Unfreezing something in time

Joan Miro - Woman and Bird in the Night

Jenny Odell, in Saving Time, reflects on the constantly changing appearance through the year of a Buck-Eye Tree -- actually, just a single branch in order to provide an example of a mental exercise she describes as "unfreezing something in time."  

What's important is that this way of observation can help change the way that we experience the world and change the way we think of the bodies that move through the world, together.

Time is not a clock cycle, not an imagined series of boxes that we will inhabit - tomorrow, Sunday, June.  Instead, it's a constant unspooling.  (I'm imagining Strega Nona's pasta pot or bread with constantly expanding yeast.)

What is a clock? If it's something that "tells the time," then my branch was a clock-but unlike the clock at home, it would never return to its original position. Instead, it was a physical witness and record of over, lapping events, some of which happened long ago and some of which are still occurring as I write this.

This exercise in observation is an example of what I have come to think of as "unfreezing something in time." To do this means releasing something or someone from their bounds as a supposed stable, individual entity existing in abstract time, seeing them not only as existing within time, but also as the ongoing materialization of time itself. Here, it's important for me to note the difference between seeing the tree as evidence of time and seeing it as symbolic of time. While it is certainly possible to derive some fruitful thoughts about time and fate from the branching structure of a tree, what I'm talking about is different: The literal tree in front of you is encoding time and change at this literal moment.

This exercise of unfreezing something in time is not hard to do. If you want to see time that isn't fungible, just pick a point in space— a branch, a yard, a sidewalk square, a webcam-and simply keep watch.

A story is being written there. Like the larger and larger wind patterns on Windy.com, this story is inseparable from the story of all life, even yours. This story is, finally, the signature of "it": the restless, unstoppable, constantly overturning thing that makes it all go.   (p. 139)