WA X I S S U E 5
I I I — AT T E N T I O N
SUMMER 2014
ON TIME
Text by
Margaret Cohen
On Time:
Kairos and
The
Arts of Action
116
Imagine the display of a digital clock.Its seven-segment
digits flash predictably, indifferently, moving relentlessly in one direction at an ever-even pace. But for
people, time is tricky. It varies in intensity. It speeds
up or slows down. Its experience is qualitative and
complex.Over centuries,philosophers and poets have
struggled to express this complexity of experience.
They have not, however, been helped by the words of
the English language. Think, for instance, about the
word opportunity.The word, as it exists in the English
language, suggests a moment both of invitation and
good fortune (synonyms include: a favorable time/
occasion/moment). But the word itself misses the
fact that opportunity arises in dynamic, unfolding,
often dangerous situations, when a moment surges
up as the decisive occasion for a critical action. We
say opportunity knocks, as if opportunity was waiting
for us to let it in: a promise beckoning at the door,
the word itself failing to capture the human skills
necessary to recognize the moment and draw from
it a favorable outcome, before it slips by.
117
I I I — AT T E N T I O N
The ancient Greeks had a better term for this alignment of skill and ‘favorable
occasion.’ They called it kairos, which they distinguished from kronos (time as
sheer duration). In contrast to opportunity, kairos has a network of meanings
emphasizing both human skill and the ephemeral window for its expression. This
network includes measure, proportion, timing, and season, as well as advantage
and profit. When the ancient sculptor Lysippos gave Kairos human form, he did
so in the form of an athletic, naked young man, walking on a razor’s edge and
balancing fine scales on a fingertip. Lysippos endowed Kairos with the muscular
feet needed for poise on such a precarious blade. The wings on his heels and back
ensure speed, flowing locks frame his face and his skull is bald. Underneath one
copy of this statue, an epigram explains: Kairos can be grasped as he comes towards
you, but no one can seize him once he has passed by.
Lysippos’s Kairos was one of the two statues at the entrance of the stadium
in Olympia (the other was the winged Hermes, the cunning god of communication).
But athletic achievements were not alone in the arena of Kairos. Medicine, public
speaking, and navigation all were endeavors in which Kairos’s influence could
be seen. It’s no coincidence that all of these undertakings share the negotiation
of violent, opaque, and often dangerous environments which hold the potential
for safety and sometimes success. These environments can be in some measure
understood, and even predicted, but they cannot be controlled. Medicine contends
with the recalcitrant human body; public speaking manipulates psychology; and
navigation charts a path through the trackless seas. To cite the Greek classicists
Marcel Détienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, environments harboring kairos are
characterized by “multiplicity and… ambiguity… fluid situations which are
constantly changing and which at every moment combine contrary features and
forces that are opposed to each other.”1
For athletes, doctors, orators, navigators, and all who strive to excel or
simply to survive through what might be called the arts of action, the ability to
grasp kairos is a practical necessity. Since antiquity, people have written practical
treatises seeking to systemize the embodied intelligence required in such arts.
Across these treatises, techniques for grasping kairos have proved difficult to explain.
The mutable, variable nature of environments where it appears exceeds systematic
description, just as the appropriate human demeanor amidst such multiplicity
exceeds rules and protocols. When Joseph Conrad, seaman and novelist, wrote
about excellence in the practice of seamanship, he called it craft. For Conrad, this
118
SUMMER 2014
Kairos, Roman work after the original by Lysippos
ca. 350 — 330 B.C.
WA X I S S U E 5
ON TIME
excellence depended on individual capacity, but also familiarity with collective
experience, which he termed “accumulated tradition kept alive by individual pride,
rendered exact by professional opinion, and, like the higher arts… spurred on
and sustained by discriminating praise.”2 And indeed, when Lysippos endowed
his Kairos with a finely molded athlete’s body, he too expressed appreciation
for the rigors of training. At the critical moment, however, long apprenticeship
yields to swift judgment and embodied expression, making the ability to grasp
kairos a kind of instinct at the juncture of thought, intuition, and expression. In
writing about the psychoanalyst’s decision when to end an analysis, Sigmund
Freud called this instinct tact. He explained,“A miscalculation cannot be rectified.
The saying that a lion only springs once must apply here.”3
Because kairos appears amidst situations of multiplicity and mutability,
it too is a shape-shifter. Its myriad guises emanate from the elements of specific
environments.These environments were enchanted for the ancient Greeks, while
in modern times, kairos surges forth amidst still formidable, but more earth-bound
forces and features, which, at sea, include winds, waves, currents, and reefs. With
the counsel of Circe, Odysseus navigated a path between the monsters Scylla
and Charybdis. Millennia later, Ernest Shackleton was beset by polar ice in his
failed bid to cross the Antarctic continent. In Shackleton’s feat of survival, he
displayed the ability of those who excel at seizing kairos to turn destruction
to salvation. When his ship The Endurance, was destroyed by ice, Shackleton
established a floating camp, Ocean Camp, on this same element. He and his crew
drifted on ice for months, until ultimately landing on a recognizable island. From
there, Shackleton grasped kairos in the form of the path to an inhabited whaling
station, a bold and risky, though successful intuition, for it required navigating
a twenty-foot open boat eight hundred miles across the worst seas in the world.
