by Douglas Lain
“Be careful with that.”
“You’ve been playing with us,” she said. “You’re just playing games.”
“Please be careful,” I said.
We were near the Sears Tower, and I shielded my eyes with my right hand and looked up to see if I could find the top. The Tower just blended into the clouds, into the sky.
“Are you listening to me? I’m going to smash this. You’ll be stuck here.”
I tried to remember what the manual had said. Would a premature disconnect send me back or break me off in the stream? I was fairly sure I’d be sent back to the present, but getting stuck in 1972 wasn’t my idea of a bad time. It wouldn’t be a major adjustment, living without email and high def television. I could live in low definition.
“You want to start breaking things? Fine. But, all you’ll do is destroy your future. The entire timeline will pop,” I said.
I told them that I had a theory. The big historical moments couldn’t be altered by actions from the future, but it might be possible to make adjustments. I told them that I was looking for a seam in the fabric of history.
“What did you think this man could tell us?” McKenna asked.
“I wanted you to talk to him.”
“You wanted him stoned?” McKenna asked.
“I’m experimenting,” I said.
“Did you think this through at all?” Wendy asked.
“Would you just …” I paused, tried to think of what I should say next. “Just give me the box.”
She took her time handing it over, like it was a loaded gun, as if I might use it to hurt her, and when I had the box back in my hands I confirmed her worst fears. I looked at Terence, said goodbye, and reset. That timeline was gone. The Wendy, Chomsky, and Terence McKenna that had travelled by cab from the airport to the Sears Tower were gone, and if I tried to go back I’d find younger and more naïve versions of them in their regular positions. The stage would be set just as it always was, with everyone frozen in place, ready for my directions, and always ready to snap back into place again.
CRAWDADDY ONLINE
Jeff Morris
January, 7th, 2014 - 3:52 pm | 823 views | 0 recommendations | 2 comments
The Butterfly Effect
The butterfly effect is a metaphor that encapsulates the concept of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory; namely that small differences in the initial condition of a dynamical system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system. The butterfly effect is a common trope in fiction when presenting scenarios involving time travel and with “what if” scenarios where one storyline diverges at the moment of a seemingly minor event resulting in two significantly different outcomes.
—Wikipedia
I’ve lived in Gate 23 of the Chicago O’Hare airport, lived in the twenty-two minutes between 1:30 p.m. and 1:52 p.m. on November 16, 1971 for the past six days. I spent New Year’s eve in the past, the same moment over and over again, and I used a yardstick to measure the spaces between Terence McKenna and Noam Chomsky, between Wendy and Carol. I measured out the spaces between the bit players too. After seventeen visits I knew all about them:
Sylvie’s children were Jennifer and Troy. Troy was two years old and still in disposable diapers. Jennifer was six and wanted a quarter for the automat television across from the gate.
George was a businessman who, at fifty-two years of age and after two weeks traveling, wanted nothing more than quiet at the gate and a gin and tonic when he got to his seat.
The doctor from New York wearing an IZOD shirt and khaki pants was named Craig, and his wife Ally was to meet him in Denver. Across from him a struggling ballet dancer named Cat stood with consciously good posture. She looked like a shorter version of Grace Jones. The doctor and the ballet dancer were seven feet apart.
Left to their own devices Cat and Craig would not speak to each other, but with some help they could be made to fall in love, or at least into lust. I discovered that I could drastically change the outcome of the moment just by asking Craig for the time; I could set off a chain reaction that led to him grunting and groaning and to Cat inadvertently flushing as she bent over for him in a toilet stall. There was such a thing as the butterfly effect. I asked Craig to look at his watch, and this led to him talking to Cat, and that led to him missing his flight because he couldn’t hear the boarding call from the stall in the women’s restroom.
I’d hit pay dirt, and the fact that nothing I did stopped Sylvie and George from their very loud public argument about her parenting didn’t dampen my optimism a bit.
The first time that Craig checking his watch for me changed history I stuck around to see how it played out. I followed Craig and Cat to Oakland on Flight 82. I stayed the night in the same Best Western and watched Johnny Carson tell the same jokes in front of the same technicolored curtain. Cat and Craig were just two rooms down from me, and the next morning I sat two rows behind them on the flight out of O’Hare.
In Oakland I managed to keep up with Craig, but I lost track of Cat. They didn’t get off the plane at the same time, and she went to the left while Craig turned right.
I managed to orchestrate the moment so that Craig and I took the same yellow taxi into Costa Contra County. The view out the left passenger window was reddish brown. Nimitz freeway was congested with blue Chevy sedans and orange ford station wagons. We headed east, and Craig sat next to me with his soft hands folded in his lap. I stared at his silver Rolex and his cuff links. We didn’t talk much during the drive.
