Time Travel

Because I am fully retired now and no longer have to deal with the craziness of December when teaching college courses, I have had time to reread over the past several weeks two fantasy novels that take place in the holiday season and really resonate for me. I have finished A Swiftly Tilting Planet, by Madeleine L'Engle, which takes place over the Thanksgiving holiday and presents a variation on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I am now halfway through The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper, which runs from just before the winter solstice and through the twelve days of Christmas. Both books are written for young readers, but as with any good fantasy, they offer much to older readers as well. Cooper's book holds up better to multiple readings, but only because the actual writing is better; the plots of both books are fascinating. These books have led me to believe in a kind of time travel by way of ritual.

L'Engle's novel presents the effects of a world-ending threat by a (fictional) South American dictator, as experienced by a family gathered for the Thanksgiving holiday. (The real Cuban Missile Crisis took place in October, but Thanksgiving is close enough—the closest family holiday, and I think part of L'Engle's point is that evil is more possibly overcome during a time of rituals.) As the family waits out the twenty-four hour period in which the world might end because of a nuclear holocaust, certain rituals sustain them: the fire in the hearth and the candles on the table, the same Thanksgiving dessert as every year, the same foods in general, the same table cloth; one the mother-in-law recites a rune (or poem) from her personal and cultural past, the twins set the table as they have always done, a young woman's relationship with a new dog reenacts memories of a relationship with a former dog, and so on. Note that it is tangible things that help these humans to deal with the abstract dread of annihilation. 

One character, the youngest child Charles Wallace, actually does time travel on a magical unicorn to make the one change in past events that will result in a different person being born than the threatening South American dictator, and so averts disaster. But what is most fascinating is the many people in the past Charles Wallace visits and how their names and habits and skills and talents often move through the generations. In this book, we see not only traditions remaining stable through time but to some extent also types of people and the choices people confront recurring. The danger of a nuclear holocaust hangs heavy on the “swiftly tilting planet” (which is of course literally happening any November), but the consistencies that the people of this family find in their traditions and in the ancestors of one of them over time stabilize the world. One might say that our repeating relations with real things and real people are what stabilize us in the face of abstract threats.

In The Dark Is Rising, Susan Cooper ties the winter solstice, the darkest time of the year for us northerners, to the rise of evil, but Christmas traditions again stabilize the people in this book, and even more strengthen them—literally empowering them when the traditions are understood. Again, the youngest son of a large family sets out on a quest. (His birthday is the midwinter solstice; he's the seventh son of a seventh son; he turns eleven and discovers he is the last of the magical Old Ones.) The main requirement of his quest (and thus his effort to turn back evil) is to collect six “signs,” each one in the form of a quartered circle (a circle enclosing a cross), but each one of a different material: iron, bronze, wood, stone, fire, water—collected in that order.¹ In part, Cooper is reviewing the evolution of humans with these forms and reminding us of how in so many myths and legends natural forms such as these have mystical properties and powers. Again, it is the tangible that can fight the abstraction of evil. 
 
But, even more, Cooper in using the quartered circle draws on many mystical and spiritual associations. Most immediately, perhaps, the quartered circle is the astrological sign for Earth, and all the elements that make up the six signs come from the earth. More particularly, if I might draw from Wikipedia, the astrological sign of a circle denotes spirit, while the astrological sign of the cross denotes “practical / physical matter.”² So, the quartered circle is also a symbol of metaphor—the joining of the physical and the abstract. The circle, of course, is also a symbol of wholeness, and the cross, as an intersection of lines on two opposite planes, is a symbol of conjunction. It is wholly appropriate that Jesus Christ, that symbolic being who is both god and man, hangs at the intersection of cross-pieces on the crucifix. And at least one theological interpretation of the Roman Christian cross is the descent of the timeless divine (vertical piece) into human experience (horizontal piece, or chronological timeline). The quartered circle is also the central component of the Celtic cross, and Cooper intertwines many northern European myths and legends into this story. 
 

