Time is asymmetric. It flows from order to disorder and cannot be reversed. A glass that falls to the floor and shatters cannot be restored to its own completeness. Nor is it possible to identify any point that is more now than any other one.

Maybe it isn’t the year I want to assemble. What I am assembling is myself. It is not time that must be held together, it is I, and the shattered grief that rises and rises. Grief over violence, shame over violence, grief over shame.

Is this my heritage, my work? Is this my principal task — to gather rain, to gather shame? Groundwater poisoned by violence.

Moving clocks run more slowly than clocks at rest. One consequence of the non-absolute nature of time is that simultaneity has no meaning. The days pass, one after the other, and I follow them. Events accumulate, one alongside the other, and I make a selection from among them. It is a simple equation, in fact: time and events, plus my selection. Result: a length of barbed wire.

It is one of the consequences of violence that people who lived before me no longer exist, that memories are annihilated, that entire universes are buried under bombed-out houses. Pain is inherited, in a steady stream from order to disorder, and cannot be reversed. There are the memories; it is in the dark that I see them, in the rain. They are my family. Darkness my light.