19
Time
Stimpunks Foundation · Zine No. 19

No Universal Now

on relativity, crip time, and the clock that was never the universe's — with a coda by Helen Edgar

L★S
Love You Down
To Your Star Stuff
· open edition ·
Relativity

No master
clock

Newton assumed one universal time, ticking the same everywhere — a single clock the whole cosmos runs by. For two centuries it seemed obvious. It's also wrong.

Einstein showed that simultaneity is relative: two events that happen "at the same time" for me can happen at different times for you, if we're moving differently. Worse for the master clock — time itself runs slower the faster you travel, and slower again the deeper you sit in gravity. This isn't a thought experiment: the GPS in your phone only works because engineers correct for the satellites' clocks ticking faster than clocks on the ground.

There is no clock the universe checks against. Every clock keeps its own honest time.

The universe keeps no master clock. Why should you?
an event A · now B · now time ↑

two observers, two "nows"
simultaneity is relative

No Universal Now · Stimpunks 2
9 · 10 · 11 · 12 stamped onto bodies & minds

railway time · factory time
a convention, not a law

Standard time

The clock is a
human invention

So if nature keeps no universal now, where did the one true clock come from? We built it. Synchronized clock time — the shared minute, the timetable, the standardized zones — is barely a century and a half old, an agreement stitched together for railways and factories so trains would not collide and shifts would start together.

It is genuinely useful. But it is a convention, not a law of physics — and somewhere along the way we forgot we invented it and began treating it as reality itself, then measuring bodies and minds against it. Be productive on its schedule; wake, work, and rest on its count. The clock stopped being a tool and became a judge.

You can't fail a law of nature. You can only fail to fit a rule someone wrote.

We built the clock, then mistook it for the sky.
No Universal Now · Stimpunks 3
Crip time

Crip time
bends the clock

Disabled people have a name for living off that clock: crip time. Irving Zola and Carol Gill named it from inside disability culture; it means the extra time and the flexible time — arriving at various intervals, processing at various rates, needing more hours or fewer or simply other ones.

The usual reading is that we are failing to keep up. Crip time says the opposite: the schedule was built narrow, and a body meeting it late is information about the schedule. As Alison Kafer puts it, rather than bend disabled minds and bodies to the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled minds and bodies.

Which is exactly the move of Minor Worlds: don't fix the person — change the thing around them. Here the thing is time itself.

Rather than bend the body to the clock, bend the clock to the body.— after Alison Kafer
bend the body to the clock bend the clock to the body room to move

same body, two clocks
flex time, exploded

No Universal Now · Stimpunks 4
clock time spiral time a smell pulls a thread across decades

not a line — a spiral
time folds back on itself

Monotropic time

Spiral time,
felt time

For many neurodivergent people, time was never a line to begin with. In a monotropic attention tunnel it stretches and folds — an hour of flow vanishes; a bad ten minutes lasts a week. Memory works the same way: not a shelf of dated files but a spiral you re-navigate, where a smell tugs a thread across decades and yesterday can feel further off than childhood.

Marta Rose named this spiral time; Helen Edgar, writing of felt time, describes how a moment from years ago might feel like now, while a conversation from yesterday feels distant. It's why "what did you do last weekend?" can land as a demand rather than a question. Not broken clock-reading — a different clock, measured in intensity, not minutes. Bergson called this lived duration; physics, in its own tongue, already agreed that duration bends.

Remembering isn't recall. It's re-navigation.— Helen Edgar, More Realms
No Universal Now · Stimpunks 5
Six ways of looking

Time travel,
broken time

None of this is only lovely. Ellen Samuels, in Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time, holds the hard edges too. Crip time is time travel — a wormhole of jerky stops and starts that pulls you out of the tidy line of life-stages, so you meet the frailties of old age while young, or get treated as a child at any age.

It is grief time and sick time: the days that swell around a loss, the strange arithmetic where you must earn the very hours in which to be ill. Capacity arrives and departs on its own schedule, and the clock offers no credit for it.

So we hold both at once — the flexibility is a gift, and the brokenness is real. Naming it plainly is how we stop grading ourselves against a straight line we were never on.

