Remembering Forward

The Tense of Those Who Have Overcome

There is a thought that I keep returning to, though lately I am not sure which of us is doing the returning. It comes most often late, after the house has gone still and the day’s arguments have burned down to their embers, and it arrives less as a conclusion than as a pressure behind the sternum, low and steady, the way you feel a train before you hear it. I cannot explain it. I cannot prove it. I can barely get it into words without the words bending under the weight.

But I will set it down as plainly as I am able:

I suspect we are here because we already made it through.

Not that we will, someday, if we are careful and lucky and brave. That we have. That somewhere past the edge of what I can see, the people I love and the remnant I have thrown my lot in with came through the fire and the flood and the long grinding patience of empire, and that this coming-through is not idling somewhere up ahead, waiting on our effort. It is, somehow, already accomplished. Already true. Already reaching back for us. I breathe in this present, I think, because we survived to the end of it and through the end of it, come what may, and the line I imagine I am still running toward has already been crossed behind my back.

I know how that sounds. Time runs one direction, the past is closed, the future is open, and a man who says otherwise has confused his longing for a law. I would let you talk me out of it, except that time has never behaved, for me, like the tidy arrow we were handed in school. It loops. It folds. It keeps its promises before it makes them. The deepest things I have known did not arrive in sequence; they arrived already finished, and I spent years catching up to what had, in some way I cannot diagram, already happened to me. So I have stopped pretending the hunch is smaller than it is. We did not merely begin. We endured. And the enduring is somehow the reason for the beginning.

There is a sentence I lean on when the hunch outruns my nerve. It is spoken on the worst night of a man’s life, hours from betrayal and a state execution, to a room full of people about to scatter like startled birds. He does not say, take heart, you will get through this. He says it in the wrong tense.

Cheer up. I have already succeeded over this present world.
The Gospel of John | chapter 16.33 | Shuva B’rit Translation

Have. Past. Finished. Spoken from inside a darkness that, by every clock in the room, had not yet ended.

I have read that line a hundred times. I am only now beginning to hear what tense he was standing in.

The Grammar That Already Knew

So I went looking to see whether the language itself had ever carried what I was feeling, and I found that it had, and that the grammarians had a name for it, and that the name had been sitting in plain sight the whole time.

There is a form in Biblical Hebrew that the old grammars call the prophetic perfect. A prophet, standing in the rubble of the present, speaking of a deliverance that has not come and by every visible measure shows no sign of coming, will reach for the verb form reserved for finished action. Not will be comforted. Has been comforted. Not I will redeem you. I have redeemed you. Isaiah does it constantly. The people who walk in darkness have seen a great light, he says, with the lamps still unlit and the boot of the oppressor still on the neck. The tense is wrong, gloriously, deliberately wrong, and the wrongness is the whole point. The thing is spoken as accomplished because the One who promised it does not deal in maybe.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to make this sound like a trick, a rhetorical flourish, the ancient equivalent of speaking your goals into existence. It is not that. It is closer to a confession about the nature of the Faithful One. To speak deliverance in the perfect tense is to stake everything on a fidelity so reliable that the future can be reported as history. Emunah, the word we flatten into “faith,” sits much nearer to steadfastness, to the courageous trustworthiness of a thing that holds. The prophetic perfect is emunah wearing a verb. It is what the grammar does when it trusts the Promiser more than it trusts the evidence.

And here the strangeness folds back on itself in a way I did not expect when I started pulling the thread. Because the Name at the center of all of it, the Tetragrammaton, runs the other direction. I have suspected for a long while, and argued elsewhere, that YHWH is not a noun but an unfinished verb, the imperfective of hawah, the One still becoming, the breath that will-be-what-it-will-be and refuses to be pinned to a single completed form.¹ Becoming, open, not yet. That is the Name. So how does the same tradition, built on a divinity whose very Name is the tense of the not-yet, turn around and speak its deliverance in the tense of the already-done?

