Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
Nursing a coffee
nursing a care
marshalling thoughts running
like cats
here and there
trying to make a semblance of sense
trying to move into the present tense
on the outside I look to be comfortable and free
on the inside I hope no one else is like me
wrestling emotions cause they’re stealing my soul
wrestling hopes and dreams, writing down goals
another day living, another day spent
another day wondering where time and energy went
That time is gone
the energy spent
the road left behind
resentments left unsaid
All that remains
is peering ahead
crossing new bridges
dodging monsters in your head
Think about yesterday
dream about tomorrow
Go on through life
deal with the frustration and sorrow
Then get up and out
get gone and back
live one more day
and do it again
Memories,
I make them now,
so far my brain hasn’t forgotten how.
Time shoots by in a quickening blast
and I recall with fondness a nebulous past.
Starry-eyed and glittery mind, I used to look ahead.
Now, sometimes, it’s wearying getting out of bed.
My oceans of thoughts seem dark but calm,
a prelude, or harbinger, of a once-remembered song.
I seek comfort, I seek reminders, I seek the past,
even though I know, like the future,
it never lasts.
This one cracked me up, with echoes of “Red Dwarf” to it. I can imagine Kryten saying, “The future is now. No, wait, now that’s the past. Now it’s the future. Darn, missed it again. You’ve got to be quicker, sir.”
The time currents are battling, splintering our hearts, minds, and senses. Would that we could do the time warp and find that place of comfort we think must exist.
Back in nineteen seventy-five, less than a blink of the galactic eye, pop culture was thrown into a spin by “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” They say it happened on August fourteenth of that year. If I could do the time warp, maybe I could ride a wave, return to there, verify that date, and breathe in the mood. On the other hand, a sliver of cerebellum thinks I’m still living and existing back then, feeding streams of knowledge across the void to me here and now. Alas, contributing to the confluence of confusion, multiple mes are feeding multiple mes, including this me, from multiple moments in my existence to create this big shiny moment that I think of now.
Oh, the hell with it. “Let’s Do The Time Warp Again.” It’s just a jump to the left, and a step to the right.
From my dream came the understanding I needed to enable me to push some struggles aside.
I’d conceived that only Now is real. There is no other time. You can ‘travel’ to another time but it’s Now, then. When you ‘travel’ like this – I’m uncomfortable saying ‘travel’ because that implies a physical movement, but I use it here for convenience while working out what term best suits – you’re shifting awareness of Now, not ‘traveling’ anywhere.
Semantics? Perhaps to some, but with important consequences. There’s only true awareness of Now, with an understood and accepted version of past events. These are what was passed on as history. Whether they’re true is another matter.
The future is a concept of what will probably happen, given the various arrows of time engaged. Some of those arrows are more strongly attached and fixed. Still, the future isn’t not necessarily what will be experienced. Except, we do not know; our expectations shifted without our awareness so the future that we experience is naturally what was expected. This is partially a biological and neurological survival mechanism.
To help me cope with the story telling, I conceived of a pack of cards to describe the scenes of ‘Now’ that emerge from Chi-particle looping and entanglements. Cards of ‘Now’ are being shuffled and dealt; these are then experienced. Fine, that was working out well. But I kept trying to adhere to a logical and chronological story-telling process. Yet the cards didn’t support that. I was struggling to reconcile the two aspects. They seemed diametrically opposed. Through my dream, I discovered that I’d carried my card analogy too far.
I’d thought of the looping Chi-particles and the resulting Nows as a deck of cards. They were shuffled and dealt. I saw this as players being around a poker table. Each card was dealt sequentially, around the table. That’s how the story would be told.
That was so flawed. The cards of Now being dealt do not have this order, consistency, predictability or tidiness. Instead of people sitting around being dealt hands of poker, one is being dealt poker, another is receiving a gin rummy hand, a third is playing hearts, a fourth is dealing solitaire, and so on. Each is both player and dealer. In the next hand, the person playing poker is now playing spades, and so on, but they’re struggling with that shift. Some vividly know they were playing poker and expected to continue playing poker. They don’t understand why they’re now playing solitaire.
That is a large part of how the entanglements emerge. We have beliefs of who we are, what happened, and what will happen next. The entanglements skewer every aspect. This creates a complex matrix of possibilities and story arcs. It’s difficult keeping them straight and then telling them in such a way, without elaborate explanation to the reader, so the reader grasps what is happening while the characters can’t grasp fully grasp it — although emerging grasps of what’s happening are part of the story.
