Time and History

 Nothing was written except a few of these posts, but I am thinking on what I want to get written. I will call that a sign of life.

I get a weekly newsletter from Rumpus. Why I take this is to get me educated on what is currently being published and maybe give me an idea of what Rumpus might take from me. I probably do not read enough of its articles or fiction to accomplish my goal. Well, considering my own interests, I had to read the interview We Live in History: A Conversation with Nicolás Medina Mora. 

I like the description of the novel given by Elizabeth Gonzalez James:

It’s hard to describe América del Norte (Soho Press, 2024), the genre-bending, century-hopping debut novel from Nicolás Medina Mora. Hyper-intellectual, Bolaño-esque critique of our modern age? Yes. A Doris Lessing-style meta-text about the process of creation? Also, yes. A frank treatise on US–Mexico relations post-NAFTA, with incendiary takedowns of systems like racism, colonialism, privilege, and power that corrupts both countries? ¡Absolutamente! But at its core, I believe it is a love story.

What Nicolás Medina Mora says about time and history, quoting in full. I admit never having gotten far with Martin Heidegger - and so I learned something new. First, that Heidegger could teach me something. Secondly, another to use the essay with fiction. Milan Kundera was the first to give me that idea.

Medina Mora: The novel’s real secret subject, its most important theme, is time. The ideas I was trying to convey in that regard were informed by a philosopher with terrible politics and brilliant insights: Martin Heidegger. In his scheme, the human experience of time, what he calls “temporality,” doesn’t fit in the quantifiable chronology of synchronized clocks. It’s “turbulent” instead of predictable or consistent. For example: the walk from my apartment in Colonia Escandón to the offices of Revista Nexos in Colonia Condesa, which, according to my phone, takes fifteen minutes, can feel longer or shorter depending on my mood. Why did we decide the clock on my phone is a more accurate way of measuring time than my own experience, or even that time-as-life—lifetime—can be measured at all?

A day in Mexico City is not the same as a day in the Tierra Caliente of Michoacán, let alone in New Haven, New York, or Iowa City. Temporality varies wildly, depending on where you’re standing, where you are coming from, where you are going, and who you are. That last bit, of course, is among other things, a question of class. A day in Mexico City isn’t the same for a domestic worker, who spends two or three hours in the subway to get to their job, than for a bourgeois editor, who can roll out of bed less than half an hour before a meeting, nor for an American expat who doesn’t need to work at all because the exchange rate has made him into a millionaire. 

I think that’s why Heidegger insists that the heterogeneity of temporality, of our lifetime, is inseparable from the fact that our lives inevitably take place within History. If nothing else, that idea explains why time in Mexico has always struck me as weirder, more out of joint, than time in America: History is more alive here than in the US. Shit happens everywhere, of course, but in my country shit really happens. Hence the formal structure of América del Norte, which spins around a device I associate with film montage and that I like to call “the handbreak” the sudden jump-cut between narrative and essay, between the future and the past, between the personal and the political. 

I wanted form to mimic content, so I tried to find a way in which the structure itself called attention to the fact that different temporalities can coexist in the same moment. Sometimes those temporalities crash into one another. That’s what happens, for instance, when History interrupts one’s private drama.

I need to get back on track. Maybe this move was not as useful as I thought it would be. My reading is behind as much as my writing. I have a copy of Doris Lessing, which remains unopened. I get the rat situation taken care of, then getting the rest of my life back on track is on my to-do list.

sch 9/13