(Image sourced at: 20minutos.es.) When in Prague one of the things that struck us was the ‘sign’ of the metronome, a tool not to measure time but to repetitively maintain a rhythm, I suggested that truth (and that always has to mean ‘my understanding of truth’) can anchor is to the past. There is of course great value in that and the alternative of being blown by every wind that comes is far from a viable alternative. However, there has to come moments when the we move from simply being anchored to the past to embracing the future. This is done when the imagination kicks in , often in the context of a shock to the system.
Yesterday the Spanish parliament was in session all day debating a no-confidence motion against the president, following on from one one of the biggest cases that exposed huge financial irregularities and illegal payments in his (PP / conservative) party. Rajoy (current president) put up a strong fight in the morning, then was absent for the remainder of the day. After a few hours it was discovered that he was in a nearby restaurant, where he remained for some 7 hours! Headlines said ‘bunkered in’ which we found very interesting as these are the very words we have been using when praying with regard to getting the institutional injustices exposed.
A common word used throughout the day yesterday was ‘shock’. A shock to the system indicates the possible break of the institutional memory and default behaviour. We are on the verge of something new opening up, though at any time of change unless there is sufficient true vision to fill the vacuum there is only one possibility and that is a change of faces but no real change. This now is where we are at. The best part of yesterday was a measure of reconciliatory language toward the Basque and Catalan communities.
We are optimistic… and ever so watchful. A shock is where it begins. It can also sadly be where it ends.
My prayer is that a similar shock happens in our small village. Leadership is holding the area back and needs to change. Similarly at the highest levels too in Latvia and they are in an election year, may the repercussions be positive in outcome and apathy/corruption/power holding roll away.
While we were in Prague one of our prayers was the unlocking for Europe, the ‘metronome’ being replaced by a timepiece that actually marks progressive not repetitive time. So we make a shout to your situations from Spain!
In 2015 when the vision of 100,000 people in the square and an empty platform waiting for the ‘word of the Lord’, the person who spoke used the key phrase in his speech: ‘tick, tock, tick, tock. The clock is ticking in Spain…’
Noting your earlier comments about how new transport did not mean a car etc. Playing somewhat aesthetic games with some of these ideas creates cultural questions. The clock is ticking is usually a metaphor for time running out, that people are rushing towards some sort of end. But it does not have to be so. The ticking clock could describe the normative function, as it does particularly with the metronome. A metronome does not mark the passage of time it merely measures, and dictates a conforming response, to a beat within time. Time as time still functions, and it measures the measures of the metronome, so many beats per second. But the metronome is normative where real time is merely indicative. In short, the metronome is normative, it demands a form of obedience and reveals deviation. If time is Lord the metronome is its executive officer.
How the heck does this help? (Not rhetorical) Just to ask is time running out or is it running everything. Stasis does not refuse the passage of time, it merely refuses change within time. It can project with promises of future change, it can be nostalgic and hold onto a perceived past, but it is not an expression of time itself. This vision did not speak about stasis, or the status quo (the vision of the unfolding buildings in the town square did that powerfully) but this one is talking about a power that operates in the town square. It would be all too easy, (cheap?), to say it is prophetic in the sense of time running out, I guess I am not convinced that this is the point. There is a tyranny of time, a refusal to let go. Marking time is the metronome, it is also military, marching without progress, just the sound of movement without its substance.
Hit the wrong button!
A large group of artists, early 2000s split into groups and went to stand on a group of points of high ground around London, I was with a group up on Epsom Downs. We were paired with an artist from a different discipline, I worked with Jono Retallick, a visual artist and maker with me as the writer. Each pair had to make a piece of work in response to the city. A couple of days before we were supposed to make the piece we got together to consider what to do and, frankly, neither of us had an idea. I woke the next morning with the repetitive phrase Nine to Five running tediously around my brain. Except it wasn’t. It wasn’t just nine to five, it was nine two five, with the two expressed as a beat, two handclaps, sharp, hard sounds, relentless, determinative, tyrannical. Nine, bang bang, five, slap, slap, nine, scratch, scratch, five.
Jono, in response made a large piece on unstretched canvas, hundreds of repetitions of nine and five in ink poured on the surface like dripping blood, and between each of them he made two diagonal slashes in the canvas with a knife. There was an overall pattern, there were underlying patterns, shifts of density, darker and lighter areas.
You might not remember it but this, and Debi’s similarly sized piece with puzzles and little bags of gold dust, were the first two things I hung in the gallery at the Theatre when it reopened.