Altered time skin#

I wonder if this comes from the same longing for landscapes? Musical space substituting for actual space? Or is it an illusion? Lockdown has burdened everything with significance, saturated the world with too much meaning. I’ve found myself listening more structurally to music in recent weeks. My friend and his wife dancing in their garden a space I know watching and listening to them in it, now, at the same time as everyone else on that 5×5 grid of screens people dispersed in space but together in time a landscape, flattened. A glimpse, electronically mediated and Zoom-chambered, but I drank it in.

Altered time skin#

I think about other spaces I know well – the walk to my son’s school, my studio, the river, a familiar beach, a woodland, London Bridge – and my skin tingles erotically with the feeling of different walks, the airs of other rooms.Īnother landscape: on Friday a friend held a birthday party, DJing in his garden for about 30 people. Rock formations, walking between buildings, horizons, enclosures, passages and transitions, arrangements of things. Confined to my house for two months now, I crave landscapes and architecture. Less acknowledged, it is doing strange things to space too. I’m forgetful over drug doses, much more than usual. Yet friends report that they find it harder than ever to concentrate, to hold on to threads.

The time for what one used to do has been taken up by what one ought to be doing: reading more, making bread, learning new skills. Time in lockdown is moving both faster and slower boredom is simultaneous with an inability to keep track, to keep on top of, to keep up with.

The lockdown is doing strange things to time.