En Francais

I'm in France this week, filming a promotional video for an exchange program our college has with the University of Bordeaux, and doing my best to play the role of a jet-setting photog type. I think I'd need one of those ratty Turkish neckerchiefs to do the part justice, maybe some chest hair and gold-rimmed sunglasses. Oh well. C'est la vie.

I've found that the mythology usually recasts itself significantly while I'm traveling. The worlds I create in my mind are like a strangely-wrought defense mechanism; they help me contextualize the events of my day in a way that I can process without constantly overturning my foundational beliefs. Though the parts generally stay the same (with periodic additions), the construction of the whole mythological world is always shifting to accommodate the needs of the moment. I'm inclined to think of this as a weakness, an addiction even, because it means I'm often not really taking things at face value, only selectively digesting those useful to my secret project. But it also may be a bit of a wash - I'm not convinced that anyone can fully embrace other cultures without some filtering through their own, and if my system doesn't lend itself towards hasty judgment of others' actions and beliefs than I could probably be doing a lot worse. This is my first time in the land of the frogs, so naturally my addictive self has been on the lookout for new mythological fodder.

Last night Sean (my colleague) and I attended a speech at the Bordeaux museum of modern art. It was being simul-translated by our correspondent with the University here, so we were there out of respect to her, not knowing ahead of time anything about the actual presentation. The subject was utopian architecture, focusing on a post-modernist "anti-architect" from the 1950's by the name of Yona Friedman and his gang of like-minded anarchist buddies. The work itself consisted of a series of crude geometric shapes overlaid on crappy photographs of Paris. But with each variation of that theme, with each minute change in sloppily applied color, the presenter had prepared a lengthy and exuberant discourse on the pure bliss of Friedman's genius. It was really about the most pretentious thing I've ever experienced, and I don't say that with disdain as much as with bemused wonder that the speaker could deliver the whole thing with a straight face. What looked to be a five-year-old's scrawled rendition of the planet became a prophetical journey into the networks of the future, an environment-creating machine, a discourse on the horizontal and vertical ideals, a land of dreams created by dreams, a confused, uncertain meditation on desire, private property and sex.

And the room was pretty full - and people were listening to the French translation through their headphones, enraptured. Sure, it was interesting in a removed, intellectual sort of way, but I was wondering the entire time how this phenomenon could have spear-headed an entire movement, when none of it, literally not a scrap of it, even existed. It wasn't even style without substance, but simply nothing. There were no buildings, no plans, no output. This man had devoted his life to the absence of a concept. Some lines on paper, and the words dream and architecture volleyed back and forth in every permutation available. In my professional opinion, we were listening to a lengthy justification of one man's creative reaction to his own personal experience of the world around him. And because we were doing that, his work existed a little more than my own mythology does. The difference being, this guy's life-long dedication to self-indulgence made him a hero (at least, in the eyes of this largish French audience).

I'm not jealous, if that's the reaction I seem to be getting at. I doubt this Friedman guy is very happy, after being allowed to delve this much for this long into his own disconnected psychological musings. What I am wondering, is whether someone like this could achieve the same level of fame now. In the 1950's I think trends were probably easier to pick up on. Mass media was still a debatable concept, and culture was more localized, more easily manipulated by some especially charismatic figure. By contrast, culture no longer faces a glass ceiling of exposure. The internet means that every idea in the world is equally available to everyone at any given time, and people can hop on and off of thought-trains on a whim; there's no scarcity of culture to drive the demand. It also means that people can wholly invent their own culture, which I think I've more or less done.

In a broader sense, I think the internet means that everyone must invent their own culture, that this activity is no longer limited to nihilistic post-modern artists. For example, living in France doesn't necessarily mean that you subscribe to French culture, except for maybe the stereotypical trappings clung to tightly by tourist bureaus: cheese, duck-fat, chain-smoking, etc. There's no reason that a person in France isn't wearing American jeans, watching Japanese TV shows and drinking Chilean wine. In fact, I think that's exactly what French people are doing. Or some of them, anyway. Others have chosen a different mish-mash of cultural elements to call their own. As is everyone else in the first world, choosing the bits of culture that resonate personally with them. This is one of the things I'm most obsessed with, and it feeds directly into post-time.

Now, what I'm suggesting here hasn't yet been fully realized. There are still swatches of culture that can be pinned down pretty neatly to certain geographical areas (like, for example, the fame of Yona Friedman, on a night when Grey's Anatomy was probably on). But I think that's where it's headed, and I defy anyone to come up with a convincing argument that it's headed some place else.

Time Travel is Stupid, I Know, But I Can't Help It

Just to dredge up Southland Tales one more time, about half-way through the third act some basic expository dialogue lets us in on the "crux" of the plot: a rift in the fourth dimension (space/time) has opened up somewhere near Lake Meade, and as a result, many of the characters have been traveling through time all along. This is also meant to explain the weird behavior of the movie's supposed 'twin brothers' (thought it doesn't). Not until the fourth season of Lost do we get time travel as premise - Heroes had it from the start, but lost most of its audience when it became an easy solution to every problem in the second season. More directly science-fictiony stuff always gets there eventually, as does fantasy set in the current day (ie Superman), but that's a more natural progression.

