In this era that requires “physical distancing,” we live six feet apart horizontally, for fear of being six feet under vertically. And yet the axis of time is one that pulls us into a different sort of distanced affect (affective distance): of distance learning and how it places us, temporally. We have been here before.
It is no epiphany to Black and/or Indigenous people that humanity is temporally stuck, perhaps in a loop. The cycle of democracy conditions the US public to live in a cycle of crisis, hope, and stasis; of campaign cycles and fundraising. History repeats itself, even as emails are drafted with the form language of the hyperbolic “unprecedented times.” At this point, that phrase has lost all meaning, and yet the shape of time we should consider is the hyperbola. It is asymptotic and approaches a limit, which is to say it approaches but never reaches an end, the end.
