Fiction

Some Time Travels

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In his “Confessions,” St. Augustine writes, “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one that asks, I know not.” He decides that time is an idea, unique to humans, and also unique in that we can simultaneously grasp the past in memory, the present by attention, and the future by expectation. In our minds, but only there, we are not locked to one perception of one reality.

Yesterday, I deleted everything that I had written up to that point by dragging my unbuttoned shirtsleeve across my laptop’s touchpad while reaching for my coffee. (No, I can not replicate the results in an experiment; yes, like an idiot, I have attempted to replicate these results in an experiment.) In a feat of memory, I retyped all that I had written to that point; simultaneously I remembered what I had written, was super-present and typed it attentively, and expected a future in which I regularly saved my work, a lesson I first learned, oh, 20 years ago. I was in three specific time-experiences at once, and all of them sucked.

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For decades, it has been known that subatomic particles can be in two places at the same time. In yet more recent (2014) experiments, physicists have “simulated” time travel. Science reporters tell us that time travel is in the “near future,” or, more prosaically, “just around the corner.” If this is so, no one from the future has yet visited us, because if it truly is something that we will invent or discover in the future (near or not-so) we would know all about it already. This is because, oh, you get it.

Many therapy techniques suggest remembering oneself in a childhood moment and reaching out to that younger self; the thought is that we carry every self we have yet been forward into our psychological present and can communicate something of a healing nature to those past selves. Whenever I have attempted anything of this sort, I have cried. I have received no reports from the younger self about what he made of the unexplained appearance of an older man leaning on a cane.

* * * *

How the false truths of the years of youth have passed!
Have passed at full speed like trains which never stopped
There where I stood and waited, hardly aware,
How little I knew, or which of them was the one
To mount and ride to hope or where true hope arrives.— “I Am A Book I Neither Wrote Nor Read,” Delmore Schwartz

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The thought experiment of time travel has a long history in popular culture. Fantasists invent tools (a jet-pack in every garage) in novels and movies, tools which actually only address the needs of the present moment and do not attempt to imagine the future needs that will be answered by the future tools. In almost every science fiction work that uses the device of time travel, the several paradoxes of “a visitor from the future would influence current history and thus change their present” or “if I go back in time and change a mistake, erase an error, will I not change who I am now?” are addressed.

Many of the heroes decide or discover that the path that brought them to where they are and to the person they are now was always worth taking, errors and all. As long as one is breathing, lessons can be applied. (Ebenezer Scrooge, for example.)

It is a seductive thought experiment, though. Offer a person a time machine to return to a specific moment in the past and take up residence there, from that moment onward, and relive one’s life so one can fix whichever errors and enhance whichever successes that followed, well, it is seductive. Offer a person life from a future moment from which they can see it all unfold, … well.

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delmoreschwartz

Delmore Schwartz

Delmore Schwartz’s heart-rending short story, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” opens with the narrator in a movie theater as he realizes the feature is his parents on their first date; he becomes frantic and yells at the screen, “Don’t do it!” and gives a list of reasons. (Oh, to have been Delmore’s mother. He was 21 when the story was published.) The audience hisses him down, as he is ruining the movie for them, but he knows how it ends.

My father tells my mother how much money he has made in the week just past, exaggerating an amount which need not have been exaggerated. But my father has always felt that actualities somehow fall short, no matter how fine they are. Suddenly I begin to weep. The determined old lady who sits next to me in the theatre is annoyed and looks at me with an angry face, and being intimidated, I stop. I drag out my handkerchief and dry my face, licking the drop which has fallen near my lips. Meanwhile I have missed something, for here are my father and mother alighting from the street-car at the last stop, Coney Island.

At the end, the narrator is thrown out of the movie theater while on screen his father is refusing to have his fortune told by a Coney Island fortune teller. And then he awakens to “the bleak winter morning” of his 21st birthday. It was all a dream.

* * * *
As Augustine saw, way back in the 4th century, we always live in the three time zones of our experience and psyche simultaneously: past, present, and future. Always.

I no more wrote than read that book which is
The self I am, half-hidden as it is
From one and all who see within a kiss
The lounging formless blackness of an abyss.

How could I think the brief years were enough
To prove the reality of endless love? — “I Am A Book I Neither Wrote Nor Read,” Delmore Schwartz

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Neat Thing of the Day: Lou Reed reading “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” (Reed had been a student-mentee of Schwartz’s at Syracuse University): In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 7 asks, “Congrats! You’re the owner of a new time machine. The catch? It comes in two models, each traveling one way only: the past OR the future. Which do you choose, and why?”

