SEX AND THE RADIATOR

This is me. It may not be you though maybe some of you can relate.

Did you know that when you sit on a hot radiator for an hour its been hours? Did you know that when having sex for an hour its only been 5 minutes….maybe even less?

When I was a boy my hero was Albert Einstein. I guess I was rather precocious as I really believed I understood much of the General Theory of Relativity. I read everything about Einstein that I could get from my school library. These were days before the computer, Wikipedia and the net. I’m rather old now. Anyway, as I remember it, I read about the theory of Relativity with the radiator/sex metaphor as a layman’s illustration. Coming into puberty the story had special interest for me. I could fantasize who I was spending the 5 minutes with. Obviously, it was a Playmate.

Fast forward and I’ve been a filmmaker for the past 50 years. Time and space are internal to my thinking and creative work. When I began making films time was 24 frames per second, shot, and later, projected. In editing, I would hold a piece of celluloid in my hands and immediately understand that the piece signified both physical dimension, length, as well as time. I actually held time in my hands, frozen in the moment. Editing in the age of digital filmmaking has reduced the physical signification of time to a visual stimulus. Although I can see the horizontal time signature on the “time line” of my editing software I cannot touch it, wrap it around my neck, nick my fingers on its edges (if I’m not careful in handling it), try taping a frame back to a shot after realizing I mistakenly had cut it out. But, time is still linear, a line, horizontal and finite.

Time is represented as horizontal and finite, defined by seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years. Calendars, watches, 7:30am alarm, lunch hour, “prime time” television, the 11pm news, Wednesday garbage collection, Sunday football…its how I organize my life. Its how I understand my life span…birthdays, an annual marking of our passing through time.

Today (another time marker), time seems to be in chaos, non-linear, unmarked, neither a radiator or sex. For as much as the Coronavirus has destroyed history it has also made a mess of my attempt to mark time. At least psychologically. I can still “mark” time into discrete units. It just doesn’t feel that these units have the meaning they used to. And, of course, my individual subjectivity will be influenced by my physical relations to the physical world.

When the Stay at Home order came in NY State I was thinking about being safe but also about how boring this would be especially if in place for a long “time.” No scheduled marking of the clock. Even when the clock is scheduled it is by my laptop, by Zoom, maybe also by Governor Cuomo’s daily press conferences. Days run into each other, often unnoticed as to their beginnings or endings. Not only am I not bored but even when bored it isn’t as bad as sitting on the radiator. I’ve heard, anecdotally, that time has never passed so quickly as it does under the influence of the new social patterns forged to deal with the evil virus. But, just as the expected boredom is not the radiator, the swift passage of time does not coincide with having sex. The virus has interceded. It is, simultaneously, both boredom and sex. I will have to go back to Einstein to see if there is something I missed in his theory. Now, I am just confused. I think I best get back to working on a film. In that world I can control time.

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