Mirrored Dates

On my desk at work there is a calendar with a quote from Herman Melville, but it wasn’t the quote that got me thinking, it was the dates beside his name: 1819 to 1891. There’s a harmony in those dates: the almost symmetry, the fact he lived to a goodly age. I was born in 1983, and although 1983 to 2038 isn’t as pleasing to the eye (damn millennium, what a let down that was), there is something appealing about the thought of dying then.

That is, as far as thoughts about dying go.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not thinking about dying that much, and I’m not planning to any time soon, but the more I thought about 1983-2038 as I punched holes in reports and filed them, the more sense those dates made.

2038 is thirty years from now. So, if this little dyslexic prophesy is true, I only have thirty years left on this earth, which is only slightly more than I’ve churned through already. Thirty years. It could fly by.

Maybe I’m having the occasional morbid thought because the skull on the cover of the Penguin edition of Under The Volcano stares at me from the corner of my desk (at home) every time I get up from the computer. His mouth is open. He might be saying, “Write now, for tomorrow we die.” Or not.

I’m not one of those young bucks who would rather die than turn sixty – I have nothing against hanging around to see the grandkids grow up, and Philip Roth has show that you can still crank out a novel a year in your seventies.

But I am a fan of goals, targets and motivational ploys (if you hadn’t guessed, look around).

It’s not exactly Carpe Diem, but You have thirty years left could be useful in squeezing more out of howeverlong you get.

This is not a fully formed thought. I am only test driving it on the information superhighway on the off chance I do cark it in 2038 and people will have one of three reactions:

1) Wow, he must have had psychic abilities.

2) It’s sad he died, but at least he died at his perfect age.

3) Who?

The Chronology of Travel, Part Two

(This is the second part of a two part essay... read the first part here.)

The Spiritual Side (and an Extended Basketball Metaphor)

I am very concerned with the progress of time, mortality and all that. Time has moved too fast for me since I was small. I am almost 25, and feel like Adam Smith in Tom Fitzsimon's poem:

Oh, I meant to have done more. …

Oh, I meant for more to be written;
I meant for all
to be well.

Being so caught up with time—its inexorable progress, the You Can Never Step In The Same River Twiceness—is a full-court game. At one end you play defence: you are the Washington Generals playing the Harlem Globetrotters. Time toys with you. There is no way you can stop it from scoring, but you are compelled to try, to tire yourself out. At the other end, you are on offence, but now there is no opposition. The game has ended long ago and you are playing in the moonlight which floods in through the windows high up near the gymnasium roof. The squeak of your sneakers on the hardwood sounds like street racers on a Friday night. The slap of the ball against the court is as loud and constant as you imagine your heart beat. There is no one else, but this is still a game. On your side are memory and imagination. The three of you can summon up the Harlem Globetrotters, but permit you to have the ball, to take the shot, to win the game.

To care about time, and your use of it, is to maximise one attribute: memory. And, with a healthy imagination in tow, you can achieve anything, alone in the gymnasium of your mind.

This is what it is like living a life pressured by time. Time will frustrate you, but in those time-out-of-mind moments when you can recall and cast forwards, remember and imagine, there are small victories. You will never win the championship, but if you cram your life full of unique events (and therefore memorable memories) you may just break .500.

This is why travel—ah, he returns to travel at last—is intoxicating for the hurried, those down on the rocks of time, those with alarm clocks falling on their heads every day, because it leaves you with more memories, more remembered time. And, with a little leap of faith (or a lot of stomping down the intellect) you can see that time is limitless. All you need is memory and imagination.

*

The thing is, though, time isn’t limitless. Sure, it jumps and spits and hiccups, and you can live on fast forward and rewind and pause, but ultimately: you die. Time’s up.

In Part One I said that travelling didn’t stretch time physically, but it did spiritually. Spiritually? I just said that time ends when you die. Well, it’s true that I am not a member of any organised religion, hardly ever think about the existence of a higher power, almost incontrovertibly doubt the possibility of an afterlife (though I fancy reincarnation would be a lark), and, if I’m honest, think what is commonly called new age spiritualism is a load of bunk. But there needs to be a word for what is not physical, and what is not intellectual, and spiritual is the best band aid I can find.

Just as Christians believe in the existence of God beyond logic and reason (the intellect), memory, for me, exists beyond the intellect. I’m sure memory has logic to it, but its own logic. How memories are recalled, the strange, seemingly unconnected stimuli that bring a memory back, is not science. Why some events stick in the memory instead of others cannot be represented by a formula. [Well, maybe it’s a Poisson Distribution, like in Gravity’s Rainbow—I never understood the maths.]

When you stop travelling and look back, it feels like you stretched time. This feeling is spiritual. It is outside of logic and reason. Outside of the physical world. With very few spiritual experiences waiting around the corner these days, travel is an easy fix. And like other fixes, travel is addictive. When you stop, reflect, and compare those times to your life while not travelling, the natural reaction is to plan your next trip.

