In the class I took last quarter ( It’s About Time) we read the first book in the Proust series and most of The Culture of Time an Space. We also studied the impressionist movement, then Trevor my former seminar leader came in and gave a lecture that I had already heard. It’s motley my own fault for picking a class with similar subject matter but i thought that there would be more of a variation. It is hard to stay motivated because it feels like I’m repeating a grade or something. Then again I could take this as an opportunity to dive deeper into what I have already studied and come out the other end with a multi-dimentional and in-depth understanding of Proust and the era his book was created.

I thought the guest lecture guy was pretentious and more focused on justifying why he was a landscaper than why he was in our lecture hall. He also seemed very close minded it seemed he only wanted to hear his ideas come out of other peoples mouths. I think a downside of studying something for so long is you build up these very solid ideas about it, and when fresh eyes start to explore what you have already concurred there isn’t any room for new ideas. All and all I am hoping that week 5 will be better that the previous weeks.

The first half of The Storyteller, concerns itself with the decline of storytelling and our ability to communicate experience in relation to the rise of the ‘information age’, an era marked by the prolific and instantaneous dissemination of information and devaluation of traditional creative impetuses. Benjamin laments the diminishing legitimacy of individual (which can be understood as encapsulating many lives by the transitive property of storytelling) experience, though it was an inevitable outcome: “The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out… It is only a concomitant symptom of the secular productive forces of history, a concomitant that has quite gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time is making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.” (87) This is true, the authority that experience once had is being dismantled quite rapidly; manifested in my generation’s notorious lack of filial piety, obsession with the cutting-edge, in popular art and culture (it is very popular to play with the fallibility of our experience/perception: The Matrix, Inception, omnipresent magical-realist literature, anything in a modern art museum) and a completely unverifiable personal observation of mine: a yearning in our culture for authenticity, with the implication being that everybody around us a phony, their experiences being assumed invalid (this is an undeveloped thought, just putting it out there). Unfortunately, Benjamin fails to point out a crucial point: This a good thing. The farther away humanity can get from the human experience, the better. Every person’s individual experience is devalued as the collective experience reveals how flawed the individual experience has been all along. These are all the clickbait studies that pop up on one’s facebook feed about how you’re brain is tricking you, 7 statistics that will change the way you see the world, 5 ways everything you’ve ever known was a lie, the white-gold dress controversy, the prevalence of reactionary histories that always endeavor to prove that the way we’ve been recording and interpreting events has been inclusive or otherwise flawed, etc. It’s all around us, it is now known that any and every single person is completely clueless, beholden to an impulsive, subversive brain acting on input from inaccurate sensory organs. “…the perfect narrative is revealed through layers of a variety of retellings.” (93) Hopefully, we can understand that this is totally incorrect. From the very first telling, from the initial creation of a narrative, we have begun burying the truth of the matter and piling on more dirt will not bring us any closer.

Benjamin also points out that stories are remarkable in their capability for perpetual rejuvenation as opposed to information which has only transient use: “The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. it does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.” (90) A stories’ relevance is elongated by each interpretation, but the text is dated (understandably so) in it’s handling of information. Yes, the nature of information is transient and insubstantial, but that becomes a moot point when it is constantly generated. The images on a computer screen are not projected, they are not being filtered through lenses or slides or film, they are being created instantaneously and unceasingly. The image is not formed by discrete units, it is just our perception of a continuum. Similarly, information in the 21st century is being updated, refreshed, populated, generated and re-generated, ad infinitum. The internet’s perpetual renewal of information is essentially what Benjamin admires about stories, but has the added dimension of not being bound to a single or discrete narrator.

During Spring quarter I began the development of an idea for a book that I have. It includes both art pieces, poetry and scripts to eventually, be performed.

Naturally, as my project is on Dadaism, I was inspired by all of the manifestos created by Tristan Tzara, whom created 9 or 10. I also get the feeling, that generally, people view manifestos as crass and something of the past. So in defiance of all this I wrote one the other day in the midst of my work on my memory project paper. It will be used in the first few pages of the (albeit homemade) book I am making.

Here is one art print I did, to give you an idea of what the words are supposed to be paired with.

