The Expanse Part 5: All slices of time being simultaneous
The past is not a point of return, but a point of departure
Hey all, it has been a while since I’ve released an essay and I’m excited to share this one with you, because I think I’ve finally reached a point where I’m able to tether all these seemingly disparate ideas together, and that’s my goal! And as I move forward through more topics you’ll see this is truly a weaving in and out of various ideas to eventually collect and culminate in a larger thesis over time. I also wanted to let you know that with the publication of this piece, I’ll be reactivating paid subscriptions, so I don’t want that to come out of left field. But if you haven’t yet committed to a paid subscription, I would truly love to have your support. If you’re enjoying these long-format meanderings, every single contribution helps me get that much closer to carving out the time I need to build them.
Last year, I began The Expanse by talking about ancestors and time as the binding thread throughout the essay series. I knew I would come back around to this, eventually. All stories include the ancestors across all our lineages and spirits of place and time. And time is not a directional line, and place is not a static point; both are in a constant state of movement. Remember how we’re also moving through time, not just space? How the fabric of the universe is made of these, together?
Time is described as an entropic entity. You’ve heard this before, right, that time is an arrow—you can’t unbreak an egg that has fallen to the floor; you can’t reconstruct the disintegrated metal undone by rust over a century of exposure to the elements.1 You can’t see the future, and you can never go back to the past. You can’t reverse aging and death. This is ultimately where the arrow lands, right? The end. It is the unknown of all that is unknown. My grandmother is sitting somewhere right now, legs crossed and leaning forward with her elbows on the kitchen table, muttering to me to not worry too much about death. She pulls a long, dramatic drag from her cigarette and snuffs out the last of it in her giant 1970s red plastic ashtray. As tenuous as our relationship was, it brings me comfort to know that as I write these words and as you read them, she and I are sitting in our weird thrifted wooden office chairs at that rickety wooden table. The early evening summertime sun streams in all the way from the living room windows on the other side of the house to rest on her face and the ancient wallpaper behind her. The vast silence of the space between her words is filled with heavy smoke and the firm punctuation of an extinguished cigarette. She and I are in that moment together, in stillness and in motion, our pasts and our futures forever intertwined. Neither of us will ever leave that moment, or that place, but we have both moved beyond it—her in death, and me in life. Do you see? This is not an ending but a phase, a cycle, a flux.
Reading over the last few sentences, I’m suddenly overwhelmed with the sadness of loss. I can never go back to that moment, I think. And as quickly, I remember, that moment is forever with me and I am forever there. I don’t have to go back, because I never really leave. I tell myself, Don’t recall that memory too many times, ok? Because memory deteriorates, too. Like a jpeg, it loses data over too many repetitions.2 Every remembrance is an apocalypse. And I need every detail of that original memory to remain vibrant, so that I can make it through every moment ahead that I walk through.
We have a problem with endings, it seems. But I think we also have a hard time with beginnings, and the journey between. We can’t answer the question of what comes before any easier or better than we can answer the question of what comes after. We’re born, but from where and when have we come? In order to contend with the mystery, we’d have to be able to wrap our heads around the cyclical nature of our vibrant world, of time and the universe; that things are neither beginning nor ending so much as they are phasing, and inevitably return again even if differently than before. Maybe if we addressed the mystery of birth, we’d have a better time with the mystery of death. Maybe if we understood time in regards to cycles, or spirals, we’d do better with all the time we have between. I think one of the reasons I've been so drawn to take on the subject of apocalypse is because an apocalypse encompasses all of these.
In the last two essays, I’ve been talking about time, futures, and the limitations of the white imagination in reflection of select works by Indigenous authors. The tendency of the white imagination (with some exceptions) to bend towards the dystopian is of particular interest to me. I think it has to do with rootlessness, the severance from the stories and the land that could ground us in an awareness there is more to the future than a capitalist hellscape of scraps. Those of us who are still carrying a belief in the systems we've been indoctrinated to uphold will struggle to imagine how to live and thrive through and beyond it, let alone prevent it. The worst of us may even give up on all of us, and bend towards the cataclysm in their search for a departure from it. The future they envision is a wasteland because they are trapped in linear time, lost in the wake of an errant and accidentally entropic arrow. Where it lands, they believe, lies our end. They can’t imagine the repair of our severance from the land and each other; they can't imagine reconnection. But we have to begin. We used to have stories that guided us through our imagination to the other side of everything. Those stories are still with us. Those stories can still guide us.
