147: Tents

[Plumstead Car Boot, December 13th 2040] Of all the things I have chanced to snatch from the bubbling abundance, from those cultural debris that rise from the silts of decades, from the crumpled forms that crease over themselves in a hysteria of temporal abandon, be they shirtsleeves, photo albums, gutted radios, haemorrhaging plush toys or scuffed magazine covers… Of all these and more, this most recent piece of swag has folded me deepest into its tomb of intrigue. I’m caught. Like a glimmer on its dust jacket. Unravelling “Temporal Elasticity Syndrome”, by Annie Mitchell. Its cover flaps like some appendage of a needy pet as a chill breeze ripples through the tent. I’m trying to light the gas stove. I live on the Plumstead Ridgeway, under the North Circular, in a pop-up tent, issued – like the gas stove – as part of a Crisis survival pack. I had studied Temporal Elasticity Syndrome fervently in my early twenties at the time of its inception, when TES was a truly fertile field of study. The research labs back then were my second home – sometimes my first. But now the first is this nylon sack under the bridge. And that glint I reached for only this morning, when I plucked Mitchell’s essay from the Plumstead car boot, from the stand of an erstwhile granddaughter, still glimmers on the cover in the flicker of the gas flame as I reach for my ear-marked page. I’m sure it's been nearly four decades since her first philosophical musings were published, wrapped in the scholarly garb of statistical data, in which Annie Mitchell brought to the world’s attention this phenomenon that quite literally pulls individuals back into their past – leaving something she described as an ‘ontological husk’ in the present, though I don’t need to explain this to you. I start to read the introduction against my better judgement. “We are thrilled to present an exploration of our current grasp on TES, featuring insights from leading contributors in the field. Advancements in understanding TES have been gradual since its discovery; this peculiar temporal condition reveals its intricacies with a certain reluctance. However, we are witnessing a genuine acceleration in various aspects of TES research, where novel insights and concepts continue to emerge and converge, enriching and emboldening our understanding.” When I can no longer hold it, I take the journal with me down to the stream at the bottom of the Ridgeway, setting it down on a rock open on my reading page. As I squat to micturate, I make efforts to find some solid ground: It’s a Christmas, I'm sure of that – there are fewer beatings; no one’s pissed against the tent in a while – But when? Which one? I've shut so many away under bridges, set some loose in abandoned buildings, locked some up in dorm rooms, tucked a few into doorways and stairwells. And now… I’m by the stream under the bridge, but which stream, which bridge? Annie Mitchell’s face seems to have the answer, smiling up at me from the dust jacket. Every publishers’ granddaughter, on the tent of the rock. I snatch up the book. Come on Annie, back to the ranch. Back at the tent, in the last gasps of heat from the gas canister, my eyes start to skip and jump between paragraphs, my attention doubling back and stumbling forwards. A mental fog that might normally be dispelled with a few blinks, before shaking myself back to the present, has now caught, snagged and stretched me all the way to another present. Juddering my head from side to side, back and forth, as my starts to focus again I’m drawn to the abstract from one of the accompanying articles I’d just skimmed: Temporal Elasticity Syndrome (TES) presents a pervasive and intricate manifestation characterised by the gradual extension of temporal strings, concomitant with instances of retrograde recall to past moments. While initially perceived as a benign occurrence, contemporary understanding acknowledges that a considerable subset of individuals may become compelled to involuntarily revisit and relive past experiences. This study delves into the multifaceted nature of TES, shedding light on its phenomenological intricacies and highlighting the potential for its evolution into a compelling force driving individuals to revisit their personal temporal landscapes. The findings contribute to a nuanced comprehension of TES, emphasising the importance of recognising its diverse manifestations for both theoretical and practical implications in the field of temporal psychology. The print and page softens as though sinking through pores in the tiling, tiling I hadn’t laid my feet on in 24 years. Tent floors aren’t tiled… It's like this, to my mind: if it were just a thought, I could step back to that point in the past, and quite easily hop back to the present, and remain to an observer here … but it feels as though there's a force, an entanglement happens somewhere along the line, that's stretched the material all the way from there to here - the umbilical cord is cut at birth, but something runs on between child, mother, grandmother and so on. [Nagorno-Karabakh, South Caucasus, December 13th 1991] I'm the seven-year-old me, contracted to the mind of me-now, or my me-now self, expanded to the size of a seven-year-old; a grandmother of sorts, but whatever constitutes me, at any time, it’s this fact: that back in the tiled world, our Christmasses were comatose; churches were shuttered, and granddaughters were swept up by Lithuanian-born Soviet submarine commanders. It was on the grounds of the old naval college that the idea seized me that I would like to recreate all the tents and shelters in which I’d ever lived, or would go on to live in. The idea didn't go beyond an idea, one incidentally conceived of in a tent, largely because to recreate the “Past Tents", I would need to recreate everything that was actually present when I lived like this: the tent, the camp, the district, municipality, demilitarised zone, the semi-autonomous region, the disputed territory, the world, the galaxy, the universe, and so on and so on. An impossibility. But, sitting in my past, as my present, I could finally out-live the foreclosed conclusion, which, seemingly drawn from a lack of projection, had nonetheless contracted its generational spell in the gum-chewing jaws of adults glowering down on sleeping children. For those entangled in significant temporal stretches, the initial belief that TES was a benign condition marked by self-resolving temporal leaps has given way to the realisation that, in many cases, it is a slowly progressive phenomenon. Given its prevalence, it stands as a significant contributor to recurrent journeys into the past. Ongoing efforts involve extensive studies of large participant cohorts aimed at refining prognostic insights for individual cases. Noteworthy contributions include the comprehensive research by Emily Reynolds and collaborators, summarising their findings alongside the work of others in individuals grappling with TES. So, as with so much, the reality is, how to put it? Markedly more… Vivid? The present is so thick, so touchable, and the past so vaporous, but being birthed into the past again, that feels hard yet gloopy, I'm truly coming together and falling apart over and over and over. Standing, to venture further into my former home, I'm caught; the elastic around the front of my waist is cutting into my midriff again – the pull from behind. The snag must be somewhere else. A sucking sound, like the water draining from a helicopter’s hot tub, stretches out until I'm here again: left at summer camp for the holidays, with an assorted bunch of misfits, future warlords and life-long despisers in training, the conspicuous odour and that warmth tell me it's laundry day. Must I glimpse the rota on the way in? It will tell me the task I'm supposed to do. Yet I know which one it will be, and it's this knowing that causes me to retch. It is the retching that snaps me back to my tent in the present; my shivering husk emptied of all of the sludge and bile that make up the sensory scramble to prolong the business of decay. I must have vomited in my sleep: there’s a patch of frozen mulched up journal pages beside me. My breath hangs frozen in the air in this dismal snow globe. Outside my tent I can hear the dry snorting of a large animal, or several, as the sounds encircle me; hooves, claws, or.. talons scraping and scratching against the frozen soil and the hem of the tent. I hear the crack of a whip in the distance. It won’t be long now. I reach for the zip to let them in.