We only ever experience anything once.

Shirley McKechnie (chatting today over tea)

This is the second question from Shelley Marshall’s call for contributions to Proximity:

2. What tense is the present in? How expansive can the present be? (What does the present exclude? Can the present expand and bleed out to encompass the past and the future? Is it possible to experience a present which does not embody the past, and conversely, is it possible to experience the past except through the present? Is it possible to experience a present which is not in some way anticipating the next moment?)

I’ve been trying to address this stuff for Shelley, so thought I’d call on some Henri Bergson to answer it (again, trying very hard to be brief with the responses … to avoid the temptation to ramble on!).

Henri Bergson’s Pure Duration is a form of temporal synthesis, the “horizon of inner life” (Guerlac 2006 p.81) in which quality, feeling and sensation are experienced. It is the “data of consciousness” in which time is  de-spatialised (and as such any notion of time being linear is abandoned).

What does this have to do with the tense of presence?

To be present implies (whether we mean it or not) knowing where one is located. But, at the same time, we tend to refer to the temporal—of being in the now for example—as being a critical aspect of presence.

Bergsonian Duration frees the experience of presence from location or space. It marks the experience as a purely temporal one, but not one that is locked to the current. Rather, Duration exists in flight through the temporal*; it demands (gently) that presence be thought of as consciousness: as flow through memory, temporality, attention and novelty.

Now, here are my really short answers to Shelley’s questions:

The tense of duration.
Very.
Nothing.
Yes.
No & yes (although this answer requires a rethinking of what the ‘present’ is – ie, careful not to conflate ‘current’ with ‘present’).
No (although I think the word “anticipating” is not quite right here).

* It’s so difficult to write without invoking spatial metaphors!: “marks”, “through”. In other words, to write about presence denatures it. Writing is a spatialised act, its primary weapons are metaphors of space. It is nigh impossible not to feel clumsy when writing Duration.

I’ve been thinking about repetition in improvisation. This is because I’ve been working (for some time) with developing improvisations for quite specific ‘dramaturgical’ framings and seeking ways of arriving at presence within these framings.

Recently I have been working in Melbourne with choreographer/director Helen Herbertson, and we began talking about the “repeat” word. Helen said “going back to” – as a means of avoiding saying “Could you repeat that?”!

What is it to repeat an improvisation? To settle on the energetic essences of the physical actions, whilst maintaining an engagement with the new in the improvisations. The trade-off is clear in this kind of work: to try to locate the past but risk never arriving back at what it was that first engaged us/me, or to acknowledge a settled state of being that potentially reduces the quality of attention or engagement with the unknown.

The desire for me is to remain in the “first week” (or the first instance), whilst accessing (forward in time) the accumulation of the weeks of work. This is clearly impossible, but the idea might provide a flexibility in my attention and listening that quietly emboldens the promise of the past. Far from wanting to drop what has gone and simply move on, I am seeking to perform at the nexus of the known (but still unfamiliar and difficult to pin down) past and the surprising now.

(I’ve been writing a bit for Proximity and this writing is part of that engagement).

“All these things are difficult to form into words. If a person gives a name to something and then holds fast to that name, he will miss the real meaning.  Yet if no name is given, then he floats about in empty space and does not attain awareness. “

Chozan Shissai Master Swordsman Japan 1728