And Her Voice Reached A Thousand Years

Hesitantly, On "Designing Time"

I am not doing much this evening. My process for creation is, possibly, unavoidably passive. I don’t really take notes or anything, but like the swamp creature I am, will instead let dozens of ideas percolate, dancing in and out of one another, like minnows swimming around an old alligator in a pond. The alligator may not even seem to notice the minnows, but then they will line up instantaneously in a shape that looks big enough to eat, and snap. You, dear readers, get a draft, with typos.

This evening I am layering scents, and thinking about a fragment of Heraclitus my buddy engeignos has been helping me with.¹ I am not infallible, I don’t know everything, and I really start fading hard in Greek. Heraclitus is barely Greek, even, though, and his pure beam of psychedelia is pinged down through as many indirect references as my New Mexican beam of light. Proceed with caution.² Here, though, is the 92nd fragment— a mention of the Sibyl. I told you we would get to meet the Sibyl. We have two translations to work with.

And the Sibyl, with raving lips uttering things mirthless, unbedizened, and unperfumed, reaches over a thousand years with her voice, thanks to the god in her. 

Now this is the translation that prompted me to ask for help. Nevermind who the Sibyl is for now, we are looking at that third clause, “reaches over a thousand years with her voice.” This is a remarkably vivid conception of both space and time— where the Sibyl, a woman with the voice of a god, utters something from a single point, and it “reaches over” a thousand years, and then stops. Not an always, Walter.

The phrase “reaches over a thousand years with her voice” attempts to capture the Greek verb ἐκτονωμένη, but we just don’t have that one in English. “Reaches over” feels too passive, like a voice that is preserved and echoes rather than one actively pushing or straining through time. It’s like the Sibyl’s prophecy is hovering rather than surging, and in that, we lose some of the tension—the taut, divine force sustaining the prophecy as it presses forward through exactly one thousand years.

The Sibyl with raving mouth utters things mirthless and unadorned and unperfumed, and her voice carries through a thousand years because of the god who speaks through her.

This second translation refines the imagery, swapping “unbedizened” for “unadorned,” which perhaps sharpens the sense of purity and lack of pretense. “Unadorned” has a starker, more absolute quality, as if her words are unembellished out of necessity, not choice. “Carries through a thousand years” gets closer to ἐκτονωμένη than “reaches over,” but it still lacks some of that active tension. “Carries through” gives the sense of continuity, a voice that survives, but it doesn’t quite capture the strain or the forward force implied by ἐκτονωμένη.

This translation is somewhat more faithful to the idea of a sustained, ongoing presence. Her voice “carries” rather than simply being “preserved.” Yet, it still lacks the sense of ἐκτονωμένη as an active, physical projection, something that is straining to reach into the future, upheld by divine intensity.

What is really interesting here, actually, is the conceptualization of a thing— a voice, emanating through time. The words, whatever they are, are the word of God. Of a god. A strange god, perhaps, but a god nonetheless. There is an utterance, it starts in a place, and it echoes across a thousand years, and then stops. We could map the temporality of this voice, we could map the shape of it. There is a space to this voice. I’m running out of Eliot to quote:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

Now to return to me— I am very distressed. I am distressed about money, and time, and, love, and lots of other things, but mostly I am distressed about this (taps screen). I didn’t know this could happen to me, but it has. The post is impossible to find, but this morning I read here about a concept called “schizotemporality,” which licks all my salt. In essence, the claim being made was that our digital interactions are schizotemporal— that is, I can say anything to you, here, and it will have no expiration date (unless you don’t subscribe to the paywall….speaking of..).

But schizotemporal isn’t good (taps screen again). We are not communicating in space or time here. The dimension value of time is zero, the dimension value of space, is zero. This is a feature of online textual interaction, not a bug. One can argue about “disappearing internet” and the fleeting nature of what we thought was a new permanent archive, but that is not what I am talking about here. What I am talking about here is that you and I have no path to one another here. You can’t follow my voice, you can’t follow a smell, you can’t feel the urgency of my thought— you can’t even tell any longer if I am even a real person. Have I the voice of a God? Must I push these words through a medium? No.

A few days ago I made a post, suggesting that “Discourse” has come to an end. That we— the good guys, have pushed “Discourse” as far as it can go, and are now experiencing the death fold of a cusp catastrophe. Some of the new haters on Twitter, who have figured out I’m not a white nationalist at all, and am barely even right wing. They pointed out that I was simply offering warmed over criticism— that what I was saying has been said before (and by better writers), and in hindsight, they were mostly correct.