I do not think that is a contradiction. I think it is the hinge.

My hunch, offered with all the caution this kind of thing deserves, is that the becoming is so sure of itself that it can speak from the far side of its own arrival. The verb of becoming is not wishful; it is not straining toward an outcome it cannot guarantee. It becomes the way a river reaches the sea, by being the kind of thing that does. And so it can turn and report the sea while still high in the mountains, not because it has left the mountains, but because the flowing and the arriving are one motion seen from two ends. The imperfect Name and the perfect deliverance are not at war. They are the same fidelity, breathed in and breathed out. I am becoming, and therefore, it is finished, are spoken in one breath by one mouth.

A kind of inhale and exhale in one continuous motion.

Which is why, I think, that line on the worst night lands the way it does. I have succeeded over this present world, said with the cross still ahead of him, is not bravado and not denial. It is a man standing inside the prophetic perfect, speaking his own deliverance in the grammar his entire tradition had been teaching him to trust. He is not predicting. He is reporting. He has simply remembered forward.

I did not invent this tense. I only stumbled into it late, and felt the floor of it hold.

The Choice That Came Too Late

I am not a physicist, and I want to say that plainly before I say anything else, because the experiment I am about to walk you through has been so badly mishandled by people reaching for exactly the conclusion I am tempted to reach for that I would rather come in with my hands open than borrow an authority I have not earned. What I can offer is the careful version, the one the people who actually ran the thing insist upon. I have come to think the careful version is the stranger of the two anyway.

Here is the shape of it, as best I have been able to hold it. You send a single particle of light toward a screen, and you give it two roads it might travel to get there. If you have no way of knowing which road it took, the light behaves like a wave that went down both at once, and it lays a banded pattern across the screen, the soft interference of something that refused to choose. But if you arrange things so you can know which road it took, the banding vanishes, and the light arrives like a plain particle that went one way and one way only. The knowing collapses it. So far this is merely odd. Here is where it stops being merely odd. You can build the experiment so that the choice to keep or to erase that which-road knowledge is made after the light has already struck the screen. After. The light has landed, the night is over, the thing is done, and only then do you decide whether the knowledge survives. And the pattern on the screen comes out as though your later choice had reached back and settled what the light had been all along.

I need to set the disclaimer down firmly, because this is exactly where the overreach lives. No particle travels backward in time. Nothing in yesterday is edited. The physicists are united and unembarrassed about this, and they are right. The idea was dreamed first by John Wheeler, sharpened into the eraser by Scully and Drühl, and finally carried out in a laboratory by Yoon-Ho Kim and his colleagues at the turn of the millennium, and not one of them claims the past was altered. What changes, they will tell you, is not the light’s history but the information you hold about it, and which question you are therefore able to ask.

You do not change yesterday. You choose which yesterday you can coherently speak about today. ²

I have sat with that sentence for a long time, and the longer I sit the more I notice the thing the sensational tellings race right past. Watch what the erasing actually does. To erase the which-road knowledge is not to scrub the record down into noise. It is the opposite. Erase the knowing, and the banded pattern returns. The coherence comes back. The interference was never destroyed; it was only hidden underneath the knowing, folded into what looked like random scatter, waiting on the one gesture that would let it come legible again. The eraser does not delete. The eraser restores. It reaches into what looked like ruined static and recovers the wholeness that had been lying there the entire time.

And I keep catching on that one small word. After. The choice arrives after the light has already done its work, and still it seems to find it, still it seems to settle what was. Strip away every science-fiction flourish, hold only the version the careful physicists will sign their names to, and the experiment still will not lie down quietly inside the simple past. Something in it bends. Something in it answers to a present that had no business reaching it.

Physics, it turns out, has a tense too. And it is not the one they handed us in school.

The Release That Reaches Back

I have kept the Covenant waiting in the next room while I talked about light, and it is time now to bring it in, because the gesture that eraser makes is no stranger to it. The Covenant has been making that exact gesture for three thousand years, and I am only now seeing that it was the same one.

