Introduction
The following texts were presented in a reading at the David Society for the Study of Time. 2 When David said that he would present three stories, I proposed that we do a tandem reading, specifying only that my texts would center on The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin, a rock garden in Long Beach, California. We were delighted to discover serendipitous resonances between our work, especially around gardens and slow time: David's short story "The Gardener" paired perfectly
Introduction
with my text about a rock gardener, and our texts featured characters and observers experiencing time dilation in different but comparable ways. Building on these themes, I wrote these tales of the "Deep Stream" in collaboration with and response to David's work, especially The Bone Clocks, for reasons that will become apparent in the Afterword. The interactive spirit of our reading was enhanced by David reading the Horologist's letter that he wrote at my invitation, and which is embedded in "A Perturbation in the Deep Stream."
A Perturbation in the Deep Stream

By Paul A. Harris and David Mitchell
The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin is a xeriscape (a drought tolerant landscape) in the California Heights neighborhood of Long Beach, California, where many residents have taken advantage of a city program that subsidizes the conversion of grass lawns into drought tolerant landscapes. The garden's creation in 2009 is attributed to the aptly named Pierre Jardin. Jardin coined the neologism "Petriverse" to mean both 1) a world composed of rocks; e.g., a rock garden; 2) words composed of rocks; i.e., verse written with stone. The Petriverse's tagline, "a rock garden where nothing is written in stone", is literally and figuratively fitting ( Figure 1 ).
By Paul A. Harris and David Mitchell
As a world composed of rocks, The Petriverse is a garden featuring assembled arrays of rocks, stones balanced on bases, and naturally standing stone stacks. Stone displays integrate other collected materials, including tree stumps, different kinds of shells and various beachcombed treasures. Larger installations evoke the places rocks were collected, such as a rock-pile simulating a "tidal shelf," which combines Palos Verdes shore stones with coral trees and a dolphin skull. In a work called "CAUTION:
By Paul A. Harris and David Mitchell
Rock climbers in tree" (Figure 2 ), rocks were nestled in the forked branches of a large pine tree seven years ago; since then, they have sunk down as the wood grows up; the rocks can no longer be removed, and one is being cracked by the two-metre-tall vinyl banner that presents them as a teetering stone stack, expressing the deliberate destabilizing of language that Jardin practices, and the incomplete nature of the Petriverse project. The range of rhetorical registers reflects the diverse audience the texts are addressing, including schoolchildren, teens, hipsters, and artists.
By Paul A. Harris and David Mitchell
The bedrock composition laid in the nascent Petriverse was a Cretan labyrinth (see Figure 4) . As a petroglyph found on ancient stones around the world, a kind of proto-writing, this symbol set the cornerstone for a petric poetics. Jardin made the labyrinth with white pebbles he collected on a beach in Crete after visiting Knossos, the archaeological site of King Minos's palace, a site associated with the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. Jardin set the labyrinth in a bed of blue aquarium gravel, evoking swirling motion in a pool, which Jardin conceptualized as a kind of maelstrom, a world-originating whirlpool, from which flowed a stream he named made out, serving as a portrait of the artist (see Figure 5 ). Large stone signs painted roadsign-yellow and mounted on car jacks at both sides of the garden demarcate the Petriverse as a "SLOW TIME ZONE." A "Manifestone" broadcasts the garden's ethos in a lighthearted haiku: "Stones are vital signs/of the earth's living spirit/plus they're pretty cool." The garden has a dedicated blog simply called "The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin"; 3 a rock-face and speech balloon with a QR code labeled "read me" enables strollers to access the blog while at the site, and post comments. An aperiodic newsletter called The Slow Times occasionally appears in a document box like those used by agents selling homes.
By Paul A. Harris and David Mitchell
It was the Slow Times headline article, "Temporal Anomalies Detected," that first brought The Petriverse public notoriety. 4 The story reported speculations that the Further noting that temporal vortices may form when consciousness gets caught in circular reasoning, they suggested that petriverse text messages such as 'NOTHING IS NOTHING' were causing a condition known as "paradox vortex of the cerebral cortex" in passersby.
