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.
Tag: Time
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).
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”?
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.”
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.
Indra’s Net
An itchy, hairy, melancholy spider tiptoes along threads of text. Time is to the one who travels a bit like Indra’s Net. At each “eye” in this net of infinite dimension, one is told, lies a jewel set there by the net’s artificer to please the tastes of the great god Indra. Inspect any one jewel and one will discover reflected there in its polished surface all of the others. Alan Watts described it thus: “Imagine a multidimensional spider’s web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so on ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image.”
Love and Marriage: A Discourse
“There I was,” recalls the time traveler. “A married man, despite my vexed relationship to marriage as sacrament and institution.”
“Okay,” nods the narrator, eyebrows raised, trying to intuit from what he knows of the traveler’s past what might lie on the other side of “vexed” if that word was hyperlinked. “You’ll have to say more at some point—but go on.”
“Sarah and I had exchanged our vows seventeen years prior,” explains the traveler, “outdoors, in a state-sanctioned but otherwise nonreligious ceremony, with the blessing of friends and family.”
The traveler pauses, proceeds haltingly here in his telling, reliving again the flowers, the arbor, the sunshower afterwards. “I wasn’t seeking to marry,” he adds. “That wasn’t part of any future I’d imagined for myself in my youth.”
Narrator considers this, nods again approvingly, asks what he’d imagined in its place.
“As far as I can remember,” muses the traveler, “all I’d wanted was to write.” He smiles, picturing himself hunched over his notebooks in years past.
“But you and Sarah fell in love?” asks the narrator.
“Yes,” confirms the traveler, “no denial of that on my part. And there we were, in the final months of our Master’s program: both of us wanting to pursue PhDs in English, with hopes of earning a living, despite already mounting debt, by continuing to teach courses at the college level.”
“Fair enough,” says the narrator, elbows propped on the arms of his chair, fingers arched to form a pyramid. “But how did you get from there to the decision to marry?”
“The immediate stress in those days,” breathes the traveler, voice achieving new resolve, “was that we were drawn toward different programs. Mentors dear to us at the time advised us to go our separate ways. ‘Sarah should go to Buffalo,’ they told us. ‘Matt should go to Brown.’”
Narrator purses his lips, tries to conceive the traveler’s dilemma.
“I remember us crying afterwards upon leaving those meetings,” murmurs the traveler. “Neither of us wanted to live apart.”
Traveler looks up here in his telling, eyes glinting. “And so it happened.”
“Just like that?” inquires the narrator. Traveler nods. “Just like that,” he replies, snapping his fingers as if to illustrate. “Over dinner one evening: we agreed to marry.”
Escape from Space and Time
“What about the future?” thinks the time traveler. Could binaural beats be of use, as the Monroe Institute claimed? The narrator has cassettes of theirs in his basement, and could be cajoled into playing them for the time traveler as the latter reclines on a futon at Dada’s House on the night of a full moon.
“The Monroe people seem sort of creepy, though,” warns the narrator. They allege that their “Gateway Experience” enables escape from space and time. CIA thought the technique had some degree of merit, didn’t they? Enough, certainly, to warrant an investigation. The results of that investigation have been declassified and are available now through the CIA website. Thobey Campion reviewed the agency’s findings about the Institute several months ago in a piece for Vice.
Free Jazz vs. Circuit City
The time travel narrative dredges up pain from the past. A bizarre love triangle rhymes without repeating. “The story needn’t go there,” thinks the narrator. If the machine or device is the narrative itself, then (to honor Moor Mother’s terms) let it draw us toward free jazz rather than circuit city. Let the “trance-script as time machine” be a liberation technology. Let it be a spirit-force that helps us heal.
Hopework
So thinketh one of our time travelers. The one who relives the past. Let there also be a traveler who seeks and conceives here in the dailiness of his lived experience a utopian future. As Joshua Chambers-Letson, Tavia Nyong’o, and Ann Pellegrini note in their foreword to the 10th Anniversary Edition of José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, “Hope is work; we are disappointed; what’s more, we repeatedly disappoint each other. But the crossing out of ‘this hoping’ is neither the cancellation of grounds for hope, nor a discharge of the responsibility to work to change present reality. It is rather a call to describe the obstacle without being undone by that very effort” (x). The obstacle is a challenge we must both survive and surpass, Muñoz argues, “to achieve hope in the face of an often heart breaking reality.”
Backstory
The backstory to the story is the story of the House on Shady Blvd. This is the past to which the author must return. He must tend to old wounds to enable future flourishing. Do we need a Time-Turner like the one used by Hermione Granger? Or is the Device that enables travel simply the trance-script itself? Does the author sift through unpublished entries from the past? Or have we gotten ahead of ourselves, trying to lead when what the story demands is that we let ourselves be led?
Trance-Scripts 