother came across a used condom in the trash can in my room and surely bent his ear about it, he slams the gavel on his prophecy with and don’t be fucking in the house! ⁵

Who could blame them? (Not about the condom: that was weird.) I mean about me not taking every possible gig, every hour of remunerable labor, not paying now with my time so that in the future, in the future ... in the future ... wait a sec. In the future what? Oh, I remember. We’re operating inside the religion of Capitalism, whose gospel is that there is not enough.⁶ Capitalism preaches the gospel of scarcity and, as such, demands we see scarcity everywhere. And if scarcity is nowhere to be found, it will be imposed. Among those imposed scarcities—of health, of food, of clean water, of adequate shelter, of comfort, of community, of meaning, of a future—is that of time. And to believe otherwise—in enough, say; in abundance, say; in gratitude, say; in the unmitigated, unbounded hang, say!—makes you blasphemous. Or a heathen. Or a criminal. Or out of your goddamned mind.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard conversations about W. H. Auden’s famous line from his poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”: “poetry makes nothing happen.” I have been to panels titled such, where people have hand-wringing conversations about the political utility of poetry. You know, Can poetry be an agent of change? Can poetry interrupt a regime? Can poetry bring the masses into the streets to shut this thing down? Always invoked in these conversations are Neruda, whose poems, even the long ones, coal miners in Chile could recite. Or some Russian poets who filled stadiums because the people needed it, it was under the brutal repression of communism, etc. Seems to me those poets and attendees would’ve been sent to Siberia, or the gulag, but I guess that’s not the point. The point everyone insists on, desperately, is Wrong, W. H., poetry makes something happen!

At some point, probably I heard someone else say it,⁷ it occurred to me that all these poets, and all these conversations, were misreading Auden’s line, and that he was really talking about (inasmuch as a poem is him talking about something) what poetry makes, the sometimes product or effect or wake or artifact of poetry, of a poem. Granted the line feels emphatic, grand, provocative even—seriously, I can’t tell you how many tweed-jacketed refutations to Auden’s line I have endured; no one has ever explained to me the elbow patch—but what the line makes made is not nothing, but nothing happening. Or rather, nothing happening. The happening it makes is nothing. In other words, a poem, or poetry, can stop time, or so-called time at least. First of all, what a good reminder it is that a poem is an action, and as Auden has it, a powerful one, too. Secondly, and not for nothing, this is one of the suite of poems Auden wrote in the late thirties and early forties, a period when one might have wanted so-called time—the clock, the airplanes, the trains, the perfectly diabolical synchronous goosestep rhythm of time itself—to stop.

Unless of course you were the regime or IBM or Bayer or the arms manufacturers or the munitions makers or the other companies profiting from the slaughter—more sales more slaughter more sales more slaughter more sales ⁸ —unless you were among the prophets and profiteers of progress, which so often is another word for murder (albeit sometimes murder outsourced), you, too, might’ve been praying for a way to stop the march of so-called time, and poems, sometimes, might do that. Poems are made of lines, which are actually breaths, and so the poem’s rhythms, its time, is at the scale and pace and tempo of the body, the tempo of our bodies lit with our dying. And poems are communicated, ultimately, body to body, voice to ear, heart to heart.⁹ Even if those hearts are not next to one another, in space or time. It makes them so. All of which is to say a poem might bring time back to its bodily, its earthly proportions. Poetry might make nothing happen. Inside of which anything can happen, maybe most dangerously, our actual fealties, our actual devotions and obligations, which is to the most rambunctious, mongrel, inconceivable assemblage of each other we could imagine.

You ever been on a dance floor like that? Ever on a basketball court like that? Ever in the long sweaty collaborative dream of an orchard like that? Ever in a study group like that? A potluck? Ever a forest? Ever a garden? Ever a conversation? A classroom? Ever an impromptu rendition of Shai’s “If I Ever Fall in Love”? Ever a Hula Hoop gang? Ever when making applesauce from the apples from your beloved neighbor’s tree? Ever when trying to get the steps from the video of New Edition’s “If It Isn’t Love”? Ever on your roller skates? Your skateboard? Ever making love? Ever at a laying on of hands? Ever in a dream?

Probably I do not need to tell you, but resting inside that nothing (happening), inside those idle hands, maybe dormant, maybe like seeds needing fire to germinate, in this case the fire of hanging out unregulatedly and off the clock, is meaning. We mostly dream, I’m saying, off the clock. And our dreams, well—it’s always good to re-remember Audre Lorde, whose brood we are: “Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed them the real food without which their dreams will be no different than ours?”

I think we all know what the fake food is. But the dream? Who knows?! That’s the point!!

But I suspect it might have something to do with who used to be your coworker, but who became in a sliver of nothing happening, a crack in the clock, your co-dreamer, with whom you together stuck the be-right-back note on the door, which was a lie, for you will never be. And were so kind as to leave the door open on your way.

Bye-bye!

