Tag: Time Travel

Frequently Asked Questions

Some of us are wondering: Who is the Narrator? Who tells the story, and to whom?

Is the tale told at a remove by a skeptic? By a future occupant who, moved into the home at a distant date, discovers a former occupant’s trance-scripts, the latter having been stored either in a box in the attic or in a time capsule in the yard?

Does the home make similar events occur as these terma or “treasure-texts” reenter history?

Is the story a cautionary tale? A warning? A case study?

Is the Narrator a time detective? Has he been sent from the future to investigate a Text written by one of the home’s former occupants: a wizard who went missing from known timelines after claiming to have devised a working means of time travel?

Is the Narrator a postmodern schizophrenic? Twenty-first Century Schizoid Man? Is part of him a time traveler wanting to go back to live his past differently? What would he change?

The act of retrospection must be dramatized. Let us assume first, then, that the House on Shady Boulevard is a time loop. People who live in the home oscillate to its frequencies. They relive its ecstasies and traumas — though always with a difference. The tale, then, is one told by someone who, years after his time living in the home on Shady, attempts, through writing, to avoid the past’s recurrence.

The Werehouse

Thanks to Frank, I found my way down there mere days after my arrival to town. What a space! It was like a T.A.Z. torn in time, a liberated territory poking through the city’s capitalist-realist façade.

To make it viable economically, artists living above had opened a coffee shop below. I remember the latter as a funky, spacious, cavernous place — a fun place to plot. And their annual Halloween parties were instant things of legend. Members of local bands would partner up with one another each year and play in one-off cover bands, performing in costume as famous indie bands of the past (Pretenders, Modern Lovers, Cramps, and the like). And the remarkable thing was, heads came out in droves: hundreds of us in costume, dancing, drinking, smoking our way toward dawn.

How I wish it was still there! Which is to say: How I wish we were there, you and I. If my Time Machine works, we’ll go there — ‘tis a promise. But not today. Today’s is the story not of the Werehouse, but of the home on Shady Boulevard.

Setting Forth

“What happened at the house on Shady Blvd? Who was the Gay Wizard?” There’s a story there if I can recover it, thinks the Narrator. The notebooks are here on my desk. Or we could dither away the Text’s capacity for transport, pursue a rabbit hole, and read Moyra Davey: Burn the Diaries. The lines of hers that give me pause read as follows: “The dross of the diary. The compulsion to scribble, the delusion that we can hold on to time. Countering this neurosis is the anxiety of being read, the fear of wounding; and just as strong the dread of being unmasked.” Given the Davey book’s cost ($173.20 on Amazon), let’s learn what we can from books here at hand. And when the opportunity arises, set forth the tale. Consult with Reanimator-folk; ask about the Wizard. Remember: We go back to go forward.

Utopia vs. 802,701 A.D.

The Traveler of my tale burns sage from Utopia, “a place ahead of its time,” unevenly distributed here in the present. ‘Tis other than 802,701 A.D., the place visited by the protagonist of H.G. Wells’s novel The Time Machine. Wells’s protagonist arrives to a future 800,000 years hence and makes a fool of himself. He imagines himself lost or damned. He blunders about; he curses, he cries. The only noble thing he does is rescue an Eloi woman from drowning — but he proceeds thereafter to treat her as one would a pet or a child. He imagines himself superior to the Eloi, and responds to the Morlocks with fear and contempt. After flicking matches around and starting a forest fire, he kills some Morlocks, regains control of his Time Machine, and hightails it back to the day on which he first set forth. My favorite touch is his vanishing at story’s end.