Those who have lived through an apocalypse have the experience, knowledge, and insight to describe world events across the past, present, and future with acute precision because the apocalypse isn't a theoretical possibility, it's a tangible reality. Octavia Butler, who is often (problematically) celebrated as an oracle, was no seer but a Black woman living in her time, bolstered with an education in history and lived experience. She wasn’t telling us about a future she had foreseen; she was describing the present time she lived in; and the unchanged present we subsequently live in. While the paths to survival she outlined have given a lot of people hope through the potential to relearn life skills and find community, she didn't intend to provide a template or field guide for how to endure dystopia. She wanted us to fear the future she wrote and fear it enough to do whatever we could to prevent it.3
I believe we still have a chance. It's going to take a whole lot of unlearning, self-excavation, and deep revelation. It will take a [re]learning of our collective languages, cultures, and land-based wisdom; and reconnecting to both the old and new lifeways that hold us closer to each other and the land. I wonder what shifts in us and our actions when we look deeper into our past cultures, and the present cultures that emerged from them, and understand how they've changed? What syncretisms hold vital pathways of knowledge of how to embrace a world of deep relationships, to renew and rebuild a world in favor of life? We have many keys and many paths of knowledge passed down, and a world of relationships to renew and rebuild. We have to really see who we’ve been, and we must connect with who and where we are now. That means building a relationship with the land. It means connecting to each other.
It’s important to look at apocalypse and nonlinear time through the lenses of other cultures and histories. I don’t want to appropriate the work of Indigenous authors, thinkers, and storytellers, but I think it’s important to learn from their work and find the overlaps in our collective lore and knowledge moving forward.4 Throughout the world, there are examples that can help forge these new paths alongside the old ones, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike: Animist lifeways of interconnectivity and relationality with all beings, right relationship with the land and spirits, and moving through life within a worldview of cyclical time and intergenerational communication is common across the historical world, including European cultures. I think it's a good idea to seek out and learn from those stories in our respective lineages, as much as we can to heal from the scarring impacts of colonialism and capitalism. I know a lot of us don't know where to begin, given the multitudinous ancestry we have; but I think that multitude is our strength and our path out of the trap of believing we only come from a singular lineage or heritage. I think if we really slow down to think about this, most of us feel the losses and the severances deep in our bones and we want to repair those losses. Dig into it all, I say, follow all those weird and winding threads. There's no going back to some arbitrary moment in the past; we aren't trying to preserve traditions in amber.5 But in order to heal the present and the future, we need to re-learn our relationship to time through these knowledges and pathways.
It will be complicated, in the way these worldviews emerge across our stories, and may not be found contained within any particular story but as a recurring theme or implication across a multitude. And given how many of us live on lands that our ancestors aren't from, how have our stories changed because of the new knowledges given to us by place? The land shapes us, the land informs who we are; we are changed by the where as much as the when of our existence. How do we tether our ancestral ways of right relationship to the land where we now live, in collaborative and restorative ways? I don’t have an answer but that’s the journey I’ve been on for a long time now, and will continue to be on for the rest of my life.
I can’t help but feel the importance of acknowledging how and where things were lost or fell off to continue co-creating the stories we need for the time and the place where we are now, and in the future. We spiral back to the past not as a point of return but a point of departure to learn what wisdom we can. We loop back around again to build on that wisdom and create the systems of knowledge we’ll need going forward. This is the citation, this is the comprehensive outline, this is the undulating path of time, place, and connection I'm seeking. All slices of time being simultaneous, our ancestors are enacting moments and movements that are changing our present; our descendants are making changes that will alter our past and the lives we’re living right now; and we are creating a world we hope to be experienced as better in the lives and lifetimes of our descendants, in a future where they are joyful and thriving in a place that is lush, abundant, and beautiful. And maybe in some small way, a ripple from that brilliant future unfurls across our lives in such a way as we can experience it in our lifetimes, too.
