TIME AND THE WRITER

I have two schemata for thinking about time. Neither one of them is anything like Einstein’s. In the first one, I imagine that the universe is a huge complexity of interwoven and swirlingly tangled fiber-optics. (This is sort of the way I see “string theory” though I don’t understand the latter at all. I’m after narrative “line.”) The gimmick is that I define an individual consciousness as traveling along those fiberoptic strings which exist both before and after the consciousness. That is, usually we see time as something rushing over us, only existing while we are “in the moment.” My formulation has existence going on without consciousness until someone is there to “light it up.”

Thus, one’s entire life is still back there somewhere -- yourself going to grade school, yourself at your first job, etc. -- and your entire life is pre-existing in that God-knows-everything and pre-ordained-it way, except that there are MANY potential futures and one’s consciousness shuttles among them. This is my idea of free will -- that it doesn’t consist of inventing options but more often is a matter of choosing the path. Once on a path, it’s hard to double back, though there might be emergency cross-overs as on a freeway.

The other schemata is more nineteenth century: an old-fashioned steam-powered locomotive on a train track. In this case one’s identity is the locomotive, rushing along with all its baggage behind it, powered by the resources found along the way. The train tracks -- rails on cross-ties -- are factual. Born here, parents named thus and so, married to so-and-so, living at this address, this many children. All that stuff that newspapers like because they can be pinned down in print and “fact-checked,” though once a “fact” gets into print wrong, it’s pretty hard to get rid of it. One can at least address what has happened already. The future might be around a curve or over a hill or hidden by fog or mirages.

Above and parallel to the train is a stream of smoke and steam that writhes and changes and sometimes is full of sparks. This is one’s emotional and creative life: impossible to pin down but certainly there and produced by the energetic transit along the rails. Below, extending along the train tracks, is a lake with a surface either calm enough to reflect the train and its evanescent smoke trail or ruffled by something else like wind or debris that distorts the picture, making it hard to see or altogether invisible. This is memory.

What I’m trying to get at is the idea that an artist addressing his/her own life has a choice of kinds of sequences: stream-of-consciousness, fact (reliable or unreliable), and reflective. People have experimented with using the lines of sentences, running alongside each other in different colors or fonts, so that one reports what a camera might see and the parallel suggests what is hidden but potently present, affecting events. The techniques are an attempt to capture identity in some of its JoHarri window mystery and honesty.

Writing and reflection on writing play back and forth between each other. One person writes spontaneously in the way that seems natural to them. Another person looks at it and says, “This is a first-person narrative, told as experienced by someone.” Then, there’s that old burlesque shtick that Bob Scriver used to love. (One guy tells about some incredible and vivid event like Custer’s last stand or the sinking of the Titanic or the summiting of Mt. Everest in such detail that one begins to think the person was there, until the other guy asks, “Wuz you THERE, Charlie?” That makes us laugh because obviously the yarner was not. White people from back east were constantly telling us with great authority some historical “fact” they knew from a book and Bob would ask, “Wuz you there, Charlie?”) Technically you call that an unreliable narrator or maybe you say this is the omniscient voice on the premise that God was there always, omnipresent. However, God was not reading a book by an unreliable narrator.

Most early non-print peoples handed over their oral stories to print-educated people, so that the reflection of their train could hardly help but be distorted by the new context -- in the first place a different language, in the second place with a different philosophical schematic of the world in all the unconscious assumptions, in the third place distorted by the need to sell the story either to publishers or department chairs, and then subtly altered for political reasons. Only recently have we been aware that someone like Black Elk was seeing something in his own mind that was probably not a lot like what was recorded in “Black Elk Speaks,” much less perceived accurately by the readers who love the book. Readers of the book when it was new cannot perceive it in the same way as now with all the intervening events throwing kaleidescopic colors on the same words.

Lately literary figures have been wrestling with the categories of fiction versus fact, autobiography versus memoir, psychoanalytic “truth” versus what an outside observer would report. We seem to have trouble accepting the ambiguity of life itself, much less our own identities. Back when we lived in villages, people told us who we were or maybe our families told us who we were or if you lived in India maybe they told you of whom you were the reincarnation. Then value judgments crept in. Was it good to be “just like Aunt Helen who died as a teenager?” Was it damning to “have a temper just like your great-grandfather who died in a shootout?” God knows. (Predestination -- or at least omniscience -- can be a comfort.)

Critics cannot agree, but today’s public seems to have an insatiable need for the TRUTH, for things to be resolved and to stay put, even as science opens the floodgates to more and more ambiguity. “We’ve resolved the nature of the genomic helix and now we know who you really are! It’s just a matter of checking out the molecules,” they proclaim. And then two days later the newspaper has a story about the myriad ways that the molecules of the double helix interact and how outside influences can change what was meant to be one gender or one eye color to something quite different.

We must give up our old nineteenth-century ideas and vocabulary, even when they are elaborated with additions and qualifications, and learn to dance with Rashomon in a world of swirling stars, trusting our own molecules to maintain our identities no matter what we say. That’s the way to be there, Charlie.