I was aware of what was going on and I knew how important this was to me.  Every person in school that I thought was, 1″cool,” was in Teen council.  This program represented the very essence of cool.  It was within this group that the seniors I was most intensely obsessed with were involved.  These seniors were those untouchable and smug looking people who appeared to be trying really hard not to be associated with the rest of the student body. It was these same students who were part of the extremely exclusive Planned Parenthood Program; Teen Council.  My obsession with this program was rather intense, I applied to be a member of Teen Council all four years of high school.

So there I was, pretending to be Charmander while the current Teen Council members evaluated me for my aptitude towards becoming a peer educator.  The interview process was rather silly, I felt that the questions had little to do with reproductive rights or whether or not I was qualified to be a part of the program.  Regardless I was accepted and became a member.  I found out that the group was quite different that what I had first thought.

I was accepted in the Spring and started in the fall, there was a retreat that we all went on that I remember the most.  I was rather shy during the retreat, immediately we were separated into two groups; the people who were already in Teen Council the year before and then the newcomers.  I felt very out of place at first, that I didn’t belong there.  We did trust and team building exercises all day long and then that night we all sat around the campfire sharing intimate stories.  I shared my story of sexuality, sexual orientation and myself.

Kevin and I were the two most out of the closet kids in high school.  We were often grouped together and many people thought that we were a couple including my parents.  Kevin was a symbol to me, a symbol of survival as a gay teen as well as a conduit of confidence.  When we were together, we felt safe, untouchable and utterly chic.  Yet our relationship caused a distance between everyone in my life.  I shared mine and Kevin’s story of ultimate high school friendship and how it helped me to claim my sexuality and push through the woes and hardships of adolescence.

What I shared with the rest of the Teen Council members wasn’t about one specific event, it was more about my current situation in life.  Sharing my story had caused an emotional reaction in myself and others, we were all left in tears.  As my story ended and I looked at everyone else a great fear had set within me.  I had never cried in front of strangers before, I immediately felt awkward and spoiled the event.  In retrospect the scary part was the relief I felt after sharing my life with random strangers.  There was a space created that made me extremely vulnerable but also excited.

That summer retreat was empowering and awakening.  I experienced for the first time what being in a close, tight-knit community was like.  Ever since that retreat ended I’ve longed to go back, to experience that summer again.  I craved real human connection, vulnerability and emotional sensuality.

I excitedly get ready for judo class, anticipating the promotion ceremony. This occurred only 2 times a year. I had overheard my parents talking and I know that my brother would be getting his orange belt, and I should be too! This was a special moment in my life. All my hard work at learning the techniques and behaving correctly would be worth it. I was barely containing myself, skipping and jumping around the car as mom drove us to class

Judo class is getting ready to begin. The students line up by rank, the black belts in front of the class and the women behind the youngest boy. Anticipation builds as I fidget waiting for the promotions to begin. The sensei starts with the older students; one by one they are called to the front of the class and given their new rank. With every student the sensei takes time to describe the students’ accomplishments and I wonder what he is going to say to me. My best friend and I hold hands and wait, trying not to move and attract attention. This is the last moment we want to be disciplined. My brother is promoted and he jumps back into line. The last boy is called to the front and I hold my breath to keep my excitement in.

And then the Sensei, tells us to spread out for warm ups. My friend and I look at each other and obey. Tears begin to run down my face, I look over to my friend and she is crying also. I don’t understand. We practiced, we were obedient, and I don’t know what else we could have done better.

This was worse than the Christmas last year when the family gathered to open gifts and I was regulated to serving them, keeping the glasses full and making sure everyone had snacks to eat while they opened gifts. There was no need for me to participate; there were none for me. I had been fighting with my brother and refusing to do what he told me to, and so my parents told me that if I wasn’t going to support the family, they didn’t need to give anything to me other than what the State required. At least, this was kept within the family, not being promoted was in front of everyone, and it was public.

Noticing the tears, the Sensei stops the class and has everyone line up again. My friend and I are called to the front of the class together and as we stand there, he begins to explain the white stripe that is on our belts, admonishing us for crying. “The white stripe, running the length of our belts is only for the women and girls that practice judo. It signifies purity, gentleness and beauty, and obedience, all traits that are expected of a proper woman. If we want to move up in rank we need to demonstrate these traits in all aspects of our lives as well as have perfection in our techniques, as purity and gentleness applies to the quality of our spirit as well as the correctness of our techniques.” He explains how it is obvious that we are not ready to advance in rank, by the evidence of our jealousy, our tears. We should be happy and be celebrating the advancement of the men and boys in the class and remember our place as girls. Not for the first time, I hated being a girl.