When the six circled crosses are joined together into one larger circle, the Dark can be defeated, at least for the time being, just as the northern hemisphere of the earth tilting back toward the sun after the winter solstice increases light in our world, at least for a while. In a symbolic way, Will Stanton is gathering together these signs made from natural elements that have been important to people throughout human history to make a symbol of the wholeness of our experience as humans over time. But the actual process is physical, using physical symbols; it is a kind of ritual, paralleling the rituals of the Christmas season, and thus overcoming the limitations of any one point in time.

I once taught these books in a course on fantasy literature, and I have read them many times. I hope now to make rereading them one of my rituals over the holiday season each year. What matters is the re-connecting to something tangible that has had value to me in the past and thus brings back memories. Wordsworth called this “emotion recollected in tranquility.”³ It is well known that tangible things that stimulate our senses, whether in reality or in imagination, evoke emotions when they evoke memories. (Think Proust.) Likewise, though I am not now a practicing Christian, I grew up as an Episcopalian, and I love hearing the old Episcopal service (Rite I). This year I found a local performance of the Anglican Ceremony of Lessons and Carols, so I look forward to attending that each year during the holidays. 
 
But what really sends me off on my own personal experience of time travel is putting up a Christmas tree. Now that my kids are grown, I put up a small table tree and decorate it with some ornaments that I have winnowed from the great number that used to decorate our large Christmas trees in past years. Each ornament I have saved has a history and thus a memory and an emotion for me: the first ornaments my husband and I bought (cheap, at Sears) for our first Christmas tree, the felt birds that were favors at a Christmas party given by some clients when my husband and a friend were setting up a new business, the ornament I bought at the university I taught at for nearly thirty years, the tiny china bells an aunt gave me, ornaments made for me or my family by friends and family, a flat shiny angel with my name on it that my mother bought for our Christmas tree when I was a child, something similar for my two sons, the two small carved wooden ornaments that I bought for my first Christmas tree as a single person, the ornaments that memorialize our two dogs, and on and on. Looking at this tree each year makes me feel happy and whole, because it is the gathering place of so many memories and emotions. I was joking with one of my sons this morning that perhaps we should call it the Time Travel Tree, rather than the Christmas tree.

It is very dark and dreary today, and like everyone else I am a year older, but the physical things we use as parts of our rituals, in church or in secular celebrations, ease us along by reminding us that time does not just move in one direction, toward an end. We can with our memories and imaginations re-experience and enjoy the past and anticipate the future and thus even temporarily defeat chronological time. That's what rituals are for.

Here's to a wonderful New Year!

1Some critics argue that this order represents a backward, anti-chronological portrait of human evolution and thus is a kind of time travel in its own right: we all began in water; early on we tamed fire; then we learned to work with stone and wood, and later make tools in bronze and then iron.

2http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrological_symbols

3In his “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads.

Hammock & Canopy

I had an interesting reflective experience recently. One of my sons took me to an Art Garfunkel event at a nearby library. Garfunkel is making appearances in small locations (like this library's theater) while recovering from a loss of voice in his upper range. He sang some great old songs and read some poems of his own and then answered some questions. It was a wonderful, soothing trip into the past. At several points Garfunkel spoke of his current wife, once using one name and once using a different name that might have been her nickname but was not obviously so. It was a slightly confusing moment—wait, you just said her name was X, and now you are calling her Y! I registered the discrepancy, thought about it for a bit, then let it go. But I also noticed that several of the women sitting in the row in front of me looked at each other, eyebrows raised in query. These women had been talking steadily among themselves before the show started and continued their interrelations during the show with looks, smiles, etc.--ongoing social contact. On the other hand, my son and I rarely spoke during the performance, processing all the events internally and separately—at least until we got home and talked it all over.

The looks and smiles the women exchanged with each other during the performance stuck with me as an image of something that I mostly don't participate in. I'm an introvert and need a lot of time to myself to think in order to function well psychologically, but most other people seem to be extraverts who need ongoing social interaction to maintain themselves. In the week following the performance I began to remember an image from a fantasy series that my son introduced me to maybe ten years ago. The image is a forest canopy, and it appears in the book Elven Star, which is volume two in the Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (1990). In this cycle, there are four worlds, one based on each of the four elements of “sky, fire, stone, and water.” The world in Elven Star is Pryan, the world constructed around fire—the sun is at the center of this world, literally. Here's part of the synopsis of the book: “On steamy Pryan, Realm of Fire, never-ending sunlight and plentiful rain have created a jungle so vast that humans and elves dwell high in the trees and only dwarves live anywhere near the ground.”¹ In other words, the more sophisticated beings in this world live in a canopy of leaves and moss, and many of them don't even know they are not on solid ground.

