In Patagonia Day 33
Puerto Varas (rain)
Today, as promised by the folks who predict such matters, the skies dumped rain a constant heavy rate. In the hostel where I am staying, there are people of many nationalities, and each has a different relationship to time. One, a Canadian who works as a police officer, is taking the only extended vacation (two weeks) he will be allowed in the next few years. Another, an American (one of the few I’ve bumped into) was recently laid off and is spending her six months severance pay by spending six months traveling South America. A young couple from Johannesburg both quit their jobs and are embarking on a multi-month fly-fishing tour of this continent. My Dutch friend Jakob is retired from UNESCO and travels outside most time, focusing instead on space— visiting UNESCO sites. I fall somewhere in the middle, wandering a bit to delay returning to Trump’s America, but, more important, to find the space and time to actually think, which generally is discouraged for people working in today’s neoliberal university system. Rainy days of the Patagonian variety highlight everyone’s differing relationships to industrial time. Anxiety by those looking for a complete experience, recalibration for those needing a planning day, and of course action for those who dive in regardless of the circumstances (something required of long-distance trekkers for example). I also think of Victor, the farmer back on Chiloé, sipping maté in an overheated kitchen watching the skies for a break in the rain before starting his daily and interminable chores. It’s days like this that the very idea of time shows its complexity, revealing its materiality, abstraction, and multiplicity.
One way to begin to think about this (only to begin) is how time is given in (lived) experience. In The Adventure of Ideas, Alfred North Whitehead insists that experience must be understood through affect: “The basis of experience is emotional. Stated more generally, the basic fact is the rise of an affective tone originally from things whose relevance is given.” Immediately following this assertion, he invokes what he calls a “Quaker” sense of “concern.” The occasion of experience is never merely a passive (or even semi-active) perception, but instead a full bodied sense of what and how something counts, how something matters. Concern brings with it both a sense that there is something vital, truly at stake in any experience, and at the same time introduces temporality. His “Quaker” sense of concern brings with it not just a passive sense of care (as in feeling sympathy for) but also an obligation to action. In other words, concern is fundamental to any occasion of experience, it is affective, and, perhaps most important, it opens out toward the future that must be made.
In a neoliberal world, that future is necessarily experienced through a sense of belatedness. Time is never well-spent as the future will always bring opportunity loss. In measured performance, participants always miss the mark. This is where Whitehead’s focus on experience, affect, and what he calls “the peculiar status of the human body” helps salvage time and begin to make a future that could be an adventure instead of a loss. Concern is not about belatedness, but instead actually produces time—that is the occasion of experience. To walk up Osorno requires concern—the ash and gravel path is only relatively stable, the wind makes walking difficult and at times even dangerous, but the peculiar status of walking is always an opening out onto the future, a marking/making of time step by step, each with concern for the next. Such an assertion seems trivial (according to people who worry over “the big picture”) but time is trivial—it is a granular experience made not by accomplishment or performance, but through a knowing and understanding body.
T. Hugh Crawford
