Time is your hands cooling, time is dust, time is beans, time is the literal tree in front of you

"Unfreezing something in time" with author and artist Jenny Odell

Jenny Odell is a brilliant artist and author. Her newish book, Saving Time, is a reflection on all the ways that modern societies have come to enact the aphorism “time is money.”

Odell describes two components in this new (and mostly bad) way of seeing the moments of our lives: “(1) the measurement of abstract and equal amounts of time like hours and minutes, and (2) the idea of productivity that divides up work into equal intervals.” In a world of Google Calendar slots, I don’t think we need to elaborate on this. This is our default, dollars-per-hour world. The real question is: can it be escaped? What could time be, if it was not that time?

A few months back, Jenny came on KQED Forum, the show I co-host, to talk about the book. She led us through an exercise in guiding our attention to the more-than-human world, and hundreds of people across this whole Bay Area began to call and write in with their observations. This can be a cosmic thing. Breath turns into electrical signals that travel from the station to Sutro Tower and become airwaves. (Air. Waves.) Someone tunes to just the right spot on the electromagnetic spectrum. Those signals become the motion of a diaphragm. Tiny bones move in ears. A person hears and stirs. They write something beautiful, profound, funny. A producer sends it to me, and the circuit is complete. This whole infrastructure developed over more than a century connects me and them, and through us, everyone. Sometimes, I know instantly that I’ll never forget what they said.

We’ll get to Odell’s exercise — we’ll do a planty version of the exercise! — but first, let me give you the moment that stuck with me.

A listener wrote: “Doing the dishes while listening to the show, I stop to write this, feeling the heat from my hands slowly decrease.”

What a gift! Every day (multiple times a day) here is a way to consider the vessel of your body, to feel something real, to be in yourself. Hands. Hot. A hint of steam. A prickling? The relief. Cool. For me, a menthol tendril of a memory—Icy Hot on an old injury. Gah! I have thought about this listener comment every couple days for months. Time is your hands going from hot to cool.

Another listener, Kirsten, wrote: “I have been listening while dusting under furniture (not something I do often) and I'm recognizing the span of time held within the dust, similar to how it shows in sedimentary rocks, though on a smaller scale. The dust contains old and new particles both from the inside and outside world, and the hair and skin particles of loved ones and pets who have visited my house.”

Time. Is. Dust! (Dust is love?)

Jenny herself has a different saying.

Time is not money. Time is beans. It was as serious as many jokes are, which is to say about half. Saying it meant that you could take time and give time, but also that you could plant time and grow more of it and that there were different varieties of time. It meant that all your time grew out of someone else’s time, maybe out of something someone planted long ago. It meant that time was not the currency of a zero-sum game and that, sometimes, the best way for me to get more time would be to give it to you, and the best way for you to get some would be to give it back to me. If time were not a commodity, then time, our time, would not be as scarce as it seemed just a moment ago. Together, we could have all the time in the world.

Magic Beans

When my oldest kid was a toddler, we were wandering around the neighborhood when they snatched a bean pod from a plant. The pod was big, but ordinary, kind of leathery. Not thinking much of it, I opened the pod and… HOLY SHIT. Plump perfectly marbled purple beans lay inside like polished rocks from a precious collection. We danced, astonished at our good fortune. Can you believe these goddamn beans?!! From that day until this one, we call them magic beans, even though, as the gardeners have already guessed, they were just perfectly normal scarlet runner beans. We now plant them regularly—I can see some blooming from where I sit right now—and every time the first pod ripens, I want to shout as I pull out these tiny miracles.

Another listener, Antonio, said on that show: “We have a saying in hazardous industries: Ignored safety concerns become landscape. Meaning: if you ignore something for a while you no longer see it.”

How many magic beans have you eaten?¹

In her book, Jenny lays out an exercise for “unfreezing something in time,” as she calls it. Over the months of the pandemic, she’d pass the same tree, a California buckeye, Aesculus californica, and look at the same branch, “her branch” as she came to think of it. At such close focus, she could follow its delicate progression through the seasons:

In late December, the end of the branch had a small, reddish bud. In January, the bud got bigger and turned green. In early February, the bud opened to reveal small, tightly packed leaves. Over the next few weeks, the leaves and their stems grew briskly, and by the end of the month, they had opened fully, lost their ridges and waxy sheen, and become darker green and downright floppy. In March, I found that insects had eaten some holes in the leaves, and the branch had begun to grow a flower stalk. In April, the flower stalk doubled in size, and then some of, but not all, the flowers on the cluster opened—finally, that scent!—sending out long stamens into the sunlight. In May, all flowers were open, an invitation not just to me but to the explosion of bees whose buzz was audible on nearby streets. By early June, some of the flowers had begun to wither, and a bright yellow was starting to creep along the leaves from their tips. By mid-July, all the flowers had withered and the leaves had become thin, brown, and papery.

As she watched through the annual cycle of this unusual tree, which goes dormant in the summer, it attuned her to the buckeye’s own time.

And that led her to a widening spiral of time. This was the unfreezing. How had the tree gotten there? In what moment of history? When would it die? Why did the buckeye flower on this unusual schedule?

That “is a record of a change in the climate three million years ago, when the buckeye adapted to the newly dry summers that killed off its then contemporaries. In effect, it adapted by shifting its own calendar.”

Note: It wasn’t just the amount of attention that let her notice all these things, but the length of attention, integrated over time. Here’s her visual study from the book:

So, what then, is a clock? Odell asks.

If it’s something that “tells the time,” then my branch was a clock—but unlike the clock at home, it would never return to its original position. Instead, it was a physical witness and record of overlapping events, some of which happened long ago and some of which are still occurring as I write this.

How to Unfreeze Something in Time

OK, then, let’s do the unfreezing exercise. Here’s her instructions… “Just pick a point in space—a branch, a yard, a sidewalk square, a webcam—and simply keep watch,” she writes. “A story is being written there.”

For our purposes, let’s pick some living plant. Watch it for longer than you normally do, long enough to see it as evidence of time.

As Jenny would put it, “The literal tree in front of you is encoding time and change at this literal moment,” and so is every other living thing. So, watch something for long enough to learn how to read that particular clock.

Maybe you’ll get back to me this afternoon, maybe tomorrow, maybe in a year. (I’ll round them up, when the time is right.)

1. The 10-year-old in me cannot help but see the wisdom in the children’s song about beans as a magical fruit. The more you eat, the more you forget to consider the miracle of life.