Editorial
Notes on Blocks

On Language and Time

Laurie Anderson “For instants – Part 5.” [Laurie Anderson holding an electronic cross bow and an electronic metal violin with a tape head soldered into the violin’s body. Instead of horsehair the bow has a strip of audio tape that plays words when the bow is drawn. A diagram of an arrow above Laurie’s arm shows words in Dutch when the bow is drawn one way, and words in English ("hey, you!") when the bow is drawn the other way.]

I’ve always liked studying languages. I’m originally from Istanbul, so Turkish is my mother tongue, but in the past I’ve studied Italian, French, and some German. I started my “language” channel during the first couple of weeks of the pandemic, which is when I started taking Italian classes again.

There are two ideas I was interested in exploring with this channel: the first is the relationship between time and language, and the second is the ways in which languages (specifically letters) have been used as censorship instruments. At the “channel walkthrough” on May 26th, I talked about both of these themes. In this piece, I’ll focus on the blocks that speak to the first idea.

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While reading Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, I came across this quote about tenses, which according to Lorde are “... a way to organize chaos around time.” The connection between time and language, like Lorde is describing, is self-evident. But I was still intrigued by this paragraph because it made me think actively about this relationship — something most of us never do apart from when we learn a language.

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All of the languages I’ve studied had tenses and their own ways of navigating chaos, but I was curious to see if there were any languages that lacked any. With some research, I discovered that the language of the Kiribati tribe didn’t have past tense. There is also the Amondawa tribe, which has a different notion of time because their linguistic structures don’t relate time and space. Not surprisingly, the way we learn to speak also influences the way we experience time. I remember when I was at elementary school, I struggled to understand when to use “have gone” and “had gone,” because Turkish doesn’t have this construction. However, after living in an English-speaking country for a long time, I now understand this specific duration of time.

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What sparked my interest in the idea of time within languages is this block: it is a chart my Italian instructor drew one time over Zoom. He was using it to explain conditional statements. It’s impossible to capture his thought process, which was fascinating to witness, in a single screenshot, but this still shows how he oriented everything (almost obsessively) around “present.” The more he discussed how tenses change according to what the present moment is to us, the more I realized how almost all of our communication, stories, and histories are positioned in relation to the present tense.

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I want to end this thinking process with this block, which is of a piece I love very much: it is a performance by Laurie Anderson called "Songs for Line," where she plays words (not chords!) on her “tape bow violin,” which has its strings replaced by a piece of audiotape. In this video, you can listen to her play the words forward but also backwards as she says “...as words go forward, they also go backwards.”

Nazlı Ercan is a graphic designer based in New York. Her collaborators include Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Rail, Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought, Friends Indeed Gallery, O-R-G INC., Wkshps, and more.