Editor’s Cento
Comprised of lines from the work in Issue Six
ON TIME
An atom can swallow a particle of light, spit it out, and whether you watch a video of this happening in real time or in reverse, you cannot tell the difference. This is decidedly not the case when you record/rewind someone eating a piece of pie, or lighting their hair on fire. You can’t un-eat a slice of lemon chess. You can’t un-flame what is now burnt char. And when we watch videos of humans that move back in time, they often look unnatural, uncanny, off. In this way, the linear arrow of time is tangled up with heat, in cahoots with entropy, paradoxically in bed with the second law of thermodynamics—disorder is the very thing that gives time its “order.”
For physicists, time can be A Problem. Philosophers have long questioned if time is illusory. Across different cultures, how time is conceptualized and discussed varies. And odds are, if you ask someone how they visualize a year (like a clock? like a steady march on a line, with a jump back to the start? like a ladder? like a spiral?), their answer will differ from yours. No one understands time completely, with one hundred percent certainty.
Time, as humans typically experience it, appears linear. We move from today into tomorrow, from one year to the next. X happens → then Y happens. And yet, time is not so straightforward as our experience of time might seem to suggest. In the spirit of time’s slippery, hard-to-pin-down nature, we asked writers and artists to engage with time, and all of time’s peculiarities, for this themed issue.
Now, we invite readers to sit with the fourteen pieces in Issue Six. And I won’t tell you where to start, or where to end—but it is my hope that after spending time with each individual piece, after moving from one work → the next, that you’re also able to sit with the issue in its entirety and let it wash over you (much like how a single moment can pass by but nevertheless connects to the now, swirling around every other single moment that has been experienced, felt).
As I was putting this issue together, I kept thinking about the process of writing—and how I’ve been trying to carry ritual over to my reading practices. Because of how good capitalism is at invading lives, I’ve found it important to engage in writing intentionally—not in terms of an end product, an “object” that one arrives to at some “end.” As we know, writing—and the act of creation more broadly—is about the process, the ritual, the act of making, (whatever that looks like) itself. As I (re)read the issue now, I’m struck by how these fourteen pieces (alone—but more so together) compel an intentional way of reading and engaging. As they distort time, speeding through some moments, lingering in others. As they draw with and against the rigid arrow of time. As they—often playfully, and poetically—grasp at time’s elusive straws. It is our hope that this issue grasps at you, in some way.