Coins, Glass, Nails, Pottery, Cinders

‘The world is full of persons, only some of whom are human.’ ll. lll. lV.

Nietzsche wrote that a human being resides somewhere between a plant and a ghost.

Beauty has always required two agents: a beaut and a beholder. In lieu of a ring, her new fiancé came back from a trip to town with socks for himself, and an extravagance of lilies, their faces already slabbered with a stain of pollen. She arranged them, and then walked through the house feeling a pleasurable emptiness, like a shirt in a shop window, framed, somehow. The flowers were her beaut, and she was the beaut of the house itself, and of the view of the hills, and she in turn beheld the view of the hills – beauty and beholding were pouring freely back and forth and it felt for a moment like something that could not be exhausted, the very flowers like some Jurassic proof of sex, of personhood, full-spreading themselves in the closed container of their vase, gradually making the water rank.

Or maybe that was later. Maybe she bought herself the flowers. And for Bob it was just the socks.

What is the point of flowers? Their petallic openness to smudge. What is the point of beauty? Branches inosculating in the primalgreen dream forest, a fuse of reach. From the Latin osculare, to kiss. To be a tree kissing itself, pleaching its own branches, she thought. To be a slow and solid home, for the deep past and the dirtying bees.

V.

They were brushing their teeth together in the bathroom when Bob said, When are you going to pluck that? and the part of her that bends to shame said, I just did. Later, in the bed’s atmosphere of distinct chill, he said, It’s not that I don’t think you’re pretty. No? No, it’s just that I’d like looking at your face even more if you didn’t have all that fuzz.

VI.

As a week passed and the lilies browned, she tried to recall her belief that the wilt is also beautiful.

Graham Harman

Vll.

Evenings, Bob liked to put himself into a slouch container with his bigger screen. Sweet evenings, when he invited her to come and watch something from beginning to end in the slouch container. They piled up all the extra wool behind them like an inert mother sheep, while the real sheep stayed a goodly distance from the house in their green and degraded valleys, having broken down throughout the day their coarse food of grasses, and having let it travel, in the dark and knotted night, to the third true stomach. There was such sweetness in this pact of story reception. Normally Bob would watch the beginning of several films, skipping through at double speed if they couldn’t hold his attention. It’s not that I don’t think you’re pretty. Our world is no container, she thought sadly on nights outside the slouch, fingering her private perforations on the couch.

Vlll.

Is it possible she wanted to delight, more than she wanted to be delighted? Did she want, above all, to be a font, a brook, a source, a small pure laughing cut of water that a thirsty hiker would be glad to find – ecstatic to find, to taste?

lX.

Above all, the view of the hills poured back at her. The more she beheld the mountains, the more mountainous they made her. What she wanted above all for the fuzzed and lovely hills was that they not be exhausted.

X.

A textural class of soil known as sand submits to a rage of melt in order to be seen through.

Xl.

When the pollen dust was everywhere and she tired of picking up after it, she threw the flowers in the fire. It was a wonder to watch how they burned.

Xll.

The vase, emptied of flowers. The vase cooling and shifting on the kitchen bench, next to the candystripe tin that held twists of meat for the dog. The vase did not await fresh flowers, neither did it refuse such waiting. Its relationship with waiting was mysterious, though real. In the smoothed and fired dark form of its vesselbody – a provision to the self of mostly empty space – it tended a thousand options for shatter.

Joan Fleming

In search of lost time

A rushed sequel to a bestseller

Tim McMinn

Saving Time: Discovering a life beyond the clock

by Jenny Odell Bodley Head $35 pb, 252 pp

The Liver King wants your time. Specifically, your time spent on TikTok.

Australia has the highest monthly TikTok usage in the world at nearly thirty hours per user, up 26.5 per cent since last year. That time is valuable. According to Suzie Shaw, CEO of We Are Social Australia, TikTok’s unique algorithm (which puts reels, or short videos, in front of the app’s users) provides ‘a great opportunity for marketers to reach a highly engaged audience’.

