you simply continue

a few thoughts on time, Tony Hoagland, and Judith Hermann

We Would Have Told Each Other Everything
2025, Judith Hermann, trans. Katy Derbyshire, 197 pp.

This morning I was looking for a Fanny Howe poem I was sure I’d saved in a text file that contains poems I’ve collected for the last fifteen years. I couldn’t find it—not the poem, but the file itself—which caused me a great deal of distress. The file is about 200 pages long and contains at least that many poems, maybe more like twice that. I don’t count them, and now the prospect of going through and numbering all of them is overwhelming, and probably next to impossible, because over the years I started to group them by author. Each time I’d add a poem whose author was already represented by a poem in the file, I’d locate the existing poem or poems and put the new one right below it, noting the year of publication. Because of this, the file is not a very good reflection of the linear passing of time, but rather a document of time folding in on and over itself. I sometimes wonder whether I should add more information, like the date the poem made it into the file, and the reason why, or how I found it, if someone sent it to me or if I found it in a book or, during the pandemic years, on one of those poetry accounts on Twitter. Take Tony Hoagland’s “There Is No Word” (2012), for example, which I know I read in AJ Daulerio’s newsletter The Small Bow and sent to C a day or two later, then typed into the file. Above it is Hoagland’s “The Time Wars” (2003), of whose addition to the file I have no recollection, though I remember having read it and think now it’s possible it came from M. Would it be helpful to me if these pieces of information were noted in the file? Would they help me remember, or would they turn into data that I know but can’t actually remember myself, the way seeing a photograph from childhood can embed the idea of a memory that the mind cannot truly recall?

Here’s that Hoagland poem:

THERE IS NO WORD

There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store
with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack
that should have been bagged in double layers
—so that before you are even out the door
you feel the weight of the jug dragging
the bag down, stretching the thin
plastic handles longer and longer
and you know it’s only a matter of time until
bottom suddenly splits.
There is no single, unimpeachable word
for that vague sensation of something
moving away from you
as it exceeds its elastic capacity
—which is too bad, because that is the word
I would like to use to describe standing on the street
chatting with an old friend
as the awareness grows in me that he is
no longer a friend, but only an acquaintance,
a person with whom I never made the effort—
until this moment, when as we say goodbye
I think we share a feeling of relief,
a recognition that we have reached
the end of a pretense,
though to tell the truth
what I already am thinking about
is my gratitude for language—
how it will stretch just so much and no farther;
how there are some holes it will not cover up;
how it will move, if not inside, then
around the circumference of almost anything—
how, over the years, it has given me
back all the hours and days, all the
plodding love and faith, all the
misunderstandings and secrets
I have willingly poured into it.

More time origami.

In We Would Have Told Each Other Everything, an autofictional rendering of three lectures she gave at Frankfurt University, Judith Hermann writes of this kind of non-linear time, but she also writes within it; it’s the scaffolding for the form that the book itself takes. It all starts with a chance run-in with her former psychoanalyst—talk about time collapsing—and proceeds through a barrage of memories that weave in and out of each other. There are also, as is to be expected, meditations on the process of writing, but it strikes me that the heart of the book, the reason it exists, and the reason Hermann’s writing exists, is her particular experience of time, her comfort with traveling backwards and forwards at the same time. The writing seems suspended in a dimension from which Hermann is able to channel something akin to the truth.

“Feli came into the kitchen,” Hermann writes of an encounter with an old friend after a decade of silence; Feli is the friend’s daughter, “warmed up a jar of baby food and sat down with us, a graceful girl with long limbs, blank eyes; she had obviously already learned that you can fall out of touch for half a lifetime, then you see someone again and pick up where you left off, you simply continue – yeah really, you do. The years between don’t matter; people update and uphold themselves in your life, whether you see them or not – it doesn’t matter.”

I ended up finding the file; it was exactly where I’d thought it would be, and I had simply been overlooking it. My distress, I believe, had come from the idea of losing not the compilation of poems itself but what the compilation represents: not just the passing of time, but the way each moment connects to ones before and after it, like today, reading Hoagland’s “The Time Wars”—We ourselves aren’t thinking about the future anymore.—and thinking I must have saved this one, whenever I did, for the exact person I am this exact moment.