Augustine, writing to God in Book XI of the Confessions, admits he doesn’t know what time is. The past is gone. The future isn’t yet. The present has no duration — it vanishes the instant you try to hold it. And yet we live inside time as something entirely real: we measure it, plan around it, grieve its passing, wait for it to arrive. Augustine’s answer is to relocate time from the world into the soul. He calls it distentio animi — a distension, a stretching — the soul pulled taut across memory, attention, and expectation all at once.
This is what philosophers call an aporia: not a puzzle waiting on a clever solution, but a genuine impasse, one that sharpens the more carefully you look at it. Paul Ricoeur, writing seventeen centuries later in Time and Narrative, takes Augustine’s aporia as his starting point and pairs it with Aristotle’s idea of emplotment — the shaping of events into a followable story. Ricoeur’s argument is that narrative doesn’t solve Augustine’s problem philosophically. It answers it poetically: it gives discordant, stretched time a shape we can act inside, without ever closing the philosophical question. He’s explicit about this. The aporetics of time and the poetics of narrative sit on different levels, and narrative’s productive power comes at the cost of never finishing the argument. The aporia stays open. Narrative is just how we keep walking through it.
I’ve been sitting with two recent events that put this structure under real pressure — one where the aporia turned up wrapped in wool, the other where it turned up dressed as an algorithm.
An object that won’t resolve
At the RMIT Regenerative Futures Institute’s “I Brought a Thing” event, the designer Ricarda Bigolin brought a 1950s wool blanket, screen-printed with a line from Ursula Le Guin’s essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction — Le Guin’s critique of the hero’s story, the arrow of conquest, narrative as a weapon aimed at a target rather than a bag that holds many things at once without resolving them into a single throughline. The blanket is distentio animi rendered in fibre. It’s 75 years old. Its wool comes from an industry whose 19th-century boom was underwritten, a few decades earlier, by the dispossession of the Gunaikurnai people from Budj Bim — one of the oldest and most extensive aquaculture systems on Earth, a place-based system of eel traps and channels that had worked with the land’s rhythms for tens of thousands of years before the first merino sheep landed in Victoria.
Call the wool “regenerative” now, and you’re asking one object to hold a genocide, a wartime shortage, a 1990s market collapse, and a hoped-for ecological future — all at once — without letting any of them quietly cancel the others out into a clean redemption arc.
There’s a second aporia hiding inside the first, and it belongs to the present rather than the past. Farmers today are locked into debt cycles that punish exactly the transition toward regenerative practice that the industry claims to want. Set stocking rates mean a farmer can’t destock a paddock without defaulting on the loan that paddock secures. Interest doesn’t pay for soil to regenerate. A farmer might genuinely want to rotate grazing, rebuild topsoil, and rest land — and be structurally unable to, because the debt was built on the assumption of continuous, maximal output. It’s Augustine’s aporia again, just economic instead of metaphysical: a present held hostage by a past it can’t act its way out of, waiting on a future the financial structure won’t let it reach.
What the pellets refuse to be
The quieter object in the room that day was a pellet, passed hand to hand around the audience — solid, dense, entirely wool. It’s the work of a farmer named Sherry Simons, a third- or fourth-generation crossbred prime lamb producer, who spent two years figuring out what to do with something the market had made worthless. It costs about six dollars to shear a sheep. The wool that comes off costs about four. Sheds across the country hold years of bales nobody will buy. Sherry’s family told her to figure it out, and the pellet is what she came back with: a hundred percent wool, dense with nitrogen, able to hold three times its own weight in water, releasing nutrients slowly into soil as it biodegrades. Wool blankets can do a version of the same job laid straight onto garden beds — three years of service as living mulch, against a couple of months for the synthetic version from the hardware store.
Laura Main, presenting the pellet at the event, was careful about what she claimed for it. Not a redemption. Not a story that resolves the blanket’s history sitting on the table beside it. Just wool finding one more use before it’s finally, completely done — going back into the ground, completing a carbon cycle that synthetic fibre never could. It’s a different register from narrative concordance altogether. The blanket holds discordant time open, refusing to let it collapse into a single story. The pellet does something else again: it doesn’t resolve time, it just keeps matter moving through it, one more cycle, no arc required.
Prediction as ideology
At a #PERN talk introducing her book Predicted: How AI Is Restructuring Social Life, Mona Sloane named the same aporia in a completely different register — not an object, but an ideology. She calls it the prediction paradigm: the assumption, built into how AI systems are designed, funded, and governed, that there is one past, cleanly producing one future. Someone in the audience pushed on this — doesn’t a predictive system’s own intervention in the present make the whole process recursive rather than linear, since today’s prediction reshapes tomorrow’s training data? Sloane conceded the practice is recursive in operation. But the underlying logic, she insisted, never stops assuming linearity — because linearity is what makes prediction sellable, fundable, governable. You can’t condense many possible futures into one investable, actionable future without first agreeing to believe the future is singular.
That condensation is exactly how power accrues. Even a project as scientifically serious as AlphaFold has been shut down for not turning a profit — proof that predictive infrastructure answers to capital before it answers to knowledge. Against this, Sloane pointed to something almost defiantly small: a return, in some classrooms, to handwritten exams and no-tech assessment. Not a solution to the prediction paradigm. Just a refusal to let it be the only available future in that one room.
Staying in the strain
Put the wool and the prediction talk beside each other and something clarifies. Augustine’s aporia was never only a puzzle about the metaphysics of time. It’s a site of power. Whoever gets to decide whether discordant time collapses into one official story — wool is regenerative, this is the future AI predicts — controls what’s allowed to become real, and what stays buried underneath.
Ricoeur’s narrative and the prediction paradigm both promise concordance: a shape that resolves the strain. The blanket refuses that promise outright. The audience’s recursive objection refuses it too. And the pellet, in its own modest way, refuses it a third time — not by holding the discordance open like the blanket does, but by declining to need an arc at all. It just keeps something moving through the ground, one more season, no story required.