Things are finally looking up.  I got my book and I am actually enjoying doing the reading along with the rest of the class.  Now that I am using the same translation, it is easier to follow along with what is happening.  I’m done with my close reading which I was really stressing about.  Speaking in front of the class wasn’t that bad after all.

My project is finally started at least now too.  After going back and forth about what I was going to do the project on, I made a decision and now I can breath a little easier about getting that started and finished before I leave for my trip.

The too common conceit among artists and persons who have spent much of their life studying art is that the experience of art is superior or even meaningfully distinct from any other experience. Trevor Speller, a professor at Evergreen and suspected sentimentalist, gave us the declaration that, within the Proustian school of thought, a piece of art has the ability to unlock these involuntary memories that are so crucial to Proust’s sense of beauty and joy. We see this examined in Proust’s handling of Vinteuil’s phrase and probably in other places in the book. Stephen Kern supports this blasphemy on page 58 of The Culture of Time and Space, “The involuntary memory is entirely passive; however, once it has occurred, one can work to make it last by embodying it in art.”

Now, a statement that is far too controversial for how obvious and self-evident it is: Art is not magical. There is no capacity for a book, nothing more than a simple arrangement of pressed wood pulp and ink, to hold even the weakest charge, let alone the powerful swirling cosmic energies that art aficionados purport lay dormant underneath the cover. Paintings are not actually portals into inter-dimensional spaces inhabited by the wood nymphs of sublimity and music is not the whispering of a water ubergoddess. Everything is inert material and art is no exception. Maybe, MAYBE, thought is an exception, but I have great confidence in the ability of neurobiologists to remove that mystery from the table, eventually. The infallible history of scientific understanding eclipsing all other modes of interpreting the universe is neatly side-stepped by art idolizers: Art is the mirror held up to reality, Art is the spark which sets the human soul afire, Art is the crack through which the light enters, Art is the exception because I said it eloquently.

This conceit, this incognizance, pervades every walk of life (barring monasteries and waterfall caves perhaps). Deadheads believe that the Grateful Dead are divine, Surfers believe that surfing is the key to enlightenment, hedge fund managers believe that money will lead to joy, everybody, more or less, glorifies and exalts their preoccupations. This is natural and this is fallacious in every instance (although I must say, I believe the hedge fund managers have gotten closest to the mark in this ugly, deplorable, capitalist world we live in). However, the idolatry of art is particularly annoying because I have to hear about it all the time.

What this conceit really is, the sad truth buried underneath the posturing, the jargon of art theory, and the desperate aping of significance, is nothing more than a hapless incapacity for the shock and tumult of reality. Unable to achieve singularity and self-actualization the too sensitive and considerate young soul becomes enamored by the world of the arts. Oh, how every body glitters and shines on the stage, on the silver screen, what dignity and charming melancholy does even the lowliest rogue have when rendered in oil or pastel, what cohesion of purpose and sincerity of thought do all the characters in the novel have. What order and beauty and how significant it all is, surely, this is the truth. The wretches around me, the raving hobos and scabby dogs outside my window, the topless towers of dishes stinking in my kitchen, the innumerable nights I’ve wasted staring at my computer screen scrolling through trivialities, my own shame and the weight of all my regrets, all those are illusory. Please oh please, let my world be false and the world of art be true.

