(FUTURE) - PRESENT - PAST
I have always liked the metaphor attributed to Polynesian philosophies in that we have the PAST in front of our eyes while we back into the unknown FUTURE. It makes sense in terms of our personal life spans, to think that our PAST is getting longer and longer while our FUTURE is getting shorter and shorter. So, what about the PRESENT? All languages of the world struggle with these concepts, trying to make some sense of this phenomenon of time. If, for the moment (no pun intended) we accept the linguistic notion that thought and language is generated mainly via binary choices, we would generate real TIME (termed ‘realis’) via the choice between PAST and PRESENT using the notation of
(1) Realis {past, present}
So how do we capture the elusive FUTURE?
Common sense dictates that nobody knows for sure what will happen tomorrow and yet we seem to plan for it, so much so that in Western-style economic philosophies the FUTURE is a paramount concept that needs all our attention. For example, how could capitalist production succeed without highly detailed projections into the FUTURE (even the communists are hung up on 5-year plans)? Obviously, all biological systems depend on forward planning, following a feedback loop that dictates the PRESENT acquisition of sufficient energy resources to be able to have enough reserves to look for more resources in at least the immediate FUTURE (like tomorrow, as far as food is concerned, or like ‘saving for a rainy day’). And yet, this seemingly unshakable belief in the FUTURE is diminished by our language universals. In English, for example, the so-called FUTURE tense is a misnomer because it is not a ‘tense’ but rather a ‘mood’ category expressed with the modal ‘will’ (or other lexical choices like ‘going to’). Many other languages (e.g. Namakir, the Austronesian language I researched) express this syntactical dichotomy more directly as ‘realis’ versus ‘irrealis’, i.e. real time is in the ‘realis’ category while the FUTURE and other counterfactual expressions use the ‘irrealis’ grammatical markers. As such we can define ‘time’ as
(2) Time {realis, irrealis}
This captures the probably uniquely human capacity to think and speak in terms of time that never happened, or most likely will not happen. When I say ‘I should have gone shopping yesterday’ I am in the ‘irrealis’ time frame. Equally when I say ‘If I were the President of the US, I would abolish wage slavery tomorrow’, I am twice (if … were; tomorrow) in the ‘irrealis’ time frame, however much I conjure up the possibility that in the FUTURE anything could (or ‘can’?) happen. Indeed, much of our imagination is based on the ‘irrealis’ and yet is the only hope many of us have when we say (in the present tense) ‘a better world is possible’.
That said, the conundrum about the PAST and PRESENT equally remains a paradox. How long in time is the real-time PRESENT before it turns into the historical PAST? In the first instance one might even speculate that the PAST should also belong to the ‘irrealis’ because time gone by can be measured but never be revisited in reality, but easily enough in in our ‘irrealis’ imagination (cf. the literary genre that embeds the protagonist in time gone by like A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court). In fact, the whole idea about RE-counting history (cf. Gibson’s monumental history of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), while an immensely human obsession, seems to fall into this ambiguous category. The famous metaphor of ‘those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it’ sounds eminently reasonable but as ‘we know from experience’ - consider this very phrase in terms of what time frames are possibly included - we seem to repeat history at an alarming rate, what with endless wars and destruction of our environment. Maybe this is so because we do not generally consider history as ‘real’. On the other hand, the Polynesian metaphor cited at the beginning, is testament to the notion of the PAST being very much in the ‘realis’ time frame, what with ancestors and ancestral lands defining who you are right now. In the Western world we too regale in our glorious histories but often from a perspective of triumph over others or great achievements in terms of scientific and technological developments. In that sense one of the most interesting developments, in my mind, has been the invention of the ‘moving picture’ which can RE-create history as a PRESENT spectacle. Before we could only ‘read’ about history (or hear it in oral civilisations) and ‘see’ pictorial depictions (including staged theatre, as invented by the ancient Greeks along with the ‘historical’ PRESENT), giving us the sense of the ‘irrealis’ rather than the ‘realis’. Now we can watch the PAST and the FUTURE as if in the PRESENT (now streaming on the internet). How much this is confusing our still primitive (temporal) brains (thought and language) is another question - or is it a mechanism to ‘see’ things more clearly? In my mind, an enduring confusion even before the invention of the moving picture, is one that gave rise to the absolute dominance of the ‘irrealis’ that is deeply embedded in what ais called ‘religion’. The attempt to shift the ‘irrealis’ to the realm of the ‘realis’ (God is ‘real’) has seemingly a history as long as ‘recorded history’. I wonder if this ‘invention’ has come about via the history of human domination over nature (e.g. the advent of agriculture) and thus over other humans, so much so that the dominant class and its representative (the King, the Queen) needed a ‘realis’ explanation and justification that could not be found, hence recourse to the ‘irrealis’ and pronouncing the Emperor as a divine being, to be obeyed and to be feared. To balance the executioner’s stick approach with the carrot, there needed to be some humanitarian aspect to religion, namely the promise of a paradise after death for all those citizens who suffered under the injustices of their superiors. As we can now combine religion with conjuring up the PAST and the FUTURE as the PRESENT - we literally ‘watch’ the bombing of Gaza as if the clash of religions and ideologies is some sort of morbid entertainment, just as Henry VIII is currently beheading some of his wives on TV.
Given that the PAST can be - and sadly often is - a traumatic experience, there is now an emphasis on the PRESENT, as if to forget the PAST as an unnecessary encumbrance. To be here and now, to be mindful of the PRESENT rather than ‘dwell in the past’ (consider this metaphor for its implications) seems to be a therapeutic alternative to the established Freudian approaches of yesteryear, where to RE-visit or even RE-live your PAST was seen as the solution to one’s psychological problems and pathologies. Thus to extend the contemporary Gaza war scenario, a ceasefire is celebrated by all concerned media as a victory over the other, having achieved the mandatory 1: 20 death ratio, the immediate PAST is quickly forgotten, so we can move on to the next 15 seconds instant report of another atrocity somewhere else, followed by an advertisement for a new smart phone that can record and broadcast everything you see and do. Time and its comprehension by thought and language seems to spiral down a vortex from which there is no escape, like cosmic bodies drawn into the vortex of a black hole. Of course, the latter is a question of time incomprehensible to ordinary humans, but the former is only punctuated by calms before the storms. As we navigate our daily lives far away from deadly conflicts - mediated only by moving pictures beamed into our living rooms - concerned only about what to buy next, how to invest our surplus income, how to pursue our dream of happiness and eternal love, how to advance our careers, what to wear tomorrow - we blissfully meditate while forest-bathing, all the while feeling a bit guilty that we just watch the cruel PRESENT elsewhere from a safe distance. Yes, we can envisage a FUTURE for a better world, but we have no practical idea how to go about it, especially as the military opposition has it all worked out on how to respond should the ‘snakes’ raise their heads (cf. Myanmar for another example). Even contemplating all the linguistic implications doesn’t seem to help, Chomsky notwithstanding! One might even invoke Einstein and suggest that time too is relative, like movement, i.e. is time passing me by or am I passing through time standing still (note my use of the PRESENT ‘continuous’ tense-aspect, encompassing both PAST and FUTURE)? Hold on, the latest news is that Einstein might be wrong after all! Might be? Is? Will be? Has been? Had been?
