Something shifted the moment my residency application was submitted last week. Not relief, exactly. Not just the satisfaction of ticking off a major bureaucratic milestone. Something stranger, more disorienting. Time warped.
Gone was the urgency that had structured my weeks in Warsaw thus far - I better do this, should go and do that, need to complete X before the deadline. The linear pressure that comes with working toward a specific bureaucratic goal. And in its place: a temporal quality I'm still learning to name.
My first instinct was to call it limbo. That familiar word for the in-between, for waiting, for suspension between states. But limbo suggests stasis, a holding pattern, being stuck. What I'm experiencing is the opposite of stuck. I'm experiencing temporal expansion.
It's like this: The TARDIS - Doctor Who's time-and-relative-dimension-in-space machine - doesn't wait. It doesn't exist "between" moments. It exists across temporal registers simultaneously, bigger on the inside than its external dimensions suggest, operating according to laws that don't respect linear causality. That's what's happening now. I've submitted my application for temporary residency, which means I'm no longer an applicant racing toward deadlines. But I'm not yet a resident with confirmed status. The bureaucratic process takes as long as it takes - weeks, months, who knows. I have no control over it and no deadline to work toward.
And in that bureaucratic pocket, time has expanded.
My days feel different. Not longer, not slower, but thicker. More textured. I'm not rushing, but I'm not static either. I'm not waiting for something to happen; I'm existing in a present that doesn't demand anything specific of me. The metro glide became possible in this expanded time. So did the recognition that I want to photograph the world underground, document the passages handlowe, pursue creative investigations without deadline pressure. All that's to come.
This is simultaneously scary and loving. Exposing and protective.
Scary and exposing because when you're no longer structured by bureaucratic urgency, you have to figure out what structures your time instead. What do I do with days that don't have specific tasks attached to them? How do I move through a city when I'm not moving toward anything in particular? The warping reveals that I've been using deadlines as scaffolding, and now the scaffolding is gone.
Loving and protective because the expanded time gives me permission to glide, to notice, to pursue meaning without justification. Warsaw holds me differently when I'm not frantically completing registration tasks. The city becomes generous. She grants the upgrade - permission to surf through her systems with grace rather than efficiency. The TARDIS effect operates at this paradox: I'm more vulnerable (no structure, no deadlines, no clear next steps) and more held (the city has accepted my application, time has expanded to accommodate exploration) simultaneously.
The warping happens across every plane. Temporally, days don't follow the rhythm of deadline-driven productivity. They unfold according to different logic - attention, discovery, the rhythm of walking and noticing rather than completing and achieving. Spatially, Warsaw is both more mine (I've formally applied to stay, declared my intention) and less fixed (I don't yet have the documentation that confirms belonging). The city exists in quantum superposition - simultaneously home and not-yet-home.
Existentially, my identity in Warsaw has shifted but not resolved. I'm performing a role without a clear script. Not tourist, not quite resident, not temporary visitor. Something else. Something the glide reveals but doesn't name.
Creatively, projects can unfold organically rather than according to imposed timelines. My upcoming World Underground photographic intervention doesn't need to be scheduled or justified. It reveals itself when the warped time allows for revelation.
Phenomenologically, what I notice changes when urgency disappears. The nature of things - that quality I keep trying to articulate - becomes visible in expanded time. You can't rush your way into seeing the nature of things. You have to let time warp around you.
But here's where the hyperreality gets complicated. Because I'm aware - acutely, wonderfully aware - of my position as privileged surfer. Not privilege in the economic sense, but privilege as granted permission. Warsaw has accepted me. The city has bestowed the upgrade, allowed me into a role that not everyone gets to play. I've been given access to the glide, to the temporal warping, to this particular way of moving through her systems.
This isn't something I could demand or purchase or earn through effort alone. It's something the city gives. And that gift - that acceptance into the performance as privileged surfer rather than struggling applicant - shapes what I'm able to notice, how I'm able to move, which temporal registers become accessible to me.
The warping time reveals this privilege as much as it reveals the nature of things. When I glide through the metro, I'm moving as someone the city has chosen to hold differently. Someone she's granted special access to. The expanded time exists because Warsaw decided to expand it for me, to create this pocket outside normal causality where I can explore and document and pursue meaning.
And yet - here's the paradox I'm trying to hold - this granted privilege comes with responsibility. If Warsaw has given me the upgrade, what am I doing with it? If the city has accepted me into this role, how do I honour that acceptance? The privilege isn't just aesthetic pleasure - it's oriented toward something. Documentation, investigation, the creation of work that emerges from being held this way by this particular city.
