Time & Perspective Quote by James Broughton

Time doesn’t march in Broughton’s line; it pools. “Everything that ever happened is still happening” reads like a filmmaker’s metaphysics: the past isn’t a closed chapter, it’s footage that can be replayed, re-cut, re-felt. Coming from a director associated with the postwar West Coast counterculture and a queer, ecstatic strain of experimental art, the claim isn’t meant as a physics lecture. It’s an aesthetic and spiritual dare: stop treating your life like a linear plot and start experiencing it as a living montage.

The subtext is both liberating and slightly unnerving. If the past is still happening, trauma doesn’t stay politely behind us; it keeps echoing in the body, in habits, in the stories we compulsively tell. If the future is already “happening,” anxiety is exposed as a kind of premature editing: we render tomorrow as a finished scene and then suffer inside our own rough cut. Broughton counters that with “Here and Now,” a phrase that can sound like bumper-sticker Zen until you hear the pressure he puts on it. Eternity isn’t elsewhere; it’s the only location we ever actually inhabit.

This works because it uses totalizing language (“everything,” “eternity”) to collapse our favorite defenses: nostalgia as refuge, planning as control, regret as penance. The intent is not to flatten time into meaninglessness, but to intensify responsibility and attention. If all of it is alive, you can’t outsource your life to “someday” or bury it in “back then.” You have to show up for the scene you’re in.