Essay: Irrealis Moods
Irrealis moods are a category of verbal moods that indicate that certain events have not happened, may never happen, or should or must or are indeed desired to happen, but for which there is no indication that they will ever happen. Confused? Me too. That is why I am writing this paper - an attempt to better understand a feeling that has very little place in the English language.
The category “irrealis” has been a useful label for a variety of languages that show a grammatical contrast between “real” and “unreal” situations. It’s an older, nineteenth century label for a verb mood. In other words, it means that language can express fact (what is real) and can indicate fallacy (what is unreal). It was identified by the linguist Roman Jakobson.
Realis, also known as indicative moods, looks something like this; “I am eating”. Another example of irrealis is “I am sleeping”. To begin the switch to using irrealis moods, we could say something along the lines of “I would like,” as opposed to, “I will like.” The ‘would’ leaves much more room for interpretation and imagination whereas the ‘I will' is definite. They would have, could have, should have, are all irrealis moods. It is a no-mans-land that doesn’t exist. It is an undefined dimension of time. Often, the indescribable is the result of ignorance. The word likely exists in some language, you just don’t know it. In Ruth Margalit's eulogy for her mother published in the New Yorker, she introduces a word in Hebrew, malkosh, which refers to the “last” rain. Malkosh is this idea of the last time you didn’t know was the last time. The last rain that you didn’t realize would be the last rain. As Margalit points out, malkosh can only be used in retrospect, but by definition you know it'll come.
Most of us, although we aim to live in the present, we are actually elsewhere. We're not exactly in the present. We try to be, or we claim to be, but we're not. We’re in the future. We’re in the conditional future, we are in the past, we are remembering, we're fantasizing. We’re constantly drifting from one tense to the other or from one mood to the other. Albert Einstein said, “For us physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent."
Recently, someone I am very close with moved overseas. The final two hours we spent together before she left felt scripted. We were laying on the grass in a garden, shadows from the slender leaves of the Japanese larch dancing on our bodies, not saying a single word to each other. Such a difficult moment became easy like a shoeless summer. No words needed to be said. To this day, some five months later, I still struggle to articulate the feeling I had inside my head. When I attempt to articulate it, it feels like trying to explain a dance to a blind person. I can count on one hand the amount of times I have felt that in my life. The recurring theme in all of these moments of feeling present is that I was not truly present; at least for an extended period of time. I was replaying the memory of the present moment in my head while I was living it first hand. I was dancing with the ghosts of the past while they were still mortal beings.
In Andre Aciman’s book of essays called Homo Irrealis, he reflects on the imagination’s power to forge a zone outside of time’s intractable hold. It is a book on desire, not for a person, but for a particular feeling in time. An example that Aciman prefers to use is Beethoven. “...Because as he's close to death and has just been sick and was given the impression that he had in fact survived, will die soon after he composed this piece of music, which is basically, “I don't want to die. I want this piece of music to keep going for forever. That's why I'm not closing it as soon as I can.”” Artists, writers, and scholars such as Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud, Eric Rohmer were not exactly writing about what happened to them or what they wished would happen, but instead writing about something long and far away that could never happen. You look back at this thing that never happened and it continues to haunt you. That thing that you imagined happening never happened but it has become a memory in its own right and therefore you carry it with you. Unfinished business from the past is very difficult to live down. Our lives are filled with these unfinished moments. The might have been that never happened that could happen but wish it won't but secretly hope it does.
One could argue that the ability for us to live in irrealis is equally as detrimental as it is beneficial for our mind, body, and soul. As humans, we carry the weight of living in this undefined dimension of time. Czech writer Milan Kundera speaks of this weight in his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being. “Dogs were never expelled from Paradise. Karenin knew nothing about the duality of body and soul and had no concept of disgust.” He goes on to discuss how the love between a dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development. “Dog time cannot be plotted along a straight line; it does not move on and on, from one thing to the next. It moves in a circle like the hands of a clock, which—they, too, unwilling to dash madly ahead—“. Like the grammatical contrast between “real” and “unreal” situations, there is a stark contrast in the way that humans and dogs understand and cope with time. We understand that Albert Einstein with his general theory of relativity has shown us that time is fluid and is affected by gravity and velocity. On an astronomical level, time is relative. Sure. This hardly affects people in their everyday lives or in their life at all. It hasn’t once crossed my mind as anything more than an interesting fact. Just like how a second isn't what we think it is. Scientifically, it's not defined as 1/60th of a minute, but as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom". While this is a cool fact, it means nothing to me. Time doesn't care. Not about us, not about dogs, not about the trees. Time gives no thought of those who are affected by it. Times’s own existence is an arbitrary calculation determined by some very smart individuals.
How is it possible for us to manage this information on a layman level? Is it done by an unintentional mass formation psychosis in pursuit of a civilized society? Aciman holds the belief that “What we’re looking for, what we’re trying to grasp, is not there, will never be there; yet looking for just that thing is what makes us turn to art.” He continues on to say, “art is how we quarrel with time. We burrow between two moments, neither of which stays long enough, and make room for a third that overlooks, shakes off, transcends, and, if it must, distorts time.” It makes sense to me that art, one of the most subjective things in society, is what people turn to when they are trying to understand deep ideas and beliefs that feel indescribable in their own right. For example, a painter who pours their heart and soul onto a canvas that they feel represents what’s going on inside their own head better than words can. To them, each mark on the canvas helps them communicate an idea the way that they feel gets their point across best. As a viewer of this painting, you will likely interpret this art in an entirely different manner than the artist. Your own thoughts and feelings dictate what this painting will say to you. For one individual, the painting can transport them back to their childhood home, playing with the dogs in the backyard, watching them carve in and out of the tall trees that line the perimeter of the home. For the person standing next to you, it can bring up a traumatic repressed memory. Two people in the same place, living in the same “now” that we collectively agree on to exist in our lives, seeing and feeling polar opposite images. The through line of their situation is that neither of them were actually living in the present. They think they were, but the art transported them back to this undefined dimension of time that we spent most of our life in; The irrealis.
References & Citations
https://mathiaspastor.substack.com/p/published-drafts-1-malkosh
https://www.thoughtco.com/irrealis-were-grammar-1691045
http://www.bcbsr.com/greek/gtense.html
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08FPBMCS9/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-unmothered
https://openlettersreview.com/posts/homo-irrealis-by-andr-aciman
Sæbø, Kjell. (2016). Irrealis mood and negation.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316285199_Irrealis_mood_and_negation
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Homo Irrealis by Andre Aciman
Rooms Of The Mind by Mackenzie Campbell