What I did not offer then, that I am offering now, is a way out. A way past both Discourse and our hangups with technology. Over the course of the last year, through a number of attempted (and failed) connections with persons that I met via the internet, is that time and space may be enemies of paltry things like “information dissemination” and “answer retrieval.” It might be the enemy of financial dis-intermediation, and it might introduce market inefficencies that capital may ruthlessly exploit, but time and space are just extraordinarily important for human interaction. One of my favorite new followers, Julie Frederickson, demonstrated what I am talking about on her blog a few days ago.

Julie reflects on the struggles of social overstimulation as an introvert, particularly in gatherings dominated by nerdy, socially awkward, or neurodivergent individuals (that is all of us on Twitter, with one exception). She describes feeling exhausted and overstimulated despite self-care efforts like nervous system exercises and sleep. Julie highlights the social challenges within such groups, where people navigate parasocial dynamics, insecurities, and, especially, status concerns.

Now look, I have five thousand followers on Elon Musk’s X dot com, and I get invited to the cool parties sometimes. They take the wind out of my sails, because I am the poorest right wing influencer to ever saunter into a Thiel-sponsored event, but I resonate with a lot of what Julie is talking about here. In the absence of time, and existing in space with persons, we are all simply jumbled together, often with little to discern about one another besides whether that person is “anon,” whose group chat they may be casting shade in, and especially how many followers they have.

That is a recipe for social anxiety. The high follow accounts are nervous about living up to their hype, the small accounts are jockeying to become larger accounts. These types of gatherings are extreme examples, but if you are reading my blog, the chances are, you’ve encountered this problem.

Time and space are the problems here. Discourse can win you the presidency, but it doesn’t make you any friends, and it won’t help you fall in love. Those— they require the voice of a Sibyl. You must be able to hear the voice, and follow it— perceive its truth.

So what solution do I offer? I have another friend— he’s a mathematician, and he’s also not a narcissist (neither am I). A mathematician and a musicologist. He may have also been my CIA handler, but I stood him up last week and so it’s back to eating Top Ramen for awhile.

Anyway, I know him through something we won’t talk about today— the DIY/Makeshift spaces scene of the early 2010’s. It is older than that, but that is when I was around, living in a shared cold water flat in the Bywater that was mostly a crash pad for itinerant artists. Yes, I’ve been like this a long time. I’m an aging hipster.

In addition to being a mathematician, an anarchist, and probably a spook, my friend has another mission— he uses incredibly engineered sound to facilitate social gatherings. In the old days, we called this “throwing parties,” but it is genuinely a lost art, or at least an undeveloped science. When I say incredibly engineered sound, I mean he— well, I can’t talk about it. NDA and shit. But the real magic isn’t in the hardware, but rather in who uses it and why. I’ve seen him in action a few times, and he is incredible. Give him a scene, any scene, and he will select a song as a base layer, and start listening to it, and he will slowly start layering more and more sound— listening each time for the natural points where two sounds could come together, and create the exact right atmosphere for the exact request.

In essence, what my friend is doing, is painting with time. That is what music is— it’s painting with time. You select a key, that will be the colors you paint with, and then you make lines in space and time with them. Time, because our primitive imitations of the birds and the wind— it has finitum— it is in time, it begins and ends. It has space because proximity to the source of the sound changes what it says. The voice of God sounds different from the far end of the room.

Smell is the same way. He engineers sound— smell is the one I have always been fixated on. I love music too— far more than I do even poetry, and painting, which have space, but until very recently, have been hard to conceive temporally (more on that later?). Like sound, and like the voice of God, smell emanates from a point. Frankincense carries further than benzoin, and some sounds carry further. Some carry across a thousand years, but there is a curious thing happening.

What if someone is more interested in being near the palo santo and the bass section, in a particular party? We have an irregular distribution— you can navigate to the place you want to be. And what if you get there and find someone already there, just like you? For the same reason? Isn’t that something easier to talk about than, uhhh…status? I think we would all rather the palo santo (but be careful, it is quite endangered).³

We conceived the voice of the Sibyl, and sound, and smell, as a radiant space emanating from a point. We also noticed that different sounds, and different smells, and different voices.

We have all been damaged socially by our dependence on technologies that may or may not have been the best thing for us. I have no comment on the ethics or the profit or the loss— I can only say it happened.

