Time as a body

Last time I promised something on Chappell Roan. That was early November, and now everything I write on her seems banal. Can it be that her outcry—which just a minute ago seemed so fresh, so true—has been absorbed as a private good for women who feel a way? “HOT TO GO” showed up on the soundtrack at the gym, and if to me it feels like an anthem for femme sexuality, still it doesn’t disturb the routine of push-ups and rows. Between Christmas and New Year’s I went to a Chappell Roan dance night—a femininomenon!—and it was fun and so needed in the swaddling fuzz of the holidays, but still it was a thing one could buy and enter and leave.

I do want sexuality to change the world. I do want what Roan promises, a revision of the shames attendant on being sexually alive as a woman. I do want that interplay of performing, giving, receiving, seeing and being seen, to be part of public life—and a joyful, life-giving part of that life.

One of the strange things about belly dance is that men don’t like it. They don’t want to be aroused willynilly like that, they don’t want to look at this woman who is so powerfully offering her joy in herself. Men in America are used to being in charge of their sexual experiences, and they’re raised to think that they must be in charge—in charge of women, in charge of themselves, in charge of when and what they encounter. This need for control starves the public sphere of eros.

But eros is irrepressible. This force, feeling, god, whatever you like, lives at edges, so it can never be stamped out so long as there is human contact. So long as we still encounter each other. Which seems, at times, endangered.

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I just finished Sheila Rowbotham’s second in her series of decadal memoirs, Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s. Though not so powerful a book as Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties, this one provides a fascinating picture of radical life in England during the seventies, a time when, even as radicals were trying to translate the promise of the sixties into real life, a conservative backlash was forming. (Margaret Thatcher makes an ominous cameo here as the “Milk-Snatcher” who ended free milk in British schools.)

Two things strike me. First, though few of Rowbotham’s fellow radicals have regular jobs—they cobble together livings as writers, editors, teachers in adult ed and other pick-up programs, occasional crafts and trades—despite this lack of predictable employment, they never lack for food, housing, or medical care. Rowbotham herself lives in a house that she (legally) owns (in London!) and shares with a revolving cast of friends, who take turns cooking and cleaning and pay into the expenses. When she has an abortion, she grumps that she has to pay for it, but apparently not so much that it’s a hardship; when she has a child, we don’t hear about the cost of her medical care. Her child wears secondhand clothes, as she does, but he’s not naked, shoeless, or cold. Her friends have educations without debt. No one sells sex. No one comes from money, yet they all get by.

This ease of a patchwork survival enables a patchwork politics. Though the CP, Labour, and the Tories loom in the background, Rowbotham and her friends spend their time in myriad informal groups: men’s groups, women’s groups, socialist groups, neighborhood groups, child care circles, bands of photographers and criminologists, alternative newspapers and magazines, small presses, and every overlap and intersection of the above, all independent, all beyond institutional aegis. Rowbotham & Co. have time to produce books and pamphlets, oral histories, lecture series, exhibitions, and they are able to take in each other’s productions because they have time. Without a daycare, Rowbotham has three days a week free for writing. Her communal house means she cooks once a week. Shopping barely impinges on her consciousness.

I’ve written through this a few times without getting it right, because the relation of cause and effect here is delicate and redoubled. Rowbotham & Co. live communally to get by, and they have time and resources because they are communal, yes, but also, this detailed communality is their life. Because they have time and energy to invest in their politics, Rowbotham and friends approach their politics with care and nuance. They have time for civil disagreement, time to build compromise, and these compromises themselves beguile time, become life.

Second, Rowbotham writes often of the deadening force of orthodoxy, and she sees orthodoxy in political simplifications that barely give pause now. For example, she writes that the concept of patriarchy is “delusive” because it implies an unbroken line of male power, which is an ahistorical simplification of a complex reality. “Patriarchy” is also defeatist: “I rejected a concept which made it well nigh impossible to examine how variations in women’s position had made effective resistance possible.” Finally, leaning on “patriarchy” cuts women off from potential allies (men).

Rowbotham is sympathetic: simplification and orthodoxy occur when people feel their backs against the wall. But it’s clear that, for her and her friends, freedom and joy live in the negotiation of individual realities. If Rowbotham & Co. never quite figure out what they might demand of the government, how they might reconcile and boil down diverse ideas into action—this is a repeated difficulty of their organizing—to the reader, it emerges that their living politics is the victory. So they didn’t win a future in the sense of impressing their ideas permanently through state power; still they lived their hopes. The future-in-present is what they won.

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God, I haven’t written anything quite so detailed in Now*ing for a while! Did you have time to read it? Thinking all that came naturally as I read the book—I read a lot over the holidays—but getting it down in sentences, finding quotations, lord all that takes time that I have had to pry out of everything else in my life. Forming a sentence is a difficult business. Time, time, time.

