Unessay Personal Note

For my unessay project, I made a zine with images that symbolically depict perceptions of temporality during times of isolation and illness, inspired by imagery in the Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, as well as my experience of time during the COVID-19 pandemic. I chose the form of a zine for my project because they are often “noncommercial and amatuer,” and produced out of “pure desire or need to communicate,” (Bell, 188). Since I do not often draw or create art, I felt unintimidated by this medium enough to feel good working on and completing it while also still feeling challenged. I wanted to use this assignment as an opportunity to sit in the present and actively process how the depictions of illness and epidemics in this Outbreak Narratives course can illuminate or add to how I have been understanding temporality during this past year of social distancing. 

In Mann’s novel, the protagonist, Hans Castorp, goes to a sanatorium for patients with tuberculosis up in the Swiss Alps. While he plans to stay a few weeks, he ends up staying for seven years. Whether Hans is taking up his rest cure in bed or on the balcony, exploring the town, in the mountains skiing, or coming back to the sanatorium to have a meal, his stay challenges his previous notions of how to occupy and conceive of time and space. 

Drawing also from Alison Kafer and Ellen Samuels’ writings on crip time, inspired by the concept of queer time, I explore through illustrations the malleability of temporal perception when one deviates from traditional conceptions of temporality that are shaped by compulsory heterosexulity and/or ablebodiedness/ablemindedness (Kafer, 27).  Expanding on queer theory, Kafer explains how “straight time,” characterized by, “a firm delineation between past/present/future,” (Kafer, 34) and “curative time,” which can only conceive of disability in the present in the context of intervention, orient perceptions of time/the future around reproduction and cure. While Lee Edelman argues for queers/queer theory to reject futurity altogethter, Kafer attempts to tease out how differenct conceptions of time and the future might be imagined in order that disability can exist fully, and perhaps even be desired, in the social imaginary of the present (Kafer, 45). 

​Works Cited

Bell, Brandi Leigh-Ann. "Riding the third wave: women-produced Zines and feminisms. (Discussion Papers/Documents De Travail)." Resources for Feminist Research, 2002, p. 187+. Gale Literature Resource Center, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A98372244/LitRC?u=swar94187&sid=LitRC&xid=209e9ac5. Accessed 9 Dec. 2020.

Gentile, Jill. “Time May Change Us: The Strange Temporalities, Novel Paradoxes, and Democratic Imaginaries of a Pandemic.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association , vol. 68, no. 4, 1 Aug. 2020, pp. 649–669., doi: 10.1177/0003065120955120. 

Kafer, Alison. “Time for Disability Studies and a Future for Crips.” Feminist, Queer, Crip, by Alison Kafer, Indiana University Press, 2013, pp. 25–46. 

Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. Translated by John E Woods, Alfred A. Knopf Inc., New York, 1995. 

Samuels, Ellen. “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time.” Disability Studies Quarterly , vol. 37, no. 3, 2017, doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy.swarthmore.edu/10.18061/dsq.v37i3.5824. 

Image descriptions and Zine Reader 

Below is a description of each page of the zine, along with the quote in the novel that inspired the image and a corresponding quote from one of the other four cited sources. 

On the cover is what I imagine Hans’ view from his rest cure lounge chair looks like: the mountains frozen in time, only the cycles of moon and sun in the sky indicate passing time. There is a dark sky with the moon cycles, then below are snow capped mountains, then a hilly landscape with snow in front of that, and finally a forest with only the peaks of the trees showing. The title is pasted over the forest: “Time in Isolation: still & again.” 

"It’s peaks, summits, ridges, and brown-green-reddish forests stood there silent in time, were draped in the web of silently flowing earthly days, now sparkling against the deep blue of the sky, now wrapped in mists, now aglow with the red of the setting sun, now glittering hard as diamonds in a world turned magical by moonlight-- but always in snow, while six unbelievably long months had scampered by” (Mann, 341).

“We gaze at new and more brilliant stars across a suddenly wider galaxy, but primarily from our confinement in the most familiar of settings” (Gentile, 654).

On page one, there is a picture of a clock and a thermometer with both of their measurement marks seeming to fall off the frame of the object. Up in the sanatorium, similar to periods of isolation during illness, the utility of a standardized measure of time seems to fall away. Without the marks indicating seconds or degrees, what does a clock keep track of? 

Hans says, "what time actually is-- nothing less than a silent sister, a column of mercury without a scale, for the purpose of keeping people from cheating” (Mann, 89).

On Tom Boellstorff’s time falling rather than passing-- “it allows for two cycles of time (such as days of the week and numbers of the month) to be running simultaneously yet not perfectly parallel, creating circular moments of coincidence rather than straight (in both sense of the word) lines of forward movement,” (Kafer, 36). 

On the second page, there are four almost identical pictures of a person with a thermometer in their mouth. The background consists of tally marks. Inspired by the scene where Joachim describes to Hans how the days fly by quickly in isolation up at the sanatorium. He explains how the seven minutes during rest cure when he takes his temperature makes him appreciate time and grasp its true meaning. 

