The Tempedum
My E-Concept ‘The Tempudum’ is my attempt at coalescing the instrument of a pendulum and the tempo (being the rate or speed of an event). ‘The Tempedum’ is inspired by Vedika Rampal’s the ‘pharmeikṓn’ which also uses my own play on words. Derived from ‘tempo’ – ‘the rate or speed of motion or activity’ and ‘pendulum’ – a tool where a weight oscillates between one extreme and another.
The interconnectivity which exists between time and nature is one which often gets overlooked in our fast-paced modern lives. One particular personal moment which inspired this e-concept is when, as a child, I observed an elder engrossed in watching a spider build its web near my school gate. In the Anthropocene, where it seems that events surround time rather than vice versa, many fail to observe that all these measures of time that limit rather than free us, were placed by humans. ‘The Tempedum’ invites the reader to discover that to experience that sense of liberty, which literary artists describe as the ‘freedom of plants’, by venturing towards an empathetical and unbiased perspective.
I further go on to explain what the tempedum of time sounds like by delving into one of the many definitions that humans like to assign to time, the temporal terms of time being a ‘before and after’ phenomena:
This ‘before’ and ‘after’ of time, reduces time to bleak terms that go against the tempedum,– non-temporal terms. This manner of defining time is the catalyst for the deterioration of the tempedum which exists in nature and among us.
Thereby, in this manner of inviting audiences to listen to the tempedum of time, I aim to capture one of the most important essences of the Anthropocene – the human influence on one’s perception of time. By using a figurative image of a ‘pendulum’ – a tool meant to represent harmony at precise time intervals and is resistant to changing unless acted upon by an external source, I depict this element of the Anthropocene without the limits set by the pendulum. In this manner, my E-concept is free from limits both implicitly and explicitly.
In this manner of redefining, one’s perception of time, I invite audiences to detach their emotions, their life experiences, and even their subjectivity when understanding the meaning of time. I relate this understanding of time through my close reading of John Clares ‘The Moors’s, and other various works of previous entries in the Living Book.
-Fatima El Cheikh Khalil
Works Cited:
Sheldon, W. H. “The Spirituality of Time.” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 23, no. 6, 1926, pp. 141–54. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2013980. Accessed 18 Nov. 2022.
bleon8st1, and bleon8st1. Blseh! (Gesundheit), 27 Jan. 2016, https://blseh14.umwblogs.org/2016/01/27/brian-leons-key-passage-analysis-of-john-clares-the-mores/.