ONCE A MEDIUM

But what about reality?

Logically, the greatest writers should be newspaper reporters. Oh, yes, they also intensify, diminish, dramatise, censor -more so, perhaps, than any writer of fiction; but they write, dictate, at the time immediately after the events they report. And this must cut out a tremendous amount of distortion. The library shelves are packed with novels wherein the author portrays happenings that have been 'moulded.' to fit the writers ' desire; to please the reader. The tale is told as the author wishes it had happened; or, more usually, purely as a product of the author's imagination. Again, this is authorship, I know; but I would not wish to be such an author. The extreme of such writing must be the romantic novel; an art form which has always left me cold, but which has made fortunes for many authors fortunate enough to be able to churn out such romantic stories.

But what about reality?

I ask myself - knowing my humanity and fallibility - and knowing that I also live with a mind conditioned by past experience right up to NOW, - is it possible to set down reality in print? Has it been done? I think not.

If one could set down simple and true reality, unvarnished and unchanged, would it be merely boring, like a textbook? Disgusting and repulsive, as life can so often be? Sad, funny, exhilarating? Or all of these and much more?

Who'd want to read it, anyway, when one is living it? So to try and set down true reality is attempting the impossible. The next best thing must be to examine the aspects of life that most confound us. Which, for me, means firstly - Time.

One of the greatest human tragedies is Time. The fact of always being at the spot marked 'Now'. The irrevocable past closes behind us as we draw each breath. The unpredictable and unavoidable future dangles before each of us, like multitudes of carrots before donkeys. And we live our lives mostly on the basis of faith in the future. We can hope for the best. We can fear the worst. But whatever is coming will come, that's for sure. The moving finger never stops writing. It is generally regarded as a blessing, this automatic closure of the past behind us. What has gone before may influence us now, and may affect our future living. The lingering effects of old causes permeate through Time like ghostly tentacles reaching out to embrace us as we move forward; but nothing concrete can come back; physically, the past is dead. All the people of yesterday are dead and gone, even though the places they inhabited remain. Why, you can go on an archaeological dig and find their remains, and the bits and pieces of their old daily living.

And this, to my mind, is tragic.

The older one gets, I suppose, the more frequently and strongly one is assailed by nostalgic memories of other days. For me, this extends farther back than just painting rosy pictures of one's personal past. The human mind is adept at discarding the painful and retaining anything that boosts the ego. Ask almost anyone about the blackest period of their past. The world may have been shaking to the tread of invading armies, the air vibrant with bombing planes, the crematoria chimneys belching their smoke, yet still the individual will be able to recall to you the treasured little memories of personal events during that period, even though it were only a kind word from a fellow human.

If a man was buried to the chin in mud, and the mud receded an inch, the recession would swiftly be attributed to divine intervention, and become a treasured recollection. The remaining five feet or so of mud would be swiftly relegated to the background of memory. The inch of respite is - naturally - all that matters.

This oyster-like process goes on in all of us, continually. The piece of grit becomes a pearl as time passes.

As earlier remarked about authorship, past personal experience is often warped and embroidered. We make the facts over and re-present them to ourselves, as we would prefer them to have been. We remember the soft kiss and forget the sharp blow. Or, if we cannot forget, we emphasise the one and diminish the other.

This process is directly due to the pressures of Time. Our brains - or memories - have not the capacity to remember every second of every hour of every day of every year of the past; so we condense or embroider to make it fit; to keep it manageable. It is significant that under hypnosis almost anything, from any period of a lifetime, can be remembered. Everything is recorded in us, somewhere, and the records are accessible to us if we know how.

This I find is a consolation in the face of fleeting Time; which, in self-defence, we measure in seconds, hours, and days.

The space-time puzzle has always fascinated me; right from boyhood I have always been interested in the strange limitations of Space and the unexplored ramifications of Time.

There are many - especially in this age of the Russian/American Space Race - whose interest in Space is directed wholly to expansion and extension: that is, the 'conquest' of Space. On the other hand, apart from the fact that I lack the brains, the interest, the dollars or roubles necessary to explore Space, I have always considered that the mystery of TIME is the greatest challenge to Human. The solving of this riddle seems to have been discarded as an impossibility, in spite of Einstein's theorising. The dawn of the Atomic Age must carry most of the blame.

Yet it seems a short-sighted policy, this mad rush to conquer Space. We know that to cover Space takes time, - so much time that our lives are not long enough to cover some of the distances envisaged. But Suppose Time could be altered, or modified. Suppose we could break the Time barrier as we can break the sound barrier? What a short cut to the stars that might be.' As a boy it always enthralled me to stand in some particular spot, for example, a location where murder had been committed, and consider the strange fact that I was occupying exactly the same little patch of Space as had the murderer or his victim.

Yet, except imaginatively, there was no link of any kind between them and myself; or between them and anyone else who had stood there since, or before the murder. Yet there was also the strange fact that certain spots are often the scenes of repetitive crimes or other happenings. It is, we are told, merely coincidence if three or four persons at different times commit murder or suicide on the same spot.

