Fight for your Chronology
A torture tactic practiced by many captors is to cause their captives to lose their sense of time. Captors can do this by putting someone in a room with no windows and feeding them at all hours they can do it by telling them it’s the wrong time, they can also do it by putting too much light in a room when it’s night time or vice versa: making it dark in a room when it’s actually daytime outside. In the Transatlantic slave trade, colonizers did this to stolen Africans by stowing them in ships like cargo below deck, in darkness. For months at a time these captured Africans underwent the torture of unhygienic and claustrophobic circumstances that also disoriented their sense of time, seasons, and days. Upon arrival to America, the now enslaved Africans were told the days of the week, of minutes and hours, and of holidays like Christmas as new means of keeping time. No more indigenous rituals no more looking at the stars in the moon and no more language for units of time beyond the second, the month, or the year. Losing phrenology is a great affliction that has successfully broken the psyche for many of us, causing us to act out of our minds, and in obeisance to a culture and a system that has ultimately captured us.
The notion of lost time being a form of torture is my motive for writing this blog entry, when you lose your chronology, not only are you disoriented (unnecessarily) you’ve also lost volumes. And I’m speaking from personal experience here, which I’m not ashamed to do: I don’t want to act like I am the worlds most perfect diarist—I’m just operating in the specificity of this mandate. I digress. Knowing that it’s a torture tactic for someone to lose their sense of time, really brought things to a new place of understanding for me and I hope for you as well. When you are disoriented by not keeping your chronology, a lot of lies can get into your life because so much has gone unwritten.
In the past year I have faved some difficulty in keeping my entries in order. I have unfinished entries, unwritten entries, and entries that need to be elongated for richer context. Within this has been the burgeoning understanding of what chronology means to a diarist. In summation: authority is founded on decency and order; scattered or lost chapters means losing track of time and season, and behaving untimely because of lack of revelation.
Your chronology: the lived calendar of the testimony of your times, chronicled in order, with understanding and discernment. In a system that despises the indictment of order, we must remember that chronology is under attack because it is a timepiece. Knowing our “when” means being attuned and in season and so being able to behavecall things into existence. The journal is a wresting place where we pull exhoes from the Spirit of Truth into legible form through what the west calls “journaling”. It’s historicizing, and it’s where our journaling practice is headed as we engage the seriousness of our times, the intention of our existence and the unclaimed indictments in history.
Every day dark powers are at work in their usual deception to snatch our eyes from eternal matters with false urgency, the delay of hopelessness, distracting emotions, fear’s illusions, negativity’s bad ideas, and the folklores of generational curses. These knock us off kilter and cause us to devalue our lives as history, sinking our gaze to base things and dragging us into the realm of unholy, vile subject matters. Don’t be cajoled, deceived, hurt, confused, beleagured, tempted, or entertained from the witness of your chronology. Every day, everything matters in it’s given order, no matter your circumstance. To put you out of order and to jumble the calendar of your truth is the aim of Teastained woman, fight for your chronology. Document what keeps you from keeping score, keeping track, and keeping up with the times.
