She Wears Woolf

“Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” — John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1970

I see you in the orange glow of the small black lamp on your desk. The one whose neck is bent to look like a coiled snake peering at you. The one you use to build with—water cooling systems for computers—things I understand in theory, but could never see the way you do. This same lamp on your desk has seen you working up a sweat in the late afternoons when you have nothing but time on you. This lamp sees what I see: how you love what you build with your hands—tangible things.

This is a reservoir. You held it just above my head to show me. It stores the coolant for the loop. It was a clear cylindrical container, fitted with black lids on either ends. It had clamps so it could be mounted onto something.

And these are called fittings. You pointed to short white metal joints, the size of your thumbs, screwed on the ends of the reservoir. They allow you to connect each component in your loop with tubing. The reservoir is one such thing, but the other components include the radiator and the water blocks. The former looks like a miniature version of what I know the word to be, and the latter is a square metallic plate pinched at its corners, with holes where I assumed the fittings would go.

The radiator keeps the whole loop cool by dissipating heat and the water blocks are what you actually mount on the hardware you want cooled. The more heat you can dissipate, the closer the coolant temperature will remain to ambient temperature. Radiator almost sounds like refrigerator, so your explanation fails to lose me.

In your palm is a compact object. This is the pump. It looks heavier than all the rest. A black cap, the shape much like the bottom of a tea candle, encases what I imagine is all machinery. This is jutting out of something with a much larger circumference, but with the same depth and shape of a camera lens cap. The ridges though, are noticeably thicker. There is a valve on top for the reservoir to feed the pump with coolant, but also one behind it. The pump sends the coolant through the entire loop and it all eventually goes back to the reservoir.

I piece what I saw and what you said in my own language, reproducing it in a way that I understand, in a place out of context, unseen and in the dark of my bedroom. There is a lamp seeing me: It lights my back and casts intangible shapes on the walls. I, too, build with my hands, but in the ways I know how.

A lot can happen in a few weeks. The possibilities multiply based on how often you socialize and meet new people and how often you make things happen for yourself. A routine will make any day slower, especially, if much of it is spent alone. Being alone means you’ll spend more time thinking, and if your brain is the kind of brain with a selfishly wild imagination, you’re in for a difficult few weeks.

Otherwise, if you’re lucky enough to be spending your time for a bigger purpose (i.e. outside yourself, coexisting with other humans), you realize that how fast or how slow it runs, is actually relative to many factors. Often, you think things are going by quickly because you are doing too many things according to certain time markers you’ve set for yourself. When the laundry’s done. The minute you arrive your workplace. The last sip from your first cup of coffee. Lunch time. When you finished photocopying. When the e-mail was finally sent. Dinner.

But you can also stretch your time markers to gauge durations. Instead of a second or a moment, time stretches and becomes specific: How long it takes for you to reach his doorstep, or how quickly you can hide your feelings. Or perhaps the few minutes before your cab arrives. The long and silent ride home. The time it takes you to find songs in your music library to compile a thirty-two minute digital mix. Or the time it takes you to write an accompanying reflection about how a lot can happen in a few weeks.

You don’t have any time left for another batch of laundry tonight. But this is a first in a long time, when you’re able to sit down and really think about anything. You’re thinking back on the last few weeks and there are moments you want to rewind, moments you want to fast-forward, and a rare few that you actually want to pause and freeze. These are the moments with someone else, away from your selfishness and away from your imagination. Thanks to your smart phone, you might not have been in the same room. If there was anyone physically there with you, who were you with? Did your eyes ever meet or were they shut with the image of someone else?

You can’t have all of time; you certainly can’t have everything, but you are allowed to keep some things quietly yours.

Digital Mixtape 001 – You Can’t Have Everything

Write letters?

I struggle with time, which is only made worse by the unfiltered flood of information. I still have difficulty distinguishing which information is more important. Now that I’ve built a new path for myself, where I am forced to find worthy causes for my time, it has become a heavier thing. I want to spend it as easily, as I breathe, but I become too conscious that there are sixty seconds in a minute, and I then spend it in spurts – as if hyperventilating. I need time, but my body doesn’t quite know what to do with it. Do I pace the room? Do I let my mind wander? Do I sit to read? Do I search for videos of kittens on Youtube? Do I use time to talk to someone (on Facebook, Twitter, Gchat)?

We’d like to think that as long as one’s happy, one’s making good use of time. So if one spends his own happy time, making others happy too, the cycle of happiness then becomes self-perpetuating, expands and extends out to one’s social circles. This is the dream, that my friends and the people I surround myself with, live in a peaceful community untainted by greedy self-interest and modern-day loneliness. You’d like to be less conscious of time because you’re busy and you’re busy with meaningful preoccupations and people.

Ask questions?

But the joke’s on me and the time I have chosen to spend, drawing and mailing postcards to friends, grows heavy with the silence that follows it. I write this with no bitterness or resentment whatsoever. I have been struggling to come to terms with the fact that this is the sign of our times. Social bonds are weak and people come and go in clicks (of mice) and with the push of a power button – we get lost in our own infinities. You don’t just have a group of people coming to terms with an infinite reality, but you have each and every person dealing with infinity in their own way.

∞

That’s a lot of infinities to think about. With the convenience of self-reliance, it’s harder for us to reach out to friends to ask for inclusion. The multiplicity of infinity is excruciatingly isolating. Someone intelligent who I look up to, I can’t remember if it was Ben, described Twitter as a room full of people shouting their thoughts at each other,  fighting to be heard. In a way, this too describes how it feels like to be in a room full of people, anywhere.

Thrust with more time, I am learning again how best to spend it – how I’d like to spend it. I have a new appreciation for the details of daily living, of friendships, of talking to people, so that I can find a way to my dream community, where infinity is dealt with together. It doesn’t matter if opinions differ. In my dreams, we acknowledge that we are in the same pursuit of happiness, contributing to help each other’s confrontation with infinity. We don’t have to be holding hands, just respecting each other and listening. Kind of like how Livejournal is (yes I still use it), but more public.

I know that I like spending my time asking hard questions, and being with people who like to help find an answer, so I throw this back at you: Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts?

I’d like to think we can still strive for that.