Bold passage

There was in the 1990s a well-loved BBC series called Goodnight, sweetheart.
The plot of each episode was more or less irrelevant (to me); what I - and, I suspect, many other viewers - found so fascinating was the basic premise of the series: a young man, living in London in the early 1990s, strays into a backstreet and finds himself in - 1940. What makes the story even more interesting is the fact that he can walk in and out of 1940 as he pleases: the "passage" is open all the time, in both directions (although he seems to be the only one benefiting from it).

What I didn't know at the time, is that the series was supposedly (or so I am told) inspired by a series of apparently real incidents that purportedly happened on the - now almost famous - Bold Street, in Liverpool.

The most widely publicised of these incidents is said to have happened one Saturday in July 1996 (so it could not have inspired the series, which started in 1993). The accounts vary (here is a nice version of the story; and here is another one); the story was originally told during a radio programme, either by the man who experienced it (that's one version I've heard) or, more likely, by Tom Slemen.

It appears that this man - a Merseyside policeman (off duty at the time of the incident) - and his wife were shopping in central Liverpool. Near the Central Rail Station the couple parted company: the wife went to the Dillons bookshop (to buy Trainspotting, the novel) and he went to a nearby shop selling CDs.

Approximately twenty minutes later the man left the store and headed back towards Bold Street, to meet with the wife. As he was walking up the incline near the Lyceum Post Office, he suddenly felt as if he had stepped into an "oasis of quietness". Then he heard loud honking: a small boxvan - a veritable antique on wheels, with the inscription Caplan's - narrowly missed him. At the same time he noticed that the street pavement had changed its appearance: in fact, all of the sudden he found himself standing in the middle of the road. As he looked around, in a state of utter confusion, he noticed that people were dressed in a distinctly old fashioned manner; their clothes seemed like relics from the 1940s or early 1950s. And when he looked towards the bookstore where his wife was supposed to be shopping, he noticed that the sign Dillons had disappeared - the store displayed the name Cripps, and it didn't seem to be selling books at all: there were ladies' shoes and handbags in the windows.






Then - much to his relief, I imagine - the policeman saw a girl wearing a distinctly NOT "vintage" attire: a lime green sleeveless top and an unmistakably modern handbag. She was heading towards Cripps. He followed her and saw her stop in her tracks before reaching the shop (some accounts say she did enter the shop and then came out): the ladies' outfitters shop had "changed" back to a bookstore. Dillons was there once again, along with the rest of 1996.

"Did you see that?!" the policeman is said to have said to her.
"Yeah," said the girl. "What was that? I thought they were selling clothes, but now I see it's a bookshop... Weird."

Weird, indeed - and on more than count. Such "hybrid" timespace displacements, with mingling of people from different eras, are seldom heard of (but not totally unheard of, witness this head scratching-inducing story.)

Later it turned out that other people had experienced unsettling temporal and/or spatial displacements around the same area.
More on that some other time.

And by the way, since Dillons has been defunct since 1999, I am sure many people would love it if the bookshop reappeared again - or at least be comforted, as the many grateful customers of old Cripps are, by the thought that, somewhere in time, it still exists... :)

History in the Making

or

»Arnold Toynbee was here«

If you like history, like I do, then you probably know that many textbooks suffer from what could be politely described as... actually, there is no polite word for it: let's call it tediousness. Fastidiousness. Being boring. Sequences of numbers and names and alleged political and/or economic reasons – as if people and their all-too-human urges didn't exist at all, let alone be, as they are, at the very core of History.

But every now and then, there is a historian who shows a feel for the vividness and uniqueness of every single moment in time/space. It is as if they cast their minds back in time, to try and pierce the veil that seems to separate us from what has been.

And then there is Arnold Toynbee.

Toynbee's writings captured the imagination of many people. Which is why mentions of him appear in popular culture, from Indiana Jones to computer games – and the great sience fiction writer Ray Bradbury called one of his stories The Toynbee Convector. (Which is also the name of a blog dedicated entirely to our Arnold.)

