Species of Time in Emergence Magazine

AS Emmanuel, it’s a pleasure to speak with you. At Slowness, we have been inspired by what you’ve done at Emergence Magazine, from the aesthetic sensibility and the intention in the materiality to the clearly articulated intersection that you explore — ecology, culture and spirituality. We might say that slowness — slow cultivation, or at least a punctuated equilibrium — is a characteristic feature of all three. Could you tell us a bit about how Emergence Magazine came to be?

EVL I had been working within the intersection of ecology, culture and spirituality as a filmmaker for quite some time. In 2016, I was working on a new documentary that was going to explore spiritual ecology. I was in my studio, working on ideas for the film, and I had a big whiteboard with 3×5 cards on it as part of my creative process. I hadn’t started filming yet, and then a bit of a vision came to me out of the blue. All the cards were reshuffled, and instead of being scene cards laying out the narrative, they were individual voices of different people, each from different walks of life, each exploring this theme. It was one of those things, like a creative inspiration. I sat with that experience for a little while, and it had a weight to it that felt more real than the film project I was developing. It was pointing to something else. I sought the form. It had to be something more like a space, because in the vision it had been like a space of voices coming together. To me, space is at the root of what a magazine is. It grew out of other forms, out of the salons of Paris in the twenties, the intellectual and spiritual and philosophical discussions that happened at courts around the world or in monasteries. Those were spaces where ideas were shared. All these thoughts passed through me over one afternoon.

My studio was a garage next door to my office where we had a handful of people working on film projects. I went next door and I said, guys, I think we should run a magazine. That’s where it started. What’s wonderful is nobody on the team had any experience in publishing a magazine. They had some experience in publishing books and lots of creative experience in film and emerging media. So that formed the way we approached thinking about a magazine. It wasn’t going to be a text-only publication. It was going to use the mediums that we had experience with. It was an emergent idea that then formed into something more concrete.

AS Speaking of aliveness, each of the print magazines is its own object, from the first volume with the exposed spine binding to the latest, volume 5 — Time — which is an inscrutable large-format hardback — totally different, essentially a book that dispenses even with the Emergence Magazine wordmark. All it says on the cover is TIME. Was this freedom of form something that you imagined from the beginning? And how have you managed to maintain an aesthetic throughline within that freedom?

EVL Early on in this process, we found a design team to work with. They have been a huge part of our canvas of expression. I had worked with Studio Airport already, a Dutch design team which you work with at Slowness as well. They helped find an aesthetic sensibility in both the virtual and physical spaces.

The first volume had a very playful quality. It contains so many different paper types and colors. The next issue was a slightly more pared back attempt to develop a specific language again. Then at the turn of the pandemic, we really tried to orient our editorial direction in line with what was unfolding. The theme of “living with the unknown” emerged and became a guiding editorial impulse for our third volume, and our fourth volume on the theme of “shifting landscapes” was a way to address the liminal space.

From there, the question became, if we are to adapt to these epic forces of change, we are going to need to think about the most foundational aspects of how we live in relation to the Earth. And that’s where “time” really came to the surface. So Studio Airport showed up again, responding visually to our ideas. I always find it exciting that they think of things that we never would come up with and invariably try to push us. They actually said, well, how about a cover that doesn’t have a logo, doesn’t have any branding? What if it’s just a white object with a tiny little word for “time” in the very middle? Which from a branding and marketing perspective — for a magazine that sits on stands — is suicide. And yet here we are.

AS It’s a credit to you both — it was creative of Studio Airport to come up with the idea and brave of you to go along with it.

EVL Yes, I really must credit them. What Studio Airport and Emergence Magazine share is a belief in the power of beauty to help reveal something within this very broad canvas we live in, where the human and the more-than-human come together, and we are all here in time. Maybe we want to ignore it, so beauty can be a way to draw us into these connections, that shared relationship we have that underpins everything beautiful.

AS Absolutely. The Time issue is a kind of adventure in species of time: deep time, geological time, ancestral time, sacramental time. It’s a deliberate exercise in diversifying our notions and registers of time, a paean to chronodiversity. As Jenny Odell points out to you in her interview, many of us would balk at the suggestion that time is something other than hours and minutes. We are very heavily invested in the clock, and, as she points out, our version of clock time originates with colonialism and the interest in measuring other people’s time in order to buy it and sell it. In some sense, this is fait accompli. Each of us measures and sells our own time, or at least that is what the cult of productivity teaches. But this exercise that you’ve engaged in, exploring other registers of time, is not just conceptual to you. It’s emancipatory. At some point in the magazine you ask, “If we can recognize a different kind of time, can we come to dwell within it?” How has this investigation changed your own way of living in time — or times?

EVL That’s a great question. I have thought about time for a while as more cyclical than linear. This volume starts with a quote from Rumi, the famous Sufi poet: “Step out of the circle of time and step into the circle of love.” For me, that is not just a beautiful line, but a direction for so much of my life. It points to this whole other reality that exists behind what we see in front of us. Linear time is just an idea, but it is a very potent one, one that has ensnared the majority of the world. It has become a tool to continue this crazy, crazy dream that claims that the world is not alive.

Through basic spiritual practices like aligning with the breath or going into a space of love in the heart, you can learn to observe a different way that time moves in the world. When you step out of the linear framework and you stand in front of a tree, you can say, yes, a tree marks time. Each year a memory is layered into wood as it marks the circumambulation around the sun. The tree’s experience of time is so other to us, and yet it’s an expression of time. And what is the language that we share? It certainly isn’t a linear, digital expression of time that is atomized, that controls stock markets and business practices and gym regimens and whatever else we do with time. To me, time is a language that is much greater that belongs to the metaphysical as much as the physical. It is a spiritual language. You can call it love, you can call it qi, you can call it the way.

