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“Time, time, time…

See what’s become of me” (Simon & Garfunkel 1966). The things one remembers, the things one forgets, in the quick-quick-slow foxtrot of life. Wondering at 30, when the brain feels too full already, how memory can still be possible at 50, but somehow at 50 managing it with ease. And wondering at the selectivity of memories that pop up over and over, when others are forgotten—like the last time I felt truly affronted at being treated like a child. In the hallway of a Spanish hotel, my Dad quickly responding to my choking on a hardboiled sweet going down the wrong way by bodily upending me. The indignity! I was, after all, eight years old, and well past the stage of being picked up by a parent, this stance perhaps embellished by my being surrounded by adults; my parents and older siblings, then about 13 and 15, so adults to an eight-years-old’s mind. This fall, I’ve been reflecting on time quite a bit, and thinking about other writers’ reflections on time too.

I came to Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics only in the last few years, although they were published in Italian in 1964-65, and English in 1968. Each of this series of twelve stories begins with a scientific fact, or at least something understood to be scientific fact in the mid-1960s. Narrated by Qfwfq, a reincarnated Being who morphs from shape to shape, retaining memories from the inception, the stories follow the development of the Universe from the beginning of Time. Although each conscious form is true to its own nature, the stories offer very human reflections on love, complicated relationships, evolution, extinction, the search for signs, writing, and the urge for immortality.

I read physicist Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams when it was published in 1992. Told as a dream diary of the young Albert Einstein as he works out the theory of relativity, each of the thirty brief chapters explores a unique conception of time, and its impact on day-to-day life and being. Similarly to Calvino’s work, Lightman brings scientific concepts into his imagined time conceptions, although some may be pushed beyond their known limits. If time stood still, for instance, parents would forever hold fast to their children; if time were circular, we would be fated to return to our successes and failures ad infinitum.

Most recently, I enjoyed psychiatrist Francois Lelord’s Hector and the Search for Lost Time (2012, translated from the French, Hector et le temp, 2006). I stumbled onto the Hector series after watching Simon Pegg as Hector in the 2014 film, Hector and the Search for Happiness, based on Lelord’s Le voyage d’Hector ou la recherché du bonheur (2002). Hector’s examination of time takes him on an adventurous trek across continents, as did his previous searches for Happiness and Love. While Calvino and Lightman based their imaginative explorations, however loosely, on scientific constructs, Lelord focusses on lived and cultural perceptions of time. Lelord counters our current cultural anxieties about pressured time, our sensed lack of time, with alternative cultural constructs of time that encourage an expansion of our perceptions of time, allowing us to take a breath.

At this time of year, when Father Christmas “Did gyre and gimble in the wabe” (or some such, with apologies to Lewis Carroll, 1872), as we ring in the New Year (at least on the Gregorian calendar, 1582), and “settle our brains for a long winter’s nap” (thank you Clement Clarke Moore, 1822), this is a time of reflection, when memories stir. Tonight, I hope you’ll join me in reflecting on the past, as we move into a bright new future. 2017. Bring it on!

Nearly Midnight

©Catherine Jenkins this last day of 2016 all rights reserved

Creative and Academic Writing: Animals of Different Stripes

I’m a writer and have been for decades. Over that time, I’ve written poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, non-fiction, a thesis, a dissertation, academic articles, book reviews, reports, case studies, etc. etc. I can switch gears as required, fulfilling the demands of each style and format, but I’m always aware that different types of writing impact me differently, have different working demands, and different after-tastes.

I started in poetry, and am closing in on finishing a new collection. For me, poetry was and always will be the purest, most visceral form of the drug. This is the writing that starts from pure inspiration; it’s a tickle in the back of my brain and I have to hold my breath and gently pull the thread for it to spill out on the page. This is writing that wakes me at three in the morning, that likes me to carry a notebook (the kind with pages, not electronic).  This is the form that brings me the biggest buzz, that unmasks me utterly, that leaves me feeling vulnerable and weak in the knees. But also fiercely able to stand by my words, and to take on the world. This is my tiger form (my Chinese year, by the way).

