If you could go back in time, where would you go (and why) #Backtothefutureday @History_hit

This post is inspired by the following #backtothefutureday – what do you mean you haven’t seen Back to the Future? That pinnacle off 1980s film making – by Dan Snow on Twitter (@History_hit):

As soon as I read it, I knew exactly the places and times that I would go. Before I take you on a short tour of the history that I would visit, a quick note on time travel.

A lot of the responses Dan got were along the lines of: ‘I’d warn voters about the oil price crash following the Scottish Independence Referendum’; ‘I’d prevent the Great Wars’ (always amuses me describing them as ‘Great’, my Grandad fought in the Second and it wasn’t that great); ‘I’d kill Pol Pot.’ All tempting prospects, I will grant you, I’ve lost track of the number of times my wife and I have thought ‘If we could go back in time, get to the hospital sooner, would Tristan be with us today?’ Recent theories in theoretical physics have something to say about this.

In the Standard Model of Physics, Time Travel is allowed, at least in theory, if you create enough gravity you can force SpaceTime to bend back on itself and travel backwards in time along a Closed Time Curve (CTC), but inevitably you are going to run a high risk of creating paradoxes: banging your own Mum, killing your Dad etc these paradoxes, it is theorized, would lead to unfortunate things like the unmaking of the very universe, so not cool. For this reason it has always been suggested that Time Travel will always be impossible, even if technically possible. Stephen Hawkings famously threw a welcome party for time travellers on June 28, 2009, no one attended.

Last year, University of Queensland physicist Tim Ralph and PHD Student Martin Ringbauer proposed a new theory, that they partially tested suggesting that – as much as I understand it – Time has a built in anti-paradox mechanism born of Quantum Mechanics meaning you could go back in time, irrevocably change the past but return to the present to find nothing has changed. Any changes that you made, any paradoxes you create, may or may not endure in the multiverse but the present you will return to is the present you left. So there’s no killing Hitler (or your Dad), no banging your Mum to create the paradox of fathering yourself and, closer to home for me, no way to save Tristan’s life.

Kinda cool, huh? If you want to read more on that, here’s some further reading:

Nature: Communication – Experimentations in Closed Time Link Curves
Huffpo: New Time Travel Simulation May Resolve ‘Grandfather Paradox’

Anyway that’s not at all what this post is about, I just find it interesting. Here is, in Chronological order, the points of history that I would visit and why:

The Mystery of Potbelly Hill

In my earliest visit, I would take our time machine to the Southeastern Anatolia Region Turkey and the
rough period of 9130 BCE (Pre-pottery Neolithic A). On a mountain ridge rising out of a flat valley a group of Hunter-Gatherers are quarrying stone, huge quantities of stone. Why they are quarrying stone, what they used to quarry and why they began are not clear to us in 2015, but these hunter-gatherers will soon be using this stone to build a series of 20 stone circles consisting of at least 200 megaliths. I will drop in on these pioneers at 100 year intervals and watch the site become the first of religious sanctuary on the planet with successive generations continuing to build upon this site for 1000 years, until it is abandoned quite suddenly.

12 000 years after my first visit, the remains of this once mighty site will be uncovered by Klaus Schmidt and given the name Göbekli Tepe (Potbelly Hill). Since its discovery, the site has totally rewritten our understandings of when humanity moved from a more primitive hunter-gatherer existence towards society in a form that we can understand today. Excavations continue at the site and create far more questions than we have answers about its builders and the purpose of their building. You can read more about Göbekli Tepe here.

A meeting with the rubber people

Having left Turkey and the mysterious ruins of Göbekli Tepe, now buried by the very people who built and inhabited it for 1000 years, I would take our time machine to Central Mexico and the states that are now called Veracruz and Tabasco. Here, we find another culture closely related to the early hunter-gatherers that first established themselves in the region around 5000 BCE. We do not know what they called themselves but history has named them The Olmec, meaning Rubber People.

Often referred to as the mother culture of Pre-Columbian Central American peoples, everything you probably think came from the Maya – the concept of Zero; the Mesoamerican writing system; the Mesoamerican Ball Game; the Long Count Calendar (of 2012 conspiracy theory fame); and even the very building of pyramids – all originated with The Olmec.

