If these walls could sing...

Last night, in the post about Jung in Ravenna, I mentioned that something similar happened to me, too.

It did - only it wasn't a visual "slip".
Instead, I heard something that "logic" tells me couldn't have been there.

It was September 11th or 12th, 1998.
I was visiting a delightful small town by the sea; a town I had visited many times before.
(The absence of geographical names is the result of a "secret pact" with myself: whenever something is precious to me, for whatever reason, I take precautions to preserve it from over-exposure and outer influences by withholding a vital piece of information. And you're welcome to think I am a kook...:))

Around 3 o'clock in the afternoon, I climbed a hill to visit an ancient church that stands there, commanding a view over two gulfs. (It's actually just a single gulf, but from the vantage point at the church it looks like two.)

I was happy to be there, and relaxed, as I usually am after the sea air, with all that iodine, gets me. But, climbing that hill, I was also saddened on seeing the obvious neglect of the town by its present population.
And so, when I arrived at the top of the hill and leaned on the parapet in front of the church, observing the skyline merging with the sea, a sense of melancholy took over me as I thought about the town's glorious past.

I like history; I even know a thing or two about it.
I also happen to have a vivid visual imagination.
Which is why it would have been practically impossible for me to resist the temptation of trying to imagine the town as it once was. In my mind, I tried to remove all the baggage of the centuries, all the architectural additions (AKA houses ;)), and see the hills around me as they once were, overlooking the very same sea that I was now hearing, pounding against the rocks far below me.

I turned to look at the church. It was too far "gone" to be envisaged as it once was, what with the additions and remodeling through the centuries (and besides, nobody really knew how it looked when it was first erected, back in the 7th or 8th century). But at least its location hadn't changed in more than a thousand years. Regardless of its looks, people had been climbing that same hill for more than a thousand summers, more than a thousand autumns, more than a thousand Septembers; and, without a doubt, they, too, stopped to catch their breath at the very spot where I was standing at that moment. The sea was the same as then; so were the mountain crests and the hills in the distance; and the sun, all those centuries ago, shone on their hair and cheeks as it shone on mine in September 1998.

My spirits were suddenly lifted; I started to feel cheerful as I hadn't felt in a long time. I realised that nothing could really defeat and destroy the ancient spirit of the city; that the neglect, as destructive as it was, could not reach backwards into time and corrupt what once was. For once something exists, it never ceases to exist: it cannot cease to exist.

I decided to go to the other side of the church, to take in the view of the "other" gulf.

There was a stone bench attached to the church wall. I sat there, leaning on the church wall with abandon, with the back of my head against it. I felt so good... With my sadness and resentment gone, there was nothing to occupy my thoughts - nothing whatsoever. I just wanted to breathe and relax, not thinking, unthinking, almost animal-like. My eyes wandered lazily across the sea and up into the sky and back again.

Then, out of nowhere, I heard music. It seemed to be coming from behind the wall on which my head was resting. I was startled. (The church seemed empty when I had arrived, and I would have heard people arriving to the top of the hill and entering the church.)
I listened intently. Definitely, it sounded as if it were coming from inside the church: a small male choir singing a Gregorian chant - muffled but unmistakable.

For some reason I still find slightly odd, I immediately grabbed my handbag and literally ran to the other side, where the entrance to the church was.

It was just as I thought: there was nobody there.

Nor was the music, for that matter.

I stood still, holding my breath, so I could catch the slightest sound of any movement, anywhere in the church.

Nothing.

And yet, I still stood there for a minute longer, waiting... something.
Then I returned outside and looked all around me: there were no people, either arriving or descending from the hill.

It's been almost ten years, and I still haven't figured out what exactly was that happened on that warm September day.

There is no question of my having "imagined" it. (My mind was almost totally blank at the moment, remember? And even if I had been thinking about the church's history - which I wasn't, certainly not at the time - I would not have thought about music.)

There was no visible or audible tape recorder or any other sound device - or anyone to operate them, for that matter - not in the church not anywhere around it. (The church doesn't have a monastery or any type of dwelling attached; and I didn't have any type of radio or player with me.)

