I saw an artist wearing a head piece made of magnetic tape pulled from a VHS cassette. My first thought was that it seemed a shame to destroy an old tape, even a blank one. But as I thought about it more, eventually I came all the way to thinking that the destruction/use of that VHS tape in that way did more to preserve the tape than it did to destroy it. At the very least, the transformation brought it to my attention in a way that an untouched tape could not have.
Things that are not in a state of transformation are in a state of decay.
Transformations permits the making of new memories about an object (or an individual).
The act of transformation is an act of preservation then, expending effort to slow the relentless effort of the universes entropy towards the destruction of all things is a beautiful, tymeful act.
I like the Middle English word tymeful meaning ‘at the due time.’
In contrast with timelessness, it reflects the beauty of transience. It captures a quality of being within a moment, bound to it. We are only alive in time, truly timeless things are, necessarily, dead.
Why the Middle English spelling, why not timeful? Because rooting it in the spelling of a bygone era draws more attention to the beauty of this idea that everything that is alive or ever was alive, was alive at the due time.
Words, like ideas, are kept alive in our minds, in our memories. They live not just through transformation, they live by transformation.
Put another way, tymeful transmits a lightly different idea for me than timeful, and I like the feeling of that earlier form.
