“Hurry up, please, it’s time!”
T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland
I have always been fascinated by time, the passage of time, the effects of time. Even as a boy, at midnight on New Year’s Eve, I burned the past year’s freshly-completed calendar as if to signify that its time was truly gone. Even today, I mark off the days on my calendar one at a time as if to anchor time. Today is done, I think drawing a diagonal mark across the box with the date, tomorrow awaits.
And the older I get, the more the years fly by. I often remind my colleagues at Southwest Minnesota State University that I originally intended to stay here three years. We came in 1989. I assured myself, “three years and onto somewhere closer to family, somewhere with a warmer climate.” Three years has grown into nearly twenty-two.
Wordsworth speaks of “a spot of time.” He is so accurate when he explains that some moments in our lives become significant at the exact moment they happen and then also take on more or shaded meaning(s) as we move away from those events. A visit to a monument, for example, can come to mean much more than the actual trek there. In his case, his first visit to Tintern Abbey and second visit with his sister five years later both took on deep meaning. The ruined Abbey hadn’t changed all that much in the five years between his visits, but his life had. He saw those ruins in such a different light the second time. And on his repeat visit, he also saw them as his sister, experiencing them for the first time, would have. It was as though he knew this experience two or three different “times” at once.
He is so impressed with his experiences, he is so sure of their current and future influences on him, that he states that he knows the memories of these visits will bring him such happiness and support “In which the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world, / Is lightened.” Indeed, these visits are so powerful to him he senses that such experiences allow us all to “see into the life of things.” These aren’t just tourist destinations; these are spiritual events with mythic, life-changing consequences. He gladly acknowledges “with pleasing thoughts / That in this moment there is life and food / For future years.”
Wordsworth and others have noted this. I think it’s the job of the poet, the artist, (photographer, novelist, essayist) to arrest us to a moment we might otherwise not notice, ones we habitually overlook.
Today, a colleague and I were speaking of Harper Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird has been relegated to adolescent coming-of-age LIT by so many, but its enduring force still surges for many young readers. In perfect pitch Lee wrote a depiction of a time and place in our history that (for the most part) is gone, but which still lurks in many parts of our society although in more nuanced and subtle ways.
Looking at the stark, blatant racism of the Deep South in the Depression fixes the attention of high school readers today, arrests the attention of many who hardly know the significance of a black man as president. That’s a fact (Obama in the White House) they can just take for granted. Blacks already populate their sports and entertainment world, their school lunchrooms (as teachers and students not just janitors) and their TV screen: the news, weather, sports are all brought to us by a shifting palette of American colors, not just European White (and Male)—the TV skin tone of my youth.
Compare how Mockingbird has stayed with the young readers of today while Catcher in the Rye has diminished. Holden Caulfield no longer jives with youth because his world was so narrow that today it seems stilted and privileged. Scout’s world is mostly gone, except maybe in the Tea Party’s image of what America should return to, but her world is alive with variety and promise. Holden’s isn’t. His cynicism is old hat; it’s this generation’s cynicism now. Our youth sense Scout’s optimism; they’re drawn to it. As cynical as they are, our youth are repelled by Holden’s self-loathing righteousness. It is too much their own pessimism.
My fascination with time drew me to science fiction. I devoured the classics from Jules Verne to H. G. Wells to Bradbury. I grew up with Spock and Kirk first-hand, before syndication and without spinoffs. Star Trek was raw, laughable special effects—that a ten-year-old can do on a desktop today—but I was loyally, glued to the screen of possibility: diversity (only we didn’t call it that then), intelligence winning over superstition and ignorance, and of course other-worldly adventure. I stood in line for three hours to see the original Star Wars on that second day it opened. I ended up seeing it five times within the next month, always with fresh eyes.
My own speculative fiction, The Marsco Saga, forces readers to pay attention to time. As much as I love Dr. Who, I don’t play any tricks with “time warps” or “dual times” or “overlapping realities.” Marsco time is the gritty look at our time with all its flaws, played out to the least desirable extreme. Earth, 2092. Marsco dominates the planet and solar system out to the asteroid colonies with the time-honored strategy of naked power. As democracies run their course and collapse, they begin disenfranchising their citizens who are least educated, the most costly in terms of social services and the least likely to produce any profits. This puts a bit of the “Third World” next to every developed city or area around the globe. Nations downsize. And they protect themselves with barbed wire and checkpoints, surveillance, and armed troops. They select and screen who can use their vast computer network, the only one left standing.
The Marsco World is a world not so different from our own, exaggerated for effect but not as speculative as we would wish. I have posted a few chapters of The Marsco Dissident on this blog and hope you enjoy them. This summer, I plan to have the first two novels, The Marsco Dissident and Marsco Triumphant available for e-book download. I hope you will take the opportunity—and time—to enjoy them.
