Deep Time

Where is the depth in time? Can we see ourselves in relation to the depths of time as if we peered over an abyss or looked out into the abyss of the night sky? Is the depth of time the black space in which starlight stalks or the rifts between geological layers? Or is it in the depths of our bodies holding a clutch of organs that devised their symbiosis across millions of individual lives? Will it drive one mad to gaze upon these deeps? And would this madness be the perception of deep time?

When I look at a postcard of a set of floor tiles in Siena, a card I bought three decades ago with an image from a building constructed centuries earlier, the tiles pictured bearing the image of Mercurio Trismegisto, contemporary of Moses, where is the depth of this fossil? Are time’s depths infinite or unbounded? The wide, howling seas of time in which we flail and float—what shores do they surround and what vessel will cross them?

Once I visited a petrified forest: a series of holes dug into a desolate waste. Within the holes crumbling bits of rock resembled wood raddled by termites. I couldn’t hide my disappointment. At Kata Tjuta, its bedrock bound in a slow, unyielding entropy that reveals countless forms, ghosts of landscapes swept like storm fronts across the sands. Lost among all this time, the strata of events lay compacted to their crystalline essence, cracked, crushed, and blown back into the lungs of skinks and salamanders scattering from the slippery edge.