By Paul A. Harris and David Mitchell
For Pierre Jardin, the article proved to be a real coup d'éclat, as it led to his first public work, commissioned by a philosopher aptly named Brad Stone at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) in the US. Professor Stone enlisted Jardin to design a "slow time zone" on the LMU campus where faculty and students could engage in Looking down on the ceremony from a rooftop perch, Pierre Jardin vazquezmelvin@example.com.
By Paul A. Harris and David Mitchell
He had put to rest the Perturbation in the Deep Stream, and was guardedly optimistic that walking the newly minted labyrinth would prove to be a trip to the Slow Time Zone. Jardin's contemplative experience of slow time in the labyrinth; the text's seven sections mimic the path's seven circuits, and several palindromes and chiasmic tropes mirror the path's reversals and reversibility.
A Perambulation in the Deep Stream

I.
Lines align body and mind;
I.
Feet tread a thread to the heart.
I.
As he approaches the labyrinth, Pierre Jardin reflects on its embodied and symbolic dimensions: "Labyrinth walkers don't walk in a void. We walk in a physical space," 7 but we also walk in "an imaginative space," "cabinets full of junk, treasure … both cultural … and personal, like home grown cosmologies" (Mitchell 2014: 374) or favorite novels, or 80's pop songs. Jardin pauses at what one of his favorite novels would call "The Aperture," but technically is known as the labyrinth's "mouth," the only fork in this garden's path, where you choose whether or not to enter. "I'm a mirror rim am I," the mouth intones, as Jardin passes through the looking glass to a wonderland where "Weird Shit" (Mitchell 2014: 15; 17; 20) can happen and mythical monsters may live-though Jardin would be more likely to meet Medusa than the Minotaur, given his predilection for petrification.
II.

In the end it turns out
The way out is the way in
In the end it turns out
In reverse, inside out.
In the end it turns out
Walking Ariadne's thread is rather like reading a book full of twists and turns that ends in the middle, only to up start again, going over the same ground in the second part, but in the opposite order. 8 The thread forms a Script written in 7 The passage substitutes labyrinth walking for writers working in Cripsin Hershey's lecture "On Never Not Thinking About Iceland" in The Bone Clocks: "Writers don't write in a void. We work in an imaginative space …" (374). 8 While The Bone Clocks explicitly foregrounds the labyrinth motif, Cloud Atlas' form is the most labyrinth-like of Mitchell's novels.
In the end it turns out
boustrophedon, bi-directional text that flips or reverses from left to right and right to left in alternating lines. The Script guides Pierre Jardin like a Greek ox (bou), turning him (strophe), furrowing his brow as he plows his way through the labyrinth. "I'm walking a line," he sings, "I'm thinking about empty motion"-like, for example, the motion of "an empty wine bottle rolling oh-ever-so-gently on the [ship] cabin floor, this way and that … This way and that … This way and that" (Mitchell 2014: 306) .
III.
Breath and blood cycle in synch
III.
The pacing of concentric circuits Every turn a return to earth.
III.
The labyrinth walk is Pierre Jardin's immersive baptism in the Deep Stream of archaic time, echoing the labyrinth's possible origin as a chthonic journey through a winding underworld cavern, symbolizing the uterus of the Earth Mother. Ariadne's thread is Jardin's "second umbilical cord" (Mitchell 2014: 38) : a nurturing tie to the lithosphere he loves. He looks out to sea and sees Catalina Island, where he often camps and collects volcanic rocks from the Miocene Era. On the geologic time scale, the Island is flying vazquezmelvin@example.com miles per million years; in human terms, that's 2 inches a year, making it very hard to detect with the naked eye. To mind the gap between human and geologic scales, Pierre does the mental math: 2 inches = 5.08 centimeters; a micron is point-five zeros-1 centimeter; there are 525,600 minutes in a year; ergo, the island is moving about a micron a minute. Given that a human hair is 40 microns thick, if I stand still for 40 minutes, I will see Catalina move a hair's breadth. Or, he realizes with a start, the San Andreas Fault may fracture at any moment; if I'm lucky, this bluff I'm walking on will also survive by becoming an island.