AS You write in the magazine: “Time begins to open as a living force, a cascade of processes and interplay of relationships.” In the age of physics, we tend to think of time as something more impersonal, sort of an indifferent, homogenous chronos to match homogenous topos. What can you say about time as a living presence?

EVL Well, time is also a completely abstract presence that exists in the spacetime continuum. But what happens when that manifests on Earth? There are many realities. Take light — light travels from the Sun in one form, and when it hits the Earth, it goes through a prism that reveals the many different colors within that light, and that light also hits the Earth differently in different places, from the poles to the tropics. That’s the basic science that we learn in elementary school, and perhaps it’s one of the most important things that we learn. So light can be considered an abstract, maybe unexpressed color. Time is similar. It can exist in the world of abstract physics, and when it hits the Earth and it manifests in a human body, we age and we change. It manifests in a tree, in a bird, in the ocean and its tides. Then the abstract becomes a physical expression.

So I don’t say that time isn’t abstract. It is. It can exist in a place of nonexistence. But we don’t even relate to time in our society as a form of nonexistence. That would be interesting. Instead, we take one tiny aspect of time and we strip it away from everything else, which is a very different thing than talking about an abstract notion of time.

AS I love the phrase from Jane Hirshfield’s poem. She is addressing time directly and she says, “Your prosopopeia is us.” That is what you are describing — in the same way that light goes through the atmospheric prism and turns into all these shades of color, time in our realm is expressed as each organism or each being. Each entity has its own time, and that is time.

EVL It is time. It’s the oneness being present in the multiplicity of expressions that exist here on Earth. When we say that these other beings don’t have their own forms of time, we also deny something in ourselves.

AS It becomes a typical monoculture.

EVL Exactly.

AS Some of the texts in Time play games with their own linearity as a kind of metaphor for breaking out of the arrow of time. Layli Long Soldier, the Oglala Lakota poet, writes an essay that uses punctuation to pun on “not” and “(k)not” — absences and complications — and she inflates her footnotes to such an extent that they become a kind of rival timeline to the main body of her essay. So she sets up an intertextual weft of knots between the elements of her own composition. And then we have Tyson Yunkaporta. It may be no coincidence that they are both indigenous. Tyson interweaves his essay with sections of his rewritten libretto for Beethoven’s Fidelio. He is inviting us to double back and lurch forward in an operation that he calls, “throwing spears at the arrow of time.” I wanted to ask you about this kind of formal experimentalism. How central do you think it is to what you’re trying to achieve with the magazine? And how would you say that form and content combine to produce new shades of consciousness?

EVL What I was so touched by in both of those instances was how we, editorially, would never, ever have thought of that. Initially we spoke to Layli about ancestral time, and she came back with a whole lot more, using footnotes to create almost competing experiences of time. Honestly, our first reaction was, is this going to work? But it really does. And the same with Tyson. The value of these thinkers and artists who are experiencing time in profound ways and are then finding ways to articulate that experience is what is at the heart of Emergence.

Perhaps the most exciting thing is that when you have Layli next to Tyson, next to Jenny Odell, next to Jane Hirshfield, next to all these different people, a mosaic or fabric starts to come together from these different threads of time, each one unique, each one rooted in its own place. Together they reveal time from so many vantage points.

AS Like a polyphony of times.

EVL That’s it.

AS I wanted to ask you specifically about the art direction of the physical volume of Time. The issue begins with a single, chalk-blue line which doubles itself in a kind of graphic mitosis. Then it doubles again, fractures, layers, and stacks itself throughout the volume, providing an exquisitely simple and potent visual narrative that keeps evolving and holds together the various approaches and stances of the voices that make up Time. Can you speak about how that idea of the line and its permutations was born?

EVL Definitely. Early on with the Time issue we decided we would use archival material. So for instance in the Roger Reeves story, you have these great portraits of Mike Tyson and Muhammad Ali and John Coltrane in a state of rest. That decision revealed the need for some sort of meta-level visual arc comprised of original material. Here I really must credit Maurits Wouters from Studio Airport as the creative force behind this idea of the line. It came completely from him. It’s all hand-drawn and it holds everything together brilliantly.

AS It’s so beautiful, so simple. Maybe that brings us to our last question. In her essay “Wrinkled Time,” the geologist Macia Bjorenaud uses this phrase, “the labyrinthine library of time.” She has arrived at this quintessentially Borgian language to describe the timescapes that have opened up to her through her scrying of rocks. Elsewhere, in the chapter on trees, Robert Moor traces time through the discipline of dendrochronology. It seems as if any thing or category in the universe has its own version of time, as you’ve been saying. The Earth, of course, has its own cycles — days determined by rotation, years determined by revolution, a procession of solstices and equinoxes determined by relation of axis tilt to our position vis-à-vis our star. And even these intervals might be considered parochial within the larger context of galaxies and deep time. With so many scopes available to us, and so many directions in which to look, which versions of time do you believe we should privilege?

EVL Oh, that’s a very, very hard question. I don’t know if we should privilege any. I think that should be up to each person to decide. I think we should separate out this notion of “this is better than the other” and allow things to be messy and intermingled.

I think we need to be more conscious about how we create moments in the spaces that we occupy. We don’t have to be prisoners to the clock bearing down on us. We can step into different realities of time and participate and investigate and settle into them and see what they do to us. But we have to allow this variety into our lives.

AS So the plea is to deliberately, with some regularity, dethrone the clock.

EVL Indeed.