It’s the pyramids that I’ve brought our time machine here to see, you see they simply don’t exist anymore, with the notable exception of La Venta in Tabasco. In the early 20th Century, oil was found in both states and our modern hunger for black gold would lead to the destruction of priceless archaeology and forever rob us of a more complete understanding of Olmec Culture.

I would walk the paths betweeen the first pyramids ever to be built in Central and South America and marvel at some of the finest artisans the world has ever known work their wares in precious Jades, Amethysts and Obsidians; take in a match of their insanely violent ballgame in one of the first stadia ever built for sport and follow them as drought and environmental change would force them to move from capital to capital abandoning their previous monuments, often ritually sacrifing the stone back to the earth in the process.

Finally, around 500 BCE, in the last days of the Olmec Culture, I would follow in the wake of their emissaries from the Olmec Heartland along their well trodden trade routes across Central and South America. Here I would bear witness as they continue to teach their advancements to the Maya, the Aztecs and cultures too numerous to name from Southern Mexico all the way through to the Brazilian Amazon.

Paying my respects to ‘Oriens’

Next for our travel through time, I would like to bring our time machine back to the UK and a Villa close to the Roman town of Mancetter about 1600 years ago. This one is different, closer to home, I’ve brought us here to pay my respects. We are here for the funeral of a Roman child.

A little girl, her name lost to history, embalmed using Frankincense and buried with the wealth of a noble lady. Laid to rest in a beautifully worked, lead-lined, coffin with jet bangles on her wrists beside the family villa where she had spent her short life. Her parents grieve beside her graveside, 1600 years separate us, their tears fall from my eyes. Their pain, is now my pain. Her name is Oriens.

I was there when Warwickshire County Council’s in-house Archaeology Team, Archaeology Warwickshire, opened the lead lining of her coffin for the first time in 1600 years. Filled with silt, all that remained of a child so loved: two jet bangles, a few teeth and some bone fragments, everything else lost to the acidic soil she was buried in. I remain very proud to have been involved in giving her the name Oriens and being able to help tell her story to the world.

I wonder if her parents would take some solace knowing that in 1600 years time their daughter would be remembered, that she would have a legacy stretching far beyond their own.

We won’t linger too long by the graveside, we have more to see…

Not all romance with Byron and the Shelleys in Switzerland and Italy

Next, I take our time machine to 1816 and the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. where we are going to hang out with one of my favourite poets, Lord Byron, and some very notable friends.

To say we are joining ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ Byron at an interesting time in his life would be an understatement and a half. Having been the darling of English literary scene since the publication of the first two parts of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812, Byron’s excessive lifestyle had finally caught up with him.

In the previous 6 months, He left/fled England following the rather public breakdown of his personal life. His wife Annabella had quite openly left him, taking away their daughter and was filing for a formal separation on the grounds that Byron was a lunatic who was involved in an incestuous relationship with his half sister Augusta Leigh with whom he was obsessed and that he had the unfortunate propensity for sticking his cock in anything that moved…all largely true. This is not even mentioning the fact he once tried to buy a 12 year old girl for £500. All these things came to a head, with his life imploding and debtors beating a path to his door, Byron decided a change of scenery was in order.

It was only a few months into his stay at Lake Geneva that Byron would meet and befriend fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley – another one of my favorites – and Mary Godwin who would be soon to marry Shelley. At the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva in June, Byron, the Shelley and Godwin with 2 companions were kept indoors across 3 whole days where they would entertain each other by reading out loud German ghost stories and composed their own. From this literary play, Mary Shelley would form the basis of her magnus opus, Frankenstein – A Modern Prometheus.

Byron rarely stopped still for long and I would follow him from Lake Geneva to Italy, where he would stay until 1823, fall in love with Armenian culture and write prolifically both poetry and none-fiction whilst having numerous affairs with married women in various cities across the country. I would be there when he founded the Liberal Newspaper with Leigh Hunt and Shelley and present at his debauched dinner parties before the dream ended with the death of Shelley in a boating accident in 1822. Two short years later Byron would also die.

This is one of my favorite Byron poems:

WHEN we two parted

In silence and tears,

Half broken-hearted

To sever for years,

Pale grew thy cheek and cold,

Colder thy kiss;

Truly that hour foretold

Sorrow to this.

The dew of the morning

Sunk chill on my brow–

It felt like the warning

Of what I feel now.

Thy vows are all broken,

And light is thy fame:

I hear thy name spoken,

And share in its shame.

