In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 255.
Writers and readers often come to the Essay with subconscious ideas of how narrative should take shape, how time and space might be handled, and how experiences should be presented, parsed, and cohere. “It is almost impossible to talk of time without using metaphors of space: the future that lies before us, the past that remains behind us,” writes linguist Yásnaya E. Aguilar Gil. But according to Gil, for speakers of Quechua and Aymara, “the past, that which we already know, is before us, in front of our eyes, whereas the future, uncertain, remains behind, at our back, we cannot see it.”
To live, in this sense, is to walk backward into the future, the body orientated toward all that has been. Concepts of space, time, and their narrative shape are obviously not standard between writers, but bringing one’s own assumptions or instincts into clearer light can aid decisions of where these instincts might be a help or a hindrance. For instance, when might realism, scene, or chronology be useful to drive nonfiction writing and why? What kinds of knowledge or knowing do these systems of meaning-making belie? When might bodily experience prove more useful in its narrative sequencing, the asynchronous, circular, or blurred space-time of the memory or dream? And what ways of thinking, being, and knowing do they articulate?
In opposition to Native and Indigenous epistemologies of land and emplacement, “[t]he very essence of Western European identity involves the assumption that time proceeds in a linear fashion,” writes philosopher Vine Deloria Jr. “Further it assumes that at a particular point in the unravelling of this sequence, the peoples of Western Europe became the guardians of the world.” How a culture sees itself within time and space, experiences time and space, speaks to its belief systems, to the philosophies, politics, and ethics it perpetuates. To situate oneself within time and space is to decide upon a form, assertion of being, assertion of knowing, is essayistic. To write form is to acknowledge those times, places, and people, those situations, philosophies, and powers that shaped the life and body from which the form issues—whether as continuation of, departure from, or problematisation of that inheritance. Form is force. It is avowal and complication. A reaching, a suppression. Perhaps both at once.
“In the case of Mixe,” explains Aguilar Gil, “time is also predicated in terms of space, only that this space is not horizontal but vertical, time passes through us from head to toe, time falls upon us: we say ka’t yaknajäw tii menp këtäkp (‘what comes-down is unknown’), or menp pajtp (‘it arrives, it rises’).” Rather than a body moving through time, the body appears as a fixed point. Time, life, happens to it—a stream crashing upon the individual where they stand still. “Switching from Mixe to Spanish,” writes Aguilar Gil, “necessitates moving from a horizontal to vertical plane when we talk of metaphors.”
How might the essay travel from the horizontal—from beginning to middle to end; from quantifiable truth and narrative plenitude; from the values and metaphors of colonial narratives of progress—to the vertical, the unknown crashing over a body? In one of the oldest tales of spatial verticality and temporal linearity, that of Abrahamic downfall, humanity descends; linear time begins. But there is always another perspective, even in the oldest, seemingly most intransigent of narratives. What of the serpent? And so we are confronted with the reverse question: How, in a tale of Abrahamic downfall, do we move from a different kind of vertical, the Fall, to the horizontal, sidewinding knowledge of the serpent? How must we listen to this animal? How many more truths does a tongue speak once it benefits from the doubling of being split?
To be alive is an endeavour in meaning-making. To live, to strive to understand—is an essayistic gesture. A life requires we exist within confines, circumference of a body, of place and time. And this body, strange scripture that each of us must walk within, provides laborious rite to be honoured and contended across a life. In the case of how one handles time and space in the Essay, it is useful to consider that the varying kinds of knowledge or “knowing” we each possess—corporeal, individual, communal, institutional, spiritual—can and likely will be in both harmony and conflict with one another. From that harmony and conflict, one’s various forms of knowledge affect how one sees, understands, and navigates the world. The kinds of knowledge one brings to the page often demand, for this reason, different ways of writing. That form move beyond a binary choice between either horizontal or vertical, that the Essay acquire dimension, multiply its points of tension, rather than favouring narrative plenitude, temporal or spatial flattening. That it coil, strike, sidewind; that, as it moves forward, it closes its eyes.
Lars Horn’s first book, Voice of the Fish: A Lyric Essay, won the 2020 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, the 2023 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and was named an Honor Book for the 2023 Stonewall Israel Fishman Nonfiction Book Award as well as an American Booksellers Association Indies Introduce Selection. The recipient of fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Kenyon Writers Workshops, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Horn’s writing has appeared in Granta, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Kenyon Review, Poets & Writers Magazine, the Rumpus, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. He lives in New York and teaches nonfiction at Columbia University.
image credit: The New York Public Library