My friend is very good, though, at engineering spaces….sonically, materially, chemically— he can do it all. He’s very good at bringing people out of their shells this way. The secret is creating context that is not based on status anxiety. The most obvious example, of course, is “IRL” meetings of people from “Twitter,” but there are knock on effects all up and down the line.

Smell, sound, space, time— the voice of god in the Sibyl. I am running out of time, here. C. Sandbatch is old and tired, and he feels like he has gone as far as he can here. He will still be around, of course, because he is a writer and old writers never die (until they do), but I can feel the jaws of something large closing on me, and that the nature of my work is fundamentally changing. Am I going to design incenses for you? No. Well, maybe, if you’re lucky, I will package a few and send them out. I won’t be nasty with the price— I am a ride or die. It pains me endlessly that money is the price of entry to experience, and I want to do everything in my power to alleviate that.

Awhile ago, someone asked me what I thought the highest form of art someone could engage in, in the post-Covid 21st century, and I hastily threw together a list. What I came up with, if I remember properly, were:

1. Terraforming (Gardening & Husbandry)

2. Music

3. Fashion

4. Interior Design

5. Conversation

A year and a half later, I am willing to add “dataset curation” and “algorithm design” to that list, for reasons we will discuss another time, if I am still here.

I can’t help but think, also, now, of the “parlor arts.” These were the intimate performances and crafts the European golden centuries. They were exactly what they sound like they were, live storytelling, magic, recitations, and shadow puppetry. Each of these arts was an attempt to connect people not through status or screens but through proximity, through a sense of shared presence. Picture charades, shadows cast on walls, the strain of voices carrying across a room—not a thousand years, perhaps, but far enough to reach those who mattered.

These arts was that they weren’t about "content" or gaining followers; they were practices that anchored you in a room, with other people, weaving connections in real time. Status anxiety, and lots of other anxieties too, fade away in close quarters where your voice didn’t just hover but actively moved toward others, in the same way the Sibyl’s voice was strained through time, compelled by her god. Just as the voice of a god moves through the Sibyl, reaching over time, the parlor arts were about creating a kind of social resonance, one that’s almost impossible to replicate on digital platforms.

Maybe, in some strange way, we could bring back that quality of presence, even here, through the ways we interact. The Sibyl’s words were mirthless, unadorned, and unperfumed, yet they resonated. Escaping history means neither ignoring nor emulating the past but learning from it, finding ways to make the ephemeral real and to give voice its spatial and temporal dimensions again. In the end, whether by incense or insight, I find myself trying to do what those parlor artists did—holding a space that invites others to inhabit it with me, even if it’s only for an evening, and even if the scent of it fades before morning.

A long time ago now, while recovering from my third bout of covid, I started the second iteration of this blog. At the end of my first post, I said this:

I have a distinct sense that the world is ending. The 14th century Italian peasants Anglolo di Turo wrote about had that sense, and it turned out they were right. Our task, and my task here, is simply pointing in a vague direction at present. We need a new way of looking at the past, that sheds the convictions of the technicians, and without recapitulating the mysticism of the monks. I am going to work on that.

If you want to come along for the ride while I work this out, I’d appreciate the company. Maybe we can find a way to let go of the past, and take a look at the last thousand years or so with a fresh set of eyes, and do what Ezra Pound told us to do a hundred years ago: “make it new!”

I don’t know— my mind wanders. I was right about the world ending, but I didn’t expect, at the time, that it would end with us triumphant. Now we have to design the time moving forward. I hope we get to do it together, in a better place than this. But I wanted to share that with you, that thought I had about our social malaise, which lingers even at a moment when it could turn around. No more discourse, please— we need time and space, and the technology to get away from the screens. We need temporal designers!

1. Not just lounging in a haze of perfumed smoke, I am making the thing. This evening has involved clarifying some pinyon pine resin— this takes some of the more volatile, wild-smelling alkaloids out of the resin, but the clarified amber liquid’s profile is both sweeter and easier to work with. Accompanying resins in this batch are frankincense (for light), and benzoin. If you have ever been to a Catholic mass, this is that mixture, with some frontier American vectors in the pinyon and the secret component.

2. We eventually concluded that the text must be hopelessly garbled— and is probably the reason Frazer leaves this early mention of “the” Sibyl— the early Greek myths only ever refer to the Delphaic one, out of The Golden Bough.

3. The synthetics just don’t hit right.