John Dee, as Imagined by Derek Jarman

Among the more fearsome of the precursors to what follows is John Dee, the great Renaissance spymaster, court magician and inventor of the British Empire. Filmmaker Derek Jarman is just one of several artists to have made much of Dee in recent decades. In fact, Dee appears repeatedly throughout Jarman’s oeuvre. We first meet Dee, for instance, in Jarman’s 1978 film Jubilee, where he operates as a kind of early-modern Doc Brown. At Her Majesty’s behest, the Dee of that film works up a spell that sends Queen Elizabeth I 400 years into the future–i.e., to London in the age of punk. And what begins in Jubilee continues in the films that follow, with Dee cropping up again the very next year by way of Shakespeare’s famous magician character Prospero. The latter wields a wand modeled upon Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica in Jarman’s adaptation of The Tempest (1979). Nor is this the last of Dee’s appearances in Jarman’s catalog. He also turns up as muse, for example, in a film named after Dee and Kelley’s famous scrying experiments, The Angelic Conversation (1987). Nor was Jarman alone in thinking highly of Dee. The latter captured the imaginations of several of Jarman’s contemporaries. To mention just two examples: Dee appears as a character in Michael Moorcock’s Gloriana, or The Unfulfill’d Queen; and comics artist Alan Moore wrote a libretto about him. For Jarman’s own reflections on his interest in Dee and in related topics like alchemy, see his memoir Dancing Ledge.

Repeating the Encounter

Time machines are devices that permit movement between two or more modes of production. Yet the consequences of this movement vary, dependent as they are upon the nature of the traveler. Wells’s traveler is rash, brutish, given to frenzies, where he bawls “like an angry child” (34). In his behavior toward the people of the future,

he repeats the Encounter

and takes the Other

for a fool.

Afterwards he reprimands himself, councils “Patience,” and tells himself, “Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all” (37).

“Like the flapping of a black wing”

I record a voice memo, pleased as I am with the wordless sounds of cicadas and a niece playing with water in a toy sink in my in-laws’ backyard. Mood alters, though; weight returns the moment I consult Facebook. The latter brings upon its users an atmosphere of bad feeling. “Glunk” goes the sense-board. My father-in-law cooks up delicious pastrami sandwiches (red onions, pickles, provolone stacked on kummelweck rolls, the latter a regional specialty here in Western New York). Mood enhanced, I utter thanks to the chef. Eyes closed, I open them again onto Wells’s The Time Machine. The Time Traveler sees the Dreamachine flicker of day’s interchange with night “like the flapping of a black wing” (18). Days flicker past in much the same way here, as one scrolls through these Trance-Scripts. Take comfort, though, reader: for as the Traveler explains to those caught up in his journey, this unpleasantness of moving “solstice to solstice” merges at last into “a kind of hysterical exhilaration” (Wells 19).

Time Out of Joint

“The Time Traveler” (as since Wells we’ve come to speak of him) lapses again into an introspective state, “his lips moving as one who repeats mystic words” (The Time Machine, p. 5). The sight of Tokyo 2020 here in summer 2021 perplexes him.

Is that you, intrepid Unconscious, telegraphing via Internet-of-things to say, “Time is out of joint”?

Jamberry

Jamberry is an audio-visual tone-poem that riffs on the American Dream-State and its history. It sings the raft down the river, the one containing Huck and Jim from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — only it follows the raft’s progression (reimagined as a canoe) well beyond Twain’s time. Huck and Jim plunge over a waterfall, enter a time tunnel and drift prophetically past trains into outer space. Moons, rockets: they’re there on the page, Jamberry thus possessing a kind of “space flick plot,” like the one referenced by Black Arts poet David Moore (aka “Amus Mor”) in the opening minutes of Muhal Richard Abrams’s “The Bird Song.” Traveling across time I recall Raistlin Majere, the mage who adventures to the years prior to the Cataclysm in Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragonlance novels. Books that delighted me when I read them as a kid. Afrofuturists like Moore see in the space flick plot a means of escape. Chariots and arkestras part the waters and lead the righteous ones to Zion.

The Time Tunnel

I listen to Julius Hemphill’s “Dogon A.D.” as tree-friends dance in the evening air. Push and pull of many forces: sadness, loneliness, anger, disappointment. All amid boredom: relentless repetition, until a friend recommends Prince Far I’s “Free From Sin.”

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ubIZL6WwuQY

Digital flânerie leads on two separate occasions to The Time Tunnel, an Irwin Allen production that aired on ABC from September 1966 through April 1967. G-men work in some top secret underground facility in the desert, a sequel of sorts to the Manhattan Project. More than 12,000 personnel in their own self-contained city. A brash scientist accelerates the program, sends himself into the time tunnel. His friend goes in after him. Two men tumble helplessly through time as colleagues and friends work to rescue them and bring them home. Allen went on to fame as the “Master of Disaster” in the 1970s with The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974)—films I discussed at length in my dissertation.