The moderns transformed Scylla into a rock and Charybdis into a whirlpool, yet
Kairos can still take living form in our disenchanted seas. When lost in the open
waters of the Caribbean, seventeenth-century pirates reported how they came
upon a school of sea turtles and followed them on their migratory routes to land.
In Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, kairos wears the shimmering
colors of a majestic marlin. The poor fisherman in the story literally displays his
deep knowledge of the sea on his body:“[T]hin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in
the back of his neck,” with hands stiff and creased from “handling heavy fish on
the cords,”“[e]verything about” him “was old except his eyes and they were the
same color as the sea.”4 Rich in experience, the fisherman courts kairos with the
most basic tools: a simple skiff and a strong line, which he holds lightly, able to
understand “a tentative pull, not solid nor heavy… One hundred fathoms down
a marlin was eating.” Hooked and played for hours lengthening into days, the
marlin finally comes flashing out, water pouring “from his sides… bright in the
sun, “his head and back… dark purple,” with stripes glinting “wide and a light
lavender.”5 The fish’s glorious colors as he jumps into the air that will be his
death express the allure of kairos, but once kairos has been seized, it disappears,
just as the fish’s colors leach out when he dies. The old man’s struggle to land his
great catch is both a methodical and heroic application of the tricks of his trade.
From athletes to explorers, from psychoanalysts to fishermen, the ability
to grasp kairos enables practical success. And yet, from Lysippos to Hemingway,
artists and writers have imbued this fleeting moment with a charisma and beauty
119
WA X I S S U E 5
I I I — AT T E N T I O N
distinct from its outcome in the realm of necessity. Their images and words
express our longing to prolong kairos, so ephemeral and yet so enticing, which
is impossible facing the menace of failure and loss. The chance to dwell in kairos,
the ability to savor and cherish it, helps explain the appeal of non-instrumental
activities that explore how to wrest kairos from the indifferent flow of time.
Photography is one such art. And surfing is one such practice.
Waves have offered visual artists across history and culture some of the
most dramatic subject matter for evoking the terrifying power of nature as a
raw, elemental force. The Enlightenment philosopher Edmund Burke defined
the experience of the sublime as “the pleasure we take in experiences of terror, when
danger does not press too near.” Heaving oceans, whether contemplated from the
shore or in the seascapes of painters, are perhaps the perfect example of Burke’s
definition of sublime. Both provide a vantage point where we can lose ourselves
in this awesome environment without fear. Among the connotations of kairos
in antiquity was the critical moment, which is also the term used to characterize
a wave at its steepest pitch, just before it breaks. In the 1850’s, the innovative
photographer Gustave Le Gray used the speed of the recently invented camera
to capture a wave on the verge of breaking in photos such as The Great Wave, Sète.
Although unsurfable, Le Gray’s wave pointed the way for twentieth-century
photographers to refigure the wave from an image of awful nature to an arena for
human expression. To mesh with the wave as it unfurls is to inhabit the pocket
of kairos for longer than an instant, even if just for a few seconds longer; to turn
its insolent urgency to pleasure.
1
2
3
4
5
Marcel Détienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society,
trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 20.
Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1906), 37.
Sigmund Freud,“Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937), trans. James Strachey
(London: Hogarth Press, 1968) XXIII, 218.
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952) (New York: Scribner, 2003), 9-10.
Hemingway, 62.
120
SUMMER 2014
O N P R O C R A S T I N AT I O N
7. Walter Benjamin was in this camp. He believed that procrastination
was an active form of thinking (and in this sense, an entirely productive
use of time and creative energy). In his text The Writer’s Technique in
Thirteen Propositions, Benjamin stated that the writer should in fact put
off setting pen to page for as long as possible, letting his or her idea
germinate before fixing it in the tangible world and thereby halting its
growth. In this same set of propositions, Benjamin encouraged writers
to be choosy with their materials, to read their work aloud to “sharpen
the inner ear” (ideally in the “audible silence of night” or amongst “the
murmur of voices”), to never consider a work to be finished until it has
been sat up all night with, and when unsure about one’s ideas, to simply
re-write what has already been written.
8. Benjamin never finished The Arcades
Project (also known as Passagenwerk) — a
collection of pre-Postmodern writings on
nineteenth-century Parisian city life — that
he famously worked on for thirteen long
years, between 1927 and 1940, the year
he died. Though this also might have something to do with the war.
9. I asked two
people I respect
what they think
about procrast i nat io n. T h e
first said: it’s a
problem of fragmented agency.
The second said:
it’s about death.
10. I’m told that men procrastinate getting married because they are afraid
of commitment and women procrastinate having children because they
want to have careers. Here are the things I procrastinate on, perhaps
you can relate: paying (certain) bills, taking showers, calling my mother,
contributing to organizations that do good, writing this piece. I eventually force the words.
121