What ‘Timefulness' by Marcia Bjornerud taught writer Janice Pariat about Earth's temporal rhythms

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2 days ago

Every Saturday, as often as we can, my husband and I head away from Shillong and take a long walk out in the hills. For next book research, but also because we enjoy such activity. The roads are mostly empty; we pass a small shnong or two on the way, a few locals, young goat or cow herders, sleeping dogs, clusters of chatting women at designated riverside 'jaka sait jaiñ' washing clothes. The views are splendid – vast and open across the hills and canyons, and at this time of year, with the rains, drenched in mist and greenest green. Amidst the green, dark rocks. Jostled around this seismic landscape. Tumbling down the slopes like frozen waterfalls, jutting out sharply from the edges of hills, standing solo-tall, figurative and mysterious.
If you walk up close, you'll see they are sometimes blanketed in moss or painted by fungus in Pollock-esque patches of grey, red, and black. In or around rivers, stones lie smooth and softened. Often a trail is dwarfed by towering rock faces, solid and ancient. They are a presence, as much as the trees and rivers. It is on these walks that I've become mesmerised by rocks – beginning to see them not as cold and inanimate but as being very much a part of our storied landscape. There has always been evidence for this here. Close to Mairang, for instance, about two hours' drive northwest from Shillong, stands Lum Kyllang, a gigantic mammoth-shaped granite formation towering 700 feet above ground – the story goes that Kyllang and Symper, two spirit guardian brothers, who bickered endlessly, had a final showdown, with Kyllang throwing mud at Symper, and Symper tossing rocks at Kyllang.
Until today, Symper (about 50 kms away to south) is mud-rich and forested, while Kyllang is starkly, slippery stone. And, as local stories go, he's still mischievous in spirit – beguiling climbers, playing tricks on them and leading them astray on their way down. At the edge of Meghalaya, in Sohra, stands Khoh Ramhah, a natural rock formation that resembles a traditional basket, a khoh, or an inverted cone. We grew up hearing stories of how it once belonged to a giant named Ramhah who roamed these hills, and whose basket turned into stone when he lay down to sleep. Ever more importantly, the Khasis are a megalithic culture, raising megaliths to compute their history and clanship, to mark long funeral trails, and the hills even today are dotted with these towering structures, some of which have fallen victim to the weather, many others to modernity, to the construction of buildings and roads. On our walks, especially around Mylliem, an hour southwest of Shillong, we pass clusters of these stones strewn across the hillsides, still marking a clan's memory, hidden in the undergrowth alongside the trails we take.
Perhaps this is why I've found such resonance in the work of American geologist Marcia Bjornerud, who urges us to begin thinking about rocks not as nouns but as verbs – with agency and spirit all their own. They are both witness and journal, both participant in and consequence of the earth's intricate geological processes. In Turning to Stone, Bjornerud twins the story of her life with the biographies of particular rock types, basalt, granite, sandstone, among many others, gleaning succour, wisdom, knowledge from her supposedly 'mute' subjects. Rocks are far from silent – either vibrantly functioning as vehicles of folklore or weaving narratives of geological history. While I'm able to manage gathering the latter, from family, friends, chats with strangers on our walks, it irks me that I am yet unable to read geological text, that I can't quite understand our planet's ancient language.
This drove me to pick up Bjornerud's first book Reading the Rocks: An Autobiography of the Earth – I must admit it wasn't the easiest to follow all the way through, for the language could turn quite technical at times, but I soldiered on – absorbing little by little the deep, continually unfolding history of the earth. It's a tale filled with cataclysm and reincarnation, with flux and constant adjustments over billions of years. Bjornerud is not only a riveting storyteller and an astute historian of her own discipline, but she is also deeply interested in the intersections between geology and philosophy. What questions might be raised given the vastness of deep time? What might rocks teach us about ourselves? What wisdom could they impart? How may they guide us into reframing our lives and the structures of our society? This comes to the fore beautifully in her slim slip of a book Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World.
A book that found me just when we began to encounter the quarries.
On our walks, around many corners, and alongside main roads. Hills and hillsides hollowed out for sand and stone. To serve the rampant construction drive across Meghalaya. At first, it was hard to believe that such vast swathes of earth could be reduced to the merest, finest grain, but standing there, a little bit horrified, a little bit in awe, we saw it was all made possible because of colossal machinery. Gnawing into the earth, digging through soil like butter, and to the side, endless trucks waiting hungrily in line. In so many places where we've walked now, the hills are alive with the thudding of stone-crushers. Why must we do this? We've asked, as we walked away. Is there a way to quarry more…ethically? But is this the question to ask? Is it not imperative to wonder whether it's ethical to do so in the first place? And how have we arrived here? At a point when humans (driven by extractive capitalism) are the most major of 'geologic' forces shaping our planet, driving our own selves deeper into ecological devastation?
I found increasingly that I turned to Bjornerud's Timefulness for answers.
