An Actual Occasion*

 

1. “Cities may not cohere the way you think they do.” She walked across the first of the six lanes comprising the infernal highway. “You walk across the same road you’ve used for fifteen years. You see half a dozen not-quite-things—a tree in bloom, a mobile phone transmitter, some pulverized bird.”
2. She moved past the second lane, cars ignoring her reckless presence, cars hurtling from place to promised time. Each one, that dream, Autopia. “Like star constellations. When we draw a line around them, we’re giving them a name, so we can believe they exist in a way we think we exist.” [She took out her phone. She duckfaced and selfied the moment. Filter? Nashville. Lo-Fi. Perpetua. <SEND>.] “When we do that with, say, a tree in bloom, a mobile phone transmitter, some pulverized bird, we are making that outline a ‘city.’”
3. Lane 3 was no match for her blind faith. This forward-facing futurist. “The city is an object wished for.”
4. The fourth lane was next, and this time, did she float across? “My father said, ‘Constellations are the product of human perception rather than astronomical realities.’ He was right. That’s how they look from earth.” Infinite formlessness freaks us out. But, an animal or a chariot inscribed in the sky makes the universe more human and makes us more like the universe.
5. She said these words as she fought across the fifth, penultimate lane, made easier or more difficult by the increased traffic at this time of day. People heading home. To be unalone. To dream of escaping this chronic city. “The moments we call crises are ends and beginnings. This, you.”
6. He had the answer—waiting patiently on the other side of the six-lane highway, a clogged artery—and she was so close to him now, her heart, more mess than myth. She could smell his eau de cologne. Maybe? Patchouli gasoline. Yes. They gazed across the bullet-fire of vehicles. He stared at the selfie she has just sent him, adding a new filter. Perpetua. Aden. Willow. They longed reunion. In two hours time, they’ll stop fucking each other in a gasp of heady, indefinable pleasure, wordless and breathless, creatures conditioned by places. Places as pleasure. His outline, then hers. No name for this conjoining except, “We.” Perhaps? Possibly? Love is a highway that’s never quite finished, never quite started. And yet, two hours before their future post-coital cool, a red car—roof down, young couple in front, escaping the drudgery of their suburban lives, the smell of life fading away like cheap eau de cologne—crashes into the woman and the man, on the hard shoulder of this six-lane highway at the start of the long holiday weekend. Willow. Aden. Perpetua.

 

*“Later, Whitehead introduces a new a primitive notion which he calls an actual occasion. For Whitehead, an actual occasion (or actual entity) is not an enduring substance, but a process of becoming. As Whitehead puts it, actual occasions are the ‘final real things of which the world is made up,’ they are ‘drops of experience, complex and interdependent.’” The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/whitehead/#WM

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Commissioned for Jitesh Kallat’s monograph, edited by Natasha Ginwala.

I miss doing nothing

I miss doing nothing. Or I miss the idea of doing nothing. I spend a lot of time thinking about which, and whether there’s a real difference, or an unreal difference, and that too takes up more time. I describe time as a resource. Unlike crude oil, corn and quartz, it is infinite, but spending too much time thinking about infinity has lost me years of my life since I was a child. Children rarely do nothing. Except maybe young girls. I see them sit quietly at restaurants with their parents. They’re coloring in a unicorn drawing. They’re quietly lost in their own sense of colouring. Maybe this is not exactly nothing but boys of the same age are like hyperactive protons, agitated energy, vectors unable to conceive of stillness. Boys adhere to Brownian motion. Parents writhe over the vexed question “When do we give our baby their first iPad?” Because new parents, maybe more than anyone, miss doing nothing the most. They crave it. They are in an endless jetlag of the body. It’s in their eyes. I miss doing nothing. I ask novelists if they read less novels than they used to, before 4G. Most say yes, their brains have changed. Forever. (The others are lying.) I know one person — a novelist — who refused to get a mobile phone of any kind. He was a modern day Walden. He enjoyed the detachment from digital obligations the moment he stepped out of his apartment into the city. He said it made him see and hear the birds and the trees more vividly. This delinking, he claimed, was a balm for his writing brain. He protected this like a dragon might protect a unicorn. Then he caved. We made him cave because we are bad people. And now he is just as addicted as the rest of us. He has either joined the world as it really is, or he has abandoned the other world of which he was one of the last remaining survivors. Part of me is relieved. The other part of me is sad. Purity, another voluntary victim. But this debate too can take up time, that diminished resource, which I literally have less of the more knowledge I gain. Perhaps wisdom is understanding time’s unknowability. And with this comes less time. To do more or to do less. To worry about doing more or not doing less. You see the quandary. The swamp. Which is why I spend more time missing doing nothing. I miss the blank alps of my mind, the thinned air of inactivity. Because more and more I am time, not in an eschatological sense, but, in essence. The neuroscientists can’t help me. They’re nascent. They referred me to the theologians. Who in turn said, seek the technologists. All the minutes waiting for Uber to arrive add up to some fraction of eternity, which I refuse to acknowledge except here, speaking to you. Time accelerates. It stretches. It vanishes. Collapses. All these metaphors. What if time is really just language? Language never freed us, according to most philosophers.

1.0     We are born into language.

1.1     And it is the case.

1.2     And that case is the world.

1.21   [ ]

I watch other people swipe right on dating apps and I decide that I’d prefer a mechanical finger that would do the swiping for me… So I can use that extra time… To figure out why I’m afraid of swiping right… Why the gaze of a stranger whose name is a string of symbols in a language I don’t understand, why she fills me with the dread I have for the end of time itself, the kind theologians proscribe. This girl on my screen, she’s pretty, she’s from Bulgaria. She doesn’t miss doing nothing. She was born into a Brownian world where frat boys have turned technology into theology, demagogues have preyed upon the free time of crisis ridden boys, those agitated protons so close to exploding far away, or next to me, depending where I’m writing this and reading this. Bored people crave war. The sweet girl suspended in the downloadable app, she’s afraid to be a feminist and not be a feminist, she doesn’t know where she stands on pornography (subject/object). And this takes up so much of her thumb time she’s starting to think her spirit animal is a thumb. Her therapist tells her this, and Jung told her therapist, through red coloured notebooks and visions of eternal time. Returning time. Myths of return. Archetypes as emojis. I would like to follow Freud and Jung as they walked around the making of the modern world and I would do nothing. They would do nothing.

1.3     We did nothing.

1.4     We were always doing nothing.

1.41   Weren’t we?

1.5     [Battery dead symbol]

From The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present by Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland, Hans Ulrich Obrist (Penguin, 2015)

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Originally published in Ingrid Hora’s book, JOMOHOMO, 2016, designed by Åbäke.