Liver King (aka Brian Johnson) is CEO of the ‘Ancestral Lifestyle’. Every morning he bellows ‘Good morning, Primals!’ to his followers and exhorts them to live like our early ancestors, while marketing his line of liver-based supplements. He has 4.2 million followers on TikTok. He is seriously jacked, and aside from a pair of shorts his only other garments are an occasional ‘Viking’ helmet or fur mantle. His antics include extreme workouts (‘simulated hunts’) and the consumption of copious amounts of raw liver and testicle.

Johnson epitomises hustle culture’s constant grind for profit and purpose, maximising every waking (and sleeping) hour. Alongside the continual spruiking, Johnson frequently, and apparently earnestly, articulates his motivation for founding the Ancestral Lifestyle as helping America’s ‘lost people’ to express ‘their highest and most dominant selves’.

In addressing this crisis of masculinity, he is shouting into the same echo chamber as Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate and many others. As I read Saving Time: Discovering a life beyond the clock by Jenny Odell, I kept thinking of the Liver King. Superficially, it’s hard to conceive of their having anything in common, and I suspect Odell would cringe at the association. She is scornful of ‘productivity bro’ culture. But what Johnson and Odell both do is tap the irresistible human urge to ground self-help and visions of the good life in imaginings of our deep past. In the case of the Liver King, this is a vision of man the hunter, clad in skins (well, partially – gotta flex those pecs!) with his Liver Queen and children. Odell’s vision is of a past where average people and communities had more autonomy over their time; autonomy lost to rampant commercialisation and exploitation.

Saving Time is inspired by the burnout many of us feel after years of lockdowns and working from home. She writes about her own experience of these years, the anxiety and loneliness, contemplating moss. This frame dominates Saving Time’s billing. As a parent of two boys living and working in a city distant from family, it’s what drew me to the book. This theme of embracing slowness is addressed in each chapter, each of which is interwoven with minutely observed vignettes from an unhurried journey through Oakland’s hinterland.

But the book unfolds quite differently. Early on, Odell locates the root of our troubles as temporal autonomy lost to an equation of ‘time as money’, a play on the well-worn aphorism. From this follows a patchy and disjointed history of sorts, infused with hindsight, brimming with anger and blame towards a faceless ‘them’ who landed us in our predicament. Odell meanders across the ground of heterodox economics, gender theory, and intersectionality. The sway of the powerful over the time of everyone else –particularly the vulnerable – is Odell’s main preoccupation. There is something to this, but the framing of ‘time as money’ is too narrow and hobbles the work as a meditation on our experience of time in modern society.

The demands of capitalism, work, the market – choose your term – on our time are just a part of what is happening. In Debt: The first 5,000 years (2011), David Graeber writes of the web of social obligations which are deeply linked to modern systems of credit and money. The complexity of our society puts obligations on us as citizens, including on our time. Odell describes how, ‘at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic … the structure of my life was held constant’. Yet this stillness was either self-imposed or imposed by governments to protect the lives and health of fellow citizens. Who in New South Wales or Victoria cannot vividly recall how the structure of their days revolved around Gladys Berejiklian’s 11am briefings, or waiting for Dan Andrews with trepidation – jacket or vest? Odell gives this network of obligations the vaguest of nods, noting that, like language, ‘the observance of time systems … is what allows us to participate in an “intersubjective world”’. There is so much left unsaid about the non-economic demands on our time – of religious observance, parenting, care for the elderly, or participation in cultural practices – because it doesn’t fit with the ‘time as money’ frame.

Saving Time has a lot in common with How to Be Idle (2004) by Tom Hodgkinson. They share many references (such as Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed [2001] and E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class [1963]) and both hanker after a time when the pace of life was slower and working people had more autonomy over their time. One difference is that Saving Time is much less funny than How to Be Idle. And where Odell is vague about exactly when the past was better, Hodgkinson (following E.P. Thompson) knows precisely who he thinks used to live better lives: weavers in pre-industrial England. It’s a pity Saving Time is so earnest, while also being so hazy on the details. If your principal concern is reclaiming time from work, a solid dose of irreverence can only be an asset.

But Odell has some serious things to say that a chatty book written by a white man in the early 2000s just didn’t. For example, she points out it’s hard to be a flâneur when ‘walking while black’ in America. She also applies critical lenses that draw out some aspects of the experience of time by women and those with disabilities. These arguments are well made and ensure that Odell has made a contribution, if not fulfilling the promise of her idea. g