In the chapter “Clarity of Mind,” after Joachim takes his temperature, Hans asks him how long it takes, he puts up seven fingers, Hans says they must be up by now, and Joachim shakes his head: “Yes, when you pay close attention to it-- time, I mean-- it goes by very slowly. I truly like measuring my temperature four times a day, because it makes you notice what one minute, or even seven, actually means-- especially since the seven days of a week hand so dreadfully heavy on your hands here” (63).

“[For Hershey,] the time of prognosis is a single moment of telling but also an extended, if not indefinite, period of negotiation and identification. During that period, past/present/future become jumbled, inchoate. The present takes on more urgency as the future shrinks; the past becomes a mix of potential causes of one’s present illness or a succession of wasted time; the future is marked in increments of treatment and survival even as ‘the future’ become more tenuous,” (Kafer, 37). 

On page three, on the left hand column there are four consecutive pictures in a vertical row depicting Hans’ view from his bed. He can only see his hands, his bed, the corner of the window which shows the moon or sun, and a blob indicating a dream appearing and disappearing. Time expands and seems to be suspended in eternity during Hans’ bed rest. He stops sleeping very well and the days and nights begin to blend in together. While the days provide a diversion, he indulges in vivid dreams day and night that are daily interrupted only once by the knock of a nurse (indicated on the bottom right corner of the last image). The images multiply until the right column is just darkness. 

“The hours of slumber were, however, animated with varied and lively dreams, and he could go on indulging in them even while lying there awake. Divided as it was into little segments, the day provided him with diversion, but the hours of the night, as they marched past in their blurred uniformity, had much the same effect” (Mann, 199).

“crip time is vampire time. It's the time of late nights and unconscious days, of life schedules lived out of sync with the waking, quotidian world. It means that sometimes the body confines us like a coffin, the boundary between life and death blurred with no end in sight” (Samuels). 

On page four, the images are in the same format as page three (four vertical columns which multiply into darkness but this time, the big image is on the left and the darkness on the right). The images depict a barber’s seat, Hans’ hair overlapping his ear, a fingernail clipper and file set, and overgrown fingernails. Time contracting and never being able to catch up- despite seeming to always sit in the barbers seat, Hans’ hair also seems to overlap his ears. Or similarly, he seems to always have his nail clippers and file, yet his nails seem to always be overgrown. 

“His hair and nails were growing, too, growing quickly it seemed, because a fringe of hair kept overlapping the edges of the ears; and he frequently sat, a white cape wrapped around him, in the adjustable chair in the barber shop on the main street of Dorf and had his hair cut-- he was forever sitting there, it seemed” (Mann, 535).

“Living in ‘prognosis time’ is thus a liminal temporality, a casting out of time; rather than a stable, steady progression through the stages of life, time is arrested, stopped” (Kafer, 36).

On page five, there is a skiing figure in the top right corner who seems to be skiing in a circle- some snowflakes are visible, as well as lines indicating the wind motion. Working hard to move forward but always seeming to circle back- surrendering to the cycles of time.

“You ran around in a circle, toiling onward, with the feeling in your heart of doing something useful, when in fact you were tracing a wide, foolish arc that led back on itself, just as the teasing year came full circle” (Mann, 477).

“This always/never known reverberates at a strange new frequency, detuned by disruptive waves of timelessness. Pasts and futures impinge in new ways upon our present, and there’s no decontextualizing the individual from the social, and no telling what path the arrow of time will take” (Gentile, 654-655). 

On page six, there is a landscape of sand dunes, the sky is semi-dark, and there is a shadow figure in the center right space whose footsteps are visible beginning from the bottom of the page. Walking in sand for what seems like eternity- feeling like you’re walking in place. 

"life in the snow as reminiscent of the rolling dunes... this marvelous state of lostness. You walk and walk, and you never get back home on time, because you are lost to time and it to you" (Mann, 536).

“What would constitute a temporality of mania, or depression, or anxiety? If we think of queer time as involving archives of rage and shame, then why not also panic attacks or fatigue? How does depression slow down time, making moments drag for days, or how do panic attacks cause linear time to unravel, making time seem simultaneously sped up and slam shut, leaving one behind?” (Kafer, 38). 

On the last page, there is a self with a jar of preserves on the top right sealed away from time with the months mixed up “all hiddledy-piggledy,” (Mann, 534). This mix-up of the months/time is indicated by a sort of speech bubble that points to the jar, and within the bubble are clusters of small circles, each with an initial of a month on them. 

"Are hermetically sealed preserves on the shelf outside of time?” (Mann, 534).

On Hans’s stay, frozen in time, "two years before-- neither short, nor long, simply without time, rich with experience yet null and void" (Mann, 493).

“This kind of cure-driven future positions people with disabilities in a temporality that cannot exist fully in the present, one where one’s life is always on hold, in limbo, waiting for the cure to arrive” (Kafer, 44).