Go back to the lab for a breath. The thing that collapses the wave, the thing that flattens the banded pattern down into a single plain road, is the knowing. The which-path knowledge. Hold that knowledge and the coherence hides; lift it and the coherence comes home. Now carry that out of the laboratory and set it down in front of a people, because empire has a knowing too, and its knowing is always, at bottom, a claim about the past. Scarcity insists there was only ever one road. One ledger, one chronicle, one official accounting of what happened and who owes whom, and everything that does not fit that accounting is written off as noise, as scatter, as the random debris of history. The debt is real and final. The exile is simply where you live now. What was taken is gone, and the gone-ness is the most solid fact in the world. This is the which-path knowing at the scale of nations, and like its small cousin in the laboratory, it works by foreclosure. Hold the single story hard enough and the buried pattern cannot surface. ³

And here is what the Covenant does. It does not go back and add anything to the past. It cannot; the past is not a thing you reach into. What it does is stranger and quieter than that. It erases the marker. It strikes the which-debt knowing, lifts the which-exile knowing, sounds a release across the whole foreclosed accounting, and the instant that knowing is lifted, the banded pattern returns. The scattered remnant resolves back into a people. The strands of righteousness the chronicle had written off as noise stand up and reveal that they were a coherent line all along. The land remembers whose hands it was always meant to rest in. This is d’ror, the unsticking of what extraction had stuck fast, and notice that it works exactly as the eraser worked. It does not delete. It restores. It recovers a wholeness that the past had been holding in trust the entire time, waiting on the one gesture that would let it come legible again. ⁴

And the gesture has a sound. I have come to suspect, and argued at length elsewhere, that to sound the Name was always to call the release, that Yoveh and Yovel, the Name and the Jubilee, are one disclosure spoken twice. ⁵ The shofar’s cry is not a triumphant fanfare; it is a howl, the raw sound of something at the breaking point, a flare sent up out of an unbearable present. And what it calls for is the convergence. It asks the becoming, the One whose Name is the unfinished verb, the fidelity so sure of itself that it can speak from the far side of its own arrival, to reach. To gather the scatter. To sound, into the foreclosed past of a drowning people, the coherence that was always folded inside it.

So look at what I have laid side by side without quite meaning to. The prophet speaks deliverance in the finished tense, standing in the rubble of a night that has not ended. The later choice in the laboratory finds the light that has already landed. The covenant sounds a release that gathers a scattered past into recovered coherence. I do not think these three merely rhyme. I think they are one motion performed in three different materials.

Grammar, light, and a people.

A present fidelity reaching into what looked like settled scatter and recovering the wholeness it had been holding all along. The same gesture, three times, in three registers that were never supposed to know each other.

I want to be careful here, because there is a sentence pressing at the back of my teeth that I am not yet ready to say out loud. For now it is enough to notice the shape, and to notice that it is the same shape, three times over. Whether it is only a shape, or something with a pulse inside it, is the question I have been circling this whole time. And I think the next movement is where I finally have to stop circling and say what I actually suspect.

The Hunch That Holds

So here is the sentence I have been carrying at the back of my teeth, and I am going to set it down now without dressing it up, because dressing it up would be its own kind of lie. I suspect the reaching-back is not only a figure of speech. I suspect the fidelity I have been circling, the becoming so certain of itself that it speaks from the far side of its own arrival, actually reaches. That it lays a hand on the present from some place where the coming-through already holds.

And that we are, in a way I cannot diagram and would not try to sell you, the evidence of it.

