Give it some time to contemplate

Time will never be enough.

A not-so-pleasant start, but also the premise that leads me to write after so long. I resigned myself to the fact that time will never be enough again. Never. I can't get rid of that feeling... there will never be enough time to do it all! To experience it all. Or to see it all, since during the last few years doing things has become actually seeing things.

But what is actually seeing it all? Every corner? From every angle? Every possible point of view at every second of the day? Even if I were immortal, there wouldn't be enough time to conceptually see it all. And, if possible, how would it actually be? I can't help thinking about The Aleph, that amazing point in the universe described by Borges, a point that contains all other points, a point where you can see everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously, without distortion, overlapping, or confusion. Seeing it all would be, without a doubt, devastatingly overwhelming.

I can see today a disproportion between what is exhibited and the time that is available for contemplating it. Any city can be a good place to experience that feeling, but you can also think about any museum, or take just a single painting. This disproportion —which characterizes most of the contemporary exhibitions— has been overly intensified by social networks, where the availability of information and pictures have become virtually infinite. The quickness of the Calvino's Memos for the Next Millennium has been utterly misunderstood (looks like we have speed but we have no actual motion).

Some short stories by Felisberto Hernández were already at the beginning of the last century starting to focus on the changes of the rising consumer society, particularly on a sensory and perceptual level. In 1887, Nietzche had already spoken about an abundance of impressions in the material conditions of the cosmopolitan urban modernity. An overabundance that, like in Felisberto's stories, seemed to be not only difficult, but rather impossible to digest. The result of this distressing hyper stimulation is that: "one instinctively resists taking in anything, taking anything deeply, to "digest" anything". Contemplation turns into 'mere impressions'.

Why can't we slow down the speed and think of those situations that force us to gaze at one thing, just due to the impossibility of of moving towards volatile vertigo? I came across this thought on my fourteen-hour plane journey from Frankfurt to Buenos Aires last night, when I found myself staring in rapture at the dilatory passage of the sky under my feet through the window of the aircraft, while flying over the Sahara Dessert. The remaining flight hours created that "no vertigo" situation. Maybe the loss of one's own time control? —this does not happen to me on the bus because I can drop off at any time, or check my social media accounts—. An aesthetic experience moment, a larghissimo time, as opposed to the prestissimo that Nietzche mentioned in The Will to Power. A temporary dilation that revealed not the thing itself, but the moment in which the thing was happening, and therefore the subjective sensorial experience of that same thing. The founding principle of the spectacular (the assumption that something must happen before our eyes) got exterminated in that very moment: fabulous.

Intellectual elites, however, are rewarding the time of contemplation. For example, I think about Cuaron's latest film, Roma. A film in which the time of contemplation plays a major role, a film which has won many prizes including the Golden Globes, BAFTAs and Oscars, and has several nominations for further recognitions. There is, again, a bourgeois split between cultured time and street time. The cultured time can be bought inside a movie theater with Campari orange.

And what is it about photography, which helps us multiply the joyful experiences in our memory? Is digital photography nowadays an unfortunate attempt to extend the time contemplating about a thing? A faint awareness of our lack of time, or at least, a weak certainty that contemplation may extend over time, even if the thing is gone. Photography has always been a reminder of the transitory nature of time, a record of unrepeatable moments that allows us to thieve that thing that will no longer be there, never again, a representation of an absence, of a pycnolesia.

But when I meditate about the reason why I take pictures with my phone, I can't help thinking of two scenarios: on one hand, I take pictures in order to represent something that turns into a past in the very moment of the capture —basically, a memory—. On the other hand (and this freaks me out), I am starting to feel that I take pictures just to give entity to the moment, a present being that is constructed as a digital present... as if I didn't take the picture, the moment simply wouldn't exist. The time is built by the picture, the reality criteria now lies on the digital picture... has social media shaped my mind so much?


And I also think that this reflection could actually be just a bit of nonconformism... just the necessary amount to be inspiring enough in a consumer world, the necessary amount just to produce a feeling of freedom, an illusive capability of being oneself. I wonder now if this whole contemplating time thing is just another form of late capitalism. The worst part is that I don't think I have the time to elucidate it.