I’ve never felt physically aligned with the conception of linear time. Time has always felt corpulent, matter-full, stratigraphic. It layers, compresses, buckles as the mantle of some prehistoric event changes it’s position. The past can change and reflux into the present. The present can settle like dust and pollen on older sedimented events, forming a physical chronicle. When I came upon the conception of “thick time”, developed by scholars Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker in conversation with the work of feminist physicist Karen Barad, I felt a sense of recognition. Time is a thickness. It is not immaterial. It is our very matter – “a transcorporeal stretching between present, future, and past…our bodies as archives of climate…making future climates possible”. And it accumulates unevenly.
There are certain days and seasons that when I cyclically pass over them are noticeably “thicker” than other seasons. It’s as if they are valleys that have a knack for accumulating sedimented events. Early October is one of those thick times, and events that happen in that micro-season never seen to fully complete. When I pass back over the equinox each year, time grows busy and dense, palimpsestic, with previous events shimmering through the thin parchment of today’s tawny sunlight.