Dear Minh,

How long did it take me to write this? How long will it take you to read?

Recently, I’ve been thinking about how each of us knows what we can accomplish at a given moment. What is the quality of a decision made in 10 seconds versus 10 hours? How would this letter read if it took 4 hours to write instead of 4 weeks?

Time is on my mind because I am terrible at managing it. In the last year, I’ve used the phrases “burning that candle at both ends” and “living on borrowed time” a countless number of times. I’ve been making art frantically, as if I have no future.

Because of the COVID pandemic, I’ve worked from home for over a year. From my kitchen window, I’ve seen the daylight hours expand and contract and I’ve heard familiar birdsongs come and go with the seasons. I’ve sent emails and taken meetings. I’ve watched full television seasons in one week. These conditions make it very difficult to distinguish work, leisure, and whatever else eludes the two—living seems like a good catchall. Different time scales are conflating, my life is now my 9-5 and vice-versa.

I’m not particularly interested in making this into an elaborate essay, or culling from the work of a philosopher or theorist to describe different experiences of time. Instead I’ll share a few notes that have informed me:

1. In many board games, a time control is a mechanism that ensures that each round of the match can finish in a timely way, and the tournament can proceed. This is like determining how quickly a player can compute and make incisive movements. Here, understanding what can be accomplished in a moment provides greater freedom of movement­, delays the player’s demise.
   
   The first time I’d ever read about time control in this context is in Yasunari Kawabata’s novel, The Master of Go. The novel follows the respected master of Go, Honinbo Shusai, as he plays a retirement game against an up-and-coming player, Otaké. The game itself is a grueling, six-month long procedure in which Shusai’s style of play is pitted against a new, technical, and somewhat computational style of play. The word for time control in Go is byo yomi or “counting seconds,” and throughout the chronicle, Shusai uses byo yomi as a way to delay his loss, often moving the game from one location in Japan to another. If you turn to any random page, you’ll likely find the protagonist struggling to complete a game of Go, and his opponent impatient to win. Here is one page for reference.

2. The film Searching For Bobby Fischer follows the life of young chess prodigy, Josh Waitzkin, as three different men – his father and his teachers – all attempt to solidify their own legacies in him. The three frequently argue with each other over the best uses of Josh’s time.
   
   In one scene, the protagonist Josh and his mentor, Vinnie, play a game of speed chess at Washington Square Park, using a game clock. Vinnie has taught Josh a ferocious style of play: slapping the clock each time they make a move, and bluffing to push the game to its conclusion. Think fast! In this mode of play, opponents rush to the finish.
   
   

3. I’ve been thinking about death a bit, which is maybe suggested by my video, Problem Machine (What’s it like to be dead? What’s it like to die?), a 10-minute durational piece that shows me tanning in a booth. The duration of the tanning session was determined by a questionnaire I filled out prior. These were questions to be answered on a scale of 1-5 about my skin and complexion – do I sunburn easily? Do I have freckles? As the video progresses, I am proactively producing melanin, in effect pigmenting myself as performance. I’m making myself blacker, in a sense, and it only takes 10 minutes.

4. I remember Mortal Man, the final track in Kendrick Lamar’s sophomore album, To Pimp a Butterfly. Using sound bites from an interview done with the late Tupac Shakur, Kendrick crafts a posthumous conversation on Black life, perseverance, and preservation in the music industry. Shakur mentions what he is able to accomplish in the span of five years, and states that, “in this country, a Black man only has like… five years we can exhibit maximum strength. And that’s right now while you’re a teenager, while you’re still strong, while you still want to lift weights, while you still want to shoot back. Because once you turn 30 it’s like they take the heart and soul out of a man.” Shakur died at age 25.
   
   

5. Finally, I want to share this video that I remapped, of Britney Spears from 2006. With her former husband Kevin Federline behind the camera, she confesses that she wishes to travel back in time and fix her mistakes, and specifically not to miss out on life. I hadn’t known about all the struggles she was dealing with then, but I sympathized with her anxieties around time.
   
   
   
   
   Maybe the only tried and true way of knowing is by doing, and having the tenacity to repeat oneself. I made a future portrait of myself to imagine all the things I could accomplish between now and then.

Slowly but surely,
Max