Okay, time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
I’m riding on last week’s epiphany. To explain, only now exists. How now takes place and the scenes associated with it can be treated as a deck of cards. This has empowered my writing imagination. The principle isn’t mentioned in the novel, except one person notices it and treats it like a metaphor, but for me, understanding that each scene is another card permits more intelligent thinking and treatment.
The characters’ and their traits also open up. Pram’s decisions surprised him. He always thought he would put his team first. That it’s a challenge for him to do it opened up a window onto himself that he didn’t know was there. From this, he discovers weaknesses that he hid from himself but also grasps the observations others made about him. It’s a struggle to be stronger and more idealistic. He admires his team members even as he ponders betraying them. Exploring the scenes and permutations, I play with the frequency in which decisions are not value based or driven by logic or principles. Emotions, whims, weariness and frustration color and shadow choices. Sometimes our nature is stronger than ourselves. The battles with ourselves can be deep and endless.
None of the characters are inherently evil or good. Each seek to make the best choices they can, sometimes demonstrating callousness about others’ welfare, but justifying it through logical and philosophical acrobatics. Things happen fast. They make mistakes, and as now collapses on them, what’s going on isn’t always clear for them. Brett, in the center of this, is more removed from these debates and decisions. Being in the center puts him in a bubble where he can rarely see past the impacts on him and his existence.
Handley has been great fun to write. She surprises me. Her role grew. Her metamorphosis and the development process drove her into new territories. New skills were discovered, as was greater strength and determination. In all of this, I ended up asking and pondering, do we have one core person who dictates our behavior? One true being?
Back to the Wrinkle, River Styx, Avalon, Lucky Gypsy and Mo Faux. Back to Handley, Pram, Brett, Richard, Forus Ker, and Philea. Back to the Travail, Humans, Sabard and Monad. Back to space.
Back to writing like crazy, at least one more time.
Thanks to the notebook (paper power!), I further evolved my novel’s setting, establishing that, theoretically nine arrows of time exist and six stages of chi-particles exist.
A Now can have between one and nine arrows of time. The arrows of time affect how Now is perceived and experienced. When all nine arrows of time exist in one Now, the Now is dominated by entropy and chaos. It becomes extremely short-lived. The gamma chi-particles responsible for Now cycle through existence more quickly, gaining energy and mass while slowing. Once the gamma chi-particles gain sufficient and energy, they move into the delta stage of chi-particle existence and decay into elements.
In our Now existence, where I, Michael, am sitting and typing in 2017 on Earth, five arrows of time exist. Three are the forward moving arrows of time involving psychology, thermodynamics and cosmology (Hawking’s take on Eddington’s idea). They work in relatively parallel synchronicity.
The other two arrows of time in this reality are the biological arrow of time and the imaginary arrow of time. We can’t grasp the imaginary arrow of time but we perceive its impact; from this emerges the paradoxes and conflicts of our existence that we can’t explain.
Hawking’s three arrows of time are dominant in this Now, providing the Now with a relatively long life and stability. This also affects the states of time I call Hawking Time, which are the present and the near and far futures and pasts. The near and far states are extensions of the impact of strong psychological and cosmological arrows of time, providing us (as the observers) with the false impressions that the future and past exist when they’re actually just knowledge/awareness of other Nows.
In the novel’s Now, the same five arrows of time are in place as in our Now. The difference emerges from the Now’s creation. The Now was created when beta chi-particles encountered a wave function collapse. The five arrows of time emerged. That’s normal.
Here’s where it changes. The beta chi-particles would normally become gamma chi-particles. In this instance, the beta chi-particles became binary gamma chi-particles. This, coupled with a more dominant imaginary arrow of time, causes the binary gamma chi-particles to continually loop back into themselves. Crashing into themselves creates new iterations of almost the exact same Now, but with a side effect of chronological entanglement. In essence, the Hawking states of time are misconstrued about being the future and the past. Additionally, the binary gamma chi-particle presents the characters with the illusion that they can control the past and the future and overcome the inherent paradoxes.
This will not happen ‘forever’. Eventually, as in the case of a standard gamma chi-particles, the binary chi-particles of the novel’s scenario will cycle and decay to the point that they gain more mass and energy, becoming delta chi-particles, etc.
Glad I cleared that up. Needed to more fully understand it to be consistent and more clearly tell the story. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
Michael Seidel, writer 