31: what we know of the past we know of the future
quick thoughts before work on seasons and children
The days are getting shorter again, noticeably shorter. I say noticeably because for the most part I am outside all day, oftentimes during sunrise. It is getting back to that part of the year where it was when I first started my job, which is funny to say because it’s also not: it’s always only ever getting close to a new time. It never goes back to any part of the past—except that it does. And it does this not simply because we say it does—it isn’t simply a social construct—it does this because this is the part where the sunlight shrinks, or the darkness grows, or the sunrise comes later, or the sunset comes earlier, however you’d like to say it. In this case what we know of the past we know of the future.
It feels like there is an important distinction, or should be, between what language—figures of speech or shorthand—indicates as being something like constructed, and the something else that things like seasons give us. The glimpse of something being one or the other is found in language’s slippages: when we realize that it is not actually getting back to the time that I started, because that would be moving backwards in time, is a good example. I’ve always taken the way language is threaded through with these ‘inaccuracies’ as indicative of our misrecognition of time itself, but I also think now that there is something important about the difference between referring to something like the time of year and other social conventions.
For one, many “social constructs” are harmful, fueled by ideology. The slippages here are more than inaccurate, they’re wrong. For two, it would seem that we use the slippery language that we get from describing the seemingly cyclical reality of the natural or physical world on social things, when we shouldn’t, because that wrongness is actually harmful.
The example that immediately comes to mind for me is the way, where I come from at least, there is this tendency to label children—usually one of a set, if a family has multiple— “trouble.” The whole “black sheep” thing. I’ve grown up watching grown ups in my life say “oh this or that child is trouble,” and go on and on about how now that they’ve identified that they know a thing or two not only about that child, but about that child’s future. The problem, and the deepest way this is harmful, is that behavior—action—is born out of this that bolsters this false reality, and it becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. We have no idea how powerful we are, how powerful our language is, in shaping each other.
I float the hypothesis that we project the sort of language/ understanding of things like seasons on people like children, and notice how it provides the possibility for a certain sort of distinction, because the term “construct” is often easily uncritically utilized. Not only on social matters, but on nature or the physical world as well. The important distinction is between the fact that things like time are not constructs the way things like childhood, the teenager, adulthood, people are.
It would seem that we have to think through the former in order to better understand the latter, in a world that is simply more complex than one that is built of non-constructed and constructed things. Because as we (should) know, just because it’s a construct, it doesn’t mean it isn’t real.