Time, once you get past the benevolent mask of Father Time and the atomic precision of modern time, is a tricky thing and, I submit, a fascinating study.
Time travel fascinates our creative sensibility to the Nth degree, judging by the staying power of time travel motifs in novels like H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” (1895) and Octavia E. Butler’s “Kindred” (1979). Recent Hollywood fare allows us to escape to “Star Wars” (1977) in a futuristic setting “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away . . .,” “boldly” “Star Trek” (2009) to futures “where no person has gone before,” leap far-away back to “10,000 B.C.” (2008) to the dawn of civilization, or do a quick hopscotch-jump forward to escape childhood and become “Big” (1988) or witness the “Armageddon” (1998) of the world, again, in “2012” (2009).
Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) technology makes possible the wonderful time-travel odysseys into the past and future, replicating the ancient storytelling of epic mythology – remember Brad Pitt as Achilles in Warner Bros. “Troy” (2004), a CGI-enhancement of Homer’s written version of a far older performance? – with an increasingly realistic and epical intensity right on time for our HDTVs. Indeed, that ancient bardic artistry has been objectified, digitized, commodified and mass-reproduced by sciences of chemistry, physics, architectural engineering, economics and advertising, among others.
But the objective measures here also mask covering subjective states of mind. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity (E=mc2) suggests, to me, that time can be subjective, relative, tricky and, thus, potentially dangerous. This is especially true when we confuse time with the mask of modern times, which we often accept without ever scrutinizing the “official” history-making forces that compress time and make it linear, progressive, benevolent. Thus, a very friendly Father Time, with his long, white beard, reminds us of the good things and helps us to forget. “Forget the struggles of life,” he says, his voice smooth like caramel and his breath cinnamon-sweet, “and don’t worry, be happy now and cheerfully look forward to a brighter day.” Forget the struggles of others. Forget the deeper time that makes us pause to consider its scale, the connectedness of everything, our smallness, our common humanity . . .
As the recently deceased French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss indicated through his lifelong work, human memory reveals the same basic structures and myths when you bypass the mask of present times and look for the deep essence.
The relationship of human memory and mythology occupies artists, literary scholars and philosophers for this reason, for just as some remarkable events sear into our memories, it is not uncommon for unpleasant and traumatic memories to be relegated to the RECYCLE BINS of our hard drives. The “true” and “official” story, measured by objective time, is shaped in this way by individuals and societies. This is fine because it is human; however, when this temporal awareness becomes too flat, linear, progressive and self-centered, that’s when alarm sirens start to grow in intensity.
When once we had the old alarm clocks sounding Brriinnggg!-ing wake-up calls to take affirmative action, relatively and metaphorically speaking, now we have alarms that soothe us with the sounds of pleasant dreams. Perhaps our favorite talk-show voices, maybe New Age, lite jazz, classical, soft rock musak or, in my household, “nature” sounds: rain, ocean, thunder, summer night, rainforest and waterfall.
The tricky, dangerous nature of time shows itself in such dreamy modern moments.
Consider, for example, a recent opinion poll on race and President Barack Obama reported by CNN. Apparently, following African-Americans’ remarkable exuberance about the prospect of overcoming racism during the 2008 election campaign (about 67%), their optimism has gone back to levels they held, ironically, during the dreams and hopes of the Civil Rights era.
Following Obama’s election, the sale of guns and ammunition has served notice as a referendum on his success, causing far too many Americans’ memories to leap far away “Back to the Future” (1985; 1989; 1990): “back” to the time of pure, individual existence that the Founders’ codified in the Second Amendment as the right to bear arms; and toward the “future” bearing (semi)automatic guns with laser-guided scopes and armor-piercing ammo.
And, of course, on the same night U. S. Sen. Obama became President Obama, affirmative action fell to the Proposition 424 referendum in Nebraska, even though Omaha distinguishes itself by having one of the highest rates of poverty – among its largely African-American community – in the country. The 2008 election, which was, by overwhelming consensus, a referendum on the Bush Administration’s execution of the “War on Terror” and the economic mini-Armageddon it helped to inaugurate, also lined up the usual suspects: disproportionately high job losses on minority (African-American and Hispanic) individuals and families; disproportionately high rates of those risky mortgages and foreclosures among the same; disproportionately high bankruptcies causing minorities years of financial and legal entanglements; and, of course, apathy from government officials, programs and bodies. U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who knows about poverty firsthand, had the wisdom she earned from it questioned and demonized by U.S. senators and an affirmative action case she wisely adjudged reversed by the Supreme Court she soon joined.
Maybe much of this confusing, schizophrenic time travel goes back to May 1954 and the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. This post-WWII, Cold War-era case set the precedent for dismantling segregation by addressing the legacy of past problems with modern social science. That is, the winning attorneys argued, segregation had major psychological and sociological effects on “Negro” children.
Sometimes I wonder if the confusion over race goes back to Brown, which focused on modern statistics at the expense of arguments based on the centuries-old myths that supported slavery and, significantly, influenced those who drafted the Constitution. (Because the Supreme Court discredits such evidence, the case for slavery reparations always fails.) Did modern statistics simultaneously help usher in the end of segregation and a short window of integration by, ironically, setting precedent in statistical evidence that couldn’t introduce into courts the deep time needed to prevent the premature closure of that window? In other words, did Brown rest too much on the hard, measurable evidence we could graph for the eyes and leave the invisible, pervasive and ancient myths that caused the problem to lurk, adapt, modernize and then return – full of propositions and referenda, and using “dream” rhetoric – wearing the face of Wardell Anthony Connerly?
I hope I don’t have to time travel far to ward off the alarming answer to this tricky conundrum.
Dr. Gregory E. Rutledge is an assistant professor in the English department and the Institute for Ethnic Studies.
3 comments
Mr Rutelege quit trying to be so clever and learn to be smart.