A friend once told me she listens to music in the shower, to keep track of time. Estimating each song to be three and a half minutes, after a fourth or a fifth tune,  she would know her thoughts had strayed too long.

At that time, I found her idea incredibly alluring. It was junior year of high school: I had just mastered memorizing four chapters of a textbook in two hours the evening before an exam. I don’t remember how it started or how I got there, but I felt and fulfilled the moral urgency to make productive—to make tangible—every second.The itinerary I built for my father’s month-long California trip allowed exactly thirteen minutes for a chocolate sundae at the primordial Ghirardelli.

There was one place time maximization didn’t apply. The shower was the only non-offensive place to cry. You’re not obligated to explain to the sink why you are crying, and the curtains won’t make you—make you—feel better. I could never explain what’s wrong. So I’ve always cried in the shower. One does not think of the clock if one is really crying.

A week before the SATs, I tried the music strategy. It didn’t work. I didn’t follow melodies—I noticed only the pauses between. Time cuts in discrete intervals, hard figures amputating the tenuous flows of sentimentality. Yet even then I felt guilty, for not noticing the passing instances–instances stringing into a continuous aging.

I halted facing the math: isn’t it odd, whatever the music and I just did together is to be summarized as an inaccurate, amorphous 3.5? Is three and a half minutes the rectangular, neon-green 03:30 on a digital alarm, or slightly more than half an arch between two figures invisibly waved by the skinny needle called the minute hand? Or is it a 3.5 at the upper corner of a transcript, or—I thought as a chill ran through my stomach— a purely formless thing I can never grasp but am forever catching up to? Like a score some bureaucrats in heaven are keeping, written down somewhere us mortals cannot touch, a score you earn while spending, spent as it is earned.

Would time still be moving if I do not move? What if there were no melody, no falling waters, no rising air. What if the microbiomes took a break from crawling and for a second I forgive everything—I forgive myself, and the watches and phones forgive themselves too: Would time reveal its mathematical skeleton, or would it disappear with us?

Étienne-Jules Marey, Flight of Gull, 1886

The summer after my first year in college, I decided to take up an internship in Ahmedabad. A few weeks in, a fellow intern signed us up for a tour of the Ahmedabad Old City. Our guide halted us beneath Teen Darwaza—a gate we passed frequently to get to a street-food market—and pointed at an enclave in the wall. In it, a flicker of flame: the mujawar light.

 600 years ago, a Muslim guard—a mujawar—was keeping the gate when he noticed the Hindu goddess Lakshmi fleeing. Stopping her, he told her she couldn’t leave the city without permission from the sultan. Lakshmi agreed to wait at the gate if the guard would go ask for it. Knowing she would leave upon his return, the guard requested that the sultan behead him. Lakshmi is still in the city.

“This light has been lit for 600 years,” said our tour guide, “no matter rain or flood.”

 Next day during lunch, the friend asked me what I thought of the tour. “It was beautiful,” I said, referring to the architecture, “and I heard so many interesting stories.” “Interesting stories?” he repeated sternly, “do you remember the light? A Muslim man chose to die to protect the wealth of his Hindu neighbors. That was a moving example of ethnic unity.”

 “Think about it, people continued to light the light for six hundred years! Even during war and the riots.”

 I found myself in shame. “600 years” for me was a figure of speech, one of grand and sentimentalized historical narratives not to be taken literally; but for him, six hundred years is thousands of hands feeding the warmth, physically cultivated by one man after another. If stories are only myths and numbers are mere signs, then ethnic unity, sacrifice, perseverance—these are not sincere values, but tokens of a good political outlook, elements in an interesting guided tour. I was ashamed not for because I didn’t believe: I didn’t think believing was possible at all.

 If one chooses to believe, time does not emphasize ideology, but indexes all that comes and goes. Just as lights depend on burning, years are only possible when they’re filled with sprouting and wilting, riots and wars and floods and rain. “600 years” is all that happened in those years, with all its happiness and hardships. After all, ignoring the specificity of the number shortens the depth and weight of histories; to erase time is to forget all those who came and went—the burning and light.

If day and night are as concrete as soil, what is a person who does not feel the corporeality of centuries? Too comfortable with forgetting, or too scared to remember?

Étienne-Jules Marey, Geometric Chronophotography of the man in the black suit, 1883

The thing we call disaster is not twenty thousand or eighty thousand deaths,
but a person died,
and it happened twenty thousand times.

After the 2011 East Japan Earthquake, a reporter allegedly asked director and writer Takashi Kitano what he thought of the government’s response, citing a relatively low death toll. The interview is nowhere to be found, so I cannot be sure if or how the conversation really happened. But his answer, translated above, was posted by a WeChat poetry blog in late January, in lyricized Chinese form, about a week after the then epidemic center, Wuhan, went into lockdown. 

I’ve always imagined dying to be a long moment: the way the falling of a soldier is stretched out on the silver screen, or the stillness before firing sealed in Goya’s paint. Even Breughel’s Icarus, the one drowning in the corner off the shore of a busy countryside day, had a split second of his own. Icarus is lucky, lucky he had the artist’s gaze. Someone was watching. Instances as such are created by being seen: doctors pronounce time of death, while the unobserved are counted—estimated: one in twenty thousand, one amongst eighty thousand.

In second grade, as part of my school’s patriotic education, we went on a trip to the Museum of Nanking Massacre. Around a tall, circular, jumbled pile of white bones we stood. These are the bones of people buried alive, the teacher said. Look, look at the war and bloodshed your country endured. Look and remember.

Only in the mind of beholder, it is possible for the moment of dying to be repeated and extended, one instance of millions of deaths to become many long moments. Perhaps that’s why we mourn, so the duration of our pain matches the gravitas of death.

After the field trip I began to dream of counting bones. I am slow and the ghosts keep howling silently: an old man chasing after his grandchild, who didn’t know better and crawled out of the hiding shed; a woman with my mother’s face falling into dirt again and again, eyes glaring with rage. I didn’t do it! I scream, sinking into scattered ribs: Sorry—sorry! I am looking! I am looking.

Even as the nightmares faded, I retained the habit of saying hello to the ghosts when my eyes are closed. The mass-buried dwelled, but not for forever; eventually, remains of holocausts no longer haunt the nights. I wake to scroll through numbers at breakfast, to analyze and circulate the digits. 

This February I only cried once, on the way to class, the day my mother texted that my uncle’s gone. The professor asked how we were feeling, I said I feel nothing. I still couldn’t explain what was wrong: I really didn’t know him, or the other hundreds that would become thousands and then millions. But at night I closed my eyes and tried to stretch out time for each number. Smiling or wide eyed, grumpy or unmoving, in darkness or beneath noises. But every image instantly collapsed onto another, hardly catching a name or a phrase. Silence is a long sigh for many.

 

 

Susie Xu studies Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She occasionally writes about art for The Chicago Maroon and has