I wasn't under "influence" (alcohol, prescription or OTC drugs of any type) nor was I suffering from any physical or mental condition worth mentioning.


So... what was it?
No, really - I am asking you: what do you think it was?
Send me an email if you think you've found a satisfactory answer. ;)

The Ultimate Tourist

or (as this* delightful website which beat me to the title puts it):

IT CAN HAPPEN TO YOU
IF YOU ARE JUNG AT HEART

Many time slips seem to happen during perfectly mundane activities.
In fact, the activities can be so mundane that, for that very reason, the "time slipper" doesn't even notice anything out of the ordinary... at first. (But more on that on some other occasion.)

Then, there are those enchanted moments that happen in circumstances that are somehow out of the ordinary: during travels, in moments of extreme feelings, in moments of self-oblivion, of - literally - ecstasy (Gr. extasis = being outside oneself).

It is then that the nature of "time travel" - the connection between slipping out of "time" and stepping out of oneself, of one's perception of Self - becomes evident.

If you're reading this page, you are likely to have heard of Carl Gustav Jung.
In fact, you're likely to have heard of him even if you aren't reading this page.

He was a very famous Swiss psychiatrist, originally a disciple of Freud (originally, Freud's favourite disciple, as a matter of fact), who revolutionised the "scientific" psychiatric perspective of man and his/her placement within Time and within the World at large.(And, by the way, his surname is pronounced YOONG, not "young".)

Jung always loved traveling. He especially wanted to visit Rome - but he never did. It's a very interesting story, but it's not the main point of this writing.

During one of his travels in the early 1930s Jung visited the ancient town of Ravenna, once upon a time the capital of the Western Roman Empire. Its many Byzantine churches are famous for its glorious mosaics. But Jung's attention was focused mainly on the tomb of Galla Placidia, a Roman princess in whose fate he was deeply interested.

After the emotional experience of visiting her tomb, he and an acquaintance (we know now that this "acquaintance" was likely one of his former students and his mistress at the time, not that it has anything to do with our story) proceeded to visit the Neonian baptistery, also called "of the Orthodox"...




Let's listen to Jung's own account as published in his posthumously published autobiography, edited by Aniela Jaffe, titled Memories, Dreams, Reflections, translated by Clara and Richard Winston.

Pages 284-287:


"Even on the occasion of my first visit to Ravenna in 1913, the tomb of Galla Placidia seemed to me significant and unusually fascinating. The second time, 20 years later, I had the same feeling. Once more I fell into a strange mood in the tomb of Galla Placidia; once more I was deeply stirred.

I was there with an acquaintance, and we went directly from the tomb into the Baptistery of the Orthodox. Here, what struck me first was the mild blue light that filled the room; yet I did not wonder about this at all. I did not try to account for its source, and so the wonder of this light without any visible source did not trouble me. I was somewhat amazed because, in place of the windows I remembered having seen on my first visit, there were now four great mosaic frescoes of incredible beauty which, it seemed, I had entirely forgotten. I was vexed to find my memory so unreliable."



Follows an extensive description of the mosaics and their relevance to Jung.
I know there are people who are really not that interested in such descriptions, which is why I've italicised the entire passage, so you can skip it or read it, whichever you prefer.



"The mosaic on the south side represented the baptism in the Jordan. The second picture, on the north, was of the passage of the Children of Israel through the Red Sea. The third, on the east, soon faded from my memory. It might have shown Naaman being cleansed of leprosy in the Jordan; there was a picture on this theme in the old Merian Bible in my library, which was much like the mosaic. The fourth mosaic, on the west side of the baptistery, was the most impressive of all. We looked at this one last. It represented Christ holding out his hand to Peter, who was sinking beneath the waves. We stopped in front of this mosaic for at least 20 minutes and discussed the original ritual of baptism, especially the curious archaic conception of it as an initiation connected with real peril of death. Such initiations were often connected with the peril of death and so served to express the archetypal idea of death and rebirth. Baptism had originally been a real submersion which at least suggested the danger of drowning. I retained the most distinct memory of the mosaic of Peter sinking, and to this day can see every detail before my eyes: the blue of the sea, the individual chips of the mosaic, the inscribed scrolls proceeding from the mouths of Peter and Christ, which I attempted to decipher."


