The Reinvention of Time Travel

Time Travellers

And maybe it doesn’t matter

who the Traveller is

There can hardly be much doubt

who and what this excursion is about. 

… Why me? 5

No one knew where

I was going before:

I’m now largely sure

sum, ero, eram.

I was, I will be, I am:

don’t ask for more.

because there are unexplored

possibilities in myth …

Time travellers 1: Stones

On the headland overlooking the sea

the stones keep time.

It’s said they dance at the summer solstice,

and some see magic among the menhirs.

There is motion too on an altered scale:

each longstone makes its own revolution

though their slope and slide are always too slow

for the folk of the village below to follow.

It may take a thousand years

for the circle to return,

but whoever stands in their way

will be turned to stone.

Today there are twenty-five,

once there were nine.

 … in art, science …

Time travellers 2: Rewriting history

When Galileo made his telescope

he found motion wrapped in motion like a cloak.

When Descartes saw the fly against the wall

he drew three numbers that would say it all.

Certainty and arrogance once ensured –

and men of faith and wisdom soon concurred –

that history and nature could be tamed,

if consequence and sequence are the same.

Now time’s become disorderly and strange

events no longer seem to cause events

and everything’s unsound and counters sense:

historians, biographers, artists,

even physicists get a second chance,

a third, a fourth, to reconstruct the past.

Some day scientists may with pride opine

how the universe is run to their design.

… and in just thinking differently

How can anything be true

 when it’s all about you?

Time Travellers 3: Unfolding the map

What if time travel is achievable
by somehow escaping the
boundaries of human lifetimes?

Aren’t you tired of being where Now is Always

and Always is Now? If we could beat time

together, we’d beat time; we’d make it ours.

Who wouldn’t escape our world of stasis

to find a phase beyond these grazing tubes

that process energy in gas and food

and leave us net deliverers of waste.

Even those who believe in time travel

can’t believe that it’s possible for them.

But what if there’s a way to make it work

without magic, without technology,

not by becoming more utopian

or more mad, just by being more human?

We’re lacking – trapped inside this strange cocoon

that compacts the means and ends of lifetimes –

the will to touch the doubt before we’re born

and pierce the permanence after we die.

Let’s imagine lying by a mountain lake:

the water laps noiselessly, trapped like ice,

trees keep their breath, the crisp sun seems to flake,

and bird shapes are stayed in air like kites.

Could we, in that perfect motionlessness,

aspire not to some mystic “mindfulness”,

or states where we leave our minds behind us,

but to patience, openness, enquiry.

and find ourselves instead rocked like the pulse

of lakewater, wings, willow or daylight,

rolled unnoticed by the moon’s rotation

or the planet’s lolling pose through the year.

Surely it’s not too dreadful to be ready

for something natural when we’re alone …

… to contemplate the birth of those unknown,

drink champagne with elders about to die

and celebrate their deaths while we’re still young –

so we can feel the pulse of other times

in which we have a stake, changing those names

we have rarely heard to moments and place,

to be speaking face to face, age to age.

The old and young experience life
at different speeds; perhaps these
perceptions could be shared.

The rout of time means nothing to the young;

it runs too slow, but quickens over years.

In old age we’ll mistakenly perceive

it to flash away, daunting, deserting us

in its brutal familiarity.

Yet to the timekeeper’s stopwatch and lens,

our aging selves are fixed in comforting

histories, sensitive to the least breeze

when all that’s left is retreat and decline. 

Finally the present is beyond control:

we may be angry, fearful, disappointed,

perhaps quiescent as our craft prepares

to dock out there in that interstellar

backwater where we will soon disappear.

There’s no way we can buy more time,

and keep command; but with humanity

and foresight there’s a chance we might find life.

We may each want different ends but,
ends are what they are.

Most likely, we have long since closed our eyes

to everything but pleasures and panics;

our view is vague and contemporary.

An After and Before have both ceased to exist:

had we sat with Wordsworth above the Wye

we’d just have talked of weather that July.