There’s a scene in The Sorrow and The Pity in which the interviewer climbs down into the cellar of two former French Revolution fighters of World War 2. In prior shots we see these two ex-fighters working the field, suggesting them as peasants and being close to the land. Inside the cellar, one of them fills up multiple glasses of wine from a rustic looking barrel. They all sip the wine and the whole scene seems musty and cozily damp and dark. Despite this film being black and white, and somewhat grainy, my mouth waters at the sight of this wine, particularly homemade wine made in France, which has the stereotype attached to it of probably being superior tasting wine. Later that evening I’m in Safeway and decided to get red wine instead of my typical moscato or prosecco, which I mix with any kind of fruit juice. It’s somewhat embarrassing at having to buy wine in Safeway, and seeing that they sell hard liquor now shocks me. While circling the few aisles they have I’m confused by the prices in which seem absurdly high. This is when I realize I am unconsciously being snobbish. I lived in Italy for the past four years, and the wine there is cheaper than water. I remember being confused the first time I saw the prices of the wine there, disoriented by the comma being in place for a decimal. At first I thought these wine bottles were in the thousands, but questioned why there were only 3 digits. Such is the naivety of a foreigner who is accustomed to a world which works in a way easily understood. Anytime I mention Italy I instantly feel somewhat embarrassed that it may seem I’m trying to seem cool or travelled. And then when I realize I’m thinking that, I realize that it does mean I think it’s cool that I lived in Italy, which is probably due to our culture’s built up idea that everyone ought to visit Italy to have this change of life experience. If you’re worried about someone thinking you’re an asshole, chances are you’re probably doing something that makes you an asshole. Anyway, I lived in Italy for four years, and there’s no way to take a position of saying that without being afflicted by harsh self-criticism.  I’m at the cashier and it’s time to hand him my I.D. and without fail all these fantasies come to mind that he’s going to think I’m giving him a fake I.D.  It really, really annoys me at having to be carded. In the 10ish months I’ve been back to America, I’ve been carded every single time I buy alcohol, but in the four years I lived in Italy, and the multiple countries I travelled, I was carded 0 times. In these fantasies I always suppose the cashier wanting to land that kid trying to use a false I.D., in which I imagine is me, and become nervous that it’s going to happen. I leave the store with my 15 dollar bottle of wine, which would probably be 2 euro in Italy, and look at the entrance of the store as the light to my key flashes red as it unlocks the door. A sudden memory flashes back of a watermelon, harry potter books, and a really shitty ’94 Honda Prelude.

I came up with the term Gigantic Hearts to put a signifier to this unexplainable feeling in a particular moment of my life. I’ve only shared it with one other person, but she knew that nostalgic feeling I was trying to purvey. When I was 16 my parents finally divorced and my mother was set free. I was happy because I had the house without parental supervision, and a crew started to form of neighborhood kids. The real driving force behind what sparked Gigantic Hearts was a brother and sister moving into a house nearby. You read about these kind of people in coming-of-age stories, being the main character who opens up the narrator’s eyes. One of the first times I’d met the brother, he was playing an acoustic and just singing random shit that popped in his head, in a two story house with absolutely nothing in it. I escaped to that house often, lying on the floor beside Stephanie, hers and my story being another long affair. I’d been dumped by a girl I dated for around 3 years a few months before this, and felt extremely free and thought it would do me good to just not give a fuck for a while. Every Wednesday this group would meet up at night and drink stolen beer, skipping school the next day. The way we stole beer was to drive to multiple Safeways in different cities past midnight, walk into the front door, and grab as many cases as we could hold and run out screaming back to the car. My buddy actually knocked one of the sliding doors off its hinges once, which I didn’t know possible, thinking it was going to shatter. Sometimes instead of instantly stealing the beer we would scout around and walk through the aisles. I managed to collect the whole series of Harry Potter by stealing them from Safeway. We decided one day to throw an epic party that you always hear about, and I knew that I had to take charge to ensure this would happen. My buddy and I decided to stock up beer in a month’s time and store it in the shed. We got my mom to buy us dozens of cartons of cheap cigarettes and some hard liquor. When the party happened, there were hundreds of people crammed into my tiny house. We had bowls of cigarettes everywhere and a beeramid stacked to the ceiling. My friend who’d just moved here put a local band’s song on the ipod and someone in the audience was singing along with it, who turned out to be the actual singer, and then later on in the years he became the singer in my old band.

