Earlier this week, someone on twitter asked “what’s your favorite black unit of measurement?” Of all the answers, so many came down to time. “A minute”, which, as someone pointed out, means all expanses of time except literally 60 seconds. “A minute” can mean an hour, a week, a month, a decade, a quarter century, as in “I haven’t heard from him in a minute”’/ “We haven’t seen each other in a minute”. And of course, the classic, “I’m on my way”, which can mean you are anywhere from a half hour to never actually attending an event. Time is not a linear construct in AAVE. It isn’t for most cultures in the world, despite the insistence that we mark and measure our lives by it. Many of us, if we are paying attention to our lives, experience time as an echo, as a rhyme, as a doubling back. When I was writing my first novel, I made one of the characters obsessed with fractals—I didn’t know why, at the time, I just knew they had to be in the book. It’s only just now, as I type this out, that I realize it was an attempt to talk about time—the character who is obsessed with fractals is caught up in a fantasy of progressive history that he is rather brutally disavowed of. In my personal life—it is more pleasurable to me to mark the generations in my family by the instances when a stepparent came in to raise children as their own (an occurrence that seems to happen every 20 years or so, going back to 1900 on one side and further on another) than in actual years passing.
That’s the pleasurable side of fluid time—that when you begin to think that way, it opens you up to tracing patterns in your own life, in history, and following those instead of a changeover of days. But time is also non-linear when you are experiencing deep trauma. “The sensory fragments of memory intrude into the present, where they are literally relived,” Bessel Van Der Kolk writes in his excellent handbook on trauma The Body Keeps the Score. “When the right and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of the brain are deactivated (during a traumatic event) people lose their sense of time and become trapped in a moment, without a sense of past, present or future…Knowing that whatever will happen is finite and will sooner or later come to an end makes most experiences tolerable. The opposite is also true—situations become intolerable if they feel interminable…Trauma is the ultimate experience of “this will last forever”.”
We are experiencing a collective cultural trauma in the United States that our more popular forms of storytelling don’t really have space for. If we can’t tell the story of what is happening to us, we can’t hope to fully recover. Our current moment can’t be explained in a standard narrative arc of rising problems and a dramatic, single denouement and then a satisfactory resolution. Our story right now just goes, to use another expression from AAVE. I wonder how novels written pre-COVID will read, post-COVID (if we ever even get to something like a post, if we do not become stuck in the interminable). It seems incredibly quaint, right now, to expect resolution, sense, emotional justice from a story. It seems like that is describing an existence that doesn’t happen any more.
I don’t think this is a bad thing. I think it is time for more novels and movies and tv shows to catch up to how so many of us have been experiencing time all along—as a wave, as the skin of a pineapple, as a leaf turning in on itself. I think of my favorite most recent example of a non-linear story line—the sixth episode of Watchmen, “A God Walks into A Bar”, where two strangers—Angela Abar, our hero, and Dr. Manhattan, a kind of superhero/demigod, meet for what is supposedly the first time. It’s not, of course. Part of Dr. Manhattan’s powers means he experiences all of existence—or rather, all of his existence—simultaneously, so even as he sits in a bar and tries to pick up Angela, he’s experiencing them having sex 6 months later, and his childhood, and a conversation with a nemesis and his death, all at once. I can’t do the episode justice in a Substack post, go watch it. But when I think of the possibilities this moment opens up for us, I think of that show, and Dr. Manhattan pointing the moment he falls in love with Angela to the exact time that she picks up a gun to save his life, even though he’s told her that his death is inevitable. He’s already experienced it.