Another book I’ve been reading lately, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, comments on the way time is stolen and sold back to us as “leisure,” commodified vacations, when the time we actually manage to carve out of each day by driving faster and eating convenience foods ends up being spent on screens. “The reality of time,” Debord says, “has been replaced by the publicity of time.”

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Elena Ferrante’s Frantumaglia is essentially a collection of ways people have wasted the Italian novelist’s time, asking her over and over, “Aren’t you ready to tell us who you are yet?” to which Ferrante endlessly responds that she has already, in her books, told us everything that is sufficient, and her “real” identity could only be a distraction. Still, this collection of incidental pieces is worth reading for her incisive skewering of literary “culture.” Asked for an opinion on euthanasia, she responds with a brief endorsement of the right to die, and then adds this: “To express myself like that, in a few conventional words on a very delicate issue, seems to me frivolous.”

This sort of short take is frivolous because, Ferrante asserts, her real business is telling tales, and this takes time—as developing a serious opinion, an opinion worth reading, does—and Ferrante does not have time for both. “You work for your whole life trying to gain adequate expressive tools for yourself,” she writes. Compare Ferrante’s conviction of the time needed for art to our “literary culture,” in which “creators” are encouraged to spread themselves across as many forms as possible in a slick veneer of personality. Which do you want? Which will you support?

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As usual, events are conspiring to make my writing feel irrelevant faster than I can finish it. Today, I mean the burning of Los Angeles. Like Ferrante, I have nothing intelligent to say on a topic I know so little about. Let me refer you to my friend Peter Kalmus, whose recent editorial is heartbreaking.

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Diane Suess has invested her time in becoming the most formidable lyric poet of the moment, and her latest, Modern Poetry, shows her mastery of all the devices: shifts of voice, wanderings and revelation, the well-chosen image, line breaks, rhythm, diction, etc. For all that, this book is a tour de force. It’s also, curiously, an end game. Suess reveals the narrowness of the box that remains for lyric when we accept certain constraints. In particular: plain language, realism; no platitudes, no “wisdom,” no exhortation; no writing about anyone else’s experience; no sentimentality, no self-indulgence. Such impeccable poems have nothing left to do but assert the writer’s well-earned experience and devotion to truth—all of which is true and often moving, but geez, it’s tragic that this is what a life in art boils down to. There are plenty of ways out of the box: Alice Notley’s mythic narratives never run dry. But I don’t mean to make light of a struggle that is mine in many ways. One can’t just borrow someone else’s means. And if you are devoted to being understood, that really makes poetry difficult in a world where understanding is constantly narrowed to mere parings of time.

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I’ve been trying to discover, in dance, the beauty of a single gesture. If you can hold everything still and, with faith and concentration, show the audience one single shape or motion—that’s magic. And the magic is less what you show—no one’s holding out, in real life, for the perfect hip drop—than the fact that you believe. That is really what’s on display, your own faith in the lived moment, and that’s what people find so magnetic, that sharing of personal immortality.

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I used to acquire precious little things—perfumes, flavored oils, bits of pretty paper—and then “save” them until they went bad or fell out of fashion. This was waste masquerading as thrift. Use is not waste; use takes time. To touch the gorgeous things and wrap yourself in them, move in them through the world; to apply the scent and smell it, share it; to fill the plate with colors and forms, to taste and select; this takes time, and gives time: is time.

In this episode of Now*ing, you may have noticed that I’m lurching over the concept of time. I can say—it’s easy to say—that we’ve got a notion of time based on clocks and accounting, in which time moves in one direction at a constant speed and is at once a valuable commodity and an endless resource, renewed every morning. Our time is a treadmill, meaningless and quick. But time can be more about growth, weight, change; time can be the author of a body or a feeling; time can flow or crystallize, sap to amber. Again, easy to say, much harder to grasp.

If you’re pressed, if you’ve skimmed, let me be explicit: this year, let’s feel time. Feel your real wealth instead of chasing more. Taste, relate, luxuriate. Don’t find a new TV show, don’t scroll, don’t shop. Live. Let’s start there.

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Food 52 has got me obsessed with rice krispie treats. Versions abound, but if you make them with browned butter, the whole bag of marshmallows, two teaspoons of vanilla, four times the salt (word to the wise: I am never going to measure 1/4 teaspoon of salt), and two tablespoons of whole milk or yogurt powder (don’t ask questions, just do it)—and maybe M&Ms, but throw them in at the end so they don’t put brown streaks in your treats—then you get something sweet, salty, crunchy, tangy, and gooey, hitting almost all your notes (you won’t miss bitter). Yes, they are too much. I have known children to turn down my rice krispie treats. Not my children, though, and not you.