Today’s turn to temps mort as a fresh way to consider how quarantine catalyzed so many changes for Susan and me was inspired by Jenny Xie’s poem of the same that arrived in my email this morning. And, equally impactful, her thoughts on temps mort in cinematography set my mind in motion. What follows is a scrapbook glimpse into some of the initial ideas mingling in my mind. Preliminary connections collages together. Mostly the poet’s words and my snapshots taken today, five years ago, as COVID continued to transform the world, our world.
I’ve made minor inroads recently toward rekindling (and hopefully conveying) something of the pandemic “pollination” that took place for us while hunkering at home during the spring of 2020. A flurry of forays, but still no grand conquest. The fecundity of those first few months is at the root of so much subsequent growth. And yet capturing this period of flux, distilling the pith of the period, and articulating the enduring legacy, has remained somewhat elusive. Recently that’s begun to change. I think. I hope.
The images accompanying my post were all made on May 1, 2020. But they don’t illustrate a tidy chronicle. The connective tissue is mostly absent, mostly left to you.
Perennial edibles, asparagus and rhubarb, begin to return. And new garden seeding is initiated.
Now the empty frames, the cream of margins,
the zero of the camera’s eye asleep, on the run.[…]
the action resumes on the other side, is always
resuming,…[…]
And the only sound is the rustle of metaphors
crying out and the surprise is that nothing
we say or do not say or say again can hold
here in the crush of one thing into the other,…— Jenny Xie, “Le Temps Mort” (Source: Poem-a-Day, May 1, 2025, Academy of American Poets)
New hammocks arrive to supplement old hammocks.
Susan creates cartoon portraits from compost bound ingredients.
“In film, temps mort (‘dead time’) refers to passages of directionless time—time when very little, if anything, is taking place narratively. Useless time. In film and in life, I’m drawn to what gets awakened in these slow, languorous stretches, when the camera keeps on running, even in the absence of legible action, even when actors have broken out of character or walked out of the frame altogether. In the swell of empty time, one’s attentional rhythms get recalibrated, and constellations of meaning that remain hidden to the eye—that immeasurable substratum of the unperceivable—exert their force.”
— Jenny Xie (Source: Poets.org)
Hyacinths boom-bloom, exploding with perfume and pretty previews of summer.
And the Essex-Charlotte ferry comes and goes. Fewer cars this spring, but a welcome reminder of normalcy during this unnormal times.
Let’s return to this remarkable temps mort refrain from Jennie Xie: “In the swell of empty time, one’s attentional rhythms get recalibrated, and constellations of meaning that remain hidden to the eye… exert their force.”
What do you think?