Further reading and listening for those interested:
Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality, Vintage Books, New York, 2004
Demian DinéYazhi', WE LEFT THEM NOTHING, printed and co-designed by John Akira Harold, nun studios, 2021
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, 1993
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents, Seven Stories Press, New York, 1998
Radiolab, Memory and Forgetting, June 2007
Tiya Miles, How Octavia Butler Told the Future, The Atlantic, January 2024 (this article came out the very day I was putting the final touches on The Expanse Part 3, and it was so timely and perfect it was added as a must-read in that list, and of course, I’m repeating the addition, here)
The first book I ever read that illustrated how we move through both space and time in a way that I could visually and conceptually understand was The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality, by Brian Greene. If you haven’t read it, I really recommend checking it out. It’s extremely conversational and not at all hard to read!
This in itself is a hilariously flawed memory and interpretation of a Radiolab episode I heard in 2008, Memory and Forgetting When I remembered I wanted to drop it into the “further reading and listening” section, I looked over the transcript and saw that they actually say memory is a process of creation, not degradation. Each time the memory is recalled, you’re creating the whole memory anew when you remember it. I still find a correlation with the jpeg (I’m hopeless) in that whatever goes missing in the re-creation of the memory is filled in with a sort of “color averaging”, and memory is, as they say in the episode, not a memory of the thing itself but a memory of the memory of that thing and each time you recall the thing, it changes. The memory is a mere copy of the thing that ceased to be real the moment it passed. Queue Plato and his cave.
a] This isn’t so much a citation for what I’ve concluded here, which is my own thought (undoubtedly shared and expressed by a multitude of people before me of course) but a note of this excerpt from a bit of text from the intro by Toshi Reagon on the Parable series from the archival website of Octavia Butler’s estate:
“…As Ms. Butler herself explained, “Parable of the Sower was a book about problems. I originally intended that Parable of the Talents be a book about solutions. I don’t have the solutions, so what I’ve done here is looked at the solutions that people tend to reach for when they’re feeling troubled and confused.”
And yet, human life, oddly, thrives in this unforgettable novel. And the young Lauren of Parable of the Sower here blossoms into the full strength of her womanhood, complex and entirely credible.”
b] Also to that end, a critical look at the life and work of Octavia Butler and how her stories took shape the way they did is described here in Tiya Miles brilliant article, How Octavia Butler Told the Future
As I mentioned in the notes of my last two essays, I’m no scholar or expert on the subject of either Afrofuturism or Indigenous Futurism, and I’m not Indigenous. I am a student; a curious and investigative person with a penchant for detecting patterns and throughlines. I’m referencing this topic because I think there’s a lot for the rest of us to learn from and take into consideration. It’s important to avoid being extractive—Wiradjuri writer, artist, and scholar Hannah Donnelly addresses the way non-Indigenous scholars will, in their attempts towards decolonial work and centering Indigenous knowledges, imagine Indigenous futures in which they still have access to Indigenous thoughts, imaginations, and ways to survive the apocalypse; thus mining the future of Indigenous Peoples as much as the present. (Indigenous Futures and Sovereign Romanticisms, Belonging to a Place in Time, in the book Sovereign Words: Indigenous Art, Curation, and Criticism, pp 268) I certainly hope to avoid this. What interests me are the interconnections that I saw, and the differences, in the way different futures are presented and told according to worldview, life experience, histories, and culture. It is expressly avoiding the pitfalls of a limited white imagination that I hope to point at as the work for those of us identified as white, rather than extracting Indigenous wisdom to apply to ourselves; especially as original thought.
I’m not citing Jimmy Ó Briain Billings in this piece but I think it’s important to share his essay, Why and how are Gaelic society or earlier cultures ‘relevant’ to us now?, as he emphasizes many of these points extremely well. I hadn’t read his essay when I began this one, but it’s important to acknowledge the similarities in language here.
I’ve also touched on this before—in 2021 I adapted my 2019/2020 courses on Herbs/Smoke/Woods/Water into a few essays, one of which addresses the topic of exploring our histories and traditions in careful, thoughtful ways.
Beautiful, Sharon. I will certainly be coming back to this again (and again!) Thanks for taking the time to pull this all together.
This is so good friend