Blogging is all about the present tense. It can’t help it. It’s the nature of the format. Each post is contained within a given date. It is marked for obsolescence the moment it is posted. The structure of blogging demands now, today, the instant and immediate. It’s like a newspaper in that today is what counts and yesterday is something that only those on a mission to find a given something come to visit. Yesterdays papers are bird cage liners and fish wrappers while yesterdays blog posts are even less purposeful. You can’t wrap a salmon in a blog post. Last years “365 things that don’t suck about L.A” cannot protect your floor from bird poop and sesame seed shells.
To tell you the absolute truth the one thing about blogging that I don’t like is its obsession with now—and it is sort of strange to be working in a tense that I have some antipathy towards. Present tense is, as a rule, not my favorite one; rather, it’s my least favorite one. Don’t get me wrong, I get that we all live in the present( even when we may live it while looking forward and backwards). It’s not that there is anything inherently wrong with now (from what I hear from Twitter quotes, “the point of power is in the present moment”;” the power is in the now”; “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is God’s gift, that’s why we call it the present.” Ugh, I hate those quotes). It’s just that if hindsight is 20/20 now-sight is Mr. Magoo with a cane and a seeing-eye dog. And the past is so full of narrative and myth and stories well-told. The future is so filled with hope and potential and endless possibility. Now is just a three letter word( so is sex and god so I suppose some good things do come in little word boxes on occasion).
As a writer and as a therapist I have always been a bit obsessed with the past. “What happened?” is a question that can fill a ten-year analysis or Tolstoy novel. “What is happening now?” seems less filled with wonder. In this moment, what is happening is that I am sitting on my couch and my dog is sleeping and I have the TV on and yet there is nothing on the screen except “Finished: Weeds S6:06. The Christmas tree is blinking. I’m dressed as if I belong outside: coat, scarf and Ugg boots and I am writing this post. I guess I could turn that bit of now into a story but in order to do so I would need to bring in some past and future-tense. You see what I mean? Before (past-tense) I started to blog I was all about past-tense, actually I think i have always been about past-tense and future-tense. Memoir has always been my favored genre of writing and it is pretty much about remembrance of things past. I have no interest in Science-fiction or any future-oriented writings—but I can tell you that I think a whole lot about the future even thought I don’t write about it. Also, I don’t tend to talk a lot about the future with my clients unless it is a tense that they want to talk about and then I am happy to time travel with them.
There is a new movement in psychoanalytic psychotherapy to abandon history. What that means is that you no longer spend the first one, two or three sessions learning what has happened to your patient. The new way of working is to just start where your patient is and let the history emerge organically. The philosophy behind this is that the past will emerge in the present and to trust that in time the history will be reveled. There is a certain sense to this and even though I was trained to take a history I am slowly starting to abandon history for in the moment connection. That said, I will admit when I learn something about the past I tend to treasure it in a different way than I do when I hear about current material. History holds weight for me in both my personal and professional life. I am terribly tempted to put in a quote here about how those who don’t learned from history are doomed to repeat it, but I won’t.
When I go to a new blog I start with the now and only occasionally do I time travel back to the the beginning of the blog. I always feel bad about this because when I meet someone who I like I never ignore their past; I want to know my friend’s history and I also want to know their hopes for the future. So there is always a bit of guilt when I start reading a blog from the first day I find it. I notice the impulse to want to read the archives; I want to go back to the beginning, but mostly I don’t. I just don’t have the time to go back to the beginnings of a four-year old blog and read 1400 posts to catch up. I have noticed on occasion wishing that those 1400 blog posts existed in a book as I would be much more apt to read all of the posts if they were out of the framework of the blog and instead were in a linear narrative from start to end. I can’t exactly articulate why that is, it somehow feels related to the reason I am more apt to watch a repeat of a film on live television than I am to watch it on DVD. I feel, somehow, that I am less alone when watching something on live TV (I wish someone could explain this phenomenon. I know I am not the only one to have this feeling). When I time travel to past posts it feels, by the nature of the blog post, that I am in the realm of DVD watching and out of live TV. Any analysis of this, my learned friends?
