Time in Russia is especially fluid, and as a result, Russia is full of what we might loosely term "time travel".
When I first arrived in Moscow last Monday (27th July) I felt an enormously intense feeling of happiness and magical anticipation, and – more than any other time I have visited here – a sensation of having come back to my own home. As soon as I got off the train at Paveletsky station and went down into the metro I was completely overcome with it. The Russian people have always been kind and generous towards me in the past, but this time that is different too – people are
super friendly, in a way I haven't really experienced before.
After my last post, lots of people suggested interesting things for me to read and watch on the subject of time travel. So far I have watched the Jean-Claude Van Damme film
Time Cop, and Jon Ronson's
For the Love of... Time Travel episode. From the former I learnt two things:
1) that it is possible to go back in time and rescue people from death – i.e. that, contrary to the plot of the film
Final Destination, death isn't some kind of inevitability which will happen no matter how we might try to avert it. (Whether we are prepared to theorise about time travel on the shaky basis of fictional scenarios featuring, respectively, J-CVD and Stiffler is another matter, but nevertheless it's interesting to trace the trajectory of time travel in popular culture.)
2) That the same matter can't occupy the same space at the same time. This one is kind of a bummer for me because I was hoping to be able to use time travel to have sex with myself one day. I also learnt that epic splits will probably save your life, so I had better start stretching my groin muscles, pronto.
From the
latter, which I highly recommend to you, I was left with many interesting impressions, central to which were two things:
the elasticity of time; and the links between time travel, time loops and alternate realities.
Firstly then, time as an elastic quantity. For me, this was perhaps summed up best of all by Father Christmas. Several years ago my daughter Olive wrote FC a letter in which she asked him how it was that he was able to deliver presents all around the world in one single night. Of course, as grown-ups, we all know that Father Christmas gets asked this question
all the time, but nevertheless he kindly replied to her letter and explained that, contrary to what people think, time does not consist of regular, equal, immovable units, but is more like a piece of elastic which constricts and expands all the time without us really ever paying much attention; so great is our governing ideology on this matter that we refuse to acknowledge its inconsistencies even when they stare us in the face. This, he said, was why the most boring lessons in school seemed to drag on forever, and yet a fantastic birthday party is over in an instant. Usually, FC continued, we are at the mercy of this elasticity because, inevitably, for so long as we refuse to acknowledge it we are unable to exert any power over it. When, contrariwise, we open our eyes, and we begin to see what is really there, we can also begin to manipulate time's elastic nature for our own benefit. Thus, in his case, what feels like a single night for us is in fact a far greater length of time for him, and he is able to get everything done.
This concept puts me to mind of something my dad was talking to me about one time: that time doesn't exist; that the world we live in stands stock still and we alone move forwards in it. We walk the earth and in doing so we age; and so we create the idea of time to explain this process in a linear, forward-moving manner. But if it is true to say that there is no time then perhaps we can also say that all time exists everywhere at once. Today I accidentally walked the wrong way down Zhukovsky Street in St. Petersburg (where, for a time, Mayakovsky lived with Lili and Osip Brik, and the exact address of which crops up on several occasions in his poetry), which turned out quite well for me because it meant I got to walk back up its entire length, and onwards up to Italianskaya Street towards the Stray Dog cafe, where, before the Revolution, Mayakovsky and many other poets and writers met to discuss and perform their work. I felt very keenly the fact that Mayakovsky too had walked up and down these streets countless times, and that perhaps everyone at that time and everyone today are all walking together, but with our eyes closed to each other. I think there is there a film where something like that happens? Two people leaving each other letters in the same mailbox but from different times? One of the speakers in
For the Love of... Time Travel claims to have had first hand experience of time travel of this sort – of, essentially, slipping into an unclosed pocket of past time, and then falling back out again into the current world. The question is: what if she had never come back? Would that alternate existence have continued with her in it, alongside
this one, the one we all think of as being the sole and "true" existence for the reason that we ourselves happen to find ourselves in it? Indeed, I believe I myself may have slipped into some kind of alternate reality on two occasions in the past week in Saint Petersburg. Several days ago as I was just waking up in the morning, a strange man let himself into my flat, claiming that he lived here. He went into a room which, for the duration of my stay, has always been shut and locked. On a couple of occasions I have seen him, and we have had brief conversations about Russian language tuition and documentary film-making. Today I saw a used coffee pot in the sink, which I did not leave there. However, usually I only ever hear him: when I am in my bed I hear him in the kitchen; when I am in the kitchen I hear him in the shower; when I arrive home each night I call out a hello in case he wants to talk but I never get a reply.
I don't know if he's here right now, but the hallway lights have been flickering an enormous amount. His name is Sasha, but that's all I know. Is one of us slipping in and out of the other's time-stream? Are we simply co-existing from various points in time?
My second experience is less personal. Whilst on a tour bus around St Petersburg I somehow accessed a portal to an alternate reality in which Jamie Oliver is not only Italian but also the famous chief of some unspecified tribe. Although I returned to this reality safely (or at least I think I did), I was able to retain the documentation of this slight alteration in circumstances.
I haven't really gone into the concept of time loops here, but I'll focus on that next time maybe, alongside wormholes and Russian time travel theoreticians, because this post is already longer than I had intended it to be and now I am very tired and need to go to sleep. I welcome your feedback on my thoughts.