Arnold J. Toynbee piercing the veil of Time.
(Actually, I have no idea of what he was doing or what he was looking at at the time. But I suspect nobody else knows it either, so my theory is just as good as anyone else's...)

As you may know, he was one of the most influential - and maligned - historiographers of the 20th century, known chiefly for his monumental work, A Study of History (finished in 1961), comprising 12 (twelve) volumes. (You can find fascinating excerpts here.)

It's a huge work, both physically and intellectually, which is why usually abridged versions are used for study. But however fascinating - or controversial - his take on history as-we-know-it may be, it is what's been omitted from the abridged versions what interests us here.

In volume X, there is a section called The Inspirations of Historians, and therein a subsection (E) called The Quest for Meaning Behind the Facts of History (duh - no wonder it's being omitted...!). In it, Toynbee reveals a set of extraordinary experiences with what he called, very aptly, "local annihilation of time". It turns out, his vision of history was, quite literally, a vision (or two).

Here are some of the sights Toynbee sighted during a travel to Greece, in 1911/1912. (The accents in colour are mine, to emphasise the questions that are of greatest interest to us here.)
Not having access to the original text, so I could read it in its entirety for myself, I am reduced to copying excerpts from other sources, relying (justifiably so, I believe) on their integrity and precision of reading/typing. ;)
Most of the information was taken from here, as it is the best internet article on Toynbee's peculiar journeys though history I have found to date. (You'll notice it's a cached version; the original doesn't seem to be available right now.)


It seems that on March 19, 1912, Toynbee (who regularly refers to himself in the third person, just so you don't get confused) "stood staring" at a Jacobean, i.e. Baroque, country villa in Crete, when...


"the spectator had an experience which was the counterpart, on the psychic plane, of an aeroplane's sudden deep drop when it falls into an air-pocket. On that spot on which Time had stood still since the eviction of the Venetians by the 'Osmanlis in the War of Candia (gerebatur A.D. 1645-69), the spectator was suddenly carried down in a 'Time-pocket' from a day in the year A.D. 1912 to a day in the fifth decade of the seventeenth century on which History, in that house, had come abruptly to an end in an evacuation without any sequel except solitude and decay."


Some of the sights were far more gruesome - if historically much more significant.
(After all, isn't the historiography - and, to a large extent the history itself - of the Western civilisation one long string of massacres and bloodbaths...?)


On the 10th January, 1912, as he (= Toynbee himself) sat musing on one of the twin summits of the citadel of Pharsalus, with his eyes ranging away to the peaks of Pelion, Ossa, and Olympus over the downs of Cynoscephalae <...> the middle distance of a sunlit landscape came, in the brooding gazer's imagination, to be overcast with the sinister mist that, on a morning 2,109 years back in the Past, is blindfolding the patrols of two armies as these nervously grope their way towards one another on those fog-bound slopes. When the parting of the mist reveals to the posthumous spectator's sight the right wing of the Macedonian phalanx already carrying all before it in the momentum of its charge downhill, he instantly feels the stab of anxiety that, at this moment, pierces King Philip's heart as he glances back over his left shoulder to look for the left wing of the phalanx that should have been following his own right wing up. <...> And now it is no battle; it is a massacre -- for these uncouth Italian troops have never been drilled in the humane rules governing the 'temperate and undecisive contest' in which the regular forces of a civilized Hellenic World are more or less innocuously exercised. Look, the outmanoeuvred phalangites are raising their pikes -- they are making the signal that they surrender -- but those murderous Roman swords callously complete their cruel work."

