Timestamp, created by David Breskin, begins with a sign of life on August 11, 2024. The whole collection is the fruit of a literary and cultural experiment where the author wrote one poem each morning, jotted down the time and date, and then repeated the process the next day. Written without extensive revision, the poems form a time capsule of Breskin’s thoughts and observations.
Life’s uncertainties and the systems we’ve created to manage them recur in Timestamp: medical offices, machines and technology, phones and apps. In Target Acquisition, Breskin humorously compares online dating to the use of hyper-accurate weapons targeting systems: “Lasers offer easy acquisition...present an eager pilot with a host of romantic options...Their iPhones drawn like the Hornet’s Joint Stand-Off Weapon— swipe pistol and stamen, stigma and style.” We’ve become unwilling to let nature take its course, as with the birds and the bees. Now we manage our love lives with detached precision, at the cost of defining our love interests as “acquisitions” rather than potential partners or fully fledged people.
Breskin’s work repeatedly reminds us of our own and each other’s flesh and blood humanity. In a less dark modern love poem, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, we see attraction cleverly compared to the magnetic imaging in an MRI scanner, where we notice highly individual things about each other. Elsewhere, we see attention to humble people and the unheralded ways we care for others. Business as Usual celebrates those who devise harm reduction programs and an unnamed public servant: “The Building Code bureaucrat might be no one’s idea of a hero but she tools around town preventing babies from burning in their cribs, keeps the flood at bay.” Pieces such as Various Kinds of Medicine and The Umbilical Cord: A Lifeline of Love present both institutionalized medicine over the centuries and machine-synthesized AI poetry as the products of imperfect and somewhat arbitrary systems that fail to grasp the essence and needs of real people.
Given that we are mere, vulnerable humans, the fear and alienation people experience is not without reason. A Good Day for Measuring Yourself Against the World suggests that the human experience is like that of a young adult recently arriving off the bus in a new city, knowing no one and possessing only a letter of recommendation. Other poems further develop this idea. Bio/ethics points to the dichotomy between our advanced technologies to both carry life forward and to kill it on the battlefield, and no good deed draws on motifs of technology and scientific measurement to highlight the difficulty of identifying and quantifying morality. Not only is our world unpredictable, but it can be difficult to figure out who we should be and how we should live in light of that.
Human society is confusing, and the natural world is not necessarily a refuge. Nature is powerful enough to outlast us, as shown in Wet, “Earth is never father, always mother. She was wet before any douche stepped into the dive bar with his opposable thumbs, hairy back and cheap-cologne pheromones. She started with the oceans and here we are.” Yet the natural world can be just as indifferent to ordinary humans as the modern political and social arenas, as we see in Private Dinosaurs, where people scrolling on their phones are just as likely to be annihilated by a meteorite as the Tyrannosaurus. Rather than simply condemning or mocking our desires to make the world more predictable and safer, Breskin presents our modern contrivances as natural outgrowths of real concerns.
Yet, our quest for rationality, even when clear logic cannot be found, is not without consequences. In Apophenia, we see another dark side of our cognitive craving for order and patterns. In the same way that many otherwise intelligent people will see faces in inanimate objects, we become vulnerable to political propaganda promising to make sense of the world, which is the: “perfect recipe for the shitshow banquet of conspiracy theories now being served by white-gloved servers, smorgasbord style, to fully sate the empty glutted stomachs of the Believers.” Other pieces echo the theme of political leaders curating and simplifying reality to grab and secure power: The Paranoid Style in American Politics: Sixty Years Later, Laura Loomer and Wintry Mix: Inauguration Day. Another poem, Debating, uses the language of modern art, which intentionally turned away from literal representation, to describe political debates cynically made to seem chaotic while still crafted for production values.
Breskin’s collection asks valid and timeless questions: How much meaning and certainty do we need to survive an inherently unpredictable world? How do we live with ethics and compassion in a world that doesn’t encourage that? How can we create order and protect each other without becoming oppressive?
Perhaps the act of creating Timestamp was Breskin’s response to the excesses of order and modernity, a way of reintroducing some raw wildness back into the world. Although these pieces embody structure and lyricism, the fact that they were created and published without extensive pre-planning or editing becomes an act of courage, presenting naked, vulnerable human thought into an uncertain universe.