"After we left the baptistery, I went promptly to Alinari [the famous publishing house who issue stock photography of artistic monuments, n. V.] to buy photographs of the mosaics, but could not find any. Time was pressing -- this was only a short visit -- and so I postponed the purchase until later. I thought I might order the pictures from Zurich. When I was back home, I asked an acquaintance who was going to Ravenna to obtain the pictures for me. He could not locate them, for he discovered that the mosaics I had described did not exist. The memory of those pictures is still vivid to me. The lady who had been there with me long refused to believe that what she had seen with her own eyes had not existed. As we know, it is very difficult to determine whether, and to what extent, two persons simultaneously see the same thing. In this case, however, I was able to ascertain that at least the main features of what we both saw had been the same. "

"This experience in Ravenna is among the most curious events in my life. It can scarcely be explained. A certain light may possibly be cast on it by an incident in the story of Empress Galla Placidia (+ 450). During a stormy crossing from Byzantium to Ravenna in the worst of winter, she made a vow that if she came though safely, she would build a church and have the perils of the sea represented in it. She kept this vow by building the basilica of San Giovanni in Ravenna and having it adorned with mosaics. In the early Middle Ages, San Giovanni, together with its mosaics, was destroyed by fire; but in the Ambrosiana in Milan is still to be found a sketch representing Galla Placidia in a boat."


But Jung also said something else, often (and incomprehensibly) omitted from partial accounts of his extraordinary experience (p. 287)


"Since my experience in the baptistery in Ravenna, I know with certainty that something interior can appear to be exterior and that something exterior can appear to be interior. The actual walls of the baptistery, though they must have been seen by my physical eyes, were covered over by a vision of some altogether different sight which was as completely real as the unchanged baptismal font.
Which was real at that moment?
My case is by no means the only one of its kind."


No, indeed it isn't, Herr Doktor Jung.
Something like that happened to me, too, back in 1998.
But more on that some future occasion.

Meanwhile, here's a website with wonderful pictures of mosaics in Ravenna, to whet your appetite for travel... in space, time or otherwise. ;)




***

(Edit added on February 6th, 2009):

Much to our regret, the website referred to in the first link isn't operational anymore.

But it really deserves to be read, so here is the Wayback Machine cache of its home page.

It'll be a little cumbersome to read all of their pages this way, but it's better than nothing.

We'll always have Paris... or whatever it was

The misses Moberly & Jourdain, about whose "adventure" you read in the last post, were probably the ultimate tourists, Baedeker and all (especially the "all"). Because, let's face it: it's one thing to visit Versailles and listen to stories about the French Revolution, but to visit Versailles during the French Revolution - now, that's a feat!

Still, even during their grand adventure the misses dutifully obeyed the basic law of time-slippage, as deduced from the Minkowski's spacetime equations: travel in time, but don't move.
In other words: if you want to visit the Paris of the 15th century, you'd better be in Paris - not in Iceland or Albania. Or Haiti.

But, wouldn't you know it, there was - or so it seems - another couple who somehow managed to break even that sacrosanct law: the biologist and cryptozoologist (and father of the Globster) Ivan Sanderson and his wife.

According to Jerome Clark's book bearing the alarmingly exclamatory title Unexplained!: 347 Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurrences, and Puzzling Physical Phenomena, the Sandersons were in Haiti doing a biological survey, when one evening their car got stuck on a muddy road, miles away from civilisation (it figures). Luckily, their assistant - appropriately clad in white - was with them at the time, so he went ahead, while the couple walked up the road at a more leisurely pace.

Walking a few steps behind his wife, Sanderson suddenly observed - much to his astonishment - there were houses along both sides of the road. Not cottages, not cabins, not huts: three-storied houses made of stone, varied in style.

