Recounting Time

By Mioara
Time is not something that can be perceived as such, in its supposed capacity of an in itself identity holder, as some sort of immutable receptacle that is to be filled with various things; quite the opposite, it gains its identity depending on the things that fill it, it flows differently with respect to the relevance and the sense of the things that roam through it. Thus, accounting time first implies its decantation that will indicate it to us, that will enable us to guess it as a relation between a maximum and a minimum.

Its maximum consists in the main hypostasis in which we assume it, in which it enters our lives, namely as death… Thus, death becomes the pre-eminent form in which time shows itself to us and, as such, any evocation of time is an evocation of death, any time is for us, in the end, a time of death.

The minimum, on the other hand, appears as a time breakdown that is to show us, only to indicate to us without making it explicit, the fact that it does have an identity in itself, hypostasis which is defined by the recurrence. In this respect, I believe, it is said that when one makes the same things everyday many days in a row, it is not that a number of days have passed, but, in fact, only a single one- the standstill-present as a death of time. More explicitly, just as we get to understand that an instrument-object could have an identity in itself, that it could be something else than we intended to make out of it only when it is broken, becoming an inert thing of which we cannot make any use but into which we keep running, time allows itself to be guessed in its capacity of simple and inert presence only when it becomes broken, when it isn’t really flowing, namely in the shape of the standstill-present, of the perpetual recurrence.

What does then boredom mean? Perhaps it would be fairer to say of the moments that bore us not that they take to long but quite the opposite, that they do not take at all, that in their respect time doesn’t flow at all. The anxious waiting form them to pass is actually not a hunger for deeds but a hunger for moments, it is not an attempt at getting to events but one at getting to time.

Therefore between the time of death and the death of time it allows itself to be decanted, guessed and thus accounted.