Time and Tense

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

Time and Tense

'Now' is an interesting concept, and it has been defined reasonably well for at least the last several millennia, but how well do we understand it, and what does it really mean?

Studies of brain function and perception have shown that there is a lag between stimulus and the brain's reaction to the stimulus. Such a lag is necessary, because impulses have to travel along nerves to the brain, and the electrolytic conduction of nerves is not instantaneous; it isn't even as fast as a current through copper wire. It is likely that sensations from the feet take the longest time to reach the brain, but vision, even though the eyes are extremely close to the brain takes time, because the brain has to process the images that are formed on the retina before it can react to the images. The amount of time that it takes varies from person to person, but the between sensation and brain reaction is about three hundredths (0.030) of a second, with reactions times from 0.035 seconds to 0.05 seconds being more common.

The variation can be seen in the results of the catching a dropped dollar bill test. One person holds while the person being tested holds his fingers away from the bill until it is dropped. When the bill is released, the tested tries to catch the bill. Some people say that no one can catch the bill, but a small percentage can, and those are those of us with the reaction time of 0.030 and 0.035 seconds.

The interval between initial sensation and reaction is the period that makes up 'now'. We never see, hear, feel, or perceive in any way anything that takes place outside of that short span of time. The world doesn't actually exist outside of that span; we can see images, energy, and matter that existed before the present now, but those things are gone, only the memories of their existence is in the present now.

I have tried to picture the present in an analogy, but nothing is quite the same. It is kind of like balancing on a rail with nothing in front or behind. The rail is 0.35 seconds wide, which for light is a fair distance, but for humans isn't very far at all. The rail slides forward, or it stands still and events come at us, we can't tell, and I am not sure whether it makes any difference. We live our lives in this band of time, and we can only get out of it through imagination. Memories and artifacts from the past are evidence that there was something before the present band of now, but memories may be defective, and we can never be sure about external evidence, because it might have been altered in some way or planted. We have no evidence that the future is there (or will be there), because there is nothing beyond our band of now, and no memories or artifacts from the future have been brought in its past, our now. The future is pure imagination.

When we speak, we use verb tenses to indicate the past, the future, and now. There are several tenses for the past, because our views toward it vary. Sometime we wish to express that something happened before something else in the past; sometimes we speak of continuing action in the past, and sometimes we speak of things that are simply over and done. There are forms for all of those ways of speaking. When we speak of the future, we often use modifiers, although we can speak directly about the future. So in addition to "I will", we can use "I plan to" and "I expect to". Anything said about the future is indefinite, more indefinite the further into the future we project. There are a few different ways of speaking of the present, but fundamentally it comes down to saying "I am..." The present tense refers to things that are actually happening in the band of now that we are living in at a given moment.

In writing there are conventions about tense. Some are good and reasonable, while others are absurd. The most absurd convention about tense in writing is the "Historical Present", which is closely related to "Reportorial Present". The two are related and it appears that the historical version was derived from the reportorial form. At some point in the sequences of now, someone decided that news reporting should be in the present tense. That happened sometime in the last hundred years and was not adopted uniformly, because some news is still written in the past tense. Examples of the Historical Present are somewhat amusing.

It is silly to hear that Eisenhower commands the army at D-Day; Eisenhower has been dead for decades. To hear that once is slightly amusing, but a few minutes of such absurdity is annoying. History hasn't always been written that why. The ancients wrote history as things that happened in the past, and that was true through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, but during the twentieth century the present crept in.

The reportorial present can be even more absurd, especially when it is mixed with a proper time sequence. I have heard news reports that stated that someone "is" involved in an automobile accident, and 'is' taken to a hospital, where he was treated and released. That kind of reporting makes a great statement about itself and about the mental processes of the people who make such reports.

I started this exposition to discuss the use of the present tense in fiction, rather than to consider it in other types of writing, but fiction writing is like historical writing. A work of fiction recounts or retells in written form something that happened. The writer is telling the reader something, but it has been written down, so it clearly has to be an account of past events, even if the fictional time is far in the future of when the reader reads. Just as it is absurd to read the Dwight Eisenhower is invading Normandy today, it is absurd to read an account of an invasion of Planet X that is written in the present tense.

The whole process of telling stories has been around for a few hundred thousand years; although for most of that time it was truly telling, because the story-teller spoke to the listeners, but most of the forms and conventions of storytelling have not changed. Story telling is intimately intertwined with language in general and with the linguistic structures. The structure of language is the essence of logic, and differentiation in time and cause and effect are central to logic and to language. Just as people three hundred thousand years ago couldn't listen to a story teller recount a story that happened during the day time during the previous Fall in the present tense, because they could see that it was night in the Summer in a different location, so it was not happening at that moment. Today we don't have a story teller sitting on the other side of the fire recounting events from times past; we have books from which we read; but the book serves the purpose of the story teller. The book sits with light from the fire of the electric light shining from its features, and the book tells us the story. We use a different sense to take in the story; we can read at one's own pace and don't have to wait for the storyteller to relieve himself. Now the story teller waits when we have to do something else, but the book is still telling us what was written. The book is already there, so we know that the events being described aren't happening at this moment; although they be imaginative events that take place in the book's time far in the future, but the events have already been set down, so, like the storytellers story about the migration five years ago, we know that the book already happened; how else could it be written.

Writing a story in the present tense destroys one of the basic assumptions about stories: that it is possible. A story can't be recorded and be happening simultaneously. The people aren't doing whatever there on the page; the page has been printed, so the people did their deeds sometime in the past. To reflect that the events already happened, the story is written in the past tense, just as the story teller told us many thousands of years ago of events that happen in times even earlier, and the story teller didn't lie about when the events occurred; he told us that it was in the past, in the days of his youth or in the times of his father or in the days of his grandfather's youth or in times far past. What has happened has happened, and it probably won't happen again, so make stories make sense, tell them as things that have happened. The story teller that we use today, the book, shouldn't lie as to when something happened by claiming that it is happening at this moment.