7: Have you imposed narrative Temporality?
What is narrative Temporality?
Temporality and impermanence go together, for such is measured by the ticking clock, the circling shadow, the palpitating heart, or a single tear streaking down a lovelorn face. Sometimes a single moment can weigh more than the world.
Into everyone’s life, a little rain must fall, yet rain is also needed in order to preserve life. Vitality spills from the elements and is tried by them, and then passes back into them, energy dancing in and out of existence’s frame. A mere blink and being comes and goes, with each unit following the prefabricated biological action. Such is maturation, it happens to everything before entropy hastens decline. This universal occurrence defines matter, but spirit is external, invisible, and marks the transitions as they click by. Like a cosmic hologram playing out timelessly again and again.
Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash |
“The Hologram”
Wise old timers see a rhythm or pattern in the lives they learn about so that at the end many say that life feels like a story, with chapters, dramatic themes, ups and downs, twists, and a hero’s journey in it for the bargain. Certain days meet certain nights, in an age of development, in a generation of particular bliss or tribulation, and the many are changed by another season turning in an uncertain world. Generation gap (external trial) or generational crisis (internal trial) bring hive-minded conformers or nonconformists who think free of the mind cage.
Individualism is the prize of freedom, justice, and prosperity, and yet some people or concepts go far to set themselves apart from the many, under any circumstances or trials. These are influential characters: protagonists, antagonists, hero, antihero, villain, thrall, etc.
Photo by Mak on Unsplash |
Seasons in life:
1st model:
- Birth / Life / Death = existence
- Beginning / Middle / End = a story
2nd model:
- Nut, germination, sprout, sapling, tree, nut = a forest
- Information, Transformation, Replication, Termination = life cycle
A tree bears fruit of its own kind, and by such is it known. The soil in which its seed was planted suffered it’s germination, but how spitefully? How rich is the soil? How much rain found it? What of storms, frosts, fires, or plucking fingers? These factors shape the hologram of any growing thing, evidencing the holographic all. Adversity challenges through extremes and is marked by a seasonal yield. Crops are generations, and a generational account is a harvest tally.
Seasonal Development of a subject
- Outer / Calendrical Time: important dates / durations
- Inner / Emotional Time: important moments / events
Seasons of development illustrate generational/narrative Temporality, that which marks any progress of forms and or character/style. These things may offer generational bridges to be crossed, and on the echoing green there are no gaps or delineations.
And so it is important to take youths and elders back to moments of temporal shift, so that generations have a common reference point, and a character may be humanized and relatable. A first drive/ride, a walk under summer’s moonlight, the heart shape encased initials carved into trees by youthful kissers, the field where a boy saw his first dead body, where a girl found her maidenhood, where the orphan childhood ended, or the dawning of war.
That where is a when, and can be flashed back to or dreamscaped into developmental seasons/episodes whereby characters or concepts may be continually shaped. A scar. A favor. A smile. A good beating. How the growth weathers it’s environment reveals much about it’s nature/character.
Development is disposition. Are they weathered, delicate, perfect, deficient? This suffering or treatment of growth and developmental concepts visits the heart space the way that timelessness does, but instead of coming from out of cosmic nowhere these factors are the product of a systemic wheel of seasons, and that difference is as important as it is opposite to Temporality.
Natural themes predominate temporal matters, as opposed to supernatural or ethereal influences. We must simulate life experiences and so social development (or lack thereof) in our characters and or world, so that a sense of narrative progress and evolution may be shared with the reader. This is how living things in the text come to life, and how that character’s life is touched by temporality.