Time Travel
Posted by Atley Loughridge on March 9th, 2008 Atley Loughridge |
Argonautika closed a week ago in DC. We have a bit of time off before we start tech next Wednesday in Princeton, and I have been traveling from friends in NYC to the Obama campaign in RI to family in CT to meetings in LA to family in PA! And during all these hours of watching the countryside pass by my window, I’ve been thinking about this screenplay I’m writing.
It’s about a girl who undergoes a genetic engineering procedure for DARPA (a subsection of Department of Defense, dedicated to developing radical technology). The point is to engineer a human that works well with bidirectional computer interfaces. These are computers that pick up on the bio impulses of the neurons firing in your brain and translate these ideas into electrical impulses, sans communication. The girl, to be played by yours truly, undergoes a “knock in, knock out” genetic procedure that omits proteins and attaches synthetic proteins to key fragments of her DNA to improve her visual-spatial thinking at the cost of her verbal skills.So the procedure is done, and the gal can’t talk but she has heightened visual-spatial skills. (They’ve slipped her those forget-yo’-trauma pills so she’s not freaking out.) And I’ve been thinking about what comes next…How has she changed?
My mind is drawn to Einstein as an elevator operator, watching the clock, thinking about how by the time the light hits the clock and then bounces to his eyeball so that he can read what time it is, it is already a tad later…the beginnings of his Theory of Relativity.
So I’ve been thinking about dimensions.
How do we define “dimension?”At first glance, it doesn’t seem like any one dimension necessarily follows from another. Each dimension seems to be something entirely new and random, interconnected with the others yet based on a fundamental property all its own.Do dimensions build on one another in a necessary order?
I just tried to imagine it otherwise. Say we add the first dimension to the third, without the second. I imagine this as living on a line with sonar to determine depth. I can’t see anything, but I can sense depth.But this is still essentially a plane. Even a line plus the fourth dimension of time is essentially a plane: “Sparky, which direction do you want to go? Left, Right, Back or Forward?”
But I actually have a difficult time conceptualizing that a plane is the same as a line + time travel. I suppose each would be some form of nothing. Life on a plane without time seems non-existent. Motion means moving some distance with respect to time. So there is no motion on a two dimensional plane unless you travel so quickly your motion takes no time.
Like light. Nothing moves faster than the speed of light. So photons traveling at the speed of light do not experience the passage of time. I heard one physicist describe the perspective of a photon as seeing the birth, growth and death of the universe in a single instant. So maybe life on a plane is like the trajectory of a photon on a plane.But now how can we conceptualize moving backwards and forwards in time on a line? How can we imagine moving back and fourth on a line at all? When I move back and fourth on the sidewalk, I know it because I see trees and bushes and buildings moving in relation to me. But if all parts of a line look the same, how do you know you’re moving?
This seems just as non-existent as life on a plane, which is our first proof that the two combinations of two different dimensions may describe the same experience.But let’s try to imagine time travel on a line anyway. This riddle also seems to have just as much to do with our subject’s level of consciousness as it does to do with time travel itself. My older brother Conor thinks of it this way: Moving forwards in time means that we have memory of the past and no notion of the future. So moving backwards time must mean that we have memory the future and no notion of the past.
This brings me to the second similarity between a plane and time travel on a line. Where a photon on a plane experiences all places at once, the time traveler on the line is in all times at once, holding both a memory of the past and a memory of the future, depending on which way she is traveling in time.
So “dimension” means the ability to move in a new direction. The relationship between multiple dimensions defines the quality of that experience, rather than inherent properties of “depth” or “time.”
So for the screenplay, I’ve been imagining different dimensions. I can only get up to four. We’ve discussed life in two dimensions. Three is like closing your eyes and feeling the three dimensionality of your body (toes down there, waves of heat moving up legs, dry eyes…all locations, one feeling.) Four is like seeing all events in existence from the birth of the universe to its death in an instant…and then some. One dimension is a point, or nothingness. Maybe death. Or that feeling beyond an exhale before your lungs take another breath. Freefall.
And I’ve been trying to imagine new dimensions. I heard from my little brother Gavin that there are 11 official dimensions, but I have no idea what they are.
From where I’m sitting, the newbies could be anywhere. My bet is that I’m already experiencing them in some capacity, my conscious awareness is just not evolved enough to notice.Like time. A hundred years ago people didn’t know that time is relative to the subject’s speed. They knew nothing of the twin paradox (the slow poke on earth gets old, the speed demon in space stays young), but they were still experiencing the relativity of time in some context.Buddhist monks, for example, describe meditating for a whole day and feeling as if it had only been an instant.
I’ve been meditating on this point myself, and here’s my theory: When we are watching the Buddhist priest meditating, lots of thoughts are going through our minds. (”Boy she’s still. How long has she been sitting? Can she hear me breathing? Can I hear her?” etc.) Like riding a bike on a stoney beach, these thoughts make it feel like time is passing slowly. For us, time is passing slowly.But the Buddhist priest is not thinking of anything at all. Just like all parts of a line look the same, there are no conscious “markers” of time that passing through her mind. She is like a flash of lightning in a dark sky.So we’ve always known that time is relative. And there are other dimensions. What are they?
Gavin and I have recently been wondering how to program a computer to learn without emotions. As children, it is joyful to learn right things and how hurtful it is to make mistakes. But computers are only programmed to use logic. And since ancient Grecian era, logic has always been portrayed as the antithesis of emotion.What are emotions?An acting teacher once told me that emotions were just energy. This makes sense. They are fluid and instantaneous. It follows that they have mass. I would bet money that you lose weight after an emotional outburst. I heard Michael Jackson loses ten pounds every time he performs on stage.
But everything is energy. What are emotions? Whatever they are, machines don’t have them. Just as painting forces me to see depth, imagining the perspective of a computer forces me to see emotional depth in all of its majesty and strangeness.
And what does all of this have to do with Argonautika? What doesn’t this have to do with Argonautika? Of all the dimensions we’ve discussed, the emotional dimension, if indeed it is a dimension, is perhaps the most mysterious.Performing the emotional drama of a fourteen-year-old is a type of time travel in of itself. In order to fall in love for the first time, I must forget memories of love lost. At the same time I acquire a “memory” of the future. All lines and movements for my next hour on stage are set.
It’s weird.
All day I’ve been thinking of how to adapt this sensation of time travel on stage to everyday life. (You could say that mental time travel is not real. But has anyone been able to prove that reality exists outside our consciousness? Nope.) So traveling backwards in time means that we have memory of the future and no notion of the past. First I try to forget everything. Wipe the hard drive. “I” am nothing—no memories, no preferences, I could have been born an instant ago (just like when we travel forwards in time, we could die at any instant.) The next step is to “remember” the future. Everything I see I’ve already seen. Everything I learn I already knew. And so on.
Right now I’m sitting on this plane, practicing this. It is actually very turbulent. Winds are high. We are traveling at a low altitude and through the dark clouds I see the land rocking in and out of my window.If I try to guess which way I will be thrown, I am almost always wrong. Expectations are not the way to remember the future. Rather if I slow down my awareness to micro-moment by micro-moment, I can truly feel which way we are going to be thrown, just as it is starting to happen.
Who knows if I am actually growing younger. I doubt if I’ll be eating play-doh by the time we start tech next week. But I definitely do feel this tingly sense of readiness. Like jumping into a cold lake, or into bed with someone you love, or shaving off all your hair. Just sitting here, perfectly still, I feel like I might explode!
Posted by Atley Loughridge, who plays “Medea” and others in McCarter Theatre’s production of Argonautika.