amazing-tiger-wallpaperIncreasingly, my fiction has a comic edge; I have one book nearly complete and another about a third written. I get in the flow and giddily write pages and pages, slowing only to research often really obscure facts, like what was the world population during Alexander the Great’s reign? This sort of minutiae fascinates me, but when I come up for air, when my critical brain kicks back in, it can seem somewhat ridiculous to be asking such questions and putting in hours to get answers. This is, it would seem, the way my mind works. I’m the curious sort. I get a huge kick from writing fiction, creating self-contained worlds, but somehow making them real by connecting them to reality. This is my young tapir form (kind of goofy, but cute).

baby-tapir

In creative non-fiction, I have one book in process; it’s about my Dad’s death. Whenever I try working on it, I end up weeping full-bodied sobs. I set it aside for years at a time, in the hope that one day I’ll be able to finish it. Because it’s so raw, it’s impossible for me to get any critical distance, to tell whether it’ll be as powerful for a reader as it is for me. At some point, I’ll have to show it to an editor or six who will be able to tell me. Regardless, it is a book I will need to resolve for my own sake. Striped, yes, but more somber and regal, more endangered, like an okapi; or horned, like a bongo or a kudu.okapi

bongokudu-bull1

 

 

 

 

The academic and business writing fall into a similar category in terms of process. This is just work. Purely rational. Although I get very excited about ideas, it’s still somehow seen as inappropriate to express this through academic writing. The odd time when inspiration strikes, when I get into the flow, and become more creative in my word use, some other academic comes along and tells me to knock it off. I am hopeful, that as I gain my professional stripes in the academic world, I’ll be able to get away with more. But this style of writing, using only intellectual process and not creative, is purely black and white. Not that that’s a bad thing, but I don’t get quite the same invigoration from it as I do from the creative work. It takes a lot of time and energy, and doesn’t give as much back. The satisfaction derived is purely intellectual, not emotional.

zebras

When I started my PhD, I felt very schizoid, with my creative side effectively amputated, focussing purely on the academic. As I’ve progressed, I’ve begun to see these two halves reunite. I’m learning how the creative and the intellectual can coalesce quite nicely, how I can write academically appeasing work that also fulfills the creative urge, how I can bring a creative spark to my academic writing. I also think that academic rigour brings a greater depth and richness to the creative work, as well as a necessary sense of discipline. Between the creative and academic work, I have a lot of exciting ideas on the go. Now I just have to create the time to write them all!

Catherine Jenkins 2016 all rights reserved

All images public domain

Update from Dr Jenkins

In the last year, I’ve seen nighttime overhead highway signs cautioning drivers not to stop due to high crime risk, and overhead highway signs cautioning drivers to be aware of moose. And I don’t feel like I’ve done much travel either. I did, however, take my first trip to South Africa. I lost a friend, attended a wedding, helped a friend celebrate his first birthday, and gained a cat. I built cat shelters and traps at Toronto Street Cat, attended a series of Graphic Medicine reading workshops, and went to the first Canadian Writers’ Summit and Taste of Little Italy with my long-time friend and fellow writer, Kathy Mac.  I went to Shaw Fest where the 2015 highlight was Peter and the Starcatcher, and this year’s highlight was Engaged. I went to Stratford for the first time in years, where I saw an amazing production of Shakespeare in Love. I attended a lot of concerts, with tickets both bought and shared by friends. I caught up on a lot of quality TV and some movies I’ve missed on DVDs from the Toronto Public Library. I enjoyed some non-academic reading for a change.

I taught a lot (and I mean a lot) of students, did a lot of grading, and had the joy of watching a few of my students gain awards or entry into grad school. I presented papers at conferences in Kingston (Queens) and North Bay (Nippising). I submitted a few things to peer-reviewed journals. I defend my PhD dissertation and convocated, so now it’s official and school truly is out.

