Rob S. Friedman
November 2022
The Fiction of Tenses
Lecturing on poetry from the Lyceum stage, Thoreau made a distinction between ‘two kinds of writing, both great and rare. One that of genius, or the inspired, the other of intellect and taste, in the intervals of inspiration.’
We dwell in those gaps, float aimlessly amid wisps of ennui, fumbling for a crutch, a coma dose of novocaine. They’re safe spaces, these liminal places. Like amber containing the whir of change, a balm for the ache of effort.
We aren’t even diligent metaphysicians anymore, like sad Fechner, searching the physical for the soul. He succumbed to the fashion of the new science, focused on measuring the just noticeable difference, when somehow the mind and the body shake hands and we become aware.
Somehow the measuring suffices, assuages, inures. But for the likes of old Walt, who knew he was ‘never measured and never will be measured,’ or Anne Carson, who answers by asking, ‘For in what does time differ from eternity except we measure it?’ our constant is the interstitial, without a toehold on the stones of then and too far from to be, not abiding the fiction of tenses.
Rob S. Friedman 