I developed a really bad cocaine addiction during these months-year, and a lot of the days were endless blurs or void. I missed a ton of school, but managed to keep good grades due to the flawed importance of test scores. One day the friend who had become so close very begrudgingly took me to Tacoma where I bought some cocaine, terrified I was going to get busted at every minute. You had to use a portable battery charger to start the car every time and you could only enter through the driver’s side. He was pretty mad at me about doing something so sketchy, and I remember one day collapsing on his floor and the look of worry on his face. A few days before we were stuck in unbelievable traffic, under the glaring sun, without a radio. We almost made it through singing the whole Bright Eyes album, I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, just on the top of our heads. He was the first to take me to shows, and skipping school to go to Seattle became a normal thing. I started to have a naïve contempt for my peers in high school, because their lives seemed so boring and superficial, whereas I was seeing shows, meeting bands, doing drugs, and stealing things. What got me to quit was one night two close friends who I’d grown up with drew a gun on me and told me that I had to stop doing drugs, and they hated seeing who I was becoming. It kind of shook me out of my stupor, and they’d described personality and behavioral changes they’d seen of me, which I denied vehemently, but I’m sure now were true. It’s interesting to think of how much care my old friends had for me, even if it may not seem so, and how I have nothing like that now, despite being an adult, with the exception of those I deployed with, who I will forever love more than family.

As I look at the Safeway entrance, I realize it’s the one we stole watermelons from the outside entrance, throwing them in the intersection nearby. I live minutes from here, and it just now occurred to me. On these drives home from the stealing trips, I always had this melancholy which latched on to my anxiety so acutely. I’d quit doing cocaine fully cold turkey, but with it came the most severe anxiety I’ve ever had. I thought I was going to die at every second. One day we decided to steal food, and 2 carts later, running across the empty parking lot, we shoved all we could in the trunk and drove quickly to a nearby neighbor and parked, sitting in an alcove laughing. It was here this sorrow struck me most deep, and I thought I would never have a group of close friends such as this again, and in a sense it’s true. Around the fire of my backyard, in which we placed a circle of thrown out couches, we sipped beer and escaped everything together. I wish I could go back in time to those sorrowful moments in which I wished the moments would never end, and shake myself out of that turmoil. The separation of our group was slow, and one by one time takes us to different places despite our wishes to remain in each other’s company. My anxiety eventually died away, and I never really made close friends like that until moving to Italy. In a way, it’s interesting to reflect how so many negative actions are eclipsed by the love a group of people form of each other in seeking great memories.

Journal Entry #4

April 15th, 2015

I find it interesting how closely tied the sentiments of the individual are to their social surroundings. This course has made me keenly aware of the common threads of human nature that unite us all, across the boundaries of time and culture. It appears that people generally behave in predictable ways accordance with their environment. This is why the concept of collective memory is fascinating. When we watch films in class that drudge up and expose the secrets of a family or expose the ugly truths of history which are preferred forgotten, it serves as a reminder both of the powerful defense mechanisms we employ in order to hide these things from ourselves and the potential benefit of exposing them. As I force myself to ponder difficult issues such as the holocaust, I find myself primed for further introspection. What kind of atrocities could I be passively allowing to happen in these times? How will future generations view the impact that we’ve had? Just as in my personal life I have always benefitted from unflinching introspection and a healthy dose of self-awareness, how can I apply the same kind of frank, progressive honesty towards social issues of imminent importance?

Today I was approached by vegan activists with all the fervor of a group of missionaries thirsty for converts. They offered to pay me a dollar to watch a 4 minute film on veganism. Nearby there was another stand selling cookies for one dollar (which may or may not have contained milk and eggs). It was all too tempting, and I fell right into their snare. I spent the next several minutes in stunned silence as brutally graphic images of shocking blood-and-gore depictions of violent animal cruelty were paraded in front of my despoiled eyes. Immediately following this, with pamphlets in hand, they began asking me what I thought of the film and so went the indoctrination process.

Although I don’t agree with all of the views of the Vegan ideology on an ethical level, it is admirable that they are able to dedicate themselves so wholeheartedly to a cause that extends so far beyond self-interest. Whether or not I actually launch any major dietary changes as a result of the encounter, the experience in and of itself was inspiring. It has been so long since I’ve immersed myself in an environment so unorthodox and nurturing of creativity as Evergreen that I can almost hear the creaking as my mind re-opens to ideas that have fallen by the wayside as I became caught up in conforming to New York culture and all its societal norms. I have renewed optimism that even though I have yet to discover a clear path between my studies and an occupation, the fertile grounds of my present mentality are sure to bear fruit in a career path firmly rooted in ideals and conviction.

