Where are the Nows of Yesteryear?9

Now that so much time has passed, I must admit the possibility that my childhood memories of my grandmother’s musical box have been polished into luminosity by nostalgia. It stood on a low occasional table in her little antique shop, overshadowed by towering wardrobes and crowding tallboys but glinting as with an internal energy. Its simple, almost naïve, mechanism fascinated me: a spring-powered contraption like the works of an old clock drove the rotation of a brass cylinder, on which were hundreds of prickles that twanged the teeth of a graduated steel comb, producing hesitant and plaintive melodies. This tender machinery was mounted on a polished wooden base and covered by a lid with glass sides, through which I could admire the tense coiled spring and dark laborious cogs, watch the hypnotically slow turning of the gleaming cylinder, and sense the tiny flexure and straining of a tooth of the dull grey comb as each note was prepared, seemed momentarily to resist being detached from silence, and then yielded with a slight reluctance, like a ripe blackberry plucked from a briar. Years later when I read H. G. Wells’ description of the Time Machine, a glittering apparatus of bronze and crystal, I was carried back to the fusty old shop in the quiet North Wales town of Mold. Had I realized then that the musical box was itself a time machine I would have asked my grandmother for it, she would have kept it for me, and it would be on my desk now.

Now, philosophers of time like to illustrate the difficulties, perhaps the impossibility, of travelling back in time, by considering the case of an imaginary time traveller who kills off one of his or her grandparents at such an early age as to preclude his own birth and thus his dreadful deed. The fascination of this traditional vein of logical argument obscures an underlying fantasy, unthinkable not only in its paradoxicality but ethically, comprising as it does both murder and an esoteric form of suicide. Among our eminent contemporaries who have scratched their heads over the paradox, Professor Hugh Mellor of Cambridge has a version that targets the grandfather, while Professor Michael Lockwood of Oxford opts for the grandmother. But if I could meet my grandparents again, far from shortening their lives I would expend a little of my own in trying to salvage at least a memory of theirs. How little I know of them! What was their background? I remember my grandmother shortly before she died telling me that her grandfather once ate his dinner off the face of the clock on the Liver Building in Liverpool. My parents dismissed this as the ramblings of old age when I reported it to them, but I take it as truth and like to think that this great-great-grandfather of mine was a city dignitary who partook of a banquet for which the clock face served as a table, before its installation marked the completion of Liverpool’s temple of mercantilism. But I know nothing about my grandparents’ forebears, and indeed my memories of my grandparents themselves are hardly more than textural. When I ride back in time – on the musical box perhaps – to Mold (the very name recaptures the little town as it was when my parents used to bring me there on occasional holiday visits almost a lifetime ago), I encounter on the staircase behind the shop the soft indulgent bulk of my grandmother, and glimpse my tall, rigid, grandfather, ignoring me out of shyness rather than antipathy, turning away in the doorspace of a further room. Now that I am old enough to be the grandfather of the child I then was, I can understand something of the distance he chose to occupy, but I cannot communicate this fellow feeling, for that was then, as they say, and this is now.