T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland
I have always been fascinated by time, the passage of time, the effects of time. Even as a boy, at midnight on New Year’s Eve, I burned the past year’s freshly-completed calendar as if to signify that its time was truly gone. Even today, I mark off the days on my calendar one at a time as if to anchor time. Today is done, I think drawing a diagonal mark across the box with the date, tomorrow awaits.
And the older I get, the more the years fly by. I often remind my colleagues at Southwest Minnesota State University that I originally intended to stay here three years. We came in 1989. I assured myself, “three years and onto somewhere closer to family, somewhere with a warmer climate.” Three years has grown into nearly twenty-two.
Wordsworth speaks of “a spot of time.” He is so accurate when he explains that some moments in our lives become significant at the exact moment they happen and then also take on more or shaded meaning(s) as we move away from those events. A visit to a monument, for example, can come to mean much more than the actual trek there. In his case, his first visit to Tintern Abbey and second visit with his sister five years later both took on deep meaning. The ruined Abbey hadn’t changed all that much in the five years between his visits, but his life had. He saw those ruins in such a different light the second time. And on his repeat visit, he also saw them as his sister, experiencing them for the first time, would have. It was as though he knew this experience two or three different “times” at once.
He is so impressed with his experiences, he is so sure of their current and future influences on him, that he states that he knows the memories of these visits will bring him such happiness and support “In which the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world, / Is lightened.” Indeed, these visits are so powerful to him he senses that such experiences allow us all to “see into the life of things.” These aren’t just tourist destinations; these are spiritual events with mythic, life-changing consequences. He gladly acknowledges “with pleasing thoughts / That in this moment there is life and food / For future years.”
Wordsworth and others have noted this. I think it’s the job of the poet, the artist, (photographer, novelist, essayist) to arrest us to a moment we might otherwise not notice, ones we habitually overlook.
Today, a colleague and I were speaking of Harper Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird has been relegated to adolescent coming-of-age LIT by so many, but its enduring force still surges for many young readers. In perfect pitch Lee wrote a depiction of a time and place in our history that (for the most part) is gone, but which still lurks in many parts of our society although in more nuanced and subtle ways.
Looking at the stark, blatant racism of the Deep South in the Depression fixes the attention of high school readers today, arrests the attention of many who hardly know the significance of a black man as president. That’s a fact (Obama in the White House) they can just take for granted. Blacks already populate their sports and entertainment world, their school lunchrooms (as teachers and students not just janitors) and their TV screen: the news, weather, sports are all brought to us by a shifting palette of American colors, not just European White (and Male)—the TV skin tone of my youth.
Compare how Mockingbird has stayed with the young readers of today while Catcher in the Rye has diminished. Holden Caulfield no longer jives with youth because his world was so narrow that today it seems stilted and privileged. Scout’s world is mostly gone, except maybe in the Tea Party’s image of what America should return to, but her world is alive with variety and promise. Holden’s isn’t. His cynicism is old hat; it’s this generation’s cynicism now. Our youth sense Scout’s optimism; they’re drawn to it. As cynical as they are, our youth are repelled by Holden’s self-loathing righteousness. It is too much their own pessimism.
My fascination with time drew me to science fiction. I devoured the classics from Jules Verne to H. G. Wells to Bradbury. I grew up with Spock and Kirk first-hand, before syndication and without spinoffs. Star Trek was raw, laughable special effects—that a ten-year-old can do on a desktop today—but I was loyally, glued to the screen of possibility: diversity (only we didn’t call it that then), intelligence winning over superstition and ignorance, and of course other-worldly adventure. I stood in line for three hours to see the original Star Wars on that second day it opened. I ended up seeing it five times within the next month, always with fresh eyes.
My own speculative fiction, The Marsco Saga, forces readers to pay attention to time. As much as I love Dr. Who, I don’t play any tricks with “time warps” or “dual times” or “overlapping realities.” Marsco time is the gritty look at our time with all its flaws, played out to the least desirable extreme. Earth, 2092. Marsco dominates the planet and solar system out to the asteroid colonies with the time-honored strategy of naked power. As democracies run their course and collapse, they begin disenfranchising their citizens who are least educated, the most costly in terms of social services and the least likely to produce any profits. This puts a bit of the “Third World” next to every developed city or area around the globe. Nations downsize. And they protect themselves with barbed wire and checkpoints, surveillance, and armed troops. They select and screen who can use their vast computer network, the only one left standing.
The Marsco World is a world not so different from our own, exaggerated for effect but not as speculative as we would wish. I have posted a few chapters of The Marsco Dissident on this blog and hope you enjoy them. This summer, I plan to have the first two novels, The Marsco Dissident and Marsco Triumphant available for e-book download. I hope you will take the opportunity—and time—to enjoy them.
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