009: Burning Clock

On ambient YouTube videos and the passage of time

On cold winter mornings, my girlfriend likes to read in the comfort of crackling fireplace videos. She’ll open YouTube on our living room television and flip through thumbnails until she finds one that fits her mood. Some of these videos are framed tight on the fireplace, exhibiting the fine details of charred logs and old bricks. Others gaze into fancy living rooms and cozy cabins, offering an intimate yet vague glimpse into someone’s idyllic den. Some videos appear real, and some wear the smoothness of CGI. Not that authenticity matters — these scenes aren’t meant to be studied closely, just to serve as a warm backdrop to whatever is happening on the human side of the screen.

Yesterday, Sadie opted for a bonfire in the winter wilderness. It burned inside a dish-like firepit in the snow, against a towering white mountain and a pink sky at dusk. We sat on the couch with our books as it crackled, lethargic from recent illnesses and the previous day of travel from the next state over. It was 9 a.m. The high sun sent beams of light through our windows, indicating the day was underway and suggesting I do something with it. Unpack, do laundry, clean the apartment, stock the pantry, go for a run, get my life in order before it resumed its typical march.

Instead, I sat and stared at this artificial fire, a sense of longing bubbling within me. I longed not for the scene — though I would’ve happily sat in it — but the sense of time, or, more accurately, the lack of time, that the scene belonged to. The flames of the fire spontaneously whipped about, but everything else on this mountaintop lived free from change. The blackened logs did not succumb and topple into the pit; the snow at the base of the pit did not melt and wet the ground beneath it; the evening sky did not give way to darkness. The fire burned and burned and burned with no sign of fading. It did not intend to die.

Last week, on Christmas Eve, I sat in my parents’ living room, talking to my dad about developing a few dozen rolls of film my grandparents recently found tucked away in a closet. He went to his bedroom and returned with a black case holding a Sony Hi8 camcorder that my parents bought in 2003, along with a handful of cassette tapes. Could I digitize our family memories, too?

He hadn’t touched these tapes in over a decade, so one by one, he loaded them into the camcorder to see what lived inside. The small screen showed my two sisters and I singing in Christmas concerts, unwrapping presents, blowing out birthday candles, playing Restaurant in the basement of our first home, growing up before his eyes. He called me over to watch a shot he particularly enjoyed. I’m running up the street, arms flailing. I’m wearing a green t-shirt and light jeans a size too large. My hair is short, as are my strides. Even for a five-year-old, I’m tiny. As I’m running, I look over and see the camcorder pointed at me. That’s when I clip a crack in the sidewalk and fall face-first into the grass beside it. My dad cackles. I get up, dust myself off, and continue running.

I can rarely identify the feelings of my father — he grew up on a farm in Nebraska, if that tells you anything — but he seemed genuinely joyful as he watched these younger versions of his children, something I don’t often get to see. For an hour he sat on the couch, fixed on the camcorder, a few hundred pixels reminding him who his children were, and perhaps who he was, before time shaped us into something different. Maybe he found relief in the fact that these memories existed somewhere other than his mind, in a time and place still accessible by film. Maybe he found comfort, if only for a short time, in stepping out of the present timeline and into another.

The last few months a restlessness has moved into my gut, revealing itself most while I’m not working, or trying and failing to work. I know it’s a symptom of the unhealthy relationship between productivity and worth, my inability to stay still, optimization culture, etc. That’s not interesting to me. What’s interesting to me is what arises from it: the desire to escape time. Not to go back or forward in it. Not to add more of it. Just to step away from it. To rest and reflect. To temporarily free myself from the weight of responsibility. To give myself a break without sacrificing anything in return. To reassess what I’m doing with my time, to avoid misusing such a precious resource.

The crackling firepit on the television struck me, I think, as an unintended form of escapism, a window into what the world would look like if I could suspend time and remove myself from a constant state of change. Moments pass and matter moves, neither growing nor deteriorating. If I were placed there, my hands wouldn’t grow cold, I wouldn’t run out of logs, I wouldn’t worry about navigating through the night. I would remain unaffected, steeped in the beauty as long as I pleased.

In Concision: A Sprawl, George Estreich writes of the editor’s obsession with concision, most popularly defined in the Elements of Style as Rule 17: “Omit needless words.” Estreich argues that the compulsion to strip sentences down to their bare components — a qualitative act — “offers the allure of the quantitative, the mirage of certainty.” He goes on: “It’s like magnetic north, an idea of direction in the wilderness. But magnetic north and true north are not the same.”

By the end of the essay, he’s pointed out what we lose in an absolute commitment to concision. We wrong the writer by eliminating style and nuance. We wrong the reader by diminishing their reading experience to mere extraction. Reduced to concentrate, language becomes a way to exchange information, not a living body of words to study, interpret, engage with, and be entertained by.

“We want to experience the language, not mine it,” Estreich writes. “What we get [in an essay] is a chance to waste time, or to inhabit time in a way not governed by use.”

He concludes: “There is no true north, and the wilderness is my home now; maybe it always has been.”

Coincidentally, these words were in my hand as the firepit burned on the TV. As I stared into it, I felt the restlessness fade away, most likely because I was too tired to care how I was spending, or going to spend, my time that day. It was then I realized what I desired was not the ability to escape time, but to redefine how I allow myself to use it. To rest, reflect, reassess without feeling it slip away. To crumple up a to-do list, cancel plans, and, without guilt, say Fuck it.

It’s a simple epiphany: realizing that time is not meant to be optimized, rather experienced and enjoyed. No shit, Austin. I felt silly for forgetting this, despite all that’s been written about productivity and capitalism in the last few years. Regardless, it’s probably best that I remembered it on my own.

For the last few days, I’ve felt like that five-year-old boy on the camcorder, running up the street, arms flailing, with no destination. That boy isn’t escaping time. He isn’t even embracing it. He is simply unable to acknowledge it, and he looks to be having a good time doing so.