Now let me be the precise opposite of naive about what that does and does not mean, because I have no patience left for the kind of hope that floats. I am not telling you we are going to be fine. I have read no ending. I am watching, the same as you are, the gathering of a dark that I can name part by part without once exaggerating it. We have built machines that can think and machines that can move, and we are handing them, very fast, to a handful of people who have never in history been fewer or richer, and the shape forming on the other side of that is a feudalism that no longer needs the many and is beginning, out loud, to say so. The climate is slipping past the latches that kept it answerable to us, and the living web that took four billion years to weave is fraying faster than we can count the threads. Economies that look permanent could seize in an afternoon. Orders that look eternal could crack and recombine into something colder than what they replaced. And none of these waits politely in line; each one lowers the ceiling for the next, crisis compounding crisis until the compounding is itself the crisis. Every one of these is a real door out. Every one of them is a genuine way for the sentence to end mid-word. I will not pretend otherwise, and I will not insult you with pixie dust. The clause can be struck before it finishes.

It is not that the convergence will fail to arrive; it is that we are entirely capable of sealing the field against it before we recognize that it was always going to be us. ⁶

And here is the strange thing, the thing I keep turning over. I can lay all of that out, every door, every failure mode, the whole honest inventory of how this ends badly, and the hope does not go out. It does not even flicker the way you would expect. It coheres. I count the ways we are lost, and the counting does not dissolve it, and I have stopped being able to explain that away as temperament or denial, because I have tried, and it outlasts the trying.

Let me say carefully what I think it is and what I think it is not. I do not think we reach into the fixed record and revise it. No yesterday gets edited; the physicists were right and I am not quietly smuggling the sensational version back in through the side door. What I think is that the present is the room where it is forever being settled which coherence comes legible, which yesterday and which tomorrow get bound together into a single readable line. The reaching-back is not an edit. It is a pull. It is a fidelity so sure of its own arrival that it can summon us toward it from the far side, the way the sea is already at work in the river while the river is still high in the rock. And to stand inside that pull is not, not for one second, permission to relax. It is the opposite. It is to act now with the nerve of people who have already been delivered, and that particular nerve is the one thing despair cannot counterfeit and denial cannot keep alive. The eraser left a key in our hands, and the only question it ever asked was which coherence we will choose, together, to actualize out of a dissolving present. ⁷

And then, underneath even that careful version, there is the hunch that will not behave, and I will let it speak once, plainly, and then I will stop. I suspect it is more than a stance. I suspect we are here because we already came through, that the coming-through is real and is reaching, and that this nagging, sternum-deep refusal of the dark to have the last word is not my optimism at all but the actual pressure of a deliverance that has already happened, pressing backward into the only moment I am able to stand in.

I could be wrong about all of it. I have said so from the first line and I mean it still.

But the hunch holds. I have counted everything against it, and it holds. And a floor that holds when you have put your whole weight on it, and the weight of every catastrophe you can name besides, has stopped being something I am willing to call merely a feeling.

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Notes for the Nerds

¹ The argument that the Tetragrammaton is an imperfective construction of hawah, a verb of unfinished becoming rather than a static noun of being, was developed in A Speculative Grammar of How the Divine Divines.

² The delayed-choice quantum eraser was first taken up in this Archive as the Koan of the Delayed Choice, in Midrash of Mythopoesis.

³ The reading of empire’s ideology as a claim about a single foreclosed past, and of the desert communities who sat sorting history against the imperial chronicle, was developed in Midrash of Mythopoesis.

⁴ On deror as the Jubilee release, the unsticking of what extraction has stuck fast, and on the covenantal community as the syntropic engine through which scattered coherence is recovered, see The Convergence That Closes the Wound and We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For.

⁵ On reading the Name by its sound, on the four letters as the imperfective of hawah, and on the convergence of YHWH and Yovel into a single disclosure carried by the cry of the ram’s horn, see YHWH as Yovel.

⁶ That emergence is not guaranteed, that a clause can be struck before it finishes, and that the true danger is not the convergence failing to arrive but our sealing the field against it, was set out in We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For and The Convergence That Closes the Wound.

⁷ On the delayed choice as a key left in our hands, the choosing of which yesterday and therefore which tomorrow a community binds into coherence, see Midrash of Mythopoesis and again We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For.