The question becomes: how do I anchor work and creative needs into these shifting time tides without taking the privilege for granted? How do I remain worthy of the upgrade?
My old pal Viktor Frankl would say: "pursue meaning." The search for significance isn't negated by granted permission; if anything, it creates an obligation to pursue meaning more intentionally. If I have expanded time, what am I doing with it? If I can afford to glide, where am I gliding toward? The momentum I feel on the metro platform isn't just aesthetic pleasure - it's oriented toward documentation, investigation, the creation of work that might (I hope) offer something beyond my own experience.
Phenomenal Sobriety exists because I have eight years of personal sobriety and the capacity to build a recovery program. OS:Warszawa exists because I have the freedom to practice sequential residency and document what I find. The granted privilege creates the possibility; the meaning-making justifies - or attempts to justify - the use of that possibility.
The shifting time tides don't come with an anchor pre-installed. I have to create one. Daily social media posts for Phenomenal become rhythmic touchstones - not deadlines exactly, but regular points of contact with purpose. Completing What The Water Sees and OS:Belgrade becomes a way to honour the creative work that preceded this temporal expansion. The World Underground investigations give me somewhere to direct the glide.
These anchors don't stop the warping. They just make it navigable. They give me reference points within the expanded time, ways to orient myself when the days get too thick and I start to panic about what I'm actually doing with all this freedom.
Because that's the exposing part, isn't it? When time expands and you have genuine choice about how to spend it, you confront the question of whether you're using it well. Whether the hyperreality you're constructing has integrity. Whether the glide is taking you somewhere meaningful or just circling the same platform indefinitely.
There's that moment in Apocalypse Now when Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore decides to take a beach specifically because it has good surf, and orders a soldier to surf despite the ongoing battle. When the soldier hesitates, Kilgore delivers the line: "Charlie don't surf!" It's absurd, darkly comic, and somehow profound. The Viet Cong don't surf because they're not performing the same war the Americans are. They operate according to different logic, different temporal and spatial registers. Surfing requires a particular relationship to time and space - a capacity to ride momentum rather than impose control.
My use of the word "limbo" exposed the same innocent naivety. I was still thinking in terms of linear time, bureaucratic progression, being "between" states. I wasn't surfing yet. I was still performing urgency even after the deadline had passed. But the glide taught me otherwise. You can't glide while you're in limbo. You can only glide when time warps, when you stop waiting and start existing in expanded temporal registers.
Charlie don't surf. But I do. And Warsaw granted me the waves.
And I'm trying - imperfectly, self-consciously - to surf them with intention. To create something from this warped time that justifies its existence. To anchor creative work and recovery program development into the temporal expansion without collapsing back into deadline-driven urgency.
The TARDIS effect isn't a self-investigation in itself - not yet, anyway. It's the condition that makes investigations possible. It's the temporal quality that allows me to notice the metro glide, to recognise the world underground as worthy of documentation, to move through the city with attention rather than agenda. Everything that follows - the photographic interventions, the sonic cartography, the philosophical documentation - emerges from this warped time. The investigations are only possible because I'm no longer racing toward bureaucratic completion. Because Warsaw has expanded to hold me differently. Because the city granted me permission to be held this way.
The residency application created a pocket outside normal causality. And in that pocket, the city reveals herself. Not all at once. Not according to schedule. But generously, surprisingly, in the textures and rhythms that only become visible when you stop rushing and have the freedom to notice.
My role in the performance is transforming. I'm no longer playing "temporary visitor establishing infrastructure" or "applicant completing bureaucratic requirements." I'm playing something new, something I don't have language for yet. Maybe: "privileged surfer learning to ride responsibly." Maybe: "performer discovering the TARDIS is bigger on the inside and trying to fill that space with meaning." Maybe: "person with expanded time figuring out what the hell to do with it."
I don't mind not knowing. The not-knowing is part of the expansion. The warping doesn't demand resolution. It invites exploration. And the privilege that makes exploration possible also demands that I explore with intention, that I create something from these shifting tides beyond my own aesthetic pleasure.
And so the glide continues. The metro knows what it's doing. Warsaw holds the expanded time. The TARDIS hums along, bigger on the inside, operating according to laws that don't require my understanding but do require my responsibility.
I'm just learning to surf. Trying to anchor into the work. Trying to make something meaningful from the privilege of warped time.
David Henzell
