2: explore the concept of time in your writing. play with the idea of how we perceive passing time [linear/cyclical/all at once/not at all] and make it weird and surreal, or maybe go more classic & write some fun time travel/time loop fiction. how does time shape us? (prompt from week of apr 1st)
I’m incapable of following the maxim “show don’t tell”, so rather than actually doing anything with “the concept of time in my writing”, I’m just going to discuss it in abstract.
A lot of my essays are written over multiple days or weeks, in tiny little chunks that get stitched together without regard for chronological order. I sometimes worry that this is dishonest of me. The timing in which I write something impacts the mental state I’m in as I write it. Shifting things around just to pursue vague ideals like “logical coherence” or “readability” sacrifices transparency. It allows me to hide certain feelings, and create certain ambiguities. However, if I’m conversing with someone face to face, or even recording myself, there is no room for me to hide — time is enforced upon me and, once I say something, I have to accept it’s been said and that I everything I say afterwards will be interpreted in light of this earlier statement.
It might be silly of me to worry about any of this — writing is simply a different medium from oral communication with different allowances and different restrictions. It’s unavoidable, for instance, that it will take me many times longer to write a piece than it will take the reader to read it.
I remember struggling with that in one of my early Micro-Saddles, when I was taking the high speed rail from Shanghai to Jinan. I tried describing what I saw outside my window, but in the time it took me to write a single sentence the scene would change completely.
A later Micro-Saddle, describing a two week period when I was going through intense insomnia and rain every single day, condensed that whole length of time into about 5000 words — something you could quite comfortably read in 20 minutes. If I were narrating that period in retrospect, it would be one thing — but I was describing it as I went, and then quite often commenting on my earlier statements after I had time to rethink them. I mixed the initial narration and later commentary, making them indistinguishable except in a handful of moments when I explicitly brought up where I was while writing. What do such remarks mean though when the very next sentence was written a week later?
For instance, just now, in the middle of the last paragraph, my girlfriend got home. She’d gone to a club that she’s DJing at the day after tomorrow — the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival. One of her old friends recently started to manage booking there, so she might start DJing there on a regular basis. The CDJ system they use there is different from what she has at home and what most other venues use, so she wanted to verify her set would work, since she apparently uses some weird file format. While I was still writing the above paragraph, I more or less ignored her. I waited until I typed in the final question mark before I asked her how things went. Then I stopped writing for a few moments to talk with her.
A pretty big typhoon is making landfall as we speak — when I went outside earlier the clouds were moving incredibly fast. So there weren’t any people at the club tonight. According to my girlfriend, her friend was sitting there alone and dejected, listening to the other DJs playing there tonight. After they finished the whole process of plugging my girlfriend’s USB drive into the deck and seeing what would happen (of course it turned out nothing worked), she tried to convince my girlfriend to stay for at least one or two of the DJs. There was nothing she could do but apologize and take her leave, as she wanted to get home before the storm got much worse. (Maybe this is a coward’s decision — it would have been better to stay there and spend the night getting as drunk as possible.)
It’s about a fifteen minute bike ride from the club she was at to our apartment, so I was probably still on the second or third paragraph of this essay when she left. I suppose the fact that I’m able to make rough calculations like that is one of the advantages of the decision I made when starting to write this that I wouldn’t engage in my usual habit of jumping back and forth between sentences and paragraphs — that I would write everything sequentially, then, when I’m done, I'd go back and make minor edits for typos, grammar, clarity and so on. (By the time you're reading this, you can assume that already occurred — though I'm sure there will still be all sorts of typos and weirdly phrased sentences.) It turns out the restriction to forward motion only isn't that hard — it just encourages a slightly different “rhythm” to my writing process from what I’m used to.
I should also mention that after I finished the sentence beginning with “My girlfriend’s friend was sitting there alone and dejected,” I moved from my desk (which is really more of a table) to our bed. Since this is a tiny apartment with no rooms, this only amounted to a distance of around ten feet. Now I have my laptop on my belly, which is probably not ideal writing posture.
It seems that when “normal” people write essays in the first person, they tend to make themselves selectively invisible. They usually don’t tell you where they’re writing from, what time of day it is, and sometimes they don’t even leave any hints of their current emotional state. This is all understandable, because to all such information is hyper-momentary, and as soon as you start revealing it, you have to deal with the problems I described above. If you’re writing across different locations at different times and then editing different segments together out of chronological order, to make all this temporal and locational information explicit would turn your essay into an avant-garde sequence of flashbacks and flashforwards punctuating protracted segments veering on stream-of-conscious narration as people enter and leave the room you’re sitting in. Even if you get around to writing what you initially intended to write about, the reader probably would get lost in all these disorienting travels through space and time.
After that last paragraph, I paused for a moment and scrolled up through what I’ve written. It seemed like I’d written enough, even though I’m not sure I’ve communicated any substantial thoughts here. I tried to think of a way to wrap this up.
Having gotten this far though, I'm suddenly reminded of Natsume Sōseki’s “novel” The Miner, whose narrator repeatedly tells the reader that this isn’t actually a novel — that his story is too true to ever become a novel. Its lack of catharsis, its plethora of characters that are introduced only to disappear without playing any role in the story, the many moments when the narrator decided to do something, only to change his mind immediately afterwards, and, most memorably to me, inexplicable references to the narrator having been in a shipwreck off the coast of Taiwan many years after the events of the story — all of this is proof that the events described in the book were the truth. Except for the unfortunate reality that the story was in fact a work of fiction — based on real experiences, but fictionalized all the same.
The Miner turned out to be one of my favorite Sōseki books. Before reading it, I’d gone in expecting something incredibly bizarre based on other people’s descriptions of the book — but it turned out so normal. A boy runs away from home after a failed love affair, gets recruited to be a miner by some middle-aged man wondering the streets, goes on a long train-ride and then even longer journey by foot into the mountains, gradually gather more prospective miners as they go, and then is taken down into the pit of hell, enduring the scorn of all his new coworkers. I’ve had almost the exact same experience! Only instead of a mine, I ended up inside a warehouse putting chain with links the size of my fist into massive machines (which is admittedly less impressive). The only thing about the book that seemed out of the ordinary to me was the throwaway reference to the shipwreck in Taiwan years later — and perhaps it’s precisely that sentence which elevated the book to Great Literature in my eyes.
For the sake of completeness, here is the paragraph in question, from Jay Rubin's translation:
“Oh,” I thought, “so that’s what’s happening,” and I stood up. Funny, your soul can be halfway through the earth, and as long as the blood is still coursing through your veins, when you call it, it comes back. If things go a little too far, though, the soul won’t return to the body as ordered. When I was in a shipwreck off Taiwan some years later, for example, my soul pretty nearly gave up on me, which was quite an ordeal. No matter how bad the situation, there’s always worse. You should never relax because you think you’ve come to the end of the line. This was a brand new feeling for me at the time, though—and a bitter experience.
So it’s a pity that when I write essays like this, describing how I’m feeling and what I’m doing right now, there’s no room for flashforwards across great temporal distances. Detachment, perspective, hindsight — I’m lacking in it all.