I have seen blogs that have attempted to counter the ephemeral nature of blogging by having many blog posts displayed in a column like fashion( kind of what you see on Huffington Post) so you can’t tell which blog post is today’s. But there is something about coming to a blog and having it not stick to the blog structure that sort of overwhelms me. It is as if all the posts are saying “we are all new and equally important and you must read all of these posts now” and that kind of message gives me a simulacrum of what it must be like to have ADHD. I, in an attempt, to stop that feeling of overwhelm tend to click away from that blog and go to a blog that sticks to the structure of what I have come to accept a blog should look like.
Ultimately I think that blogging has been good for me in expanding my appreciation for the now. Overtime, three years to be exact-ish, I have learned that the past isn’t the only source of material. Each day I am noticing events, thoughts, and experiences in my experiences that might be blog worthy. And I think that blogging and writing in the present tense has liked likely taught me the lessons that are proffered in the Power of Now( I am just guessing, I couldn’t bear to read a book about the now. I much prefer Proust and his associative Delorean-desserts)— I think writing about now on this blog has inadvertently given me a greater appreciation for the present moment. Sure the past comes up, but only when it relates to something going on now. Maybe Igor gets some credit for this change in my tenses too. Yeah, sometimes when I can’t find anything in a given day to write about, I do turn to the past for material—but rarely. Here are a few posts from the past in which I was writing about the long ago past: Grayed Memories and Dancing and Dessert, just in case you are curious.
Enough of me, do you notice that the “nowness” of blogging impacts what you write about or what tense you focus on? I’m curious. Feel free to write your comments in any tense you prefer.
I too have a soft spot for the memoir. Particularly the “small” idiosyncratic memoir…
What any given person is doing in the present, for me, is always informed by what happened in the past. The present seems very ephemeral, the present moment, vanishing and feeling insubstantial until it has been reflected up as a patch in the quiltwork of the past.
With that in mind, it is probably fairly predictable that I would give myself the gift of MacJournal for my upcoming birthday!
I think I prefer the past. But I like to read about anything. Our experiences can’t help but to impact us. I just enjoy getting to know others by whatever they write in their blog, past, present, or future. Also… so glad to see you have a beautiful tree this year.
I am always in the past or the future, good intuitive that I am. I am married to a sensing type — he is always firmly in the present. I guess that between us, we make up a whole person!
I like the now. If only because I trust my immediate knowledge more than anything I am recovering from memory, and certainly more than anything I dream about.
Anyone who writes “to be exact-ish” is my friend, lol.
I think our histories make us who we are. People who have had brain injuries or dementia, and can’t hold on their memories, seem lost, adrift, undefined even to themselves. We are not a gaggle of Athenas, springing fully formed from Zeus’s dome, but rather, works always in progress. One doesn’t look at a tree and say, “I only want to see today’s new sprigs.” Without the definition and form, the sense the tree as it has grown over time gives them, the sprigs would be a little meaningless. To place all focus on them is to miss the point.
As a poetry blogger, I am always a little distressed that my poems, especially as quickly as I write new ones, seem to get consigned to Forgotten Poem Limbo awfully quickly. It isn’t as if the poems I wrote a year ago, or two years ago, have lost meaning. They were never news items or recitations of fact, and therefore should be, except for the very few topical ones, timeless. I have compiled a list of my favorite or what I consider my best poems, on my side bar, but no one ever seems to use those links.
Think of it, dear precious Weasel Friend…had you not been curious about Lydia’s first Old Postcard post, I would not know you today. And then I would have missed out on someone who delights me.
xox
Tiger Friend
Fireblossom, I love your sentiments about viewing a tree and the sense of its growth over time, even in the present moment which encompasses it. That’s lovely. And as a blogger who can’t figure out how to invite poetry into the mix (I mean write it, sometimes, but rarely post it), I’m intrigued about your blog and the list of favorites and shall skip over shortly.
