METRONOME
In Response to William Kentridge “The Refusal of Time”

Smash the vase, and reconstruct it— Time is split: fracturing, materializing days, seconds, minutes just
Lassoing order.

People are a rough collage who find the present to be jarring,
overwhelmed by everything existing, in one fragmented second frozen, froz- end stopped by time.

Cardboard characters of now, of people walking through the airport, aware
but mind resting in the past
or future like a breathing blackened

lung, in sync and gradually out of sync.

Inverted days shaped by choices,
Of when to sleep,
regardless of productivity,
time doesn’t allow backspaces, words that come out cannot re-enter.

The black room echoes,
Propaganda of action which I think time is, a bureaucratic structuring of my life–

shaped by not me and me at the same time. I’m pulling it apart like bread, walking towards the black hole and I
am not afraid.

Anything in italics is in Kentridge's own words, taken from an interview about the Refusal of Time.

SFMOMA. 2012. Accessed April 30, 2017. https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/william-kentridge-refusal-time/