Notlate — keeping a different, honest time.
Notbehind — we were never on your line.
Notlazy or slow — running a clock the wall can't read.
Nota schedule to be fixed to — a schedule that should bend to us.
the expected line crip time stops · starts · loops · gaps

a wormhole, not a timeline
held: gift and grief at once

No Universal Now · Stimpunks 6
many clocks · no master

each keeps its own time
and none is late

Arrive where we started

Star stuff keeps
its own time

So here is the whole of it. The cosmos runs on countless clocks and no master; so do we. The wall clock is a fine tool and a terrible judge, and it never was the sky.

T.S. Eliot wrote of arriving where we started and knowing the place for the first time — the shape of spiral time, and of star stuff, which is forged, scattered, and gathered back into new forms that remember. You are made of atoms billions of years old, keeping time no watch can hold.

You were never late. There is no schedule to be late to — only your own true time, which the universe has kept, patiently, since the first star.

Made of star stuff, you keep the oldest time there is — your own.
No Universal Now · Stimpunks 7
Coda
a guest passage by Helen Edgar · Autistic Realms / More Realms

Memories scatter like shards of seaglass along a fractured spiral, the centre always slipping just beyond my grasp.

Remembering isn't straightforward for me; it's less recall and more a process of re-navigation. Time folds back in on itself. A moment from years ago might feel like now, while a conversation from yesterday feels distant or unretrievable — unless something hooks me in and brings it back into focus.

My memories don't line up neatly. They tangle, twist, merge, and drift like mist through a forest. Sometimes I'm not remembering in the traditional sense at all, but kind of re-sensing — a texture, a tone of voice, the way the light fell.

It can be disorienting, in a world that expects time and memory to be neat and logical. But it is also a kind of richness, a depth of connection that linear systems miss. We shall not cease from exploration — and arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.

— Helen Edgar  · on felt time & monotropic memory · morerealms.com
closing line after T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
No Universal Now · Stimpunks 8
L★S There is no universal now — not in physics, not in a body. The clock is a tool, not a judge. You keep your own true time, and you were never late.
No. 13 Warriors and Weirdos — AURORA, the alien who came home
No. 14 The Council of All Beings — multispecies justice & more-than-human kin
No. 15 Every Creature's Own Sky — umwelt, attention-worlds & double empathy
No. 16 Minor Worlds — niche construction & the building of livable worlds
No. 17 The Nearest Body — tides, co-regulation & being pulled by what's near
No. 18 The Garden and the Stars — knowledge gardens, the commons & how star stuff knows itself
No. 19 No Universal Now — relativity, crip time & the clock that was never the universe's ← you are here
Reflection

Where have you called yourself "late" against a clock you never agreed to?

When does your time run in a spiral rather than a line — and what pulls a memory back?

What would it change to treat the schedule, not your body, as the thing that should bend?

No Universal Now is the nineteenth zine in the Stimpunks series. It reads crip time through physics — and it carries a guest coda by Helen Edgar, whose writing on felt time and monotropic memory (at Autistic Realms and More Realms) shapes spread five and closes the zine; the coda draws on her published words and appears with her blessing. She also guested No. 11 and closed No. 14.

The physics: Einstein's relativity of simultaneity and time dilation (special and gravitational), with GPS clock-correction as the everyday proof; standardized clock time as a railway-and-factory invention draws on Peter Galison's Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps and E.P. Thompson's "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism." Crip time was named from within disability culture by Irving Zola and Carol Gill, and deepened by Alison Kafer (Feminist, Queer, Crip — "bend the clock to meet bodies and minds"), Margaret Price, and Ellen Samuels ("Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time," 2017). Monotropic time draws on Marta Rose (spiral time), Helen Edgar (felt time), Murray, Lesser & Lawson (monotropism), Henri Bergson (durée), and Gilles Deleuze (the fold); the closing lines echo T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets.

The star stuff is Carl Sagan's, and the SN 1006 remnant on every Stimpunks page. The reading — that no clock is master, and being off the clock is closer to the truth than fitting it — is ours. You were ★stuff, keeping your own time, all along.

Stimpunks Foundation · Zine No. 19 · Open Edition
Print freely · Share freely · CC BY-SA 4.0 · L★S
stimpunks.org · starstuff.earth · morerealms.com
No Universal Now · Stimpunks 9