Here, there and everywhen: The English language has a tense problem

Richard Flanagan is drowning. Trapped in a kayak, wedged underwater, he sips from a pocket of air inside the Franklin’s roar. The fibreglass is cracking, the pocket shrinking. As a river guide, just 21, he’s maybe strong enough to resist the rapids’ force, the flume swelling behind his back, but not for long.

“I had been alive and now I am dead dreaming I was alive, or I was alive dreaming I was dead dreaming I was alive.”

The chant lies in Flanagan’s memoir Question 7 (Penguin, 2023), a meditation on family, history, memory. Recalling his near-death horror, he describes his hours inside the river as free of commas or fixed tense, grammar as fluid as the flume enthralling him.

What do you do when the past, present and future collide all at once?Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

Since “all writing is trapped in tenses when life isn’t”, he’d reflect. “Life is always happening and has happened and will happen …” Yet English fails in that regard. We lack the right stuff to make the diorama we occupy.

By chance, many writers I’ve read this year have focused on this deficit. Suddenly, it seems, our storytellers need a tense to encompass all tenses. The voice of everywhen, to borrow that Indigenous idea, where the past pulsates in the present as much as tomorrow imbues the now.

Poet John Donne lamented the shortfall in Elegy upon the Death of Mistress Boulstred: “Language, thou art too narrow, and too weak/to ease us now; great sorrow cannot speak”. Grief in general elicits our prose’s want, the survivor living in the tumult of present-past.

Julian Barnes, stricken by his wife’s death in Levels of Life (Jonathan Cape, 2013), refuses to adopt the historical past when speaking of Pat’s existence. Her absence is its own presence. “She exists not really in the present, not wholly in the past, but in some intermediate tense, the past-present.” His metaphor for grief is a seagull labouring free of an oil slick, the past steeping its plumes, the bird flying heavily beyond the horizon.

Even on a shopping trip, in Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel, Mrs Dalloway’s mind can swing from memories of a childhood window to a wave’s kiss, the vague dread of headlines, a column of rooks rising, the price of cauliflowers. Life is never so simple, so static, to sit in one frame.

In one essay, Will Self, of all people, writes in Why Read (Grove Press, 2022) how the self is a “temporary persona”, an ongoing performance in the moment, a rendition to mask the multiple selves and tenses we carry. Our nowness a veneer, English is too cumbersome to embrace our everywhen below.

Hereness and thereness are words used by Kaliane Bradley in her debut novel, the heady time-travel romance The Ministry of Time (Hachette, 2024), where an Arctic explorer fished from the past is both in the room as much as roaming his ice cap. Just as we can’t shed the anxieties of living in 2024, walking the dog with bulletin flashbacks of war in our thoughts, of ice caps and rising grocery prices, and what it all spells for tomorrow.

Despite that, we perform who we are, awash in various tenses. We fill the kettle, daydreaming another time, drowning in visions of back there or not here yet, or never to arrive, or each of those things at once. Until the steam shrills, its plume rising, and we resurface to recognise the room we are in.

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