A Series of Home

We have entered the epoch of timeless time. At least, this is a key argument put forward by Manual Castells in his seminal, The Network Society. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) and biotechnologies have eroded the logic of linear time. We may not be able to physically travel to points past, control the future or exist in multiple place simultaneously, but as technology develops so does our ability to experience disparate places and times.

In the case of the latter, Anthony Giddens refers to it as the 'phantasmagoric' self. Derived from the Greek phantasma, meaning apparition or ghost, the stress is on the second (or third, or nth) life lived through mediated 'distanciation'. I do not live in Colorado, but my figure looms under the surface as I insert myself through telephone calls and emails, bank transactions and votes cast.

What Giddens failed to consider was the reverse: the ghost of place imposing on the present. Of lives lived and imagined that seep into our day-to-day through media and memory.

London has become routine, but this last week+ has seen a confluence of pasts invading my present.

Partly this invasion is the product of masterful cinema. We have been enjoying a biweekly film night chez nous for the last month or so, and the most recent film struck a chord. Last Friday we watched the latest Coen brothers film: No Country for Old Men. Set in Texas in the 1980s, the film, which is eerily quiet, hangs together on its impressive yet understated cinematography. Its imagery is stark but effective and emotive. Indeed, it is so powerful that an otherwise banal scene sent chills down my spine. The shot?

A house sagging in the summer heat. Boxy, 80s-style cars line the street, the curb crumbling away.

It lasted only a few seconds, as it was only an establishing shot, but it was literally enough to make me jump. Something about the house or the cars or the street made me powerfully recall my childhood in Colorado. It was not a specific memory or event that stirred. Perhaps it was an amalgamation of childhood memories and imagined moments that were summed up in that one shot. The crumbling curb.

But that's just one sequence from one life that seems so far from now. We also watched Smoke Signals a few weeks back.  Visions of Walla Walla danced in my head as thunder clouds tumbled in across the rolling blue hills: a vision I look forward to seeing when I return in March for a weekend.

The most invasive moment, however, occurred while I was enjoying the crisp, sunny Sunday afternoon air along the Thames.  Settled on a park bench on the Albert Embankment, I sat reading Atonement by Ian McEwen (an excellent book, and I presume a good movie based on the reviews) when Briony, one of the main characters in the novel, came walking past.  She was a nurse working at St Thomas's during WWII, and at one point she ventures out to navigate the street-signless roads of London towards Clapham.  Narrated in the first person, she walked right past my bench, veered down South Lambeth Road, and commented on the park in front of my house as she passed.  How strange it was to her that there should be people playing tennis while London endured the blitz.

How strange it was to me, our encounter in timeless time and placeless place, as worlds melded and passenger jets buzzed overhead.