where does the time go

Written during chemotherapy, Winter 2023

Time, time, time, see what’s become of me
While I looked around for my possibilities
I was so hard to please

—Simon & Garfunkel

It’s not often that a “cover” of a song is better than the original, but in this case, the Bangles nailed the desperation and bleakness behind Simon and Garfunkel’s Hazy Shade of Winter better than the songwriting duo. While the Bangles do add more percussion, their delivery highlights an anxiety-inducing existential displacement. Look at me now, racing around at a frenetic pace, when did I lose my focus? Look around—there’s a patch of snow on the ground. How did I manage to overlook that? That must mean it’s winter; we’re at the end. What now?

In this video, they’re older than when they first recorded the song. They have lived through winters of their own now, and are growing closer to their final winters. Maybe the song feels different to them as they perform it. It certainly does to me as I listen to it now at fifty, as opposed to when I first heard it at fifteen. Is it pedestrian to claim that art delivers different meanings at different times, that it’s not a fixed point, just as we’re not fixed points? Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were probably too young to have written that song in 1966, and the Bangles might’ve been too young to sing it in 1987. Maybe they’re conscious of that here; maybe not. Doesn’t matter. It works for me.

We will each experience many winters in our lifetimes—winter doesn’t necessarily mean death, although it can certainly get close. I think of my winters as periods of cold withdrawals, when my spirit is tested more directly than it might be otherwise. And a true winter doesn’t last merely a day or two; it could extend to months or even years. Seasons have a contiguous quality—entering, reckoning, emerging—and there has to be enough time for a true reckoning. You might notice a similarity with the hero’s journey here as well, although what we reckon with in our winters are things we are frequently taught to ignore, pack down, or work through—things like sadness, depression, pain, madness, fear, existential trauma. Things that lay life bare.

Of course, I’m in the midst of one such winter now, and although it’s not my first, it’s perhaps the most intense and definitely the most public reckoning that I’ve been through. And it’s needed to be, because there’s been much to learn from others who have packed down this soil with their footsteps. When I reflect on past winters that I chose to weather alone, I wonder if being slightly more forthcoming with myself and others might have helped to ease those journeys. Feh. A pox on hindsight.

“Call no one happy until they are dead.” Thanks Aristotle, for that ultra-Greek reckoning in reverse. Only after all the cards are in can we truly take the measure of a person (maybe that was Kenny Rogers). In our individual winters, we *may* become conscious of that imminent, final reckoning and feel something akin to anxiety or fear. Perhaps there’s not enough strength left to perform a few final “balancing” acts. “See what’s become of me, while I looked around for my possibilities. I was so hard to please.” Was I happy? Was I virtuous? What will remain of me, what will people say when they speak of me?

Look up here, I’m in heaven
I’ve got scars that can’t be seen
I’ve got drama, can’t be stolen
Everybody knows me now

—David Bowie

When David Bowie received a diagnosis of terminal liver cancer, he did not choose publicity; rather, he crafted a final album, Blackstar, which was released two days prior to his death. It’s in some ways an odd departure musically from previous Bowie albums and in some ways not—for a man whose life comprised a series of odd departures, it might be considered quite consistent. I’ve spent a lot of time listening to Blackstar over the past year, before I became aware that I’d be entering another winter myself. It’s an incredibly personal message from a man who was consciously entering his final winter. Parts of the album convey a similar sense of urgency to Hazy Shade of Winter, but are offset by the calm self-assurance of a man doing his own final reckoning. He chose the Donny McCaslin Quartet as studio musicians, ensuring that this last missive would be as improvisational and organic (and perhaps authentic) as possible. Of course, this could also be viewed as an exercise in the futility of controlling one’s image, one’s presentation of death. Doesn’t matter. It works for me.

Our short lives consist of entering, reckoning, and returning over time to seasons both external and internal. We live surrounded by cycles, encapsulated in cycles, borne along by cycles, experiencing the world and our own progress through cycles. We are parts of nature with the unfortunate gift of imagining ourselves apart from nature. We entrap ourselves with dualistic thinking that imagines some states as more desirable than others, more worthy of our time and consideration. Summers are “better” than winters, love to be preferred to loss, happiness to depression. We don’t recognize these transient states as part of the whole, as things we pass into and move away from. We’re little microcosms of the ever-expanding and ever-retracting, breathing, cyclical universe; everything has happened before and will happen again in time.

When I had a child and was despairing of my loss of personal space and time, someone told me jokingly that even walking around the car after strapping my progeny into his car seat could become a vacation worthy of many postcards. The fact that this claim is both true and something I should’ve been able to grasp without the experience of having a child is not lost on me. Time isn’t an objective truth that we access; it’s a perception that we experience, and that perception is variable. I of all people—perpetually clock-resistant—should’ve known this. The time we spend wintering (or summering, or what-have-you) is variable and self-dependent in many ways, although not all. There are external factors to consider. But perception reigns supreme with regard to the timey-wimey stuff, as Doctor Who would say.

Unfortunately, the internality of time (the experience of it) is something that we must struggle with as separate individuals. Chemotherapy drugs have currently slowed my perception of time to a nauseous slog, and in some ways have plopped me outside of a time stream altogether. This does not help with my search for equanimity, or my little bespoke fantasy of “tending my winter garden.” But when the moments come that I can open my eyes and take in my surroundings without wanting to disappear completely from the timestream—those moments have become delicious and I am learning to stretch them longer in my perception. Vacations worthy of postcards indeed.

So where does the time go, and what has become of me? Time goes as I go, ever present and necessary in my perception of the world. I can lay claim to present moments, a past, and a future self. Time goes with you as well. Our pasts are always present with us and our futures are contained within our presents as well (the choices we make, the branches of possibility that we follow).

My mother will laugh at this, but clocks don’t reckon time; they merely measure human obligations. Fear and anxiety over “time” start when we begin to confuse and conflate time with clocks. I can’t give my time to anyone else. It’s always mine. You can never truly know what anyone is doing with their time. Lately, I’m spending mine reckoning with winter, both literal and figurative. It works for me.

Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child’s toy Slinky. Of course we have no idea which arc on the loop is our time, let alone where the loop itself is, so to speak, or down whose lofty flight of stairs the Slinky so uncannily walks.

—Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek