Time Scares Me So I Guess That's Why I Want To Make Art
Time is fake.
It just is.
Of course, when I say "time is fake" what I really mean is that the way we measure time is totally arbitrary, and things we take for granted like a day or a week or a second are all made up. Someone invented them. A year makes sense in being one revolution around the sun, and a day makes sense in being one rotation in place, but dividing a revolution into 12? And then 30? And a day into 24? Who even? Why not 10 months? Why not 20 hours?
You get the gyst.
There is also the fact that how we experience time isn't even consistent. If you're in the zone, three hours can feel like 2 minutes. If you're trying to plank, 2 minutes can feel like 3 years. If 2020 has shown us anything, it's that one month can feel like 10 years, and 6 months can feel like one week. Time feels differently for someone in Tokyo compared to someone in Hawaii, and it can feel different for two people in the same city. And there's the classic "time is relative" examples we see in science and science fiction all the time. So even our own personal gauge and measurement and sense of time is irregular and arguably arbitrary depending on environmental or personal factors.
But as much as I preach that time is fake... I also think that our experience of time is one of the most real things in the world. I watched a video from Veritaseum explaining how gravity is also fake (I'm not going to talk about that because I still think its magnets lol) which primarily revolved around Einstein insisting that we have to center things around our own experience, or perceived experience. Something something inertial observer, even if we aren't actually not moving, because we feel like we aren't moving, then we aren't (or something to that effect.) Point is! Much like what I think Einstein was doing, we are centering this around our own experience and perception, both of which are extremely real, because they are real to us.
Time is just the rate of change. Life and our existence is our experience of that rate of change as it pertains to us. And of course, existing is the only thing we have any knowledgeable experience in. Certainly we have spent more time not existing, and will spend more time not existing after we expire, but we don't know what that is like. We have no memory of what it is like to not exist because... well some would argue that's impossible, obviously. Others might argue we just forgot. Regardless, the only thing we know is being alive. Which is probably why death scares so many of us (yours truly included!)
I think if you combine those two concepts: that of our experience of time being the only thing we can know, and the knowledge of our personal experience of time eventually ending but everyone else's continuing forward without us, we get into... what I would posit as the idea of legacy. There's that Hamilton (the musical) quote of legacy being planting seeds in a garden you'll never see. And whether that be your immediate family members, your descendants, or just whoever, people want to be remembered by something. To leave their mark on time and history, perhaps in a tangible way, that others in the future can look back on and remember them by, so that the originator can, in some way, continue forward through time. A way to achieve immortality, if you will.
And you know, it works. Look at the amazing monuments erected in our earliest human history, that continue to stand the test of time, that remind us of the people who lived there. The musical pieces and paintings and films and books of people in the past that we still enjoy and analyze and remember today. Of course, it isn't fallible. How many countless expressions of the self have either been lost or ignored? Then again, if even one family or one person continues to remember, isn't that enough?
I talked about this in a vlog recently, that idea of creating something that others can look back on, that can ultimately outlast you. I can't pretend to know how long into the future my work will last, but just being able to look back on it myself, within my own lifetime, I think is satisfactory. Like looking back at old photos or vlogs or comics or writings or artwork... being transported back to that moment and time, or maybe just peeking through the window that is whatever I created and trying to remember what I was like, where I was, mentally, physically, and otherwise.
There's also the idea of how a piece of art can represent time, visually. Whether that's the day it was created, or how long it took to create it. Both a timestamp and a measurement. A receipt, if you will. Sometimes I sit on the couch filled with the anxious dread of "oh my god time is just flying past and im doing nothing why isnt time freezing when im freezing." While I'm not insinuating I can "art" myself out of that particular spiral, creating art is a way for me to harness that fleeing time into something physical and tangible that is representative of that time. We artists often speak of the woe that is "no one realizes how long an art takes because you don't see the time and effort behind the finished product" but, perhaps for someone like me who is filled with existential, time-based dread every Wednesday evening, knowing the time put into the art I create when I see it can help me feel I have some control over those fleeting seconds. With something to show for it.
I described in my vlog the feeling of "capturing time." Bottling it up. Catching it and keeping it safe, so that I can revisit it. My own personal form of time traveling. I used to call taking naps time traveling into the future. Perhaps making art is my way to time travel into the past. I express myself in the present so that my future self may have a glimpse back into the past. A souvenir for myself, from myself.
I'll leave you with this tumblr post I found shortly after coming to this revelation, that I found particularly serendipitous and fitting. It starts with your usual tone deaf commentary on phone documentation, but ends on a beautifully bittersweet, forlorn note about the human experience. Here is the full link. But I will highlight two quotes that really stood out to me, that I think go hand in hand with what I talked about above.
"There are many more such photographs of unimaginable perspectives taken moments before death, only because of the compelling human desire to assert that we were here, this happened, this was real. It’s the most human desire there is - to reach out across time and space to connect with our fellow beings until our last breath." -tumblr user "hussyknee"
"That’s the essence of what it means to be human. I was here. I explored. I saw this. Remember me." -Tumblr user "feanor-the-dragon"