Now and again I used to lose myself in two paintings hung on that staircase: ‘La Rixe’ (the brawl) by Meissonier, Queen Victoria’s favourite painter, and Millet’s ‘Angelus’, so much admired by Salvador Dalí. Both represent instants of stasis. In the first, a pack of cards lies scattered on the floor among overturned table, chairs and wine bottles; two gamblers have leaped to confront each other and are being restrained by their companions. One of the antagonists has a dagger; a man behind him tries to twist it out of his grasp while another seizes him around the chest. (It can hardly have been my gentle grandmother who told me that the model for the man with the dagger is said to have died of his frustrated exertions in this role.) The other would-be fighter is trying to draw his sword but is obstructed by a fifth man, who holds him back with one arm and stretches out the other towards the face of the man with the dagger, hand wide open and fingers crooked, in a gesture that shouts ‘No!’ so loudly that time is stopped. Every detail of the scene is meticulously rendered, though one could scarcely call the result lifelike. Meissonier masters time, and here a moment is preserved as if under brown varnish, but space is beyond him. As one critic has written, ‘his prodigious power of decomposition left him incapable of putting anything together again’. And in this painting the dimension of depth is all awry; figures seem to step through each other, space is crumpled and tumbled. (But perhaps all this is masterly, Einsteinian, a General Relativity of drunken rage.) The other painting, in contrast, offers contemplative stillness. The chimes of the Angelus, conducted by a flock of rooks high in the evening sky, come from a church tower on the horizon of an endless plain, to two potato-pickers. The young couple stand with bowed heads, at their feet a half-filled basket. They are statuesque figures, alone in the vast emptiness. In one of his homages to this painting Dalí transforms them into rook-haunted ruinous towers much taller than the dark cypresses (reminiscent of those on Böcklin’s ‘Island of the Dead’) growing around their bases. Dalí’s X-ray eyes also made out that Millet had painted the potato basket over the representation of a coffin in which the two peasants had brought their dead child for burial. In another interpretation of the scene Dalí diagnoses sexual tension; he depicts the moment after that of the Angelus, in which the male peasant leaps at the female as urgently as Meissonier’s furious gamesters strain to stab each other. Of course as a child I was aware of none of this. For me each of the two paintings in the staircase was a banner parading through all time an ancient and incomprehensible Now.

Nowadays analytic philosophers such as the professors mentioned above are not professionally interested in the phenomenology and, even less, the poetics of time, neither as evoked by Proust’s soggy cake-crumbs nor as measured by Dalí’s melting watches. Both of them pay more attention to the dry argumentation of the Cambridge philosopher John McTaggart, who in 1908 published a paper on ‘The Unreality of Time’. There are, says McTaggart, two ways of describing time. One of them seems to fit our experience of time’s flow; it uses such terms as past, present and future, tomorrow, a long time ago, and so on, all crucially connected with the concept of the present moment, the Now. (Today’s philosophers would call this version ‘tensed time’.) An event may at some time be future, then be present, and finally be past. (I can say an event ‘is future’, as shorthand for ‘will take place in the future’; the details of English tense grammar don’t enter into this discussion.) But how can an event have these contradictory qualities, of being future, present and past? Because of course it has them at different times, we rush in to say! Thus it might be that in the past it was future, at present it is present, and in the future it will be past. But this will not do, responds McTaggart; it seeks to explicate past, present and future in terms of past, present and future, and so leads us up the garden path into vicious circles. Therefore tensed time does not exist. ‘Nonsense!’ cries Professor Mellor (and I have seen him denounce nonsense, in a seminar on metaphysics I crept into once: a fierce, compact personage, he turns his back on the source of nonsense and curls up in his chair as if shielding himself from contamination, while his errant post-graduate students quail); future, present and past are not qualities of events, they are relationships. To remark that an event is future is to say that it takes place after the making of the remark. Thus the terminology of tensed time depends on that of tenseless time, time as ordered by the relationships ‘before’, ‘simultaneous with’ and ‘after’, and specified by dates such as 1066 or phrases like ‘just before breakfast on Tim Robinson’s fifth Christmas Day’. But this apparently objective version of time runs into difficulties too, at least in the outer reaches of modern physics. Before Einstein it could be supposed that any two observers would in principle agree as to which of two events happened first; but Special Relativity says that they may not, if they are in motion relative to each other. Indeed, as Einstein’s great master Hermann Minkowski said in 1908, ‘Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.’ Since then spacetime itself has been proved to be warped, to be expanding, probably to have a beginning and perhaps an end, to contain holes, to be stuffed with six or seven other dimensions tightly curled up like subatomic horsehair. This welter of wonders entails impenetrable complications for the theory of time, seeming to imply that the concepts of past, present and future have at the most a local and almost a person-specific degree of adequacy. Professor Lockwood’s book on the subject is admirably lucid, but its title gives due warning: The Labyrinth of Time. I used to think I comprehended these matters, but I am not so sure of my grip on time as of now.

