Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Paul Erb's avatar

Thank you for this beautiful encouragement. My students (and journalists everywhere) remark most frequently, upon observing ChatGPT, on how FAST it is, how little time it took to spit out its clever bit of words. And this speed, outpacing our native intelligence, makes all of us think, "Do I matter?"

It's a way of asking whether my labor, work, and action will be in sync. Lacking purpose (as we presume the mind to possess, and ChatGPT not to possess), technologies have only instructions, and can define their synchronicities only mathematically. But there's more to math than digits.

And that "do I matter?" from my students is a competitive, time-based response. It says, "I can't keep up with that." Moreover, our new digital technologies outpace us: They don't need light or dark to operate, moreover, as many capitalists of the old school might celebrate, they'll work all night. So my students ask, "Will I have a job? I need to sleep!" Blend time and space, then, and your musings about time and rhythm also blend space into the temporal question: here, and now, and we here and now (you and your daughters on the trail).

So there's something fluid vibrant, and living, in the moral-communal undertone in your essay, that the mechanical clock cannot admit--and which suggests that we should not count (!) on a measured, digital morality. "Human techniques" include methods for helping togetherness dance with separateness.

The word "community" invokes an overlap of time and space. When we say, "We," there's a sense of present-ness in spacetime. The "right" time as felt by a singer, for example, is the one that makes the harmony happen. The same might be said for that beautiful moment in the dance when one dancer catches another falling.

I'd like to see you speculate next about the role of mathematics in human music. There's a convergence, there, that your thoughts, here, seem to draw forth. Talk about dusk...

Expand full comment
Colin Horgan's avatar

I very much recommend Jenny Odell's 'Saving Time'.

Personally, I enjoy running at sunrise (or as close to it as possible) as a regular reminder that life occurs along and among different scales of time (that of birds/other animals, for instance, or of the world itself, turning with or without me).

Expand full comment
15 more comments...

No posts