Deep time

In this talk, Beatrice takes us to the peatlands of Donegal and asks what might happen if we approach the bog as a teacher.

Through storytelling, somatic practice, folklore, ecology and encounters with people who work with the land, she explores the bog as a place of deep time, memory, restraint and relationship.

She asks what the bog might teach us about care, stewardship and responsibility, and what becomes possible when we slow down enough to listen before naming, taking or trying to understand.

In her talk, she also explores the bog as an archive, a place that holds bodies, histories, ecological change, grief and memory, without necessarily resolving or revealing them.

Housed in my own question, the bog closes again, sealing its depth.

She knows when to stop.

So I'm really interested in this idea of deep time and responsibility.

So we have to understand that within Borg, carbon sinks and this idea that actually peatlands, by contrast, really are mechanisms designed to render action legible through electoral cycles and economic planning horizons.

These numbers are precise, supported by radiometric dating and stratigraphy and the careful work of generations of geologists, but they are not comprehensible.

The human mind did not evolve to understand deep time.

It evolved to understand seasons, to track the movements of game animals across a landscape, to remember which plants are edible and which are poisonous, to navigate social relationships in groups of a few hundred individuals.

Deep time, the time of geology, the time of waterfalls, the time in which a river can erode a cliff and a cliff can retreat 11 kilometers, is beyond the reach of intuition.

And the only way to approach it is through numbers and analogies and the patient, systematic reasoning that science provides.

And yet the waterfalls themselves do not care about deep time any more than they care about you.

They are not monuments to geological processes.

They are not demonstrations of erosion.

He wants to write in historical and anthropological frames, but also, as we see in Celestial Bodies, with attention to biological, geological, chemical, and even cosmological facts.

So the deepest and widest frame of deep time.

The first draft of Accursed Share attempts to describe the disposition of matter and energy, so the problem of expenditure, in three ecologies, the material and environmental, the social, the individual.

But these tensions, all of these types of history, these types of durations, pull the project apart, and it fails.

This is supposed to be enough for us to talk about today and tomorrow.

So I'm leaving some stuff on the table.

I want to think about deep time, the privileged instant, and sustainability.

The point there is, what is the instant for Bataille? Now, Tears of Eros begins with a challenging lament.

The cave operates on geological time, on a timescale where six hundred years of human history is a rounding error, a blip, a single tick of a clock whose face is measured in millions of years.

The silence at Predjama is the silence of deep time.

And if you stand in the cave behind the castle and turn off your flashlight and wait, you will hear it.

Or rather, you will hear the absence of it, the vast empty nothing that the mountain contains, the darkness that was there before the first torch was lit and that will be there after the last tourist leaves and the last guidebook goes out of print and the last wall falls and the cave mouth returns to what it was before anyone thought to put a door on it, which is a hole in a mountain and nothing more and nothing less.

with life.

And as my hand brushes the friable bread-rock, I am touching deep time, a world that rang with the grunt and bellow that no human ever heard,

an ancient world whose sun still

shines upon me, The same feeling of rain gusting on westerly winds wets that world and ours.