Writers as travellers in time.
How
do you like your history? Do you prefer it linear or layered?
As
writers we get to move freely through time. We can set our fiction in the past,
present or future and our characters can even move from one time period to
another as we allow time to shift or slip around them. If we write non-fiction,
it can be a personal record of the past by way of a biography or memoir, or an
analytical record of past events; it can involve speculation about the future
by extrapolation form where we are now, or
it can chronicle the present as, for example, so many bloggers do.
Then
there's creative non-fiction. Writers in this genre can really blur the timelines.
Some blur them beautifully as they muse on past and present - H is for Hawk by
Helen Macdonald and On the Shorelines of Knowledge by Chris Arthur - being two
fine examples. My current personal favourite is Robert Macfarlane who just
writes so beautifully about the etching of time on our landscape, in its high
places and in the rocks beneath our feet.
As
I say elsewhere in this issue, I studied history as part of my MA degree. My
other subject was psychology. So I suppose it's not surprising that I'm
fascinated by the nature of time, by how we humans measure it and perceive it.
And I've also noticed as both parent and grandparent, and of course as a
teacher, how children often perceive time in a more intense way than adults,
but also in a more fluid way. The year between a seventh and eighth birthday is
much longer than the year between a fifty-seventh and a fifty-eighth one. Last
week is as far away as a decade ago. It's no accident that so much of
children's fiction involves flexibility in the laws of time and space.
On
the subject of time and space, I was equal parts enthralled and bewildered by
Professor Brian Cox's BBC television series on quantum physics and its relation
to time. But what the programme did confirm for me was that there's more to
history than the linear approach.
When
considering history whether in terms of personal, national or world events, we
tend to think in terms of a timeline. Even when going very far back to
pre-history and the beginnings of human life, we still tend to view all that
has happened in a one-event-after-another sort of way. Days in history in one
long line.
In
each twenty-four hour period things happen, have always happened. Some of these
things are considered important enough to be noted down. Long ago they may have
been recorded as cave paintings, chiselled onto stone tablets or scribed on
parchment scrolls. More recently they'd be published in newspapers, journals
and books, and of, course on the internet. And those recorded events provide reference
points on the timeline. They're there to be read, understood and interpreted.
They're there to give structure and meaning and a bit of an underpinning to our
lives.
I
find it fascinating, in a weird sort of way, that there's a date every year
that will become the anniversary of my own death. Yes, I'm at an age where I'm
aware of time passing, of my own mortality and the end to my own personal
timeline. It's not something that scares me exactly, but I don't want it to
come around just yet.
I
try to make each day count, I try not to waste time and I try to be mindful of this
day in my own history. I strive to enjoy the gift of the present and to leave
my own tiny, but positive, marks in time.
This
day in history, its moments, its joys and disasters, it's all we ever truly
possess. However, we can be so pressed for time that we often experience our
days as fleeting. We wish we could fit more in, wish we had more leisure and
more time for our loved ones. On the other hand, on some days the hours pass too
slowly, filled with yearning for days gone by, or perhaps with impatience for
days still to come.
So,
what of all those other days? Days of past and future history. Are they truly
inaccessible; the past behind us and the future further on up the line? What if
we imagine history as layered rather than linear? So instead of looking back,
or even forward at a particular day in history, we look down and through.
Time
for some lateral thinking.
We
live on a small but beautiful, very old planet that spins in an ancient and
vast universe. Contemplating history and the passage of time on a planetary or
universal scale is truly mind-bending.
Astrophysicists
view time as a fourth dimension. They suggest not only that time can bend, but
that it flows at different rates depending on location. They posit that its
rate of flow is relative to the other dimensions of space and to the amount of
gravity that is present.
The
everyday, human version of time is just a construct. A useful construct, and
one that facilitates the organisation of our lives, but a construct
nevertheless. Our clocks and calendars measure something that is relative and
is organised in neat lines and circles by a shared understanding and agreement.
But it's not fixed and it's not absolute.
Supposing
I left the Earth today and travelled on out of our solar system and our galaxy.
Suppose I went through a wormhole - a bend in time and space that would let me
travel hundreds of thousands of light years in a blink, perhaps even to another
of the possibly many universes - I would be far away, not just in spatial terms,
but in terms of time as well. And then, after maybe a couple of years
holidaying on a far away world, I return to Earth. I would be two years older
but it's theoretically possible that fifty, a hundred, maybe five hundred years
would have passed here. My days in history would be very different from, and
totally out of step with, those of you
who remained earthbound .
I
don't fully understand the astro-physical concept of time and space, but I like
the idea of it. I find it comforting that time isn't fixed and that the atoms
that make up our bodies have existed since time began, and will always exist in
some form as long as time continues to be.
I
love that when I walk the Earth's surface my footfalls connect me with all the
layers of life and time on our wee blue planet. Layers of geology, topography,
ancestry, experience and time. Layers not limited by days, months and
lifespans.
I
love the possibility that all my days could exist simultaneously and forever,
all of them layered up, down and through the planet's physical layers and
throughout all the multiverses. I love that I might magically get a glimpse of
these other days. I love that, even if it's just in theory, there could be
places in time and space where my days in history have other and infinite
possibilities.
I
love that time is immeasurable, and I love that the marks we make on it are
immeasurably small.
I
love that as writers we can, at least for a short while, make time do our
bidding.
Anne Stormont is an author-publisher.
She can be a subversive old bat but maintains a kind heart. As well as writing
for this fine organ, she writes fiction for adults – mainly of the female-of-a-certain-age persuasion – and
for children. She blogs at http://putitinwriting.me – where you can find out lots more about
her.
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