Resisting AI Time: Personal Reflection as Lived Durée in an Age of Predictive Temporality

By J. Owen Matson, Ph.D.

This piece began—as many things do that over-explain themselves—with an assignment, as a sample narrative for a course I was teaching in personal narrative and memoir, where the readings included the usual canon of affect-rich life-writing (Dillard, Didion, Baldwin) and, perhaps eccentrically, selections from Henri Bergson’s Time and Free Will, which, then as now, seemed to offer a deeper account of memory and affect than the more clinical vocabularies of trauma or cognition.

Bergson’s concept of duration—la durée—is notoriously resistant to summary, in part because any attempt to fix it outside of itself becomes the thing it resists. Instead of time measured by the clock, it traces time as lived: dense, recursive, uneven, temporally saturated rather than measured. Duration unfolds inwardly, as the accumulation of awareness within awareness, and for that reason can’t be aligned with prediction, productivity, or the structural economies of progress.

The essay that follows emerged from an effort to perform the very thing he describes, to produce a memory that doesn’t stabilize into anecdote or event but instead loops back through itself with enough internal weather to suggest that time, as we experience it—or fail to, or only realize afterward that we were inside of it—isn’t something you pass through but something that forms inside you, accruing texture as it folds.

And now the pacing of the piece, its refusal to move efficiently or resolve cleanly, has come to feel more like a quiet form of resistance—a refusal to submit to the logistical tempo of automated foresight, as if the only way left to preserve something like interiority is to let language take longer than it should.

It was 1986. I was twelve years old, just starting seventh grade—still in the early haze of middle school, with that strange, dissonant mix of newness and whatever had just quietly slipped away. The afternoon was warm, like most Southern California afternoons, the sun bright, the air full of the scent of hot asphalt and cut grass. Nothing unusual. And yet, in the middle of that ordinary day, I found myself caught by something—an awareness not just of what I was doing or feeling, but of the fact that I was experiencing it at all.

It all began rather morbidly. For most of that day, for no apparent reason, I had been obsessing about what would happen to my thoughts—my consciousness—after I died.

I’m not sure why. But sometimes the brightness of the California sun made everything feel too vivid, too insistently present—like the world was leaning into itself, overflowing with color, warmth, and movement. The smell of cut grass, the shimmer of heat off the pavement, the way shadows edged across the sidewalk—it all felt charged with a kind of excessive immediacy, as if the more fully I was drawn into the world, the more I became aware of the possibility of not being in it. Maybe it had something to do with the strangeness of that time in my life, the slow undoing of one structure of time and the awkward beginning of another. Middle school was a threshold, and I think I felt it in my body even if I couldn’t have described it. And so I kept turning over the same impossible question. What would it mean to be gone—not physically, but mentally? What would it mean for my thoughts to stop, for awareness to vanish, while the world went on without interruption? The idea that everything around me could remain exactly as it was, only without me in it, was almost too strange to retain in thought. And yet I kept trying.

I became preoccupied with how difficult it was to imagine my own absence. The thought refused to take shape. It kept folding in on itself, especially when I felt so fully alive, so saturated with sensation, and the world around me appeared almost unbearably vivid. Every time I pictured myself, cold, dead, and underground in a grave, I could feel my imagination bounce back, as if rebuffed—not so much in fear or revulsion at the thought of death per se, but rather, recoiling at the thought that my “I-ness,” my self-awareness, could blink out, disappear, as if it had never existed, as if it had never known this moment in time, walked down this sidewalk and smelled the mixed scent of hot asphalt and grass under a bright, blue sky.

And then something odd happened. I still find it rather a bit surreal, even now, almost forty years later, to communicate in words what happened to me, in me, as me, at that juncture in time. There is such a difference between who I am now and who I was then—how I interpret that event, what philosophical overlays I now naturally superimpose over the experience, the density of life experience that I can draw upon to make sense of it. Now the moment exists within me primarily as a rather distant, almost virtual, but strangely magnetic and densely packed, memory—known but also removed and far away.

For that 12-year-old version of myself, however, what happened was utterly unexpected and astonishingly vivid—as if the world just opened up, suddenly, and then “I” was gone, and yet also, strangely, I was very, very present. My boundaries, which I had not really questioned or thought about before, no longer existed. This “I” seemed no longer contained, limited to the confines of my physical body. Instead, “I” felt, almost, ecstatic—out of my usual “place,” spread out, freely and joyously, existing in-and-as an almost unbearable flux of surging power and delight and transparent open awareness.