Funny coincidence — I’m getting ready to resurrect a post from the past, first time I’ll have done that in over three years.
Generally, my posting is of/in the now, although I occasionally include memories. But, like you, I often look to the past, whether in my own internal conversations or in fiction or memoir. I’m fascinated by how we access and narrate the past, by what gets retrieved, what left behind or out of sight. . .
i feel it in the making of my videos, if it’s not a hot product, then it’s not pertinent, but i don’t obey those rules, because i feel like if it won’t stand the test of time, then it’s not worth showing in the first place. i feel like your writing holds up to that test, good blogging does that, it holds up…. there’s a saying in the industry, your only as good as your last film, so when something is well done, it’s well done forever. that last sentence has your name all over it….
When I visit a new blog I do go back to previous posts…I feel that it is a bit of an introduction to the voice behind the words.
I am curious by nature so that might be why I explore the past.
Time is always an issue for me, in every way.
Whenever I think of time, I think of Heidegger (she said with a straight face). How obsessed we are with finding our place in it, in something fluid and jagged that drips or surges.
I hang on to dates and remember them (both a good and bad thing). Blogging is a way of bookmarking time (not just a journal, because it is public), and I think art is actually the same thing.
I feel better about the nowness of blogging when I remember that I can edit it, can remove things and play with them. It is a medium that begs editing–it’s wonderful to revisit old material and do something with it.
Great post Miss LBR, I am firmly of the belief that the past gets us here, to today. Wallowing in it can be extremely unhealthy (having done all too well at one point.)
Sending you happy smiles for the weekend wrapup, and compliments on the Sheridan Road writeup, *very* nice indeed!
tp
The past is a mystery always needing explanation; the future can’t be explained. Past tense is workmanlike and also visionary, and in my opinion the best vehicle for serious written communication about a topic. I’ve always been intensely irritated by anything lengthy written in the present tense–a note, a bloggery, a poem or a very short story can do it, but novels written in the present tense always seem to me to be trying too hard to convey immediacy and excitement, something that palls rapidly after the first few pages of minutiae, boots and sleeping dog and all.
You make an excellent point about never reading older posts on a blog, as if one can’t really be expected to want to spend that much time in any one place while riding an internet speedtrain with a million potential stops.
But it’s not all downside. Blogs are organic in how they grow themselves day by day; word gardens, to borrow Shay’s term, and bring up new blooms and drop old ones with circadian gusts of mood. Perhaps you can’t really take a walk in last year’s garden but do better to enjoy whatever’s blooming today. And the archive of the past is always there when wanted.
My blog is an emotional GPS — where I am at exactly the moment I sit down to write. Sometimes past events inform that, but I am blogging about the nano-present. Partly that’s because of the structure I put on the blog: it’s a record of a particular year (I will probably keep writing afterwards — I’ll just get a new construct). That said, I can’t stand the present tense in novels. I’ll tolerate it sometimes (Skippy Dies is some 600 pages of present tense, and once I got into it I was okay with it — it completely suited the plot and characters.) But for my blog, I like the provisional, making-it-up-as-I-go-along feeling that writing about and usually in the present tense gives. And don’t you think that the way we tell the past depends on where we are in the present? I wonder if there’s not such a gap between the traditional approach to history in therapy and the nouvelle version.
Well, the present for me this weekend is rather challenging (physically). It’s hard to do anything but be in the moment because I can’t rely on the past to get to the future (as I usually do).
I hate those blog formats where all the stuff is de-columnized a la Huffington Post. I love the diary-element of a blog. This is who I am (or you are) today. Why is it so bad to be momentary?
My now posts are often about the long-ago. You know how I love history.
