Sometimes I feel as if the world diverts me at every turn (I divert myself). Divert in two senses of the word: the first being to pivot from a path with a degree of impulsivity; the second in the sense of the Spanish word 'divertir' – to enjoy and have fun. The world seems to be constantly driving me to lose myself in an eddy that lasts seven days: the water storms forward towards the weekend and then, once there, rushes back twice as fast in a whirlpool that stuns and discombobulates.
In King Creosote's song Bats in the Attic 'the hours go by like sips of water'. With references to ‘growing silver in [his] sideburns’ and ‘twelve years in retirement’, this song clearly deals with time and old age. In a retirement home, somewhere near Kilkenny Church, an old man asks himself what else as his old ages passes as steadily and unavoidably as a glass of water empties. This song is a meditation on the unfairness of the fact that time passes, which, as the Genius contributor puts it, ‘is just brilliant… there’s the regret as you sit in retirement and look back on all the big plans you had when you were young.’[1]
“And you said twelve years in retirement
The hours go by like sips of water,
The record lies unbroken
And no doubt it’s white flour in my diet
That’s going to be the death of me
Sweet drumroll for those embittered big ideas.”
It makes sense to see life-time as liquid, one that starts even before birth with the breaking of waters, as the amniotic sac ruptures to signal the beginning of labour. This dramatic beginning continues in the torrential movement and sound of early childhood, for the child as well as anyone around them. To begin with, the only time we truly live in liquid, as we form, is when the death-process is reversed: we are the opposite of a clock counting downwards to death and old age; instead, we count upwards to birth. It’s when we are separated from the life-giving liquid inside our mothers’ wombs, finally dry, when the death-process begins: we start to age.
Now the newborn is drowning in in the data of its new environment, so clutches onto the torso of its mother to keep it afloat, alive. As development starts, the torrent is manageable: the infant learns to swim in the stream of time. Early memories, or sensations associated with these memories, are of days that seemed to last a year – there is an excess of time that brings with it boredom and listlessness. Luckily the flip side of this is that boredom breeds curiosity, and the amount of time children have is almost congruent to how much there is so much to know.
Ask anyone in their twenties a question like ‘can you believe it’s nearly Monday again?’ and you will be answered with another question, a shocked and appalled ‘I know – where did the weekend go?’ You might think that after twenty years on the planet, a human would be less constantly surprised by the passing of time. Its one of the complexities of being in your twenties where on one hand you can see a faint trajectory of your life, or how you’d like it to go – it will pass like everybody else’s, replete with friends, Christmases, children, jobs, family drama, and nothing will be much out of the ordinary – , while on the other hand the state of things can change within the day, and suddenly, looking back, you realise you had no possible way of guessing what was happening in your life now even a year ago.
The twenties, I am therefore proposing, is the time of the eddy, the circular current of water. Or, to use another, more exciting definition from fluid dynamics:
An eddy is the swirling of a fluid and the reverse current created when the fluid is in a turbulent flow regime.[2]
Whatever the real definition of ‘turbulent flow regime’, I will be borrowing and repurposing this phrase for my purposes, because I don’t think anything else captures the oxymoron of your twenties quite so much. The tension between the ‘turbulent flow’ and the ‘regime’ captures this feeling of being a wild animal forced into a straitjacket. You are learning to conform, you are learning what the career ladder is, you are making CVs when you’d rather be dancing to your friends’ post-punk band. There is friction, there is energy, there is fury. The eddy swirls around and it’s Monday again, you feel like another week has passed but there is nothing to show for it: the water that consisted last weeks’ time is already gone, was never really there in the first place, because it was too busy transforming into this weeks’ time.
The church bells near mine remind me with ferocity that the day passes. That is the nice thing about the all-rushing stream of time: it forces you to surrender. If you don’t, well, we’ve all seen The Substance by now and other such cautionary tales. The eddy will wear out the rock, and eventually, at least I hope, the stream will move on. Stagnant water breeds flies, after all.
[1] King Creosote & Jon Hopkins – Bats in the Attic Lyrics | Genius Lyrics