Since nothing guarantees that we’ll survive,

convictions too make opaque enemies

as we glide in blindness to extinction.

So, whether we require our deaths to mark

abandonment on a tideline of Mars,

a fully conscious landing in Eden,

a jarring halt of fatal collision,

or rust from lying in one place too long,

in any one of these states – any weak end

of disenfranchisement and separation –

we’ll never get to choose our leaving speed.

Yet with this wilful winnowing demise

of creativity, hope and wonder

we will have missed the chance for living on.

Instead, maybe, we’re craving to embrace

what’s to come, but reveal through our campaign

the more we try, the further it escapes

our grasp till we’re stranded, broken by pain,

in a place that seems almost like today –

always strange and deserted by the chase.

Relations we’ve lived with may
have direct knowledge of the
distant past.

Then if our nose is pressed hard on future panes

we hardly notice doors behind us shut.

But grandfathers and grandmothers who sat

us on their knees when we were three have seen

Victoria as queen. Their grandparents

might have mentioned they’d met Darwin down lanes

at Downe as always seeking evidence,

or brushed in London Streets with Wellington,

a pompous oaf who wanted them to know

they’re pitiful, like Frogs he’d overthrown

two hundred years ago at Waterloo.

Return is hopeless now; the family

connection’s lost. Fragments which once were lives

only thrive in fictions and scholarly

reconstructions that celebrate olde tymes.

It’s not necessary to reject 
science in order to see possibilities
for travelling in time.

Time travel is impossible, we’re told;

the future is a cosmic roulette wheel,

and trails that lead back to the past are cold.

So the offal of opinion must prevail.

Thinking men and women fiercely maintain

anyone resisting this proscription,

or assisting devious delusions –

like New Age fantasists who bisque belief,

and random scammers, slicksters, quacks and liars –

must be unmasked and marked for their mischief

in twisting physics and maligning science.

Reality is not some flexible

philosophy for lost and hopeless crews,

it’s not religion found in prison cells

when men with convictions compound their new

and caring god with caring for themselves.

Science itself may bruise and confuse us

with honest contradictions which confine

our perspective to whatever it chooses

as provable when deconstructing time.

So some lose trust in the ever-changing sketch

of “facts” and “truths”, and draw their own conclusions,

while those like us, less willing to object

to bare numbers stripped of their allusions,

are more inclined to demand theory

is verified before we close dissent

on travels in time.

Wait though, we really

could walk out on this persistent present,

and still pursue an itinerant cause

without abusing universal laws.

Human ingenuity can find a
way to make this happen.

Old explorers groped in icy dark to gouge

Pacific trade routes from America’s

east coast through the North West Passage,

and died in frozen wastes without eurekas!

Today our madness and technologies

can thaw the glaciers and free the sea,

turn pink wishes into more-than-maybes;

Then surely patience and integrity

can also melt the forward floe of clocks.

A species perfect in insanity,

that’s set so helplessly on self-destruct,

can’t possibly evade its own vanity

and deny itself new ways to baffle:

here then is the Invention of Time Travel:

History might be revolutionised 
if young and old 
communicated in new ways.

Let’s say in old age we could overcome

the instinct to surrender to our past,

to kick nostalgic sentimental trips,

and instead reach full charge from energy

that flows two ways in the effervescent

and absorbent minds of our unshaped young.

We may not focus well on far off things

at first. But here’s the spark: this uncanny

outbreak of empathy reveals us as

accessible and individual,

clean to close voids between generations.

Imagine: children and elderly alike

disintegrate their worlds, then realign

to impersonate the inverse rim of life –

young man of ninety meets wise child of nine.

Thus we can make a vivid history

available and newly relevant

to those who will be looking back at us

from their vantage points decades out ahead.

We’ll see the more the mists around us clear,

the sharper their horizons are from here.

And so to the heart and brain and inwards

of travelling time: each of us will blaze

only if we play two ways, both forwards

and back, like light waves in a single phase.