I don’t like the non-blog-like blog formats either…
I’m such a believer in non-chronological time. I see time as a hologram rather than a past, present future and everything impacting on each other. I’ve never thought of Blogs in quite that way before which is interesting. I do go back to the archives of Blogs I’m mad about. The thing I don’t like about Blogs is how transitory they are. A book you can hold and it exists in some form forever. All this technology is really blowing dandelion clocks into the hurricane of a non-chronological time. I think I”m channelling Tim Burton tonight. xx
My blog posts are invariably a heady mix of past and future, the here and now is my job and the whole point of this blog is to escape the mundanities of my job and reflect on my past as well as plan something to look forward too in the future. The here and now is dull, dull, and dull yet it facilitates the future. I must confess I always trawl through back issues of new blogs although I suspect this is easy because I am primarily attracted to blogs with a high visual content. I have also recently reread some of my earlier posts and I am heartened to see I have moved on and developed greatly over the past 4 years which has made me feel far more optimistic about my future
I do know what you mean about watching a repeat on TV as opposed to watching a DVD there is something about the here and now when watching that I just do not get when electing to watch a DVD, I like the whole chance thing with television that take away the prevarication of choices I am forced to make when selecting a DVD!
A truly interesting post Mme Le B-R,
I suppose my blog is a combination of written in the now and retrospective. I’ve never considered which if these I find more comfortable or why, but my inclination would be to say that what is past is fixed and can be observed from any angle you wish, over whatever timescale you want and will still be unchangeable, even if understood from a completely different perspective {and from different perspectives at different times in the future}.
What’s here and now can only be examined at ‘the point of entry’ and not only does it make it more difficult to analyse, and impossible from any other perspective, but it makes it less possible to understand and with a higher risk factor built in.
‘The power is in the now’ and other such hideous cliches perhaps only really explain why were in such a mess. Things might be considerably better if we stopped to think a moment.
But then again;
‘The power is in the get back to you on that one’ isn’t quite such a powerful sound-bite.
Maybe it should be;
‘The power is in the Ummmm’
And that whole ‘TV as company’ thing only goes to show how easy we are to manipulate as we can even do it to ourselves, especially when the power is in the now…….
Thanks for that one. I can tell you’ll have my brain rattling for most of the night now.
Yup……
Thanks a pant-load LBR!!
lol
I know what you mean about the Huff post but I do like it when blogs provide easy access to threads or series like your WIP, Thursdays with Igor. I also like it when the About page points to particular posts that fill in a bio of the person.
I think of now sort of like the last stitch of two knitting needles and the past being the sum of stitches that went before, the folds of sweater or scarf or whatever is being made, and the future as the pattern we mean to make, the one we keep changing as we go along. Maybe in the beginning we meant to make a sweater but along the way it turned into a sock or blanket. It’s in the now that we keep course correcting and end up making an octopus sweater with 8 arm holes.
it’s tricky… i guess i tend to write about the near past, something that happened not so long ago; earlier that day or a few days before. i understand completelely where you are coming from. i do like your idea of speaking of where one is now and allowing the past or history to emerge. i must admit this is a post i will have to ponder a bit… good reflection. especially for me now as i am moving into letting go of the past in order to live more fully and healthily in the present. but i have had to revisit the past for many years in order to ‘heal’ i feel; see what went wrong in order to get ‘right’ in my mind.
you have given me much to think about. nice…
Tracey,
I am really very new to all of this blogging (and still trying to find my way around) but found myself at your blog reading and reading and completely absorbed by your thought, insight and ability to express yourself in such a wonderful way as to make the reader feel as if they know you personally. I wanted to stop and thank you for bringing some light into my life today. =)
xoxox…
Nice post, Belette!
I sometimes feel a bit constrained by the blog-tense that requires everything be about the short-term present: this is how my house is decorated right now, this is what our family did yesterday, here is my latest project, etc. Sometimes there’s a desire for a different – or maybe just differently layered – narrative. Early in my blogging, I even put in old journal excerpts, as a kind of exercise in time juxtaposition. ?