I began to see the ongoing web of social interactions that the women in front of me at the concert were weaving as similar to the canopy world of Pryan. This is a good metaphor, I think, for the social world of culture all humans inhabit—it is woven of human creations and human interactions, and many people accept it as the real world, whereas it is really hovering over the original, more obdurate world of nature. And it's only during and after a significant natural disaster, like Sandy last year here on the East Coast, that some humans are forced to admit that their everyday lives do not play out on solid ground, even while they insist that the social canopy be rebuilt immediately.

Of course, we all want the safety and comfort that social institutions usually provide us—we all want to rebuild schools and hospitals and homes, though we might begin to question rebuilding homes on barrier islands. But many people insist that even the trivial parts of the social canopy are reality. There's a game going on among some truant youths in Brooklyn these days that they apparently call “the knock-out game.” The goal is for one of them to knock out another person with one punch. Unfortunately (and not saying much for their machismo), these youths have been mostly choosing unsuspecting women walking on the street to knock out. When I heard of the most recent female victim on the radio, the announcer mentioned twice that she had just come out of a nail salon when she was punched out. I wasn't sure what to make of this detail. Was I supposed to worry that her expensive nail job might have been ruined when she hit the sidewalk? Or was I supposed to lament the fact that we live in a world where a woman's nail job can't always be safe? Wasn't this just a bit beside the point? But then the announcer played a tape of another woman in the neighborhood shouting that everyone had the right to go to a nail salon and that they wouldn't be stopped from doing so by these thugs. That's living in a tissue-thin canopy, if you ask me.

The social world of culture that is constructed by human interactions is quite impressive on the whole. But I often find myself very uncomfortable with more local manifestations of it. I know that I'm different from most people in this, and I'd like to get a little personal here for a moment to conjecture why. I grew up in a family atmosphere of emotional instability. My parents were fighting an ongoing psychological battle with each other and were themselves, each one, very emotionally needy in different ways. We kids had to support or tolerate our parents in their neediness, though we very often did not get the emotional support that we needed from them. The most important thing we could do for our parents, especially our mother, was to be the perfect family in the eyes of outsiders. There was a very strict division between what went on inside and how we presented ourselves outside. I always felt the social canopy was false, in other words—made up of appearances rather than reality.

And nature was always the closest I came to security and consolation. The world of nature is just what it is; it doesn't ever intend you any harm, though it may occasionally do you harm. The animals and plants are just trying to survive with the simple means they have to do so. They will mostly leave you alone unless you threaten them; they do not make unreasonable psychological demands upon you. I found I could rely on nature much more than I could rely on people. There was a small woods behind our house (before it was all chopped down by people in order to make more houses for more people), and I used to walk in the woods a lot and commune with myself and nature and achieve some small amount of serenity out there. I truly cannot understand how other people can trust people more than nature, or how they can see getting their nails done as a right, as an important event in their lives.

Many aspects of the social world scare me, because they seem very fragile and unrealistic to me. I am very aware of how high off the ground they are, so to speak—how far removed from natural reality. What I did growing up was to create a psychological hammock for myself, if you like. It's like a social canopy, in that it is woven from human interactions, but it is woven from my own thoughts and relations with myself and just a few other trusted intimates and it is very close to the ground (the reality of nature), so that if I fall out I believe I can get back in again, even if I get hurt. I am constantly in my head weaving together past and future and present into a whole structure that I can exist within, much as extraverts do with their social contacts. This worked very well for me for several years; my “real” world inside gave me the stability that the dangerous social canopy outside did not give me. I kept the two carefully separate, even though I participated in both. But it seems to me that more and more social media are threatening the hammock and insisting that everyone live together in the canopy. Even more, the social media seem to demand disruption rather than continuation in thought and emotional relations—it's a Twitter world, not an epic or lyric world. I feel less and less comfortable in this world as the days go by. 

