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.