Page 20 - Studio International - June 1965

Time Dilates

by Pol Bury
Photo/ André Morain
Between the immobile and mobility, a certain quality of
pa av p lent. slowness reveals to us a field of ·actions· in which the eye is no
se a lente. longer able to trace an object's journeys.
l un lent. Given a globe travelling from A to B, the memory we shall
retain of its point of departure will be a function of the slowness
with which it achieves its journey. Our eye, our memory have
Larousse ed. lost the memory of A. Only the quality of slowness allows
it to obliterate its own tracks, to be an eraser of memory,
to make us forget its past.

The journey from A to B, perceived in terms of speed, is less a
Voyage than a confusion which can become so great that
A and B approach close enough to each other to become
indistinguishable. But perceived in terms of slowness, A is no
longer necessarily the point of departure towards B. One
no longer knows whether the globe is going from A to B, or
whether A is the point of arrival, or even whether the globe,
in its periplus, has any connection any longer with any
putative A or B whatsoever.
Thus, we can see that slowness not only multiplies duration but
also permits the eye following the globe to escape from its
own observer's imagination and let itself be led by the
imagination of the travelling globe itself. The imagined voyage
becomes imaginative.
Journeys avoid 'programmization· in the degree that they are
endowed with a quality of slowness; they finally achieve a
real or fictional liberty, a liberty acting on its own account and
for its own pleasure.
Speed limits space, slowness multiplies it. The liberty thus
manifested can also be observed in the contrary force which
the globe opposes to its own displacement: an opposition
whose intention is to keep reminding us of the constant
battle it is required to wage against the forces of weightiness.
At this point we enter the realm of the dynamics of slowness.
Travelling rapidly from A to B, the globe tends to make us
forget momentarily the facts of weight and gravity, to forget
even its own volume, but a slow motion re-establishes it
for us in its struggle of opposition, as it finds in itself the
strength necessary to conquer its own weight. The globe's
volume then assumes its full significance; it is real; it registers
the limits of its possibilities, of its ambitions, it is a volume
which has made its choice. In slowness, the globe's density
discovers its full potentialities.

Let us add a little complexity to the preceding data
If we add to the area of activities of our first globe a second
globe of a different volume, animated by a different degree of
slowness, then our first findings are multiplied by the second
series of findings; yet other findings ensue as a result of
this multiplication.
Two slownesses gently grazing each other even go so far as
to rub against each other. We dare henceforward speak of such
activity no longer in terms of geometry, but almost in the
language of the boudoir.
In such an atmosphere, caresses are born, are renewed,
multiply. Only linked slownesses have the capacity to create,
keep alive and re-create these foreseen and unforeseen
contacts, these tentatively gentle strokings.
The hand, the breast, other volumes proceeding from A to B,
from C to D? No voyage is so indecisive, so precise. But a
slowness plus a slowness do not equal a quickness: on the
contrary, they become intensified, they transmit to each
other their acquired slowness, adding to each other in order to
measure themselves, in terms of mechanics, by a subtraction.
Two globes on the scale of slowness: it is air, fire, earth and
water which bear the weight of their measure.

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