"As the harrowed participant from another world averts his eyes from an unbearable spectacle, they catch a glimpse of a despairing commander riding off, ventre a terre, with no more than a handful of life-guards still attending him. <...> Before the dreamer has time to refocus his diffracted historical vision, it all vanishes abruptly into thin air, and the landscape flickers back into a pastoral present in which sounds floating up from the slopes of Cynoscephalae to the heights of the acropolis of Pharsalus are, not the din of sword-blades nor the shrieks of wounded men, but the tinkling of goat-bells and the bleating of sheep peacefully grazing, to the strain of their shepherds' pipes, over the site of a double historic battlefield. Can the dreamer really have sunk, for that instant, those twenty-one centuries deep below the current surface of Time's waters on which he now finds himself riding, once again, in his normal waking life? He might doubt it if the poignancy of the momentary experience had not left a sequence of Greek elegiac verses running persistently through his head."



More experiences were to follow, including one - tremendously far-reaching - in the otherwise unexotic location of London town:


"In London in the southern section of the Buckingham Palace Road, walking southward along the pavement skirting the west wall of Victoria Station, the writer, once, one afternoon not long after the end of the First World War -- he had failed to record the exact date -- had found himself in communion, not just with this or that episode in History, but with all that had been, and was, and was to come. In that instant he was directly aware of the passage of History gently flowing through him in a mighty current, and of his own life welling like a wave in the flow of this vast tide. The experience lasted long enough for him to take visual note of the Edwardian red brick surface and white stone facings of the station wall gliding past him on his left, and to wonder -- half amazed and half amused -- why this incongruously prosaic scene should have been the physical setting of a mental illumination. An instant later, the communion had ceased, and the dreamer was back again in the every-day cockney world which was his native social milieu and of which the Edwardian station wall was a characteristic period piece."


The few "serious" historians who deign even discuss the subject of Toynbee's wildly peripatetic take on time and history, all too often dismiss his visions as being simply (simply?) mirages produced by a heady combination of knowledge and vivid imagination.
But were they really?
The sensation of slipping into an "air pocket" is all too peculiar, too specific to be attributed to flights of fancy. To dismisss that would be tantamount to calling his accounts - a bunch of lies. Either that, or the consequence of some brain disorder... the existence of which, of course, would have to be proven (which does not equal surmised.)
And any "theory" that necessarily requires the total and a priori annihilation of the "opponent" or reliance on unproven hypotheses isn't much of a theory.

***

* I'll be editing this entry in the near future, so be sure to come back.

The Eternal Now

The "now" that separates my last visit to this blog and, well, now must seem eternal indeed... (At least two of my readers thought so, which I find as endearing as it is embarrassing to me.)

Ah - if only you knew...! My life has always been "strange" (dixit one of my elementary school teachers as well as several of my acquaintances).
But now it's stranger than strange.
(Only, not to me - and that's the scariest part of it. :)

So, how can I make up for all the lost time?
I can't.
Besides, it - unlike me (and yourself) - hasn't really gone anywhere.

No, really: according to the line of thought presented in the following interesting piece of writing - a person who found the mention of this blog on another site, brought it to my attention - now is now. And it doesn't exist anyway. :)

Since it has to do with time and its perception, I thought you'd enjoy it, too.
Tell me what you think about it.

The Eternal Now

Here's what I think about this:

If we are, as our old friend J. H. Brennan charmingly puts it, "timeworms" (p. 40, Time Travel), meaning that we are a single temporal extension of X years (= the duration of your lifetime), and if the findings of quantum physics, namely that information is non-local (forgive the oversimplified verbalisation; I'll be editing this entry as soon as I can), are correct, as they seem to be... doesn't it make sense, then, that information - in this case, information about everything on our perceived "path" or "flow" of life - could travel upstream as well as downstream?

In other words, IF we are (as I see us) nodules, "hubs" of information born out of the fabric of all there is, and interconnected with everything else, then surely we could causally affect not only our future, i.e. what-is-to-come (in our perception), but also what-has-been (AKA the past)?

Think about it.
Regardles of your findings - or the lack thereof - it's the one thing that is never a waste of your time. ;)