They name thee before me,

A knell to mine ear;

A shudder comes o’er me–

Why wert thou so dear?

They know not I knew thee,

Who knew thee too well:

Lond, long shall I rue thee,

Too deeply to tell.

I secret we met–

I silence I grieve,

That thy heart could forget,

Thy spirit deceive.

If I should meet thee

After long years,

How should I greet thee?

With silence and tears.

Sir Richard Francis Burton and the Hajj to Medina

From one legendary 19th Century shagger to another and now we take our time machine just a short jump forward to 1851 to join the company of one of my personal heroes: Sir Richard Francis Burton.

If there is ever want to feel like you haven’t perhaps done quite as much as you could with your life, take a look at what Sir Rich was known for: he was an explorer, geographer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer, and diplomat. He was known for his travels and explorations as well as his extraordinary knowledge of languages and cultures. According to some, he spoke 29 European, Asian and African languages. Yep, I definitely need to spend less time on social media.

I would join Burton on his most celebrated expedition, completing the Hajj to Mecca and Medina. Although Burton had spent 7 years in India and possessed a highly evolved and intricate knowledge of Muslim culture, this journey was best described as ‘batshit crazy’ even for him. At the time, few Westerners had ever completed the journey largely because if you were caught attempting to do so, even if by some miracle you could convince your captors that you were a devout Muslim they would, in all likelihood, kill you. Burton was an avowed atheist and despite being attacked by bandits en route, managed to complete the Hajj (affording him the right to bear the title Hajji) using a variety of disguises that would not have seemed out of place in a Baldrick ‘cunning plan’.

It is often noted by his biographers that on return from his Hajj and on rejoining the British Army, Burton took the examination to be an Arab Linguist…and failed.

I can highly recommend reading more about Sir Richard Burton and the wiki page is a decent start: Sir Richard Francis Burton  it reads like someone who just got carried away making things up about themselves, only the vast majority of facts about his life are all 100% verified by contemporaries and if anything Burton was known for understating his achievements – presumably just to avoid all other humans feeling inferior.

So I hope you enjoyed my little jaunt through history.

What about you? Where would you go in history and why?

Remember: If you don’t like these thoughts, stick around, I have others…

Give me back my face… #NaNoWriWee

I may have mentioned that I took part in Kernel Mags #NaNoWriWee challenge to write a novel in just 30 hours? You hadn’t heard…okay, just to recap:

Find out more about #NaNoWriWee

Read my entry: Singularity

Read a short extract from Singularity: Tale of the Unseen Hand

Read the other entries

To cut a long story short, I’ve been thinking it might be nice to have a cover for my piece and I was wondering if a lovely artists or illustrator out there who has read Singularity might be kind enough to do me one.

I have something in mind, dreamed up on a late night with just the right amount of whisky. In my head, the planet earth, seen past a terraformed moon, swirls in thick black clouds and forms the eye of the traditional illuminati ‘all seeing eye’. At each corner of the pyramid that forms the outside of the eye is a circular panel featuring one of the three main characters: Lancelot (possibly with Guinevere) The Archivist and The Singularity (in physical form).

If that captures anyone’s attention and imagination or even you’ve read Singularity and have a better idea for a front cover, please get in touch. I’d love to hear from you!

Sneak Peek at Singularity – My Submission for #Nanowriwee

The Tale of the Unseen Hand

Where there is chaos, you will find us.

When there is chaos, we thrive.

For countless millennia, we have been watching your Kind.

They will say that I am the villain of the piece. We have grown quite adept at being the villain of the piece and I don’t mind really, it is a label that has always suited my ends well.

I think it’s important that you love your job. Chances are you’re going to spend a lot of time working, so it’s wise to try and make the best of it. I certainly love my job, which often surprises people when I tell them, partly because no one recalls a time when there wasn’t The Archivist reigning over the Monastic Order of Telepaths and partly because no one really understands the work that I do and the few that do see it as something sinister or in some way distasteful. My job is both sinister and distasteful at times, sometimes things have to be done that are not pleasant, but still must be done. The Archivist exists to perform those tasks and perform them rather well, if I do say so myself.

The Archivist has not always been my name. I trace my lineage back to the days of Earth. I was young in the days before the fall, before that infernal Coming Darkness descended on the planet that was to be ours. In those times, before the Darkness Came, and the times before that, I was known by a good many names, but most frequently by that of Kezef. Some of the oldest books to have survived from Earth tell the various stories of Kezef at great length, but they are seldom read by anyone these days, their power over Humanity has been lost. We had to react to these changes, to maintain our position in the universe.

