Strange Arrays of Time

Chronological Weirdness in the Doldrums of Summer

This summer, my idle mind often hovers over a chronological curiosity – we are further away from the announcement of The Elder Scrolls VI than the announcement was from the release of Skyrim. This fact is fruitful for memery, to be sure, but it is also just strange, and the fact of the matter is we’ll be waiting a while longer for a new adventure in Tamriel.

I’ve been wrestling with waiting and strange quirks of time lately – my running TTRPG project, Retrograde, has been slightly delayed while I’ve been awaiting the riso shop I print at reopening, and I’ve been circling the doldrums of sticky summer heat. I felt like I accomplished more in the last week of June than I did in the entirety of July. While things with Retrograde are picking up again and I’ll have the last of Retrograde’s zines printed in just a few weeks, the way time is moving for me is not quite making sense.

Where is that feeling coming from, and what does it mean, not just for me but for the work I’m doing?

At its simplest, my life now is very different from what it has been at any time before. Theatre, which has been a dominant part of my life for the past 10 years, is now an afterthought. It’s been almost a year since I last performed. Printmaking, which has newly become my primary passion, has been difficult to explore this summer – the letterpress shop I take classes at doesn’t teach or hold studios in the summer, and the riso shop I print at moved recently and just reopened this week. The monoprints and linocuts I messily print at home certainly count for something, but more often than not I throw myself off with a longing promise that things will be easier in the future. I’ll have the print shops again. It won’t be so hot in a month. Retrograde will go out into the world. The lakes will freeze over. And then next summer, I’ll start the dance again.

You could say the heat has made living in the present difficult. That’s the short answer, at least.

This is frustrating, of course – I would rather make the most of the time I have than wait for another time to arrive. Ironically enough, part of the problem is having too much time on my hands and not enough structure. In the past, I used to wish wistfully for simply the time I needed to turn my projects into reality; all I need is the time, and when I have it, I’ll write, I’ll draw, I’ll do it all. The reality is more complicated. It’s hard to get things rolling without any momentum to push off with.

In an odd way, it makes me think of the world I’ve created with Retrograde. This is a universe decisively marked by gulfs of time: while Blood Ink Teleportation allows humanity to travel vast distances and keeps major developed worlds in contact with each other, it also leaves outposts and colony worlds isolated from human contact. If we assume that there is a distance of at least 5 light years between two neighboring stars, and if we assume that not every star has a potentially inhabitable planet in orbit, we can immediately see how any kind of radio or digital communication becomes functionally impossible. Small outposts might only receive external contact with other humans once or twice a year.

What happens to the people on those forgotten worlds, waiting months and months to catch up on news from the universe? I imagine some of them dream of other worlds, other times – stories more full of life and drama than the waiting they’re given. Some of them, per my adventures, inevitably go a little insane. I’m trying not to let that happen – I’m trying to turn the waiting times into dreaming times, and trying to turn those dreams into physical reality, with whatever tools are at my disposal.

These summer doldrums are similar to times I have known before – not the same, exactly, but I believe I’ll get through them regardless. I have, in fact, been creating. I’ve continued to make Retrograde’s zines better. I made a game for a game jam. I’ve printed some monoprints and started carving new blocks. I’ve got plans in place for the fall and beyond, and I’ve been taking the time to find moments to be present with myself, not demanding work or productivity, just – being.

If there’s a lesson I’m finding in any of this, it’s persistence. It doesn’t matter that the present isn’t what I thought it would be when it was my past self’s future. Nothing I can do about that now. The only thing to do is take care of myself, my folks, and my community as best I can, and do what I can do to get things moving again.

This goes for every part of my life, personally and professionally. I still have hope – hope that I’ll be able to build the kind of life I want to live, hope that I’ll keep finding community and opportunities to share joy, hope that we’ll all still be here this time next year.

I do have that hope. I’m trying to do something with it.

Thanks for reading!

– Nathaniel