____

¹ I worked a spell for my father at the Burger King he managed in Feasterville, PA, when I was about sixteen or seventeen. If I remember correctly, I was paid about $6.25 an hour in 1990 or 1991, which is one dollar less than the minimum wage today, over thirty years later—to remind you: I was sixteen, living at home, without children, my bills paid. I scraped up gum, washed oil from the asphalt, got the dust from the vents, cleaned the bathrooms, and when I could, after stacking the cups and Whopper wrappers in the storage shed, made of those boxes a nook in which I napped. We left for work by 5 a.m., in the dark, and, in addition to lighting a cigarette the second he walked out the door of our house, the glowing embers of which I watched from the back seat of the car—my station was neither privilege nor punishment; that car’s front passenger door didn’t open—my father dipped into the same Dunkin’ Donuts, without turning the engine off, or the radio, blathering early-stage sports radio, for a large coffee, light and sweet. Every single time.↩︎

² A synonym for which is visiting, and it’s how an old-timer who grew up with my mother and showed up at a reading of mine said it as he was telling me afterward about my mother and her folks. My mom was best friends with his big sister, he delivered milk to my grandparents when they lived out on the farm. They’d call him in to have a cup of coffee. It went on a bit. And as he was noticing, and enjoying, the memories and stories emerging—it looked to me like lights turning on in a building with many windows—he said to me: “You know, Ross, you forget the stories until you start visiting like this.”↩︎

³ Or how, in my favorite chapter in one of my favorite books, Gene Smith’s Sink, by Sam Stephenson, the jazz drummer Ronnie Free’s life story is recounted, mostly in his own words. In this feat of lyric archival work Stephenson, scouring the thousands and thousands of hours of audio tapes that photographer W. Eugene Smith made in his famous “Jazz Loft” during 1957–1965, found a conversation with Smith, Free, the saxophonist Zoot Sims, and the pianist Bill Potts. They all get to talking shit and start teasing Free for moving in and staying a loooooong while. Sims/Potts (to Smith [about Free]): “He’s been with you all the time, man?” Smith: “Ever since I made the mistake of inviting him in for a couple of hours.” Potts: “Then he stayed for a few years, huh?” To which Free responds, “Shit, I ain’t got no watch.”↩︎

⁴ My grandmother Alyce died in a car accident in 1995, but it was clear to all of us (I think) that she was developing dementia or Alzheimer’s, a disease, incidentally, that, in my grandma’s case anyway, seemed to disrupt so-called time in that she asked the same question again and again, so what happened in time for some of us—a question, a conversation, an appointment, a car ride—did not seem to happen for her. Maybe because her relationship to so-called time in this way was changing, and because my relationship to her was also consequently changing (i.e., I saw, without saying so, the writing, a shitstorm of writing, on the wall; i.e., I imagined and feared her drawn-out and awful demise; i.e., maybe I partly thought it a mercy), it was not until two decades later that it sunk all the way in that my grandmother—one of the most important people in my life: we spent summers with her; we walked in the woods with her; she got kicked out of our games arguing with umps; she cooked for us anything we wanted anytime we wanted it, including donuts; she pulled my ear hard when she found me pulling Spot’s ear hard, as a wordless Golden Rule; she took us to see the old farmhouse, the gardens; she threw hard and loved to play catch; she adored us and we her—was killed in a car accident, T-boned by some poor kid who blew the stop sign on one of the country roads, which Shorty and Alyce always drove, they wanted to see how high the corn or if it was tasseling, they wanted to see what the Anderson’s crop looked like, they had to check on some gopher traps, they wanted to get California Burgers at the café in Bertha, they wanted to catch the legion game, they wondered if the creek was still flooded, there was a field of oats they’d heard about, a field of sunflowers, Iris had the barn painted, Bob planted the old baseball diamond in cockscomb and dahlias, they took the long way so they could see the beautiful thing together.↩︎

⁵ Truth is, he needn’t have worried so much that my hustle was inadequate, or that I was lazy, I was wasting time, because though I didn’t tell him, I had already made as much or more money as I would’ve in those scrounged lifeguarding hours, by, among other expellable and prosecutable naughtinesses, writing papers at college for (mostly) rich knuckleheads who couldn’t be bothered. I wrote, among several others, on some Russian’s short stories; on something to do with political economy in China; one on The Old Man and the Sea; I did an entire engineering ethics class’s worth (five or six four-page papers, sixty bucks a pop); and the first time I read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, I was paid to do so. I wish I could say Achebe changed my life at this point, but not yet. I think my clients and I sometimes, not always, devised a payment scale that adjusted for the grade. Or there might have been a flat fee, but an A got a bonus. I’m pretty sure I averaged a B. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I was practicing for the words you are reading now. At the time I just wanted to get paid. All to say, in this way I was less a disappointment to my father than he knew. And in other ways, I’m guessing, more.↩︎

⁶ Strange that this coincides with the tenet, an equally magical belief, of endless growth.↩︎

⁷ My copyeditor suggests maybe it was here: https:// www.poetryfoundation.org/harrietbooks/ 2009/11/poetry-makes-nothing-happen-or-does-it.↩︎

⁸ As Arundhati Roy asks, rhetorically, in her book Capitalism: A Ghost Story, “Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create a market for weapons? After all, the economies of Europe, the United States, and Israel depend hugely on their weapons industry. It’s the one thing they haven’t outsourced to China.”↩︎

⁹ The heart’s perhaps the most reliable clock we have.↩︎