I learned that, as I stood in the footprints of the murderer, unless one had been previously informed that murder had taken place there, no knowledge of the event could be gained by merely occupying the same spot, unless one was truly and exceptionally psychic. Anything I felt could have been reasonably attributed to imagination due to foreknowledge that a crime had been committed there. Yet there had been violent emotions here, passions turbulent enough to invoke murder. Where had it all gone? This was the very spot where it happened.

The confusing factor was as it still is, Time.

If we could conquer Time as we confidently expect to conquer Space, many fascinating problems would be solved; possibly all problems.

I have thought much about this puzzle, without progressing as far as the many persons better qualified to do so. If there is a definite Space-Time relationship, the occupants of any one spot throughout the ages can only co-exist in Time, I thought, since we can see people come and go to and from the spot concerned. That is, Time, plus another factor that we can call 'density' limit Space.

We are already familiar with the condition of weightlessness experienced by astronauts, away from Earth, beyond the pull of gravity, we become weightless. Newton wouldn't have had much fun with his apple out there; though he might well have reached the same conclusion from an opposite. approach. Weightless we may become, but the human astronaut's body is no less dense. It is still all there, - blood, bone, and muscle. Yet a ghost -the shade of my murderers victim, for example - has weightlessness within the pull of gravity, - and practically no density. Because he or it is outside of human Time, not Space.

This sort of theorising falls flat if you do not believe in ghosts, or in a serial existence that resembles a tiny spotlight moving along an interminable strip of film for each one of us. The shades may still be there; but the farther away from them we travel in Time, the more their images fade, become less and less dense, and finally vanish.

Space is much less important in this study than Time. Only here and Now in Time can we know and recognise each other as living flesh and blood. And 'here and now' covers the whole span of our mortal existence. The recognition lasts as long as we live. Indeed, there is a considerable overlap, we can recognise the seed, the embryo; we can recognise the corpse, before burial or cremation removes it from our sight. A mere scrap of bone can tell us that here, long since, were living creatures such as ourselves.

Each second, as we move through Time, our world moves with us. Everything we know is travelling with us through Time; but Space remains fairly constant for us, as for our ancestors and our descendants.

There is a funny rhyme about the person who went so fast that he met himself coming back. The conquest of Space brings the thought that such a rhyme might not be so nonsensical. Spacecraft will move from planet to planet eventually; but they will only be moving around in one small solar system. Beyond lies the Space, which may never be conquered, unless we solve the problem of Time first. We literally need to be able to meet ourselves coming back before we can penetrate into other solar systems. We could not live long enough to cover some of the distances involved.

Coming back to our little speck of this Universe, we use Time more instinctively than we use Space. We hide in Time as much as in Space. Time is as vital to us as the air we breathe. We do live serially, or murder could not remain undetected for one second. All our yesterdays would be laid out behind us for all to see; all our tomorrows lie exposed before us. We know that the forward movement (for which we invented Time as a measure) is a fact. Each tick of the clock closes the past behind us, enlarging the past by that one second, diminishing our future by that one second. 'Without our clocks we might well believe, as presumably most less-evolved life forms on earth believe, that there is no past or future, only the immediate present, the moment in which we live. Who knows about the next moment until it arrives?

But that is foolish digression. We know that tomorrow will come for most of us. We have a life expectation, in spite of the nuclear age. We believe in our serial life. We know that every image we project, and any camera will prove that we project an image, is fading and receding as we move forward through today and into tomorrow. Only the immediate present is concrete reality to our sensibilities, even though our peculiar human understanding permits us to mentally recognise the reality of time past and time still to come.

History books, films, pictures, carvings, prove to us that all Time, particularly past Time, is real and factual. Yesterday was real enough to those who lived yesterday, just as we believe in the reality of the future for our children.

Therefore it seems reasonable to suppose that we humans are only limited in our appreciation of Time by our physical faculties, which are geared by Nature to embrace primarily the present. Such faculties are dependent on flesh, blood, brain, instinct, even education and reasoning. power. All of which make up our 'Life'.

And what happens when we die?

These limiting faculties are removed, or halted.

If we are no more than highly developed machines.., with the heart as engine and the stomach as a fuel tank, death is the end. Extinction complete.

But we also have a brain. If the brain is an interpreting machine for a spiritual something, and all Man's artistic works suggest that this is so, that spiritual something will go on working, whether one or a billion human machines stop working.

So, in effect, any attempt to solve the Time-puzzle brings us face to face with investigation into Death and beyond. Only Space-Time separates the dead from the living.

We are insulated and isolated only by the living flesh and brain. The human brain cannot think very far into the future. It can imagine. It can give us an H.G.Wells. But it cannot see very far forward or remember very far back. It is significant that the backward-remembering brain, under hypnosis, can come up with details of previous existences, if one accepts such accounts as 'The Search for Bridey Murphy'. And in the opposite direction we may point to such seers as Nostradamus. But these are matters for personal belief.

Maybe we do not just live serially, but have the privilege of appearing in many productions, even if they do not all run to full-length.

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last updated March 2007