Anyway, this is all in support of the argument I'd like to make that given enough time (and forgive the meta-pun), time travel will find its way into a mythology. If the world of the story isn't pre-limited, and one obsessive visionary (or in a pinch, a team of television producers) is given free reign to let the world continually incubate, expanding and growing beyond its wildest ambitions, then eventually the biggest thing that can happen will happen, and the only corner left to turn, though stupid, will be the ability to travel through time.

And sure, its introduced most regularly as a convenient fix for bad storytelling. It allows writers to kill off an entire cast in one blow, or detonate the planet without pesky repercussions. Also, it just doesn't make any sense, and no storyteller can really craft the web tight enough to sufficiently cover the gaping holes in logic and causality that result from the effort. But there it is anyway, time and time again (more incidental meta puns for your consideration), rearing its head usually when an audience is already fully committed to a world, so that maybe its sins will be looked upon more lightly.

Time travel is stupid, and obvious, and already done. Yes. But, as previously mentioned, my mythology also features time travel, and although it definitely is, I can't shake the conviction that it's somehow not as stupid, obvious and already done as all those other times.

I mentioned it in relation to Swedenborg, and I've had one of my avatars expound upon it further here , but I've never really gotten to the heart of what it's all about, mostly because I don't think I can. The thing is, my rationale for time travel isn't really a succinct and easy-to-encapsulate central premise, but more a loose constellation of concepts and observations that I've willfully taken out of context and crocheted into a blotchy quilt called post-time. It does involve cellular technology, Swedenborg's description of spiritual time, and the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012, but narrowing it down more than that gets pretty tricky and convoluted.

I can tell you that I was initially struck by the idea in a college English class, while contemplating the observation that until a couple-hundred years ago, a person could know everything there was to know. All of the collected wisdom of art, science and literature was finite enough that it could be attained by a single person in one lifetime, and a handful of scholars and 'renaissance men' did just that. And then science grew too big for its britches, and since then the percentage of overall knowledge that a person can collect has been steadily shrinking, so that each generation of scientist or scholar must choose a smaller and smaller niche of study in order to achieve mastery of their subject. I was thinking about this in terms momentum. If this is a trend, where is it headed? Will we keep splitting fractions forever, defining a perpetual asymptote of scholarly ambition, or will we eventually transcend knowledge altogether? Okay, that sounds stupid, but now think about the Internet. As people are able to retain less and less in the grand scheme of knowledge, the Internet has made it so that the availability of knowledge is increasing at an inversely proportional rate (let's just say it is, for the sake of argument). The time it takes to attain knowledge is also decreasing steadily, to the point where I'm incensed if it takes longer than a fifteen second wikipedia search to find out something I don't know. So, to recap, our knowledge of the world and our ability to access that knowledge is increasing steadily every day; but, as a result, any given person knows less and less about the total state of affairs as time goes on, while they study more in-depth the nuances of a particular subject. Another result: ADD. We've all got it. There's just too much to know, and too many different items of information in a single day (or minute) that we need to access at any given point. It's all about learning quickly now, and not about still knowing it a day from now (because we can just learn it again tomorrow). People a hundred years ago would spend ten years learning one stupid thing, and now I'm ready to abandon the venture if I can't achieve satisfying results in the first couple minutes (and I may be an extreme case, I'll grant you that, but I don't even technically have ADD, and I promise you my kids will be even more impatient than I am).

So, lots of stuff. But, where does it all lead? For me, and my obsessive thematic mythology, it results in a world where people eventually have instantaneous access to all the information in the world, but at the same time zero ability to retain any of it. And so everyone is forced to live purely in the moment, unaware of what came before and unprepared for what will come next, existing practically in post-time.

I don't think it would actually work as a premise, but the office show iteration of the mythology that's currently grinding away like an ambitious round of Animal Crossing in my head sure thinks it would. Because although the results would be the same for every character in the mythology (the ability for time travel, for example, since no one would retain anything anyway, thus obviating the dangers of interfering with their past) they could each have their own perspective on what it meant. A Historian figure might draw on the rationale I just espoused, but a more quietly religious figure could just attribute it to the apocalyptic "end-times", as in, the end of time. When the 5000 year Mayan Calendar runs out in 2012, maybe time will just stop running.

And though it may seem stupid to have a cast of characters who couldn't remember what just happened to them, the beautiful thing is that it wouldn't actually matter, because normal people don't really act on the basis of what's just happened to them either. The way I see it, most people interact with reality on a day-to-day basis according to a set of preconceived themes. A life-long cop may begin to look at everything in terms of criminal and non-criminal; a psychologist, in terms of known disorders and defense mechanisms; a historian according to recorded historical precedent, etc. I know I'm obsessed with the world inside my head, but I think everyone else is too, just that most people happily mistake their interpretation of the world with how the world actually works. This explains why children tend to vote like their parents (or the opposite of their parents), and why one person's terrorist will always be another's hero. I'm venturing into some pretty preachy and over-generalized waters here, so I'll stop, but I'd like to just leave you with with the wisps of truth beneath the stereotypes and cliches I've laid out.

But what am I doing, defending myself? This isn't therapeutic at all! In fact, I think I'm back-pedaling. I can leave the Undigestible Man if I have to, and I can live without the Fish Master in a second, but if and when I do fall of the wagon it will be because of time travel.