IV.
In search of wonder, I turn to stone.
IV.
Absorbed in this reverie, Pierre Jardin feels he has satisfied the garden's injunction:
IV.
'SUSPEND YOUR TIME HERE WISELY.' Suspended between being petrified by the terrifying thought of tectonic instability on the one hand, while also cocooned in the comfort of slow tectonic motion on the other, Jardin reflected that "Nothing lasts, and yet nothing passes, either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts" (Mitchell 2014 : 388, quoting Philip Roth's The Human Stain). In this aphoristic epiphany, Pierre Jardin discerns his true desire: to cross over into the realm of lithic temporal suspension, to absorb himself in stones until he would begin to absorb stone himself, as if he could let stone seep into him through a kind of "dialectical animism" (Bachelard 2002: 14) , 9 until the process would reach its apotheosis in his petrification. Stones are the bones of the earth, he thinks; we humans are walking, talking minerals, the earth's upper crust in upright, bipedal form, and I, Pierre, am a rock clone, a bone clock.
V.

Now I emit
Time I won.
Now I emit
Pierre Jardin's wandering mind is wondering: what does it mean to KNOW TIME LIKE THE PRESENT? Could you ever actually know the elusive, spurious present? The present's presence wavers in and out of existence, oscillating between "None Of This
Now I emit
Is Happening" and "All Of This Is Happening" (Mitchell 2014: 65) . Mesmerized by his silhouette's appearance and disappearance as he walks the path, Pierre speculates that while the present cannot be apprehended, perhaps it can be adumbrated as time's shadow. This labyrinth is a Salvador Dali sundial, he thinks, and I am the needle; what time has joined together, let gnomon put asunder. With the right horological device, we can know time like the present in our body: I will install an analemmatic sundial, so that the shadow is cast by a person standing in the middle with a raised arm. The sundial will be called "BEING THE TIME FOR THE TIME BEING,"
Now I emit
and inscribed around the middle will be a question, "What time is it?" answered with a question: "You mean right now?" 10 9 "Dialectical animism" names the relation between mind and matter reached through what Bachelard terms "materialist imagination," a cognitive mode and practice that "thinks matter, dreams in it, lives in it" (Bachelard 2002: 14) .
VI.
Amazement for mindful meandering A maze meant for a meandering mind.
VI.
The in which a forest of trees will become an anthology of books to be printed in 100 years, composed of works contributed by authors each year and held in trust. 12 The
VI.
Slow Time capsule will show that we tried to be good ancestors to future faculty and students.
VI.
The capsule also contains a clue about the fate of Pierre Jardin: judging by this book cover and curious calling card (see Figure 9) , it would appear that his last step the first step on a different path, the start of a new thread-but that's another story.
VI.
"For one voyage to begin, another voyage must come to an end, sort of" (Mitchell 2014: 613) .
Afterword
In our presentation at the David Mitchell Conference 2017, the previous two texts were sandwiched in between three stories David Mitchell wrote for collaborations with the design duo Kai and Sunny: "The Gardener," "Lots of Bits of Star," and "My Eye On You." 13 Mitchell's first story in the sequence is narrated by a character watching over his flower patches at sunset, from beyond the grave; the second is a sequel in which the gardener comes to the aid of the narrator Leo, a boy with autism. The third, longer tale reflects Mitchell's desire to "try to visit the head of a person who is endowed with a kind of 'temporal hotspot' which means their own personal time moves at a different velocity to everyone else's." 14 This "person" turns out to be Richard Cheeseman from The Bone Clocks, as he begins experiencing time passing at a twelfth of its normal speed.