To Be Brief … No Such Thing in Some Books

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Most copies of “Tristram Shandy” by Laurence Sterne are about 600 pages long. The book is a fictional autobiography in which Tristram, the not-quite hero of a story that is not quite his own, attempts to tell us about his life from birth onward. However, he does not even begin to begin telling us about his birth and his first day on earth until the fourth volume because, like his own conception on page 1, his story is much interrupted.

(On page one, at the very moment Tristram is to be conceived, his mother asks his father if he remembered to wind the clock, an ill-timed interruption that, according to Tristram, produced an author who is incapable of telling a story straight to its end without breaks, questions, and digressions.)

The full title of Sterne’s masterpiece is “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,” and it was published over almost eight years from 1759 to 1767. It made the Irish writer world-famous and wealthy.

At the end, one more character brings in one more story and Tristram’s mother asks, “L–d, what is all this story about?” It is the second-to-last sentence in the book and it is also the question most readers ask as they conclude reading Sterne’s great comic novel. “Tristram Shandy” is one of the most entertaining novels in English because it never gets to its point.

Christopher Ricks once described Sterne’s novel as “the greatest shaggy-dog story in the language.” By the end of all these pages Tristram has only brought us all the way into his own toddlerhood, leaving with us the thought that, should he continue the attempt to tell his life-story, he will never catch up to himself.

Thus, not much of Tristram Shandy’s life nor many of his opinions appear in the book, but many other characters—and their opinions—do. The title is the novel’s first joke. Tristram Shandy is not a character in his own story. He often criticizes himself for his many digressions and his way of not getting to the meat of his story very quickly, but he always steps away from criticizing himself, and he even sets out in one chapter to finally tell his own story in a “tolerable straight line,” but not before drawing his narrative schemes for the volumes we have just read in a series of diagrams:

tristram

He opens a chapter in which he promises a straight story with an interruption about how hard it is to do that. He identifies for us which interrupting anecdote corresponds to which bend away from the “tolerable straight line” and defends the sections that he labeled with “ c c c c c ” as “nothing but parentheses, and the common ins and outs” of life. Several paragraphs later, Tristram lays out an estimate for us: If he writes two volumes a year for the next 40 years, he will be all caught up … to where he is now, 40 years before that imagined future, at which time he would have written thousands of pages yet have decades of life yet to tell us about.

Tristram recognizes that his own storytelling method has created a paradox for himself: If it took him one year to bring himself in his own story to one full day old, yet he lived 364 additional days in that writing process, that means that 364 days have been added to his job, 364 days that he did not write about because he had not yet gotten to them in the process of getting to be one day old in the narrative. “… [A]t this rate I should just live 364 times faster than I should write”—just?! that implies he might slow down!—”It must follow, an’ please your worships, that the more I write, the more I shall have to write—and consequently, the more your worships read, the more your worships will have to read.”

Sterne’s Shandy is self-entrapped in an ever-present present which interferes in real time with his recounting of the past. And Sterne loved finding every conceivable method to interrupt his character’s storytelling. Shandy wants desperately to be brief, but how brief should he be? How brief can he be? If an experience takes X amount of time to live through, and if a story about that experience takes more than X amount of time to tell—because listeners need the context and background—then every story in a life takes longer to tell than however much time it took to live it. Every writer will live forever by that logic.

Tristram’s mother asks at the end, “What is all this story about?” At the moment, Obadiah has been complaining about a cow that will not give birth, perhaps because the Shandy bull was not successful in impregnating it. He thinks he is owed a calf. Tristram’s mother asks her question and the answer is about both Obadiah’s story and the book we are have been reading: “‘L–d! said my mother, what is all this story about?—’ ‘A Cock and a Bull, said Yorick—And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.'”

Cue the rimshot. A “cock and bull story” is a derogatory term for a fanciful tale; Obadiah’s complaint was literally an accusation having to do with that phrase. It also describes the book in the reader’s hands. Sterne’s punchlines are brief, as they always should be, but there are many of them in Tristram Shandy, as he builds joke after joke, scene after scene, chapter upon chapter.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 20 asks, “‘I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.’—Blaise Pascal. Where do you fall on the brevity/verbosity spectrum?”
There is an expression, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” And another: “The more the merrier.” As in “Tristram Shandy,” the punchlines and wit should be quick and brief, but plentiful.