The Expanse Part 1: On moving through the eddies of time

And how I'm about to talk about ancestors and the past again because there is no such thing as the future, without them

Oct 06, 2023

Image is of a glowing gaseous cloud shelf reaching up into an expanse of brilliant stars against a dark background, where we see more stars in the distance. — “Cosmic Cliffs” in the Carina Nebula (NIRCam and MIRI Composite Image) via NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

I’ve been thinking about the nonlinear nature of time again. This is just the way things are, with me. I think this is just the way things are with us all, now. I think this is just the way things have become, again. This reframing of time is a necessary return—see what I’ve done, there?—to moving through time experientially, cyclically, rather than conceptually. The way time is perceived now is almost as a planar object, rather than a dimensional being, in our 21st century world, the one we move through that is dictated by all the “isms and archies”, as my friend, curator and spiritualist Negarra A. Kudumu would call them. We don’t need to get into them. We know them and what they do. If you’ve been in conversations with me for a while, we’re always getting into them and what they do. If you’re new to me and these conversations, you’ll see how we’re always threading everything throughout everything.

But what about time as a living entity, what about time as relational? Remember experiencing time as something we move about and through in the world? Can you recall a moment in time and what it felt like, tasted like, smelled like, sounded like, and looked like? Have you ever moved through the mists or the waters and felt the eddies and currents unfurling and closing themselves behind you as you made your way through the vast body of time?

There are moments in my life where I swear I perceive future events as memory. I do believe that’s part of what impacted me so much about the way the story was told in the film Arrival. I won’t say more about that here. I think there are a lot of stories about future memories that are incredibly old, throughout time. The [rhetorical] questions we're asking here are, how did we come to place such limitations on human perception; when did we start going about our daily lives perceiving so very little? It didn’t start here but it’s worth noting that we peer into these tiny black mirrors, perceiving so much less, every day. Our languages are diminishing and with them, swaths of knowledge about our known world and with that knowledge, ways of moving forward in a changing world, as well. Irrespective of the when and the how it began, what is clear is that our perception of what is “past” and what is “future” must be reconfigured, now.

The upcoming subject I have slated for this space is called “The Expanse” and I’d imagined a more science/speculative fiction bent, but I’ve come to realize that I can’t talk about “the future” without talking about “the past” and if I’m going to do that, this is the perfect space to bring in and renew that so-called “old” material and revitalize it for this season so rich with the celebration of all things ancestors and introspection and inward journeying.

I used to teach a course titled Ancestor Reconnection and Restorative Practices. I've never been so keen on discussions of ancestral healing or guiding people through that process; nor have I wanted to explicitly teach people on the specific practice of ancestor veneration. I suppose that I could have—after all, I’ve been doing this work and I’ve been researching since a young age. But I've also been aware of the fact that after so many years of doing that work and research, I stepped forward out of nowhere to begin talking about it. I strongly feel people should seek out those who are trained in this spiritual and often very culturally-rooted work. Therefore in the interest of ethics and specificity, I focused my efforts on the conversation from my points of interest and my points of experience: the personal work of excavating and untangling and unsettling the distance of feeling severed from ancestry; and the political situation of severance and distance from cultural belonging.

So after pausing the program due to the pandemic and subsequently, due to the desire to move forward in this conversation with even more caution, sensitivity, and care; I continue to do so. I have a lot that I want to continue to say, write, and share. While I've continued the conversation here and there, I haven't participated as much as I'd like, so I want to pull this material forward now and fold it in. The way I’ve come to think about the interconnections of the future to the present is so much different than even just a few years ago; and yet somehow, so much closer to how I used to think of it twenty, thirty years ago or even as a kid. The future was somehow just so present, like a folded page, or a closed loop. I don’t really know how to explain it other than to say, as I taught in my ancestors course: we’re all reaching back to our ancestors, and our descendants are all reaching back to us. It’s so profound to think how the future is changing the past, in these ways.

I think this is why I’m so on board with Black and Indigenous futurism, science fiction, and storytelling that blurs the lines of time. These aren’t stories for those of us outside of culture to co-opt as our own but to learn from and change our behavior, and grow. It’s our work to undo the indoctrination of our collectively colonized and restrained imagination. Our brains have literally been rewired and I think if there’s one potent lesson in the story of Arrival or Ted Chiang’s novella The Story of Your Life that the film is inspired by, it’s the brilliant illustration of the rewiring of our brains to unlearn linear time, and the compassion and beauty of our ultimate humanity that unfolds in the expanse.

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