I love this very short story by my friend Sue Allison. It was published in some literary magazine that I can't find the name of (whoops!). She just had another published here in the Hawai'i Pacific Review about the weather—seems an appropriate place for the story. But this one is my favorite. It makes me laugh. PS I can't do anything about the leading except by retyping the whole thing, which I refuse to do at this present.
Additional Tenses You Should
Know
by
Sue Allison
After
learning the simple tenses of the past, the present, and the future, you are
ready to address the complex tenses, which can be thought of as the sub-tenses
of the simple tenses. We will begin with
the tenses of the past, not because the past comes first, in the traditional
view, but because the past is the most popular of the three simple tenses since
it is the only one we think we know anything about. The past tense includes the
following: the recent past, the middle past, the distant past, the past we
forgot about completely, the past we are always bringing up even though people
are tired of hearing about it, the past we remember but which never happened,
the past our significant others remember differently but wait for social
occasions to add their versions, and the Kodak past, which is constructed
entirely of memories of photographs and not of the events themselves; the past
we’d just as soon no one knew about; and the past we find out later wasn’t even
true.
The past
perfect is not to be confused with the past imperfect which in the present we
recast as the past perfect but which is really a false past perfect. This is
part of the group of wishful-thinking tenses. The past is a place that is basically
full of people we used to be but don’t know anymore and often don’t even like
very much but who never go away. This is the past other people call our
baggage, and is ours to keep whether we claim it or not. Why it is precisely
our baggage that seems to interest people most about us, rather than our
current fetching figure after three weeks of dieting, is not a part of this
lesson. It is not even a part of grammar. Grammar is not about the whys of life
at all, which is why we are so persnickety about it.
The past in
which we did not take part is called the historical past. This is the past
described in the present the way that people who are in the present choose to
describe it, making it a sort of present past and since it thereby requires a
new version to be made by every generation, it cannot, much as we believe it to
be indelible, be trusted. It also means that it is never over; it just goes on
and on, a past without end, which seems a contradiction in terms, but there you
have it.
Another past
that needs to be considered is the super past, otherwise known as the
cosmological past, which was so long ago it seems like it was in the future and
is often feared what the present will become. There is probably a tense for
what happens when the future reverses itself but no one has come up with it yet
because it is way too out there for anyone to think about whose everyday
lexicon does not include the word quark. What we do like to think about, and
what we think about ad infinitum, as it were, are our historical and
cosmological futures mostly because it is upon them our presents and pasts
depend for meaning. These futures are full of people we don’t know but they are
all wonderful, happy, attractive, and brilliant people who would not be
considered baggage at all. This tense is sometimes called the imaginary future.
There are some schools of thought which hold that all future tenses are
imaginary, the future being so, but that is a debate grammarians deftly defer
to philosophers, who can’t answer it, either. The future tenses include the
imaginary future and the perfect future and the perfect imaginary future, as
well as the future which will come no matter what we do; the future we’re
putting off as long as possible; the future we prefer remains in the future
rather than actually become the present because when it becomes the present we
are going to have to do something about it; and the future which we think if we
plan for will come true. This is the delusional future, a tense that, although
it is a future tense, is only used in and for the present.
The present
is a surprisingly tricky tense. We can reinterpret the past in a kind of
recursive loop but unlike the present, which seems to have a mind of its own,
the past doesn’t actually refuse to be pinned down at any particular point or
time. The present tense includes the time during which you are actually
noticing what is going on; the present in which you are thinking of something
other than what is going on and so have no idea that your spouse just asked you
a question or the car in front of you just stopped; and the sudden present. The
sudden present happens when you have a brilliant idea which vanishes if you
don’t write it down immediately. You think you will remember it later, when it
is past and you are the future, but you don’t. It’s also called the
disappearing present, or the inspiration present, which is why writers and
scientists and artists and inventors and such always carrying little pieces of
paper around and scribble on them at inconvenient and seemingly uninteresting
moments.
There is the
present during which we are doing something we like so much we would like the
moment to last forever; this present is short. But the present we wish would
please be over soon is not; it is interminable. What our feelings have to do
with time, which is intricately related to tense, being the thing tense
describes, is a question it’s sometimes better not to think about for the
simple reason that thinking about it is counter-productive. The moment we think
that this is a great thing we’re doing and would like the moment to last
forever, it’s gone. It’s in the past, no longer in the enjoyable present.
Likewise, thinking about the painful situation we’re in merely adds
excruciating to interminable. But there
IS a present that does seem to go on forever, a present that has nothing to do
with us personally and so which we cannot control or affect with our thoughts,
and that is the eternal present, the present that is always there, that we
believe has always been there, and that we believe always will be there. This
is such a strange and beautiful present that it perseveres in our imaginations
despite being constantly disproved. We first experience the eternal present in
experiencing our parents; later, when we have children of our own, what we
think of them when they are in their cute stage. The eternal present is most
vividly and experienced in regard to mountain ranges and seascapes and summer
and almost any sunny day; basically the visible world at the time we are in it.
Eternity, which may be another word for the eternal present, may or may not
exist, but thinking it exists in the present appears to be a survival mechanism
of perpetual and stubborn naivete.
One of the
most interesting of the present tenses is that experienced when time appears to
be suspended. This is like the eternal present except that it actually is. It
is the tense from which the present got its name because it is truly a gift,
that long forever Sunday-Afternoon-present in which there is nothing that needs
to be done and one can, without anxiety, sleep late, stroll in a museum or in
the woods or cook complicated recipes from the newspaper. This is contrasted
with the Monday-morning-present, about which enough said.
In the next
section we will uncover more of the complications of tense, including the past
subjective and the present relative, but the ever-popular and enigmatic
simultaneous future tense, the tense in which multiple futures co-exist at the
same time, will not be covered. Also called a relationship, it will be dealt
with in another course entirely.