I’m intrigued by this idea of not bringing the past up explicitly until it arrives organically – it seems to be (at least from an outsider’s glance) kind of relate-able to the notion that our histories are fictions-of-a-sort (I suppose that’s pretty post modern? A kind of return to non-objectivity but meaning found in narrative and in narrative structures?). Interesting food for thought.
and, I confess, I like to read blog archives…
Time is a very subtle and mercurial thing in analysis. Perhaps also in blogging. Part of that has to do with the fact that our language about time is fundamentally abstract. Take the present tense. Just now, I’ve written these last few sentences. But if I’m true to proper linguistic usage, I have to use the the past tense to refer to them. I can’t very well use the present tense when the sentences are already on the page, can I? So the concept of “now” becomes smaller and smaller in scope the more that we look at it, the more precise we try to be about it.
Finally, it gets so small that it disappears; nothing happens in now; it has either already happened, or else it will happen.
But this is a kind of trick, a kind of slight-of-hand. The kind philosophers get caught by. We all know that things do happen “now”: we just can’t expect our usage to be overly precise about now and then. So it is with blogging: everything important is what is happening now…but it has already happened, its in the past tense — as well as being what’s happening now. Maddening, isn’t it?
And of course the other aspect of the Internet that’s important is that it never forgets. What’s important may be what’s happening now, but what you put on your Facebook page in 2007 can cost you your job. Because the machines forget nothing.
Time in analysis: that’s slippery, too. When your analysand is caught by a memory that occurred when she was 9, and its so palpably real for her that she can’t avoid it. I’m here in the moment, but at the moment it’s 1981, on the day and the moment someone told me that my son was deaf. I’m caught by it, caught in the past. Right now!
Time is a trickster! I see what Bion is saying when he speaks of the analyst approaching each session “without memory and without expectation”. Yes: OK. But that doesn’t meaning that he or she won’t be going on a chronological roller coaster ride with the analysand, until the “allotted hour” (oh, our nice abstractions!) is over…
Thanks for this your reflective post. We need to think more about time.
i do agree with you about blogging and how it “feels” as if it should always be about now. I don’t think I stick to that tho being rather ADD and flighty about things. I tend to write like I make art and it’s all over the place. I sometimes wonder what my readers really think when they read my blog. Sometimes I will post a very old post “just because”..I feel it lends a perspective on the present or it represents something that still gives something to my now times…does that make sense? did that make sense, will it ever make sense? it’s doubtful…
xoxoxo
Given my affinity for Mr. Proust’s work, the past is where it’s at. Memory, and it colors the here and now and what’s to come. It’s what is always speaking.
I do a lot of blogging in the present, but as I’ve slowly added stories from my past to the Little Love Stories tab, I find that I really enjoy writing in the past tense and exploring the history of events and how they appear now versus when I first wrote about them as present tense in my old journals.
Did that make any sense?
I write about now, when I bother to write at all. I mostly don’t bother to write!
I’m with you about perusing the archives, I don’t do it. Unless someone cites something significantly specific from a few days ago or a month ago, and I can’t understand what’s going on unless I find that something, I never go backward in time. I go forward with the writer, and I refrain from commenting until I feel I can follow the thread of their blog and what their life is like—at least to a small degree.
* * *
I am interested in this new approach with therapy. When I’ve been distraught enough to seek out a therapist, it’s usually because something is bothering me NOW, and the first thing I want to do in the office of the therapist is get that NOW thing off my chest. It frustrates me to have to waste time in my first session going over the past. Who cares about that right NOW? Help me now and let me blather about being six another time!
I’m not sure when I’ll blog again, but when I do it’ll be more likely to be of things of the past. My present is not to my liking, one that I’ve never imagined would happen EVER, but is of a magnitude that would drive me insane if I hadn’t had any sense of living left in me.
I’ve grown to love history, and my past is very memorable and beautiful, albeit imperfect. That said, your blog posts are never meant for obsolescence for me. I know because it is my point of reference and the archive is something that I keep clicking.
I don’t know if I’ll start venturing into “nowness” (living life and the blogging). It’s as gray as any gray could be and one of which I feel is not blog-worthy. Do I live in the now? Yes. But the tense I’m living it in. Definitely past and future. Now is too short a word and term.