Afterword
While it was a privilege and pleasure to have occasion to work with David again at St Andrews, it was also a challenge to write these texts, knowing that they would be heard alongside his, by an informed audience of fellow Mitchell scholar-fans. On the one hand, this context sharpens one's focus and makes one keenly aware of every word in a way different to any other writing I have done. On the other hand, David's willingness to take chances and try new things in his fiction is also inspiring, and serves as an implicit invitation to do the same.
Afterword
"Perturbation" and "Perambulation" are in part a homage to The Bone Clocks. I wrote these in implicit collaboration with the novel, first incorporating text from it in 13 The box-set texts may be viewed in the University of St Andrews Special Collections; they feature Most forms of contemporary "contemplative pedagogy" and "contemplative practice" at the university level draw on forms of Buddhist meditation and/or at http://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/bellarmineforum2016_resources/14/, accessed January 11, 2018.
Afterword
various Yoga traditions. It should be emphasized that these practices presuppose and/or entail formal training of kinds that I have not undertaken. Instead, I designed contemplative exercises organically, as it were, informed and shaped by the specific material I was teaching, with careful consideration given to the students in my courses. In the institutional discourse currently seeking to legitimate contemplative pedagogy, there is an understandable emphasis on professionalization and methodological rigor. This discourse may (perhaps unintentionally) discourage interested faculty in experimenting with devising new pedagogical practices; I would contend that contemplative pedagogy should remain an inclusive umbrella term that welcomes experimentation and recognizes that disciplinary grounding and institutional context will likely generate very heterogeneous ideas and examples of "mindfulness" in higher education. I thus follow Komjathy's advocation of "pluralist"
Afterword
rather than "perennialist" framing of contemplative practice, with an emphasis on "contextualization" in implementation and interpretation, "the process of locating people, texts, movements, and other phenomena in their corresponding historical, cultural, social, and political circumstances" (Komjathy 2017: 5) .
Afterword
In the pedagogical context in which I was working, slow time has two essential, designed contemplations of specific elements or processes of cosmic and geologic history. Students conducted these contemplative exercises while walking the labyrinth, and then wrote reflections recording their experiences.
Afterword
Teaching The Bone Clocks in this context became an experiment in literary slow pedagogy. In order to engage students (first years from all disciplines) in the close reading of a lengthy, complex work of fiction, I dedicated a third of the course (five weeks) to studying the novel: a 90-minute class session was devoted to discussing each section. In addition to writing a critical essay about the novel, students also expressed their responses to the novel in book spine poems 17 that were displayed in the university library. David's response on seeing photos of the students' works was, "Spine poems illustrate how art is a duet with imagination on cello and interpretation on piano."
18
As a final contemplative exercise, students were directed to walk the labyrinth at the Garden of Slow Time and reflect on the labyrinth as a motif in The Bone Clocks and use that experience as a springboard to help them to understand and describe the novel's narrative complexity. This exercise was a way to assess the analogy between the "willing suspension of disbelief" of reading fiction and the seeming suspension of time in walking a labyrinth. While this one teaching experiment provides no basis on which to draw substantive conclusions, anecdotal evidence suggests that the exercise was of some use for students in developing their insights into the novel.
18
17 Book spine poetry is a form of found poetry: poems are created by stacking books, whose titles form the lines of a poem. Students walk through the library stacks and pull out promising titles, before assembling them in a specific order. The genre/practice originates from the 1990s with artist Nina
18
Katchadourian's photos of stacked books; see her Sorted Books (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2013) . 18 Email received April 3, 2017. David's generous response was also humorous: "Please thank your innovative students for the collective hours and serendipity-fishing they must have spent in the library …. I wish I'd had them when I was doing media for the book -whenever an interviewer who hadn't read the novel rolled out the question "So could you sum up The Bone Clocks for me -just for those readers/listeners who haven't read it yet", I could have simply shown them the pictures and said, "Behold…" then added "My work here is done" before retiring for another cinnamon roll. Spine poems illustrate how art is a duet with imagination on cello and interpretation on piano."
