Time's Telescope

My walk to the shops this afternoon resulted in 8,000 paces, so another 3,500 or so were in order. Night had long fallen, snow had turned to slush in the rain, so my evening walk was to be strictly along asphalt - up to the end of what was ulica Miodowa, before the level crossing was erased, and back. The street (up the hill and around the corner from where I took the photo below) now ends in a chain-link gate, closing off what was once open access into a couple of orchards. And while standing at this gate, I get a familiar flashback - a curious phenomenon, which I will try to unscramble.

The flashback is through a flashback. I'd describe this like looking at something through an old-fashioned telescope that slides out; like that dolly-zoom movie shot in which the camera zooms in while tracking out. I am simultaneously in my parent's house in 1976, as an 18-year old, and in America around 1950.

Specifically: having waited for the household to be fast asleep, I creep downstairs to watch, very quietly, the Midnight Movie on BBC2 - American film noir from the late 1940s or early 1950s. It's around a quarter of a century after the films were made. I watched many of the greats, in particular John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle and Key Largo, lots more too. As much as I'm feeling the atmosphere - the klimat - of these black and white films, there's also the sense of doing something forbidden (I should be studying for my A-levels!) - while helping myself to a wee dram from my parent's drinks cabinet. 

When I spoke of my flashbacks many years ago, people would tell me that I'm only having a 'memory burp' of a film or films I once saw. But I can easily differentiate between the qualia experiences of watching a movie and Being There. For the flashback-through-a-flashback effect zooms me through my parents' front room back into the America of the '40s and '50s, recreating perfectly the effect I felt then in 1976. I have had many of these time-telescope moments over the decades, a congruence of an earlier experience I can remember in which I have had a flashback moment. The two qualia experiences nest together like cubes in a tesseract.

Always familiar, never frightening, an unambiguously pleasant sensation that lingers briefly before evaporating. Before it does, I try consciously unscrambling and analysing the experience.

But how - and why?

As a child, I felt this. The Janet and John books that were used to teach us to read in the 1960s, were - I discovered much later - based on the Alice and Jerry books published in America. There was one in particular - Five and Half Club - that I must have read aged around seven that flooded me with powerful flashbacks, mainly through the rich illustrations - so different to the greyness of West London at that time. The book didn't make overt reference to the fact that the stories were set in America, but I felt an immediate sense of familiarity and longing.

Why I was I experiencing this? What are the vectors by which consciousness can be non-local? As a child, I considered the analogy of radio. Maybe we are like receivers and transmitters, and brain waves can cross time and space and end up being picked up elsewhere? Later, as I learned about heredity, evolution and DNA, I pondered the notion that fragments of atavistic memory journeyed across the Atlantic and somehow 'infected' me. Then, in adulthood, I considered notions of quantum mechanics - non-locality, superposition and 'which-way information'. Penrose and Hameroff's theory that consciousness is quantum activity within the microtubules within the neurons, rather than something that occurs as a result of electrical signals between the neurons. 

But maybe we live in parallel with another universe, five minutes behind this one, or fifty years ahead of it, and I'm receiving glimmers of it. Or maybe all is being experienced simultaneously - eternalism, or the block universe. There is no past, present and future - everything's happening concurrently, and I catch snippets from other times. But why are they so specific, so rooted in a given place and time?

I still have no clue; I can only intuit. The experience, familiar, pleasant, has lasted since childhood; it is faint, irregular and not easily reproducible - but is real enough for me to know that it means something. It is significant; it is not to be ignored - and I don't believe it can be reduced to something material - or debunked.

This time last year:
Justify the buy: Nikon D5600

[2,990zł a year ago, 3,590zł now]

This time two years ago:
First frost, 2020

This time four years ago:
Edinburgh, again and again

This time eight years ago:
Ahead of the opening of Warsaw's second Metro line

This time nine years ago:
Keep an eye on Ukraine...
(Portents of troubles to come)

This time 10 years ago:
Płock by day, Płock by night 

This time 12 years ago:
Warning ahead of railway timetable change

This time 15 years ago:
Some thoughts on recycling