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.