The Nature of Time

The erasure poem (aka blackout poem) in this post is part and parcel of the nature of time that I’ve been meditating on all year. It’s a small piece of a big puzzle that I’m still piecing together as I grapple with Rosslyn past, present, and future.

I owe everything — the ingredients, the recipe, and the final confection — to four artists: Deborah Dancy, Ray DiCapua, Janet L. Pritchard, and Judith Thorpe. The photographs in their collaborative exhibition, Like a Whisper (Like-a-Whisper.com), and their project statement, “Like a Whisper: Time on the Land”, continue to resonate so profoundly in me that I’ve taken a creative liberty (and it’s a biggie, so I hope they’ll forgive me!).

I printed their essay and — employing the crude art of erasure poetry — I distilled fragments that defy erasure. Then I shuffled and re-shuffled the most enduring words and phrases, allowing them to coalesce a new, puzzle-piecing a mosaic of words and ideas.

In short, everything in this post is owed to the following four artists and the alchemy of their collaboration.

• Deborah Dancy: deborahdancy.com
• Ray Dicapua: raydicapua.com
• Janet Pritchard: janetpritchard.com
• Judith Thorpe: judiththorpe.com

If you linked through to read their essay, you’ll have noticed that they open with a quotation from Margaret Drabble. I excerpt the first half of that quotation here.

The past lives on in art and memory, but it is not static: it shifts and changes as the present throws its shadow backwards.

— Margaret Drabble, A Writer’s Britain: Landscape in Literature

Without further ado, here’s me erasure poem.

The Nature of Time

for Deborah Dancy, Ray DiCapua, Janet L. Pritchard, and Judith Thorpe

Traces of human activity
whisper years 
of scarring and healing,
erasures and scrapings
layered in a palimpsest.

Grounded in a landscape,
familiar yet foreign,
one musician offers a phrase 
and another responds,
a jazz riff exploration 
of shared discovery.

Simultaneous perception
of human life,
of human artifacts,
abundant evidence
of such deep history,
past, present and future.

Time is a slippery construct.

It seems to dance 
both quickly and slowly
in the blink of the eye,
everywhere present,
fragmented stories,
history bumped up 
against present realities,
construction and 
de-construction,
a landscape of ruins,
remains of formal structures.

We believe
that remnants coalesce,
that excavation, observation,
collaborative accumulation,
and artistic practice
allow one to 
wonder-dream
into ancient / modern
mysteries about
the nature of 
time.

The photos in this post are drawn from our earliest days and more recent times. For that is the timeless nature of Rosslyn.