Space is a fiction constructed of surfaces and time. We move. The sun and moon move. Our eyes move as we follow gazes of others, a practice we adopt in infancy, and project ourselves into their heads and ‘see’ their ‘world’. We see past, present, and future spaces in surfaces illuminated – in both senses of that word.
“We see past, present, and future,” is waxing a bit poetic. Philosophers and psychologists certainly won’t be moved. One reason they are unlikely to be moved is the casual co-mingling of narrative time and lived time that the preceding paragraph glosses. Literary tense and felt, phenomenological time aren’t the same. Despite the obviousness of that observation, a kind of family resemblance links the two – asked to explain that resemblance, it would be reasonable to hypothesize that literary time is artifice constructed from the inspiration of the bodily version, otherwise historical narratives would make no sense to us.
I suspect that hypothesis will prove not only insufficient but, ultimately, wrong. The ontological differences between narrative and lived time are beyond our reach at this point in the meditations. Still, these two types of time and their relation is significant to the fiction that architecture is. And their similarities useful. Paul Ricoeur was interested in this strange simulacrum as it appears in novels:
The necessity of disconnecting the system of tenses from our lived experience of time and the impossibility of separating them completely seem to me marvelously to illustrate the status of narrative configurations as at one and the same time being autonomous in relation to everyday experience and mediating between what precedes and what follows a narrative.[i]
Narrative time intersects lived time in some way. Waxing again, I am tempted to say it floats on top of it. My day, for instance, is bifurcated into the stream of events before picking up a novel (I poured a cup of coffee, opened the curtains in the corner of the room nearest the chair, made way for dogs to nestle in beside me, etc.) and the sudden rush of sights, sounds, and smells of the room and street flooding in as I close the book. Narrative time easily camouflages the time of ‘reality’ because it mimics its flow and, maybe more important, because the former differs from the latter sufficiently to be more interesting, at least in the short term.
A second issue that philosophers and psychologists might demand be less waxed is the way physical things signal temporal readings. This is at least as important as the ontological difference between literary and lived time. We see past, present, and future first and foremost in the stability or persistence of environmental layout. We focus on things that change in the environment, or things that change with our movement, because these things tend to matter to us in various ways.[ii] Something that moves could be a predator. Or a friend. Things that change perceptually as we move around them could be occluding deep dangerous chasms or sources of food or the previously mentioned friend. Aspects of the environment that appear stable are understood as given, as the persistence of the past in the present, and given little attention unless we have the surplus luxury of time necessary to examine surfaces that perpetuate history. Aspects of the environment that change or change with us propel us toward the future.
[i] Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 2, 62.
[ii] And this is evolutionarily efficient as it reduces mental processing time and energy. Kuhn, Experiencing the Impossible, 90-91.
Architecture is Fiction 