On Time

And why I have so little of it

Alberto Giacometti’s Walking Man (1960)

I have a problem: I have zero time. Almost every weekday, I work til 9pm. In the morning, I go to an office job near my house and do paid work til 4:30. During lulls in the day, I read essays by Alicia Kennedy, Gretchen Felker-Martin, Kate Wagner, the publications Defector, Dirt, and more. After work on Mondays, I go to People Against Prisons Aotearoa meetings til 8pm. On Tuesdays, I lock myself in the library from 6 to 9pm to write this blog and other things. On Wednesdays or Thursdays, I lock myself in the library again to read texts like Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?, and Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch. On my one remaining weeknight, I either train with my old running team, meet a friend for a drink, or see a show. During the weekends, I try to rest and see my friends so I don’t go insane. I often end up sleeping, manning People Against Prisons events, or doing house chores instead, though.

I stick to this schedule because I’m trying to balance three spinning plates. I have to work a full-time job to live, I want to continue stewarding the most disciplined, organized, and effective left-wing political group in Aotearoa, and within three years, I want to write a book and hold a published copy of it in my hands. I write this weekly blog because I don’t know what I want to write that book about yet, and I think the best way to figure it out is to cast my attention on different ideas until I find one I want to commit to. This schedule leaves me very little time to be human, though. I’m starting to feel worn down like Giacometti’s pitted and eroded Walking Man sculpture from 1960.

What do we lose when we lose time to exist? In her essay “I am a knife,” Jacqueline Rose writes that “harassment… destroys the mind’s capacity for reverie.” Rose writes specifically about how men steal women’s free time by delivering them the injunction “You will think about me,” but I think it applies to the capitalist war on time, too. If the cost of rent and groceries skyrockets, if public funding for the arts is cut, and if you have to work more than 40 hours a week just to keep your head above water, you have very little time for reverie. It becomes hard to let your thoughts drift and coagulate like clouds across the sky in the way that making art requires. You either have to let capitalism instrumentalize you, or instrumentalize yourself in its image to get things done at scale. I’m doing the latter, and it’s costing me greatly.

In a 2009 interview with The New Yorker, James Cameron said that his inspiration for Terminator came to him as an image in a dream: that of “a chrome skeleton emerging out of a fire.” I feel more and more like that skeleton as I become more ruthless with my time. I have to tell people I love that I can’t help them with their problems. I have to be a disciplinarian in People Against Prisons meetings to keep people from wasting the group’s time. I’ve had to give up playing competitive sports, my dream of learning to sail, my dream of learning to surf, my desire to learn te reo Māori, my desire to pick up bossa nova guitar again, my unstructured evenings playing cards with my friends at the bar, and the most important relationship I’ve ever been in to commit to reading, writing, and politically organizing around a job I have to do. I resent when people waste my time, but more broadly, I resent the system that gives me so little time to waste. As the ruling class accelerates its theft of our labor, I worry the latter problem’s only going to get worse.

In the foreward to The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James writes that the enslaved people of Haiti owed some of their revolution’s success to the fact that they’d been “disciplined, united and organized by the very mechanism of factory production.” I think, similarly, I’ve been made into a communist T-1000 by the very system that oppresses me. I’m smarter, faster, and more efficient than my political enemies, and I do more with a fraction of their resources than they can do in a year. But it’s costing me dearly. Every time I give up more of my free time or let another dream float downstream, I feel like I’m sacrificing another piece of flesh to the fire. I don’t want to be a machine, but I don’t know how else to do what I want with the time I have. As the ruling class grows more depraved, I anticipate only having to become more disciplined.

I think a freer world may one day exist, but I worry I won’t live to see it. I recently saw the Brazillian film I’m Still Here about the dictatorship’s murder of left-wing senator Rubens Paiva. I’m good at what I do and fascists historically kill or imprison people like me. As Trump opens the permission window for them to disappear people in bourgeois democracies around the world, and police blackbag activists here, I often wonder whether they’ll come for me, too. I don’t do anything illegal, but I don’t think that will matter soon. That’s another time pressure. I’d like to publish a book before the West declares a white supremacist war on China and I get a door-knock for being a communist in a few years.

People have been imagining better worlds since the 19th century and they’ll continue to do so after my lifetime. In his 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness,” Bertrand Russell argues for a four-hour workday by writing “Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers [what we would call “hot takes” today], with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works.” He later writes that a four-hour workday would bring “happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia.” I’d like that four-hour workday, too, but it’s not going to happen as long as global capitalism remains dominant. In the meantime, I’m going to try and write my book without losing my mind.

Tāmaki (Auckland) Events

• The Capitol Cinema Film Club is playing Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (1975) about a man who assumes a dead man’s identity on Wednesday, April 30 at 8pm at The Capitol Cinema in Mt. Eden. Antonioni's L’Eclisse (1962), which I also saw at the film club, is one of my favorite movies, so I’m looking forward to this one.

• The New Zealand Maritime Museum, down at the Auckland Viaduct, has a very cool collection of waka (Māori watercraft) and other boats from around the Pacific Islands. The white people boats and nationalist history displays in the back are boring, but the boats from the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, and other islands are fascinating. The museum is free for Auckland residents if you bring your ID.

• The New Zealand ballet is performing The Firebird in Auckland between May 7 and May 10. I’ve been really enjoying ballet adaptations of stage plays, lately, and the ballet more broadly. I think this one will be good.

Recommended Reading

• I liked Lucie Elven’s essay in The London Review of Books about photographer Nan Goldin and her refusal to bend to corporate pressure on AIDS and Palestine.

• In light of alleged sister-rapist Sam Altman stealing Hayao Miyazaki’s work through ChatGPT, I’d recommend reading this Lucy Jakub essay on the labor that went into building Studio Ghibli’s aesthetic.

• In that vein, I’d also recommend Daisy Alioto’s essay on AI and how “attention is what makes us human.” She tweeted “The Ghibli filter only has meaning because of Ghibli. If there is no original there is no referent.” She’s right.