Now, or never, having awoken my grandparents’ old house from the comfortable doze it has enjoyed in my memory for so long, is the time to record another aspect of it, before the mice of forgetfulness gnaw it all away. Behind the front ground-floor room occupied by the shop, down a few stairs, was a semi-basement – a mere coal-hole, I suppose, but it seemed spacious to me – into which coke used to be avalanched every now and then through a hatch in the rear wall of the house. I liked to stand on a wooden step by the coke-hill and look out of this hatch, my chin on a level with the cobbles of the back lane. Opposite, the parish church towered among tall trees. The shadowy space between the backs of the houses and the churchyard wall was projected into the unreal by my worm’s-eye perspective on it. When, just now, I summoned up maps and photographs from the internet I found that this little region of mystery no longer exists; the back lane and the terrace houses of which my grandparents’ was one have been swept away and replaced by a sloping lawn, a civic amenity offering a view of the old church from the main street. The lane mattered to me because it led to a children’s playground with a few swings, a small roundabout, and a pair of parallel bars. As a devotee of Tarzan I was proud of my ability to hang by my knees from one of these bars. My head must have been close to the ground in this position, for once when my long-suffering knees relaxed their grip I came down with a thump that sent me wailing back along the lane, but did no visible damage to my skull. (I could say that I have never been the same since, but that is true of every moment of my life.) My image of myself upside-down, bat-like, in the rectangular space below the bar, like that of myself at the hatch with my chin on its sill, gives me a measure of my size at that time of my life. Our subjective experience of the flow of time, says Hugh Mellor, is no evidence that time really does flow; what we actually experience is change in ourselves, the accumulation of memories, of memories of memories. This must include memories of stages in physical growth, and of the incidents that knock such memories into our heads. My brief surrender to gravity, my tearful return down the lane, are lodged in the loops of my brainstuff, as are my grandfather quelling my sobs with the testy formula, ‘Now then!’ and my grandmother applying as a verbal salve to my sore head a soft dove-like repetition of ‘Now, now …’

Now, and to end, let me open what always felt to me to be the secret heart of my grandparents’ house. At floor-level in a corner of the sitting room was a cupboard full of games that must have been oldfashioned even in those days of my childhood. Sometimes I would delve into it before breakfast, when there was a faint acrid tang of dead ashes in the room, as yet unvisited by the day’s routines. There were tiddlywinks and marbles, packs of cards for playing Happy Families, and shallow boxes that opened up into trays scattered with cardboard fish one could angle for with a little magnet on a string. On the floor of the cupboard, or between the leaves of big illustrated books, I used occasionally to find more valuable fish too, escaped perhaps from a long-lost pouch; they were delicately cut out from wafers of a pearly, translucent material, and must have been tokens in an antique parlour game, as I realized much later when I read in a Jane Austen novel of a young lady who after an evening visit could talk of nothing but the fish she had won and the fish she had lost. Most precious of all was a set of ivory spillikins in a narrow little box, also of ivory, with a delicately fretted lid. Each spillikin had a slender stem some five inches long, and a head representing a Chinese sage, a sickle moon, a long-tailed bird or some odd animal. Piled on a tabletop, they formed a tangle from which with the aid of a little hook one tried to extricate one spillikin at a time without causing the least trembling amongst the rest, an operation as delicate as that of capturing an elusive memory without awakening others interlinked with it that one would rather leave undisturbed. Where is this test of the subtle and steady hand now? At the bottom of a box of crumpled letters, photographs and ephemera, perhaps, forgotten in the attic of some house I have long quitted. And the moment of first finding them, in my grandparents’ cupboard? All events have equal claims to a tenseless reality, says Professor Mellor; all have their address in spacetime. Among them must be the contents of everyone’s Nows, whether past, present or future, remembered or forgotten, observed or unobserved. While it is not quite pleasing to hear that countless redundant trivialities are of the stuff of the universe, I like to think that the particular Nows that have been picked out by our passionate attention to them are stacked away separately, as it were in vaults, like paintings bought by a millionaire on the advice of experts. If the connoisseurship of memory is the human role in this indiscriminately memorious world, then among those treasures is certainly my grandmother’s quietly challenging utterance on first emptying out the box of spillikins for me: ‘Now!’