18
Many students compared the twists and turns of the novel's plot to the labyrinth's meandering path; the way in which the path tantalizes the walker by moving closer to, then further away from, the center was likened to the novel letting the reader become accustomed to a narrator or plotline, then suddenly shifting to another viewpoint or story. Other students observed that the book begins and ends with Holly, just as the labyrinth walk concludes where it commenced; some added that if the path is a metaphor for one's life journey, then the Horologists could be thought of as traversing the labyrinth for an eternity of lives. One student said that Holly's journey in the book is like the path, which she follows without knowing where it leads her, while the Horologists and the Script were like the walls that guide the path. Future Library "questions the present tendency to think in short bursts of time, making decisions only for us living now. The timescale is one hundred years, not vast in cosmic terms. However, in many ways the human timescale of one hundred years is more confronting. It is beyond many of our current lifespans, but close enough to come face to face with it, to comprehend and relativise" ("Future Library 2014-2114"). As Mitchell said of the project, "The Future Library is a candidate on the ballot paper for possible futures. It brings hope that we are more resilient than we think: that we will be here, that there will be trees, that there will be books, and readers, and civilisation" ("Future Library 2014-2114"). In a similarly optimistic vein, Brad Stone, in his "Epistle to the Future" delivered at the dedication to the garden, concludes by inviting future LMU faculty and students to investigate their temporal values, and "create a time capsule for the next palindromic year (in the case of 2112, that would be 2222, followed by 2332). In the capsule you could include this letter and all 'An Epistle to the Future' letters from subsequent time capsules (in translation if need be)" (Stone 2016 ).
18
Slow time connotes invitations to both be mindfully present, contemplatively grounded in context, and to take a long view that imagines futures in light of pasts, on several nested timescales. Sustaining slow time in these senses seems more critical than ever, in the turbulent or "catastrophic times" (Stengers 2015) we live in. The slow time of literature, of the academy, provides psychic comfort and enrichment; it also opens a political space to imagine and create alternative futures. This work, so evidently at the heart of David Mitchell's fiction, is perhaps humanity's most pressing task: as Pierre Jardin and Lachim DiVeldt would tell you, nothing less than the course of the Deep Stream vazquezmelvin@example.com.
Editorial Note
The editor would like to note that, as the creation of a fully blind copy of this work was not possible due to the personal nature of the work, this essay and creative piece were reviewed by the editor and another peer-reviewer; both felt that this did not impact their ability to provide an impartial review of the piece. The Cretan labyrinth is a viral form of "meta-life," which has propagated across the globe since the Neolithic Era through 500 human generations, predating "Rome, Egypt, Peking, Nineveh and Ur." It is an esoteric symbol of SO (Symmetry in Opposition), evident in its associated meanings: tomb or womb, map of the underworld or astronomical atlas of planetary motions, funeral site or marriage rite.
Appendix
The labyrinth pattern is disseminated by a simple seed. This embryonic motif, found on ancient rocks and pottery shards, draws in unsuspecting hosts, and entrains them to draw the pattern from the seed, in a mesmerizing, precisely plotted process. It is thought that the sensual pleasure subjects experience in drawing the pattern stems from a resonance between right/left motions and the human body's bilateral symmetry. At the moment of the human host completes the pattern, a subliminal illusion transpires: the drawn lines recede from focus and transform into a passive background; simultaneously, the circuits between the lines begin to resonate, and the labyrinth's path dominates the host's visual field. This in turn serves as a strong subconscious suggestion to give the pattern a physical body, to create a labyrinth for the host to walk through. When this happens, the labyrinth's incorporation of human corporeality is complete.
Appendix
The path, Ariadne's thread, possesses topological intricacies some call ' diabolical' because of the vertiginous effects they induce in the temporal bones of labyrinth walkers. The path's psychoteric power is based in its esoteric numerology. Number its concentric circuits from mouth to goal; the path through the labyrinth produces the sequence: 0-3-2-1-4-7-6-5-8. This sequence balances energies by alternating even and odd numbers; as the path traverses the concentric levels, it changes direction each time it changes levels. Vortical swirling is caused by oscillations between centripetal

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