'Timefulness', as a word or a notion, hasn't yet entered common parlance or common knowledge. If you Google it or its variant 'timeful', you're greeted with results for a technology company in Mountain View, California and a to-do list app acquired by Google in 2015. But Bjornerud's word refers to none of these. 'Timefulness', for her, is to become acutely aware of how the world is made by – indeed, made of – time. What does this mean? Especially for a species as chronophobic as we are. Willing ourselves to cast time as the enemy and to do everything to deny its passage – Botox, fillers, plastic surgery, anti-ageing, everything. But even this type of time denial, rooted in a very human combination of vanity and existential dread, is more forgivable, Bjornerud says, than other more toxic varieties that work with this mostly benign kind to create a pervasive, stubborn, and dangerous 'temporal illiteracy'. And by this, she means the obliviousness with which most of us live our lives on our planet without knowing anything more than the most superficial highlights of its long, long history.
We've heard of dinosaurs, perhaps Pangaea or tectonic plates but learn little of the durations and happenings of the great chapters in Earth's history. As a species, we largely share a childlike disinterest and partial disbelief in the time before our appearance on the planet and have a small appetite for stories which don't feature us humans in a starring role. Most of us simply can't be bothered with natural history – tragically so at a time when the geosciences are thriving! To disacknowledge time, to ignore how it is intrinsic to the shaping of our earth, untethers us from deep geological history. We are at this point in our human history because we have forgotten, willfully, that we are, above all else, earthlings, shaped by the earth's rocky logic. We are disassociated –detached from our surroundings, speaking of our 'relationship with nature' without realising that that's what we are. In fact, most of us live on our planet behaving like 'bad tourists', Bjornerud says, enjoying its amenities, ransacking its bounty, without ever having noticed that it has its own ancient language and customs. To be in 'timefulness' is the very opposite of this – it is to build an awareness of the rich natural history that envelops us, and a sense that we too live in geologic time and are part of a continuum from the planet's past into its future.
There are terrible ramifications to 'temporal illiteracy'. All is short-term. As a geologist, Bjornerud contends with Young Earthers, creationists and apocalypticists but as frustrating as they might be, she points out, more pervasive and corrosive is time denial that is invisibly woven into the infrastructure of our society. From economic credo that insists on constant growth to populist short-term thinking politics, from biennial budget cycles to last-minute stop-gap spending measures. And at a moment when the need for long-range vision grows ever more imperative, our attention spans are shrinking as we tend to reels, texts, and tweets within an endless, insistent Now. Bjornerud doesn't spare academia too, pointing out that physics and chemistry, 'pure sciences', are considered the highest of scientific pursuits for their quantitative exactitude, possible only under highly controlled, wholly unnatural conditions, divorced from any particular history or moment. It is telling that 'lowly' Geology, with all it has to offer – not least the geologic timescale! – has no Nobel Prize. It largely continues to be seen as a musty, dull, discipline, and this has serious consequences for us at a time when politicians, CEOs, and ordinary citizens urgently need to have a grasp of our planet's history, anatomy, and physiology.
Having an inflated, aggrandised sense of ourselves as a species is harmful – but so is the very opposite. How often we've been told, in movies, books, on the internet, that if the 4.5-billion-year story of the earth is scaled to a 24-hour day, all of human history would transpire in the last fraction of a second before midnight. I'd always thought of this only as a moment to step away from ourselves and contemplate how small we are, a moment to reevaluate. But Bjornerud calls this temporal downscaling also a wrongheaded and irresponsible way to understand our place in time. It suggests, she says, a degree of insignificance and disempowerment that not only is psychologically alienating but also allows us to ignore the magnitude of our effects on the planet in that quarter second. And it denies our deep roots and permanent entanglement with Earth's history; our specific clan may not have shown up until just before the clock struck 12.00, she goes on to point out, but our extended family of living organisms has been around since at least 6 am. Finally, the analogy implies, apocalyptically, that there is no future – what happens after midnight?
I'm not quite sure who has the answer, but I'm thinking it has something to do with us collectively experiencing a shift, a realignment with, and a consciousness of, deep time, of transforming ourselves into polytemporal beings, aware of our own present, contextualised within a deep past, envisioning a distant future. Difficult as this might sound, there are writers and academics like Bjornerud to guide us. And also, I've recently discovered, artists across the globe working on time-transcending projects.
Katie Paterson works with melting glaciers, fossilised insects, dust from meteorites, and 'future libraries' in Oslo to help us expand our time horizons. Photographer Rachel Sussman travelled around the world to take portraits of living organisms older than 2000 years for her series called 'The Oldest Living Things in the World.' Which included 'Spruce Gran Picea, Sweden' (9,550 years), 'Antartic Moss' (5,500 years), 'Lomatia Tasmanica', Tasmania (43,000 years), among many others. Philosopher and conceptual artist Jonathon Keats, in Alaska, engineers monumental-scale clocks that run on 'river time' to unstandardise our atomic time. Somewhere in Western Texas, inventor Daniel Hillis is building a '10,000 Year Clock'. This is in collaboration with The Long Now Foundation, a nonprofit organisation 'established in 01996 to foster long-term thinking.' Their work, talks, workshops, artist collaborations, encourage imagination at the timescale of civilisation – the next and last 10,000 years —a timespan they call 'the long now'. Bjornerud closes Timefulness with the evocation of the Iroquois' 300-year-old Seventh Generation idea, which remains radical and visionary as ever: that leaders should take actions only after contemplating their likely effects on 'the unborn of the future Nation…whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the ground.' In a current world that severely lack both the appetite and political-economic infrastructure for intergenerational action, the Seventh Generation idea is more important than ever.
And it begins with timefulness, with walking the hills, with earth, with stone.