STILLTIME

 

History: the repository of events that failed to happen

 

Who would have believed it!  
we are told that new Joshua 

sat the foot 

of every tower,  
as though irritated with  
time itself, fired at the dials 
in order to stop the day.*

XVI
	A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history.**

 

• "[...]the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure background (for few men’s courage is proof against protracted meditation unrelieved by action); that when they stood their long night-watches, his officers and men must have some nearer things to think of than Moby-Dick."***

The pandemic has arrested the flow of history and as such, has returned us to an immanent understanding of temporality – a grasp of this time as our moment of action. 

• With the destabilizing of the market economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins before they have crumbled.****

This is our Groundhog Day.  Each day that we live in this pause offers us a moment to act and change the future. 

As Patti Smith write, "People have the power to redeem the work of fools.”

*,**Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin
***Moby Dick, Melville 
**** Arcades Project, Benjamin
image: Austin Kleon,
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