It needs the resolute, the mild, the tough –

the sanely obsessive who hope to touch

and be touched by the future and the past –

to forge unbroken chains that link and cast

fate with faces, centuries with patience,

and unite cascading generations.

So, with care, perception, judgement, instinct

we’ll lay a circuit of the years to meet:

though we’re billions, it will be sufficient

if just one crew can make our race complete.

It would hard to let go of the present – 
and early pioneers are likely to fail.

One more obstacle remains, and this reveals

why no one has taken this route before.

We humans mostly separate ourselves

by trust – those pleased to wait for the future

and those who see salvation in the past.

Some choose to strain their necks for what they know,

while others limpet-like are rooted fast

to the present with nowhere else to go.

But a rare few venture out for freedom,

knowing time-mates could be there to meet them.

From them will trickle time-trip pioneers

like early settlers of the Earth and Mars,

Fatigue and failure may define their graves,

but their efforts will inspire further waves

of heroes to code for gates and pathways

on frail circles of families and friends.

In time their faithful feedback could rephrase

the fuzzy logic of our means and ends,

of everything we’ve tried, what works and when.

And so our options and our judgement grow;

wisdom in our age, in all ages, flows

as history becomes a way to learn

and less a trick to make the past return.

Co-operation and equality
would be essential.

Little today prepares us to conceive

a world that’s born transgenerational,

though global mutuality in science

provides a host of valid parallels

in collaboration – for invention

and discovery and for public good.

Time travellers won’t use phones or ESP,

or employ links that are transcendental;

their tools are talk and serendipity.

Mass co-operation’s fundamental;

no one would participate in regimes

of these durations, except as equals.

And travellers will confirm clear terms

of engagement when they meet, protocols

for sisters as they reach ageless brothers

where no one’s worth is more than any other.

Sure, egos and rivalries can be a means

to extend, but not be the end of, knowledge,

(grubby money often seeds our garden,

but healthy fruit alone feed everyone);

If sleazy “Dead Relation Trips” attract

an odd time-rich indolent slob, so what?

Before we take offence, we should accept

the fact that they must also show respect

and learn to value people more than cats.

Then earning respect and
overcoming the cult of individuality
would bring benefits to everyone …

Here then are three compelling benefits

if centuries and citizens could mix:

how silent generations might connect,

how everyone earns value and respect,

how myths mature to truths we might protect.

The cult of individuality

can die if we are we, not you and I. 

What if this strange advice is sound?

when I surf time will all my identities –

invented and pretended and the real –

come to an end? Will I be vapourised?

Or will truth of me continue in new friends?

… and this would not 
be all about the Traveller

Is it really the end if I’m not free

to agitate that it’s not about me?

Time Travellers 4: Inheritants

My grandfather, son, granddaughters and heirs

stand with me to stare on the plains of Mars;

we are stalled by immensity, diminished by stars.

No one’s ever been in a place so sparse

to learn what stillness and peace might teach us

about communication’s power and weakness,

when we need eloquence, when plain speeches,

and how long the wait till others reach us.

Then back in the real world …

Alaunodunum.

I met a child with Asian roots

on the steps of some museum

she’d come by thumb in football boots

for refuge with a distant cousin.

She’d escaped a brutal state

that trains the young to hold a gun

and randomly delineate

between their kin and neighbour scum.

She caught my eye and read my thoughts

and asked about the vestiges

of argument in these reports:

“So what’s the sense of messages

or the end of expeditions?

Who files their saws with platitudes,

writes rights-of-passage off as missions?

Do landmarks change their attitudes?”

She’d come on routes of reverence –

Lumbini, Varanasi, Mecca –

a third of earth’s circumference,

for a life that’s safer, better.

She’d travelled light, brought no outcome

from Gaza or Jerusalem –

turned up, turned out without a home

in far flung Alaunodunum.

I’d come from sludge beside the Thames

exuding pride and privilege,

assuming I could make words gems

in lassitude and drivellage.

My Destiny’s a nice hotel,

whose doors revolve for my return,

while she had forged a way through hell

and watched behind real bridges burn.

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