And there was more.

In Sanderson's own words:


"These houses hung out over the road, which suddenly appeared to be muddy with large cobblestones. The houses were of (I would say) about the Elizabethan period of England, but for some reason I knew they were in Paris. They had pent roofs, with some dormer windows, gables, timbered porticoes and small windows with tiny leaded panes. Here and there, there were dull reddish lights burning behind them, as if from candles. There were iron frame lanterns hanging from timbers jutting from some houses and they were all swaying together as if in a wind, but there was not the faintest movement of the air about us".


Before Sanderson, who at this stage was likely questioning his state of mind (and possibly his menu of that day), could say anything, he bumped into his wife's back. She had stopped all of the sudden. Then, says Sanderson, she took his hand and stood there, "wide-eyed and speechless"; and then, pointing towards the edge of the road, she said:

"How did we get to Paris five hundred years ago?"

So, what do we have here: another case of folie a deux...?

(Even though this is a clearly rhetorical question, it's still worth mentioning that "contagious folly", not being induced by bacteria, virus or any such vermin, spreads exclusively by oral communication... In other words: Sanderson hadn't communicated his "folly" to his wife - and yet she seemed to be sharing his "hallucination", in all its details.)

Sanderson did point out that the feeling of being in Paris was perhaps just that: a feeling, an impression (which is by definition subjective) - perhaps based on architectural similarity. After all, Haiti had been a French colony since 1697.

On the other hand, "impressions" - not being filtered by the rational mind and its hardwired prejudices - are often the most accurate mirror of whatever is happening.
(Which is precisely why psychotherapy places such importance on dream interpretation. Dreams are often full of bizarre "impressions", and it's precisely by way of the latter that we may exhume a deeper meaning of any given dream.)

None of the above matters very much, of course, because, regardless of the "actual" placement of the nonexistent houses - were they in Paris, or were they "just" in the French style? - the houses were still... well, nonexistent. If there ever were any houses, in whichever style, at whatever time, along that road - they had not been there at the time the Sandersons had started their walk along that deserted road through the Haitian countryside.

Besides, an extraordinary, truly unique detail of their adventure leaves little doubt that the Sandersons, even if it were possible, never left the island in any way, shape or form: even as they were walking through the faux Paris, they never lost sight of their assistant, Fred Allsop, in his white shirt, who was walking further down the road - and Fred hadn't seen any "Parisian "sights, anything out of the ordinary; all he ever saw was the dark, muddy road through the Haitian countryside.

How is it possible?

Assuming the account is truthful - and, in all fairness, being a cryptozoologist does not automatically signify that one is a lunatic, predisposed to "hallucinations", nor is there the slightest shred of objective evidence that Sanderson was simply lying - there are several possibilities that could explain their unexpected vision. But one thing is certain: something had caused an anomaly, a disturbance, a temporary shift in the pattern of the perceived local reality; and since only two of the three voyagers walking almost - but not quite - simultaneously down that muddy road saw that disturbance, or its effects, that something would have had to been localised : a small "field" of... what?

Reenter Miss Moberly with her novel theory regarding the possible cause of her own "slip": sudden access to Marie-Antoinette's memory field. (I don't really remember Miss Moberly using the word "field" - she might have - but that's how I imagine it, at any rate.)

Is that what it was?

Did the Sandersons unwittingly enter the memory field of somebody who, once upon a time, perhaps on that exact spot, reminisced about a street in Paris on a windy night from many years, decades, centuries before?

I like to think so.
But I don't really know.

Do you?

***

The excerpt - and my erudite interloping regarding the implications of the Minkowski (not "Minowski", Herbie!) equations - were taken from J. H. Brennan's highly entertaining and intelligently written book that you'll often see mentioned here:

(There should be a hyperlinked book cover visible above. If you cannot see it, try switching to a different browser. It seems Firefox is having a lot of trouble in its interaction with Blogger - and I am yet to determine with certainty whose fault is it.
Anyway, I apologise for the inconvenience.)