This last year I breathed out, I walked, I observed, I took photos, I pondered, I cottaged. This fall, I’ve signed up for a wine course and an Italian course, because I finally can. I’m back to working out and I’m decluttering my apartment. I’m writing inventive academic work and applying to conferences in more exotic locales. And I’ve got six non-academic book projects to pick up again, now that I actually have the time and energy and focus. Stay tuned…

Tempus fugit (or not)

Humans represent a geological blink, yet in the last couple of centuries, we’ve stressed the planet by raping and pillaging that which geological time took millions of years to create. There seems a strange myopia in our notion of progress; we use growing amounts of energy from diminishing sources. Public discourse on pollution started when I was a child, and we discussed alternative energies in high school. Yet this awareness has led to little positive change in the ensuing decades. Sometimes it seems that human animals only progress when prodded by impending disaster.

And while some move slowly, others move with a sense of urgency, but time has a subjective fluidity about it. People with dementia embody subjective time more boldly than most of us, able to conflate days, and seasons, and decades into the same moment; the ultimate sense of flow, but not necessarily desirable. I prefer to get my flow from engaging with work, creative or otherwise. Amazed, as always, to discover that while I’ve been working, the sun has set, the cats want their dinner, and my body is begging for relief. My recent use of dollar-store kitchen timers is helping me break up the day, reminding me of the need for movement.

At some point, and probably for either religious or economic reasons, humans invented clocks, somewhat nullifying our sense of subjective time. Once beyond sundials and clepsydra, early clocks tended to be in church towers or central squares. Although declaring their mechanical sovereignty over each town, they were notoriously fickle. The San Giacomo di Rialto clock, installed in 1410, has never kept reliable time, but it has survived two fires. And of course, there was no consistency of time from town to town. Even if clocks challenged subjective time, each town still had its own temporal identity. But we’ve moved from clockwork clocks into the digital age. At what point will it no longer be viable to ask those being tested for dementia to draw a clock face? And really, who needs to keep time with digital accuracy on a daily basis?

This clock has been dysfunctional since it was installed in 1410.

San Giacomo di Rialto, Venice. This clock has been dysfunctional since it was installed in 1410.

I’ve been increasingly intrigued by Steampunk (more on that in a future post). I devoured H.G. Wells’ novels when I was younger, so Steampunk gives me a pleasant sense of reacquainting with the familiar. One supposition is that, by marrying contemporary with Victorian technologies, Steampunk opens the question of whether we took a wrong turn during the industrial revolution. While that may be so, as we generally conceive of it, time only runs in one direction.

Author-physicist Alan Lightman presented a series of alternative conceptions of time in Einstein’s Dreams, and I’m sure there’s one episode in which time does run backward. Italo Calvino tackled notions of time and forms of consciousness in his Cosmicomics. Author-historian Caleb Carr projected ever-so-slightly forward to create the future history of Killing Time, in which events are almost recognizable. Some authors, John Keats for example, had very little time to make their mark, and yet they succeeded. The list of authors who’ve played with time goes on almost ad infinitum, especially once the science fiction wormhole is opened.

As I write the dissertation, I occasionally reflect on how different my PhD research would have been if I’d tackled it earlier in life, as I’d intended. Sometimes life corkscrews and plans are put on hold until the right time. I didn’t want to start the PhD with the threat of parental illness and death still hanging over me like a dark cloud. A downside to people having children later in life is that the kids may have to deal with life-changing adjustments and care giving before they have fully inhabited their own lives. Those earlier years were used in other ways, but I’m glad that I’ve circled back to complete this academic episode; I always knew I would. I do, however, have some hope that time expended caring for others’ lives gets tacked onto the end of my own life, although I doubt that time, or biology, work that way.

October—when the world goes to sleep. Halloween—when the veil between worlds is thinnest, when time momentarily evaporates. Dreamtime allows the dead to cross timelines for nocturnal visits. This month, I had a dream of my Dad and Moon, my first and blackest cat, the three of us climbing across rooftops. I try to find significance in such dreams, but they are only visits. The awareness of loss remains on waking, even if it was lifted for a brief time, even if I am grateful for the dreamed remembrance. As my mental state quickens with work on the dissertation, I am waking too early, in the full darkness of night. Although I am truly diurnal, I find myself embracing some odd sense of being a night creature, of being up and active when the world is in full dark and quiet. In the fall, I become aware of the shortness of days and the coldness of nights. Even as I continue working, I am slipping into hibernation.

© Catherine Jenkins 2013