Now Never Waits

For my day job, I’ve started posting on Twitter and, while a number of old friends are appalled to hear me say it, I find the work oddly enjoyable. Tweets are just latter-day headlines, and writing headlines – distilling complex stories into a limited space in language intriguing enough to get people's attention – was a blast, a real writer’s challenge. 

And so it is with Twitter.

What I do find troublesome, though, is the way tweeting distorts time. For I have found that systematic Twitter-posting – tweeting as a job – casts everything into the present tense. Recollecting in tranquility? Forget about it. Everything that matters is now, and now never waits.

For me, the anxiety Twitter produces isn’t about the end of civilization or the trivialization of discourse or any of the earnest plaints you hear about our speeded-up, hyper-connected world. Nothing so grand is in play for me. No, it’s that Twitter as a routine part of my work day reminds me, again and again and again, that the present moment – this time now – is already past. It’s a Memento Mori Machine disguised as a social media app. 

My dealings with Twitter have, as you can see here, got me thinking too much about the passage of time and also – and bear with me here – about what is so transfixing about photography.  

Philadelphia’s current art season gave me even more opportunity to reflect on the nature of time, with the revival of the Lucinda Childs-Philip Glass-Sol Lewitt collaboration, Dance, at the Kimmel Center setting the stage.

Dance and Time

A landmark of Minimalism, Dance is deceptively simple, featuring a seemingly endless deployment of dancers crossing the stage on a grid. (For a sense of the piece, take a look at this video clip.) Like Glass’s score, the choreography is repetitive, with only slight variations on the basic steps, and the effect is mesmerizing. Watching the dancers, listening to the music, you feel suspended in the now – but then Sol LeWitt's contribution to the whole kicks in and the present performance becomes haunted by the past.

Projected on a scrim in front of the stage, the LeWitt film stars the original cast of dancers, recorded as they rehearsed the piece. When Dance premiered in 1979, the audience saw the flesh-and-blood dancers chasing, and being chased by, images of themselves. 

But in the 31 years since, a new generation of dancers has taken over on stage, and now what you see has been transformed into an even deeper meditation on time. The dancers on stage act out an eternal present while ghost dancers offer up a performance from a long-ago past.

The Snapshot and Time

Now look at the photograph at the top of this post, and you look at a past present – an enigmatic, long-ago moment offered up to us in the now. 

I found this picture in a bin of similarly unremarkable snapshots at Mostly Books, a local used bookstore that sells snapshots at 79 cents a pop. I have no idea who these people were/are or what they meant to one another. I assume, of course, that they're a young family, probably on vacation, and I imagine sometimes that the marriage isn't doing all that well. But who knows who they are or what became of them? And, perhaps most intriguing of all, who can fathom why the person behind the camera chose this moment to release the shutter?

This picture -- and all those others I rummage through in the snapshot bin -- is a haunting. Here, in an ordinary snapshot as in a legendary collaboration of three major 20th-century artists, we look at ghosts.

Next up: Michael Snow at the Slought Foundation