The fall of Mankind and the death of Earth changed everything for our organisation. 26^th March, 2125, that single day when 14 billion humans along with all other life perished. We had failed, with all our power, all our money and all our influence, we had failed. We were expected to see the future, the past and the present, all at once; it is the gift that the universe has bestowed upon us. Such compelling power and yet not one of our Order saw the Coming of Darkness approach. So many of us were lost on that day. I should have perished too…

Read more here: Singularity

Rorschach – A character in fiction who speaks to me.

Kitty Genovese. New York. March 13, 1964. Stabbed. Attacked for over half-an-hour in the lobby of her apartment building.Thirty-eight neighbours heard the whole thing. No one called the police. No one helped. No one heard. No one saw.

Night I heard 38 people did nothing was night I put on this mask. Never wanted to see face in mirror again. Ashamed to be part of Human Race.” – Rorschach – Before Watchmen: Night Owl #2

38 people did nothing.

You are intended to be surprised, but you’re not, are you? Not really. You’re not surprised because, odds are in my favour to predict this, you are one of those 38 people.

You were not a Neighbour to Kitty Genovese when, in 1964, she was stabbed to death in the lobby of her apartment building…but

You ARE one of the 38. There will have been a time, more than one I’d wager, when you have seen something terrible, something that perhaps you could have even prevented. You did not. You walked away, you held your silence, you heard nothing and you saw nothing. You are one of the 38 people in Kitty’s apartment building…and

So am I.

I did nothing.

I did not see.

I did not hear.

More on this later…

This post started out a long time ago; I heard this audioboo from Nick Holloway (@NickHollowayVox) and it got me thinking…

There are lots of characters from literature that speak to me, but there is one whose voice I hear louder and clearer than all the others. His name is Rorschach, from Alan Moore’s superb graphic novel, The Watchmen.

Rorschach

For those of you who haven’t read it, The Watchmen takes place in an alternative and highly distopian 1985, where the planet stands on the brink of nuclear oblivion as the Cold War threatens to heat up. In America, masked anti-heroes have taken up the cause of justice as the state fails in it’s response to increasing levels of civil unrest and anarchy.

Amongst these ‘masks’, The Watchmen, is Rorschach, so-called because of the constantly shifting ink blots that form his mask.

Those of you who are familiar with moore’s work are forgiven a little surprise at the fact this is the character I would cite as speaking most to me. It is fair to say that he has some personality quirks that I do not share:

• Rorschach is about as Right Wing as it’s possible to be, while I’m a bit of an unrepentent Lefty;
• Rorschach is antisocial to the point of self-imposed issolation, I have been known to quite enjoy the company of others; and
• Rorschach is violent in the extreme, while I always seek to avoid conflict wherever possible.

At this point it is worth addressing a commonly repeated slight on the character of Rorschach, which writes him off as a sociopath. We humans like our labels, but this label seems too harshly applied to a character a lot more complex than that. There are certainly several aspect of Rorschach’s character that would single him out as having an antisocial behaviour disorder – at one point other characters recall he throws a deluded, but innocent, man down an elevator shaft – but other elements, that would suggest otherwise. Sociopath or not, he still speaks to me. At the heart of the reason for this is compromise…

We all compromise, it’s part of our humanity. Our innate capacity for compromise makes us adept and effective at collaboration. Collaboration is a good thing, it’s largely how we better the whole species. Sometimes we compromise too much; at the expense of ourselves, at the expense of others, we become like Kitty’s neighbours, because it’s easier to do nothing. It’s easier to hear nothing. I compromise too much, I always have. Rorschach knows nothing of compromise.

Never compromise. Not even in the face of Armageddon. – Rorschach, The Watchmen

*Spoiler Alert*Even though Rorschach knows that Ozymandias’ plan, to foster a world peace by providing a common threat for the leaders of the world, will be highly effective, he will not compromise his beliefs. Rather than accept the brave new world created by Ozymandias, a world that his masked comrades are willing to accept, however distasteful, Rorschach cannot. There is no doubt in his mind when he steps from Veidt’s antarctic lair into the snow that his destruction, at the hands of Dr Manhatten, is assured…

The panel of Dr Manhattan disassembling Rorschach, leaving him nothing more than a smear of blood and deconstructed bone on the antarctic ice, still affects me every time I read it. It’s powerful, such sacrifice. Rorschach becomes a true hero in my eyes…We compromise too much, but we don’t need to. Whether we recognise it or not, there is a little bit of Rorschach in all of us.

