"Jeremy Bearimy"

My favorite articulation of nonlinear time is sadly not Kenan’s but a scene from NBC’s The Good Place (2016) where a reformed demon, Michael, explains that while humans experience time unidirectionally (i.e. things happen one after the other; a succession), beings of the afterlife like himself experience time in a “Jeremy Bearimy” (pictured below).

Michael says: “...time doubles back, and loops around, and ends up looking something like a Jeremy Bearimy [in cursive English]”, then he explains the dot over the letter I as “the time moment when nothing never occurs”. (“Jeremy Bearimy”, 2016)

I think that Jeremy Bearimy is a perfect way to describe narrative time. It definitely accounts for chronological reshuffling and repetition (“doubling back” and “looping around”), as well as illustrates the different lengths in which stories can occur (through the way the Jeremy Bearimy is written in both long and short strokes between letters).

However, my favorite characteristic of the Jeremy Bearimy is that regardless of what is it or how it’s understood, it’s inconsequential to the human characters in the show, and by extension, to us humans in real life. There may exist a nonlinear timeline outside of our human comprehension, but insofar as we are mortally concerned - as articulately put by someone during our discussion in class - “Time does not exist!”

Nevertheless, the beauty of narratives is that it doesn’t have to work like how our human brains work. Hence, in narratives, we can play with time however we want. And Nick Joaquin had fun.

In “Guardia de Honor” (2011), time is constantly reshuffled and repeated often without warning, and it was a pleasant shock to realize that no one was even sure which was past or present among the two time periods, or that it even mattered to distinguish them in the first place!

What I really loved about “Guardia de Honor” is its fine use of ‘temporal seepage’ (as we’ve described in class) to move the story along. Without this temporal seepage, it would have just been two separate stories of two girls who were in seemingly unprompted and basic crises. Joaquin used temporal seepage, and its consequences, to build suspense in the story. Is what happened going to happen again? Will it be prevented? These questions wouldn’t come to mind had the two girls in the story never interacted.

CONCLUSION

The Jeremy Bearimy model is another one of my attempts to make sense of theoretical concepts which my brain is too childish to accept. Nevertheless, I hope for Rimmon-Kenan to know that her essay has helped me pin down the particular principles of time as applied in narrative, and these principles will be especially useful in my endeavors in creative writing.

I’m far from being the next Nick Joaquin, but he did publish “Guardia de Honor” when he was around 30, so I still have about twenty more years to catch up, give or take.

Works Cited

“Jeremy Bearimy.” The Good Place, created by Michael Schur, season 3, episode 4, NBC, 19

Sept. 2016. Television.

Joaquin, Nick.  May day eve and other stories / Nick Joaquin  Anvil Publishing Mandaluyong City, Philippines  2011. Print

Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. “Text: Time.” Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, Routledge, 1983, pp. 43–58. Print.