Blur Times

Blur Times combines film-poems created as part of my spoken-word project – Pibroch – with a series of geocouplets reflecting on the nature and experience of time.

In the course of awareness raising and activism during 2019, I became aware of a parallel ‘fatalistic’ strand of responses to the Climate Emergency: a scientifically correct view that, in the long durée of geological time, this fluctuation in global atmospheric composition and, thereby, temperature was neither unprecedented nor extreme.  As an oil & gas colleague once assured me (repeatedly): ‘At the end of the day, we’re all just a thin black line in a cliff.’  In responding to the Geological Society’s call for submissions, I was aware (as a trained physical scientist with a lifelong interest in geology) of these parallel truths: the urgency and vitality of life and the resilience and continuity of biophysical processes.

This seems to me to demand a critical exploration of the experience and significance of time itself – questions of both its granularity – in moments, seasons, lifetimes, generations, kalpas – and its direction.  The geocouplets in Blur Times attempt to challenge the vital urgency of the film-poems with an objective relativity.  Elements of contemporary quantum gravitational theory suggest that time is not a variable in the fundamental equations which describe being and theoretical physicists, such have Carlo Rovelli, have suggested, tentatively, that it is the sensitivity of ‘life’ to entropy – the driver of ‘times arrow’ – which creates the delusion of time.  This physical challenge to both the anthropocentric and the geological narrative prompts, I believe, serious ethical questions about the ‘discounting’ of the value of ‘future’ experience in personal and political decision-making: for example, my life and my great-great grandchild’s life are, in a sense, co-present.  Perhaps time, for us, exists because of entropic blurring.  This theme, the bedrock of physical reality and the fluidity of experience remains a continuing inspiration in my work.

Blur Times is published on the Geological Society’s Earthlines website along with a wide range of other material relating to Geopoetry. The website accompanies a publication – Earthlines – published by the Geological Society in October 2021. This volume contains my essay The Poetics of Climate Change.

Further discussion of this collaboration and examples of some of the work was published by Magma in October 2021.

Publication of Pibroch by Red Squirrel Press is expected in 2021.