Journal Entry #3

It seems to me that thus far in the novel Proust has painted a masterful portrait of an existential crisis from the inside out, by describing relatively mundane events with the embellishment of Swann’s tumultuous personal thoughts and the minutest description of his eccentricities. If one was to look no deeper than the surface level we would have a story about a man of power and persuasion who is bored with high society and so takes a mistress of a lower social class as a distraction, only to find that he has fallen in love with an unfaithful “courtesan” who is taking advantage of him. To summarize the plot in this way seems like such a gross oversimplification that it’s as though I’m describing a different book. It is as the narrator cracks open the mind of Swann and spills its contents across the pages that one really gets the sense of the crux of the issue and all its minutia. One thing I found fascinating, to highlight one of the many complexities of Swann’s internal conflict, is that the force which drives Swann to so much unhappiness in the first place appears to be his discontent with high society and his impulse to escape.

The ancillary readings so far in the course have focused on placing the novel into the broader context of the social, political, and historical context of France at that time, and have left me with the impression that as the concepts of consumerism, commercialism, and related social constructs began to take hold they provide a strong sympathetic link between our society and the society of that era. For this reason, social commentary of In Search of Lost Time still rings true to this day. I see in Swann a man who is aware enough to feel the void of something missing in his life, left by the vapid lifestyle of the time, who rather than covet the privilege and status effortlessly bestowed upon him would gladly trade it all to possess something real. He seeks to use his mistress as an escape from all that has disillusioned him, yet ultimately it all catches up to him His elitist “friends” anonymously contribute to the ruin of his relationships, and his calculated withdrawal from society creates enemies. Although I would like to think that my inner dialogue isn’t nearly as dramatically complicated as Swann’s is, I can relate to his struggle in the basic sense that he was faced with an existential crisis and sought to remedy his inner disquiet by escaping.

In my early 20’s, dissatisfied with life in New York, I was taking every opportunity available to travel. The result of which was that I ultimately ended up moving to Peru in 2012. I fell in love with the place, met a girl there named Fania, and by my third trip we were dating and I had made up my mind to stay at least a year and seriously consider relocating to Cusco permanently. Although our relationship bloomed and I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Cusco, which included; learning to ride a motorcycle, buying a dual sport motorcycle and taking it on many off-roading trips, entering a bullfight as a matador in a small town, managing an Ecological Reserve in the Amazon for 3 and a half months, volunteering with a group from the University to help train falcons to remove pigeons from the cathedral, and a stint as a local guide/driver with a tour company, my grander plan ran into some snags. For one thing Fania was unable to get a visa to the US even to visit, which meant the only way to make things work would be for me to stay in Cusco or for us to get married promptly to make her immigration possible. Also, although I had originally hoped to develop a career in tourism I found the job market to be much more difficult than I anticipated. Even though housing was cheap it was hard for me to find the kind of work I needed to support myself. Finally, the charm of Cusco began to wear thin when I came to grips with the realities of living in a developing country; corrupt police, a variety of hazards that could shorten one’s lifespan in various ways, lack of security, hopeless bureaucracy, etc.

At around the one year mark I had a string of bad luck including being attacked by a street gang and contracting an amoeba (my third parasitic infection since arriving) which the doctors said could have been life threatening if I hadn’t gone to have it treated. Even though I loved Fania and our relationship was in full swing, I also felt that maybe I had rushed into it and I wasn’t sure we were compatible as life partners. We always communicated openly and honestly, and so I don’t believe that my decision to move back home caused her any harm beyond temporary distress, although in retrospect a relationship should never have been a part of my escape plan. I would expect that she looks back on our relationship fondly, as I do, as one that wasn’t destined to last but which was fun enough and inspiring enough to make it worth the pain of separating. I am now much more careful to move with intent and to put down roots less casually then a seed in the wind. Although I am not fond of Swann’s overall character, I can relate to his existential struggle to find a place in society and his misguided attempts to escape by placing all his faith in a relationship and ignoring its faults from the start. Although I am making some parallels here, I would hate to draw too many parallels because Swann is a rather detestable character on the whole and difficult to empathize with. I think it speaks to Proust as a writer that he is able to portray through Swann an element of the human condition that I can relate to in some small way across the boundaries of culture and time.