I’ve always been drawn to them. Drawn to those people who stand out from the vast sea of our collective compromises. They stand up, they shout out, they attack what they believe is wrong. Often they are overlooked, marginalised, fragmented, disassembled and even killed. They know this is a possibility, a likelihood, but they do it anyway, but themselves at risk, in danger, rather than compromise their beliefs. Never compromise, not even in the face of armageddon.

For too long I’ve been a neighbour of Kitty Genovase. I have seen nothing. I have heard nothing.

No more! I’m making a concerted effort to be more Rorschach-like.

I will be bold…

It’s started already. Here’s something that I wrote recently: On The Abuse of Power.

The City is afraid of me,
I have seen its true face. – Rorschach

Branches, Seagull, Infinite Storms, Lancelot and Guinevere

The Branch Snapped Off In the Infinite Storm

From these feet begin the unexplored land

Coiling upwards to assault the eyes that hold,

Made profound on account of this heart

Emptied of improbable diamonds

By sleepwalkers’ hands,

All buried at sea,

Eerie as the dreams of ghosts;

As my branch snapped off in the infinite

To seagull begging young is brought.

Downpour comes into my dreams

Yellowed hands and blackened feet;

Free-wheel circular flagstones

Rattle in the throat of night

Tie a sleeping mountain,

This silent body;

The downpour raves

Between your thighs,

Soliloquy of stones and water.

If you liked that one you can listen to it over on my Audioboo

Lancelot and Guinevere

Having an affair

Without ever being in between the sheets

Talk and talk, cross space between often,

But no nearer each other.

Give everything can

While frozen to a line,

The sword that lies in sleep; and watch what cannot

Touch, unspoken as intimacy grows.

It was Lancelot who was bound,

You’re Guinevere, who knows her knight

Is hooked; only she can change the rules

And take her forbidden body to his –

Did she drop a handkerchief or a straight hand to the groin?

Or was the first moment

Lips no longer talking, eyes no longer watching but blurring,

And hands holding onto this moment in another life,

Fate standing there with a new garment to slip on.

All before had been guarded

And reversible

Interchangeable

Dance of friendship,

All now irreversible

Time-chained,

Sequential path of lovers.

It isn’t only armies who burn boats

So that they have to stand and fight.

The gesture tests us,

There on the table is the matchbox we have fiddled and played with,

Emptied

Filled with talk.

OK Guinevere,

Strike a match.

Want to read more?

Go on, you know you do. Find more here:

Without You, I’d leave aborted poem-foetus on the doorsteps of random strangers

Two Poems – I am Parenthesis and Boredom

Without You, I’d leave aborted poem-foetus on the doorsteps of random strangers

MADNESS

We poets in our youth begin in gladness,

But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness

–          William Wordsworth

I am afraid to joyfully dig so deep
(Until the voices sing me to sleep)
But I am suddenly faced with choices
(I am aware of different voices)
At night, with the voices at their most bright
Slip into sleep, sheep into fright.
I feel the tightening of elastic,
Smell slow burn rubber,
Taste the word: ‘snap’
In sanity, like the sea, laps
At introvert, infidel shores
 Below me, madness hangs in stasis
Whilst, I dig around in gladness
Taste happiness and flee from trouble
Waiting to burst that bubble.

 A Song and A Dance

You make the atoms in my bones dance in their spaces

I shake, judder, like an express train. Believe me

The atoms in my bones are dancing in their spaces.

My insect heart, tiny life drumming

its fast metabolic rate in my ear. We couldn’t

make love. I would miss you by lifetimes.

Too quick for a courtship lasting centuries.

Broken down to atoms dancing in my bones by the look

in your eyes. Like the light at the birthing party for stars.

This is longing

Unfixed

As an explosion

Tearing

Through words like fire, breaking everything down

to shaking ash. We have to start at this collapse,

Inorganic

Lives without language – mountains and rivers,

coalescing before language creeps over like foliage

We carry our atoms like memories and when we meet

The atoms in my bones are dancing in their spaces,

Uncrowded by deliberation of slower things.