"An Index for the Time Being" | by Jia Hui Lee
Jia Hui Lee, PhD candidate, MIT HASTS; photo by Jared Charney, MIT News
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An Index for the Time Being
Jia Hui Lee
Afterword; Antecedent; Apocalyptic;
Before; Beginning; Black (Hole); Boomer; Brunch (I can’t remember the Last one); Bygone;
Climate Change; Counterfactuals (If Bernie had won); Covid-19; Cyclical!;
Debut; Decay (Institutional); Dimension; Distance (see Social; Physical; Emotional);
Eclipse; Emergency; Emotional (Distancing); End of an; Era;
Feverish; Fleeting; Foreseeable?; Foreshadow of a; Forever (see Timeless);
Galactic; Gallivant (I miss it so); Gathering (no larger than 10); Generations; Geological;
Hole (see Black, Worm, Threshold); Horizontal (movement of Time); Horology; Hysteria;
Immediate; Incessant; Infectious; Intermission; Irruption (see Covid-19);
Jeffersonian; Julian; Jurassic (Period, not Park); Just in Time;
Karma (see Cyclical!); Keep (Time but it, too, Fleets);
Last (Time, as in Goodbye); Late; Late Capitalism; Left Behind; Lethargy;
Maritime; Meantime; Millennial; Minute (as in Small); Moon;
Nether; Never; None; Now (if not when?);
Occult (as in Event, not Practice); Often; Old (but Young at Heart);
Past (as in Tense); Physical; Post-; Postponed; Pre-; Prolong;
Quadrennial (see Postponed); Quaint; Quarantine (as in Forty Days); Queer (as in Resilient);
Racist; Rebirth; Relativity; Repeat (Twice); Resurrect (and Repeat); Rest; Retreat;
Science (Fiction); Second (as in Not First); Singularity; Social (Distance); Syn/Chronic;
Threshold; Time (Being, Passing, Moving); Timeless; Today; Tomorrow;
Ultimate (see Last, Zenith);
Vortex; Vigilante; Viral;
Warp (as in Let’s Do the Time Warp Again!); Worm (see Hole); Wrinkle (in Time);
X (as in 10, see Gathering); Xenophobic (Times);
Year; Yearn for; Yesterday;
Z (as in Generation); Zenith; Zombified.
Jia Hui Lee is a PhD candidate in the MIT HASTS program (History, Anthropology, and STS). His research focuses on practices of work, communication, and cognition among humans and other animals in the context of science and technology in the global South. Drawing on methods from anthropology and STS, he examines human-rodent encounters in Tanzania, looking at how rodents are trapped in various projects aimed at producing scientific knowledge. He has previously published on the relationship between international aid networks and human rights in Uganda, based on research carried out for his M.Phil. at the University of Cambridge and B.A. at Harvard University. This "index poem" was written for 21W.771 (Writing Poetry Workshop), a CMS/W class taught by the acclaimed poet Erica Funkhouser.
Suggested links
Erica Funkhouser's MIT webpage
MIT HASTS: Program in History / Anthropology / Science, Technology, and Society