On November 17, 1971 Craig got out on Eastgate Street and walked up the drive to his little yellow ranch house. It was surely a starter home for him. His wife Ally was waiting in the front yard, holding their young song Sam on her hip with one hand and holding a green rubber hose with a pistol shaped attachment in her other hand. She was squeezing out a stream. The taxi drove around the block and then I had it stop so I could get out and backtrack. I wanted to find out if there was going to be a consequence. Would Craig’s infidelity disrupt his life? Would it impact life on Eastgate Street? It didn’t have to be anything much, any lasting change in the outcome of his life would be enough to settle the matter.
Walking the cul-de-sacs and side streets of Concord in 1971 made me profoundly uneasy. I tried to bide my time in an unobtrusive way, but the way Craig’s lawn was laid out, the way the grass looked, green and perfect, but with shards of red plastic strewn along near the sidewalk, was overwhelmingly nostalgic in a way I didn’t much care for.
My memories of the seventies, of my childhood, are not universally positive. When I was seven years old I bashed my lip open by flipping my Schwinn Stingray and catching the curb with my face. Half of my mouth was swollen for what I remember to be months. Before that I’d spent most of my school days in the principals office, on the green bench, because I wouldn’t tolerate smart aleck comments from the boy who lived up the block from me. I used to get in fights with this blonde wunderkind who called me names like fag and retard when the teacher wasn’t listening, and I used to lose. But once I smashed my face even the wunderkind took pity on me.
1977 was the year I caught my parents making it on their waterbed. Well maybe they didn’t really have a waterbed, but Barry Manilow’s “Weekend in New England” really was playing on their clock radio. The volume was very low but I recognized the song. I won’t tell you what they were doing specifically, but they were doing it on top of the sheets and not like married people at all. It made an impression. So now I associate Barry Manilow, wall to wall carpeting, hanging lamps, beanbag chairs, really the whole era with this primal scene.
Looking at Craig’s lawn I knew what the bits of plastic were. He’d run over the launch gyro for his son’s Evil Knievel Stunt Bike set with the lawn mower. I spotted the white handle for the toy’s crank in the space between the lawn and the sidewalk. It was stuck down there, in the muck, and I stepped over it, into the yard. The awful feeling of trespassing tingled through me, up my
spine. The bad feeling of it settled somewhere between my temples.
I stood behind the rhododendron, peeked in the front window, and saw Mrs. Craig, or perhaps her name was Ms. Craig, sitting on their plaid sofa. She was wearing a plush off-white robe, and her bare feet dangled down and touched the asymmetrical orange and brown rectangles that decorated their vinyl floor. She was nursing the littlest Craig, and Craig Jr. was sitting next to her and watching a woman with long straight black hair, thin and small-chested, sing on TV. I waited in the bushes with my hand on the Time Box, ready to press the reset button if I was caught, but waiting for Craig to come back into the TV room. I wanted to see him with his wife, wanted to see if there would be a strain between them. Anything remotely visible, even if I just imagined it, would do, but Craig didn’t make his entrance soon enough.
The boy stood up to turn off the TV when the woman on television stopped singing. Thinking about it now the woman was probably Cher. Then he turned around to face his mother again and instead of walking back or continuing on with whatever other activity might be waiting for him, (maybe putting his eye out with a pair of glass clackers) he stopped in his tracks. I’d clearly been seen. When Ms. Craig looked over in my direction I didn’t wait for an outcome, but reset the Timebox.
There were a number of options still open to me at Gate 23, and quite a number that I’d already tried, but that were probably worth trying again. I needed to focus on McKenna more, or make sure that Sylvie found a quarter so that her daughter could watch the automat television. Sylvie needed a moment of peace.
If I smoked hash with Terence and Wendy while Chomsky explained the Pentagon papers to the girl behind the check-in desk and made sure to ask Craig for the time on my way down to the parking lot I could get nearly everything going at once. And if I tried breaking into the olive colored Oldsmobile Cutlass on level three I’d find that the door was unlocked and that the key was still in the ignition. I could get the radio going. Then Terence, Wendy and I could take a spin in the seventies sunshine. Donovan on AM and with the driver’s side window rolled down was a fun diversion, but we never really went anywhere that way.
I could set up a dozen, a hundred, changes. I could make the girl behind the check-in counter cry, and I could make sure that Craig’s wife found out about Cat. I could scream and yell and throw one of the orange chairs through the plate glass windows and out onto the tarmac, but I couldn’t change the direction of history.
When I asked Craig for the time I thought about the film Kramer vs. Kramer with Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep. I thought about how everyone’s personal life, all the marriages and nuclear families and folk groups, would be fractured in the next decade. And thirty years after that nobody would even have a personal life to break. There were just Facebooks and smart phones and double super-sized depressions.
I sat between Noam Chomsky and Terence McKenna and watched as the girl behind the counter walked out from behind the carpeted barricade at the front of the gate. She opened the door for the air-bridge onto the 747 that would take the passengers west. I listened to her announce that the elderly and those passengers boarding with small children should line-up, and I waited. Terence took another bite from the apple core Wendy had given him. Chomsky folded the Financial Times in half and glanced up at the door the girl had left open.
