Art Is Time Travel and Vice Versa
No,
there are no machines yet that can propel back or forward through time. I’ve dreamt of it 1000 times, but it’s just
not happening. It may never happen
because it is merely an imaginative effort and not a scientific one. I’m cool with that. But versions of time travel exist in real
life, or at least close approximations, that are important to recognize.
The
idea sprang from Stephen King’s On Writing, a nonfiction book about
King’s background, process, and views on the medium. At the close of the book he writes a letter
to the reader, the actual reader of the book at that moment. He describes what he is doing as the closest
thing to time travel we’ll ever experience.
He writes the message from 1998 or so at his house in Maine. But I read it about ten years later in my
house in Oregon in 2008. King explains
this as a form of time travel. The
reader is able to experience descriptions, emotions, reactions, from ten years
before. It is a report of what is
happening instead of a first-person account, but it is an experience of another place at another time. All writing is like this. In fact, when I later thought about it, all
art is time travel.
I’ve
told my kids to write in a journal. Only
one or two have dived in; one regularly, one occasionally. It is a great way to
sort out thoughts and understand stress and how you feel about the events
around you. But, years later, when you
have the time to take a look at what you’ve written, you will be astonished (and
horrified) at what is in there. Without
journals we are lucky if we can remember times, dates, locations, cars,
clothes, jobs, people and ancillary details.
We usually can’t remember what we thought or felt. With a journal, it’s all there, trapped in
amber on paper or some word document. It
was an honest account of events that you may have already forgotten. You forgot how much you hated that job, or
loved that girl. You forgot when you got
the flu for a week and read five novels and reevaluated your life. You forgot your obsession with Final Fantasy. You got to experience
yourself years before and gain a new perspective. Isn’t that what all the time
travel stories are about, anyway?
Cave
paintings to Andy Warhol, Neil Young to A Tribe Called Quest; all artistic
endeavors are truly frozen in time. We
can access a lot of these but understanding the time that they were made is
essential to understanding the piece itself.
What you grasp is human expression, in whatever form it is
presented. I assume this falls under the
umbrella of historic or artistic appreciation.
I like to think of all of this falling under the multi-colored,
plutonium-powered umbrella of time travel.
If you look at a Van Gogh print, and you can feel something, what has happened? From the dead, an artist has touched you even
in the most miniscule way. If the viewer
is more knowledgeable about Van Gogh and can zero on what was happening in his
life when he created the painting, the connection is even stronger. In some tiny way you were transported back to
the nineteenth century.
I
think I’ve never been content with the present.
This is the type of thing I’ve thought of since I watched Bugs Bunny
cartoons as a little kid. I tell
everyone that I know that watching old cartoons was how I got into
history. Those wartime cartoons are
littered with windows into another era; one that predated my parents but was
also whitewashed through oversimplified movies at the time. But it got me thinking. What was 4F, hoarding, and what the hell was
a war bond? That stuff did not exist for
the nine-year-old me, so where did it come from? I was time traveling and I was too young to
interpret the data. (Luckily, I got a degree in history and now I understand
WWII, but my education is mostly useless.
Kind of wish I was into math and finance.)
Old
movies and reruns, classic novels, dusty record albums and documentaries. All of these serve as windows to the
past. The sincere efforts can tell you
so much, but even the corny bullshit can give you a clue at what life was like
back then. Classic TV was full of
married couples in twin beds. We know
that was not reflective of real life.
But why did they do it, then?
What was it about the culture, or what the television producers thought
about our culture, which indicated Americans could not handle a married couple
in the same bed discussing everyday bullshit?
Sometimes the lens with which we view the art is also time travel.
You
can’t customize your Subaru with a flux capacitor. Well, you can, but instead of a time machine
you will have created a pathetic eyesore.
Time travel just ain’t happenin’, people. However time travel through art reminds me
that the theories and rationale are very real; it’s just all that pesky bending
the laws of the universe that gets in the way.