The normal tick-tock of time dissolved. I do not really, now, have a clue as to how long, in ordinary time, “I” was in that state of consciousness while standing there in the quiet neighborhood road. Perhaps a minute? A couple of minutes? But when I returned, while I was inwardly reeling from the experience, I knew something crucial had just taken place. I knew that I was no longer the same, that somehow, in a way that I could not even begin to describe, I had changed—merely from following the path of my thoughts as I let go and simply allowed them to move on their own.

For a variety of reasons, I did not talk about the experience. For one, I could not have even begun to have articulated what has actually happened—besides, nothing actually happened in any outward sense. But I also wanted to keep the experience to myself. I’m not sure why I decided to keep quiet and not share it. In retrospect, I think that it had something to do with wanting to keep my memory of this somewhat fragile and raw event untarnished, free from disturbing questions, protected from the rough and insensitive handling of people, even if they might have had the best of intentions. I felt as though I had been given some astonishing gift. What it was, I could not begin to explain. All I knew was that the experience had something to do with a sense of awareness, joy, expansion, a kind of awakening—from what I had no idea. But, somehow, the best way to protect the feeling and memory of the experience was to keep it secret.

Still, the memory of this inner opening, over the next few years, acted as a kind of touchstone—a catalyst that prompted me to pay close attention to the nature of my thoughts. Or rather, the way I went about thinking itself had somehow changed. I was especially intrigued by any experiences that were at all similar to my gradually receding memory of that ecstatic moment on the hot pavement up the street from my home.

For instance, a few years later, while in high school, I increasingly began to notice an intriguing sort of self-consciousness about my thinking and engagement in the world. One part of me was able to step back, somewhere deep inside myself, and just observe. This aspect of me simply took note of what was happening both inside and outside of myself, while the other just did (and thought and felt) all of the things that teenagers do and think and feel.

However, my experience of this inner self-awareness dramatically altered one day when, in full-bore observer mode, I suddenly became aware of just how multilayered and amazingly slippery my quasi-automatic immersion in the everyday flow of thought could actually be.

It was another clear, typically sunny SoCal day. I was in English class—well, physically, I was in class, but I was lost in thought, staring out the classroom’s open doorway at the campus football field. Someone was driving a lawnmower over the field. Once again, my thoughts seemed to slip away and flow on their own, as if I were daydreaming, but without a specific dream. I simply began to observe my sensations, feelings, and the movement of my own perceptions across the field. What intrigued me was that so many different experiences were happening within me simultaneously and sequentially. I noticed that I was aware of the bright blue sky, the throbbing sound and vibration of the mower, the shifting of my weight as I leaned forward at my desk, the smell of the grass. I was also aware of numerous ever-changing thoughts and feelings.

I noticed that somehow these thoughts and feelings took place on another level, distinct from my other sensations. Each sensation manifested in a way that had a different internal quality, yet was not isolated and separate from the others. My feeling of contentment was intermingled, not only with a vague sense of disquiet on the edges of my awareness (emerging, perhaps, from my distant obligation to pay attention in class), but also with the countless sensations that rushed into me, along with another layering of thoughts (again, each with its unique quality and tone): On one level I was, rather abstractly and pre-consciously humming a song to myself, while on another level, I was thinking about when my teacher would call me out, while on yet another level I was remembering, in a vague yet tangible way, a previous interaction with my teacher, in which she had been warm and friendly with me, despite my tendency to drift into daydreams.

Amazingly, to me at least, I was also aware of the fact that I was aware of all of this, and aware of my amazement, not only at the densely interwoven contents of my consciousness, but also of the fact that I was aware that I was aware of the fact that I was aware . . . and yet also wondering where all of these levels of awareness would end or begin.

This process was so prolonged, and vivid, and charged, that I added another layer into the mix: An intense desire to remember this experience, to capture in my memory, then to write it all down—not only the specifics of this experience, but also how sweetly thrilling and mysterious and intriguing it was (other layers in themselves!), even though I was doing something that was so utterly ordinary and prosaic as staring out the door of a classroom.