its violent beginnings....

Salvador Dalí. The Persistence of Memory. Oil painting. 1931

Those melting clocks. They're among the most over-exposed or well-known images of the twentieth century. And still they speak.

Time distorts. Time oozes. Time drips and falls away. Time refuses to hold its shape; refuses to be contained. Time refuses to move in a perfect circle; denies its own orbit, its ties to the sun.

Dalí was only 27 when he created The Persistence of Memory. To me, that seems awfully young to be so... aware. To know time as anything but a roller coaster ride. But even that has its distortions I guess.

Salvador Dalí. Soft Watch at the Moment of First Explosion. Oil painting. 1954.

His later painting, Soft Watch at the Moment of First Explosion, was completed at age 50. To me, that seems more true. That fiftieth birthday comes in with bells ringing. Time takes on a new urgency. Time loses meaning. Time melts, twists, fractures, detonates.

Time revisits its violent beginnings.

the god loop....

Time.
It is everything we have
and nothing at all.
It exists in light and in consequences; 
immeasurable and absolutely finite.
It is the axis around which 
everything spins,
and it is the spinning itself.

(And we,
we are just the dizzy inhabitants
of a spinning planet;
days and lives measured in the turning.)

And god?

God, too. 
God is everything we have
and nothing at all.


Wendy Stefansson
2014-10-16

The Fault in our Stars

Alternative movie poster by ZCxART. Available on etsy.com.

This is a beautiful story, a hilarious story, and an unflinchingly honest story; a comedy, a tragedy, and an elegy all at once because that's the way life is. And death even more so. 

It's a book about too-short lives, unredeemed by their too-great suffering. Not ennobled by pain, but disabled by it. Diminished by it. Demeaned by it.

About the unheroic act of simply dying. Not dying well, or dying tragically. (Tragedy is for the living.) Just dying.

Most importantly it’s a book about humanity; about two people. About Hazel and Augustus.

And small, unlikely infinities cradled within the crushing context of time.

Read more about The Fault in our Stars here or here.

time

Wendy Stefansson. Time. 
Eggshells, soot and stain on birch panel, 2001.

This mosaic was the culmination of a series of works using eggs as a reference to human ova. In it, I tried to represent time as it is experienced by the female body – round, cyclical, layered. Marked each month by the passing of an egg, of an opportunity.

For related works, see http://inno-particular-order.blogspot.ca/2014/01/growth-rings.html

timefulness

I always thought
having a child
would give me a sense of immortality;
a piece of me living on
in separate flesh.

But instead
you make me intently aware
of my own mortality.
My life gained a greater sense
of its own finity
when you were born.

I look at you
and experience the me I was
        when I was you,
and the me I am now,
and
        knowing this time to be so fleeting,
the me I will be;
and know that I’m never going to be young again,
not even this young,
and I don’t feel young now.

The moments that seem most timeless,
like pushing you on a swing this afternoon,
pulsate with a sense
of never coming again;
are timeful.
Are the fullness of my time.

Time spiralling backwards to my origins
and forwards to my own death;
containing your unlimited possibilities
and my inevitabilities.
Time stops,
holds its breath.
Time overflows.


Wendy Stefansson, 2001

This poem inspired the painting Hourglass Figures.

haiku for the end of a year

Time begins to sound
like doors closing behind me.
Ahead, it’s quiet.


2012-12-29