*

There is another readily available spiritual experience that needn’t involve churches or needles: fiction, preferably good fiction. Sure, there’s a physical side to reading: holding the book, the optics involved in transmitting light rays into thoughts. And there’s an intellectual side: comprehending the words and sentences using the rules of a given language that accrete daily. But something else happens when you read a good story. You are invited into the moonlit gymnasium of someone else’s mind. Beyond the paper and words, there is a spiritual experience.
Writing fiction is to inhabit your own moonlit gymnasium, and, with memory and imagination (and an intellectual knowledge of spelling, grammar and Microsoft Word, and the physical ability to type) you people this space.

The aim of fiction is to squeeze more into life, to permit people to experience more, arm them with memories and massage their imaginations to distort time.

Bad fiction makes you feel like you are standing in Anne Frank’s house as a tourist attraction in 2007: there are four walls and the address is the same, but the heroine feels far away and unsubstantial. ‘Fictional’.

Good fiction gives you memories which are indistinguishable from those acquired from your own experience of the world. The view from Arthur’s Seat and the view from the Marabar Caves.


Footnotes, disclaimers and admissions
1. I know Tom Fitzsimons, but it’s not unusual for young wannabe NZ writers to know each other.
2. Adam Smith lived and died in Edinburgh. I stumbled across his grave, as if guided by an invisible hand.

The Chronology of Travel, Part One

Remembered Time

From June to October this year, I travelled. Some might say I'm still travelling now, even though I've been in Edinburgh two months and will be here at least another twelve. On my travels I've been to houses turned into tourist attractions. Franz Kafka's in Prague, Anne Frank's in Amsterdam, Sherlock Holmes' on Baker Street. All of these people felt fictional when I stood inside these buildings.

I've been to villages in Malawi where the children want pens, pencils and paper more than anything. They get their older siblings to write you notes introducing themselves and asking for you to be their penpal. To these people the written word is still valuable, still contains magic.

I've been hundreds of metres above Victoria Falls in a microlight, and seen the crack that will become the next Vic Falls in ten million years. I've seen what water can do, and wondered if I should commit myself to irrigation rather than literature.

I've been to houses in Italy which do not contain a single book, and may never have contained books. Even the recipes are in their heads.

And now I reside in a city where the main train station is named after a fictional character, the highest monument is to a novelist and there’s a writer on the five pound note (Walter Scott’s Waverly, Walter Scott, Walter Scott). Other writers are remembered here too: Burns, Conan Doyle, Stevenson, and then there are the crime writers who populate Edinburgh with criminals instead of tourists.

Edinburgh is a city of writing. Not reading. Writing. That is partly what drove me to this quest for a million words: to not write in Edinburgh is to cease moving.

*

Sitting alongside the newly discovered ‘to write or not to write’ dichotomy is another, not-quite-complementary, not-quite-conflicting way of viewing life: Travelling and Not Travelling.

Before travelling for an extended period, Not Travelling would have been meaningless to me. It was School, Study, Work, whatever. Now, it's all Not Travelling. Stasis.

The problem with stasis—the irony of stasis—is that time, in retrospect, passes more quickly when you've done nothing. I’m talking about that, “Is it December already?” feeling. The “What have I done the last month and a half?” feeling. I am not talking about the “God, this day is taking forever,” feeling, which is an entirely different animal.

Here, I should probably differentiate between lived time and remembered. Lived time is the ticking of your wristwatch, the three hundred seconds you spend in the shower and the three minute phone calls with suppliers. Remembered time is what you have left of a day, a week, a month, after the fact. The memorable moments: watching the man get talked down from the ledge opposite your office, your landlord admitting he has MS.

Travelling, holidays, anything that takes you out of your routine, your usual settings, makes lived time seem to pass more quickly. You are often too busy to clock-watch. Travellers do not spend an hour pretending to work before they can head out to lunch. Time flies when you’re having fun.

But on reflection—that is: in remembered time—a week spent travelling contains so much more compared to a week not travelling. Looking back, it feels like you stretched time to fit so much more in. You did not, physically, of course. You breathed the same number of breaths, aged another 168 earth hours. But you did, spiritually (if I use this word, I might have to explain my definition… some day).

But why is the reserve of memories from travelling so much greater than those when not travelling? Because of the sameness of workdays, you are often left with a composite day, a metonymic day, one that stands for all similar days; but for travelling, even if you spend a lot of time doing the same things (sitting in trains, eating food, sleeping) you are doing these things in different places, different ways and with different people. Difference permits individual meals to be remembered. What did I have for lunch yesterday? No idea. Every lunch I’ve had at my desk for the past month is trying to get through the one-memory-sized aperture in my brain and as a result: nothing. What did I have for lunch in Venice in August? Quattro Stagioni Pizza. Lunch in a tea plantation in Tanzania? Ham sandwich on brown bread and some pasta salad made from leftovers. In terms of remembered time, travelling consists of a lot of time, working of very little. I suspect this is how people can work in the same job for thirty years: because when they look back, they do not have thirty years of memories to weigh them down.

*

To travel is to fill lived time with moments that can be readily recalled in remembered time. But that is only part of the equation…