Perhaps I am just a member of a vanishing species that cannot adapt. I could actually accept that, as an individual, but I also keep having fears that the social canopy is in a way becoming a threat to all or most humans and other living things, not just to me. There was a very scary essay in the Stone series in the New York Times a few weeks ago that renewed my fears: “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene,” by Roy Scranton.² Scranton believes that we have “passed the point of no return” in the process of global warming and that we must accept that the world of relative abundance many of us have lived in over the past few centuries in the West is in effect “already dead”--the nail salons may still be open for business, but not for much longer. In the future, we will be scrambling for food and water, not worrying about the appearance of our nails. Scranton concludes, “The sooner we confront this problem, and the sooner we realize there's nothing we can do to save ourselves [as we are now], the sooner we can get down to the hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.”

The problem is, as T.S. Eliot memorably put it, “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.”³ Many people, who cannot entertain the possibility that nail salons are not a right or even a permanent part of human culture, choose denial over the acceptance that Scranton advocates. They don't even really choose denial; the unconscious mind simply doesn't allow the threatening reality to filter into consciousness. This is a big problem, which is in part responsible for the environmental mess we are in now and probably will be in part responsible for the demise of the natural world that we have evolved to live in so successfully. The social canopy may well bring about the demise of the earth that supports it. Scranton describes this fearful situation:
“The human psyche naturally rebels against the idea of its end. Likewise, civilizations have throughout history marched blindly toward disaster, because humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today — it is unnatural for us to think that this way of life, this present moment, this order of things is not stable and permanent. Across the world today, our actions testify to our belief that we can go on like this forever, burning oil, poisoning the seas, killing off other species, pumping carbon into the air, ignoring the ominous silence of our coal mine canaries in favor of the unending robotic tweets of our new digital imaginarium. Yet the reality of global climate change is going to keep intruding on our fantasies of perpetual growth, permanent innovation and endless energy, just as the reality of mortality shocks our casual faith in permanence.”

This is why I keep writing about the process of metaphorical thinking. Of course, we should enjoy the parts of culture that help us, but it seems to me that we should also work very hard to remember that culture is not all there is of reality—in fact, that culture is the less durable part of reality. If we think of culture as an abstract phenomenon and nature as a concrete phenomenon, then it would be metaphorical thinking to keep the natural reality in mind as we move through our lives primarily in the cultural realm. The “knock-out game” is really a good metaphor for this way of thinking. We might like to believe that we live in a world where getting our nails done is an important event, but every once in a while something more basic punches us in the face and knocks us down. Jonathan Swift also provides a helpful metaphor in his great satirical novel, Gulliver's Travels. In part III, “A Voyage to Laputa...” (and other places), Swift satirizes intellectuals who are not in touch with reality. The Laputians are so wrapped up in intellectual speculations that they need to hire servants called “flappers” to tap them on the eyes or ears or other sense organs if they are in danger from the outer world they are so oblivious to and need to perceive that world, if only momentarily. It seems to me that we humans (as a whole) are so proud of our abstract speculations and so oblivious to the possible negative consequences of becoming so removed from the natural reality that we also need flappers! 

One more metaphor to conclude this post, this time from Shakespeare's Hamlet. In Act I, scene ii, Claudius uses a series of paradoxes to describe the emotional conflict inherent in his marriage to Hamlet's mother so soon after the death of Hamlet's father: “. . . with a defeated joy, / With one auspicious and one dropping eye, / With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage, / In equal scale weighing delight and dole . . . .” I would think that Shakespeare has Claudius speak this way at least in part to indicate that Claudius is not a man who respects natural boundaries. But that very awkward and even comic image of one eye looking up while the other looks down sticks with me as a telling image.  Isn't that what we should be doing these days, metaphorically? It's fine to cast one eye forward into a future world of abstract relations via the social media, or to keep one eye focussed on the artificial worlds of culture, but it also behooves us to keep one eye trained on the real world, the world of nature, the world we have evolved from and into which we fit. If Rome is burning, we should do more than just watch TV.

1Both quotes are from the back cover of the Bantam 1991 paper edition.

2http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/learning-how-to-die-in-the-anthropocene/?emc=eta1

3From “Burnt Norton” I, in Four Quartets.