When the 747 backed away from the gate and made its way onto the runway I looked around the empty gate, at all the empty orange chairs, at the analog clock hanging above the handrail, and thought about starting over one more time.
CRAWDADDY ONLINE
Jeff Morris
January 9th, 2014 - 3:17 pm | 678 views | 0 recommendations | 1 comment
A Red Wedge Meets an Orange Tear Drop: Progress in Gate 23
A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
—Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History
I dropped the Time Box as I stepped beyond the metal railing that circled the gate, and I watched as the box bounced off the curved orange plastic of a chair, into the air, and then back down to the hard tile floor. The Time Box impacted with a clang and the world changed. The past dimmed, and then everything became clear, angular, and pure.
The gate for Flight 2012 appeared as one perfect black box, and when I turned and looked through the empty space where a window had been the 747 on the runway appeared as a slightly smaller red square. The world of 1971 had shifted into fundamental geometric forms. Noam Chomsky was a partial circle, a red wedge, and Terence McKenna was a black teardrop that flowed slowly across the olive colored rectangle that was the wall behind him.
Standing in an abstract past I wondered if I could possibly be looking at the seam, at a way to get at the under infrastructure of the moment.
Noam Chomsky punctured the white circle around the girl behind the TWA desk. She was a pink rectangle.
In this broken past I could apprehend Chomsky directly, and I could see how he changed shape depending on the moment. He was a red wedge that could shift into a yellow rectangle whereas McKenna was always a teardrop.
I looked at my hands and they appeared as pink circles on a blank white background. They would move at my mental command, but the idea of holding on to something was incomprehensible.
Worse than the visual manifestation of this moment, worse than the pure forms, was the rigidity I felt in my limbs, and the momentum of my perceptions. Everything felt thin and insubstantial and yet, at the same time, everything was of consequence. I was watching the universe work itself out on the meta-level, apprehending how my own thoughts were stolen or directed. Seeing myself in the mechanism that is existence.
I got down on my hands and knees, on triangles and squares, and I searched amongst the lines, the angles, the layers, for the Time Box. I had to reset. I was panicking along a straight line. I looked at the orange chairs and they appeared as a series of thin tangerine colored rectangles. I wondered how it might be possible to look underneath.
The past was two-dimensional. It was a perceptual desert. There was nothing but the red wedge of Chomsky, nothing but tangerine rectangles and the straight line of my fear. Everything in 1971, in this new pure perception, came to me as a feeling, and I moved the feelings—the circles and squares—around an empty plane. I could change Chomsky from a red wedge into a yellow rectangle and then back again.
I reached under the chair. I closed my eyes and felt for the off switch. I reached out and found the Time Box.
The universe seemed brittle all around me, and I knew I could break it into pieces if I wanted. I could rearrange it, yes, but I could also destroy it. It would require no effort to tear McKenna or Wendy in half, and Chomsky was nothing but a paper thin idea.
What was most terrifying about the hallucination the Time Box was broadcasting was how familiar it was. I wasn’t living with an orange tear drop and yellow rectangle, but remembering these things. I was remembering my own true form.
I wanted history with the stage sets intact. If I had to give up on bringing the red wedge of Chomsky into the realm of McKenna’s teardrop, if I had to give up on changing history in order to stay in the real world with textures and faces and people and things, it was a sacrifice worth making.
I turned the box off.
CRAWDADDY ONLINE
Jeff Morris
&nb
sp; January 9th, 2014 - 3:17 pm | 678 views | 0 recommendations | 1 comment
The Future
The future of the human race lies in the exploration and making explicit of the contents of the human imagination.
—Terence McKenna
I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them. That includes political power, ownership and management, relations among men and women, parents and children, our control over the fate of future generations (the basic moral imperative behind the environmental movement, in my view), and much else. Naturally this means a challenge to the huge institutions of coercion and control: the state, the unaccountable private tyrannies that control most of the domestic and international economy, and so on.
—Noam Chomsky
Last night I transferred all of the photos from Gate 23 to my computer desktop. A 747 painted green, a photo of an ashtray filled with glass beads and butts, the stewardess wearing her brown pantyhose with the run in the left legging, and so on.
I closed the window with Carol Chomsky; she was staring at the Time Box from the front seat of a yellow taxi, her brown hair pulled up on her head in a tight bun, and her eyes focused and serious behind a pane of rain speckled glass. I closed the window that contained the image of a yellow dotted line that led to the emergency exits in baggage claim, then closed the window with Cat’s blue polyester dress laid out neatly across the tile floor of the women’s restroom. I could see Craig’s loafers, out of focus but there, in the background. I closed the window on Noam Chomsky in an orange plastic chair. But, when the face looking back at me from the computer screen was my own I stopped.
I was standing next to a support beam by the blue check-in desk at Gate 23. I was wearing my green gortex rain jacket in the photo, and had a few days growth of grey speckled beard. I looked tired, much more worn out than the innocents all around me who were in their own time, but I was smiling. In the photo I’m pointing at something outside the frame. I looked like a movie director on a set. I was unkempt, obviously not meant to be onscreen.