I Am a Time Traveler, and So Are You

Yep. It's true, because space IS time, Einstein.

a little pigeon painting in acrylic, pastel, gauche, ink

You know what’s weird? There isn’t a very good word for “the awareness of death.”

• Mortality is the fact of death.

• Memento Mori is the reminder of death.

• Mortality Salience is the measure of the awareness of death.

None of these work in the sentence, “Some people live with a high level of X, the knowledge of their impending death is just below the surface, a gurgling like a heartbeat, that keeps them moving forward in time.”

I met a man at dinner last month who casually referenced Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which I very weirdly happened to have in my purse, a coincidence which quickly established that we were kindred spirits, so I asked him if he knew of a word for the awareness of death. No one else, including Google, had.

“Thanatopsis,” the man quickly replied, which was extremely impressive, right??? And it does mean the awareness of death… in Greek, and comes from the title of a well-known (although I did not know it) poem about that idea by the 19th century Massachusetts poet William Cullen Bryant, who to be honest, I had never heard of.

But the thing is, that word is old and hard. I mean, I like Ancient Greek as much as the next nerd but I also don’t know how to make ancient Greek fetch. LOL. We need an easier word.

The best idea I’ve had so far is “morimento,” which is just memento mori backwards and cut up, but feels like something I could and would say.

“How are you?”

“Feeling some acute morimento today. How about you?”

It kind of works. But we can do better.

Please comment with your ideas or send them via carrier pigeon to San Francisco. I’m sure I’ll stumble upon your notes as I traipse around town.

TAKE SOME ILLICIT TIME FOR YOURSELF

ILLICIT TIME: Illicit time is defined (by me lol) as periods during your routine day when actually nothing is due, no one needs you, and you are filled with enough joy to spend those moments living rather than feeling guilt. In those moments, you can snatch some seconds back from death. These moments will not appear on your final bill. Illicit Time is best when it only feels stolen, but is in fact sanctioned, earned, or lucked into, eg a snow day or a well-planned leave of absence. Illicit time is strategic time, removed from the normal procession toward death, a time for incubating your next move.

Morimento Mondays

It’s Monday, so today is sanctioned work time, but I bet there are some illicit moments of joy you could sneak in there if you tried. Go for it y’all. If you want, you could use those moments to read a piece of writing (below) that I wrote in 2016 when my first child was a baby and his birth was still very much top of mind (and physically remnant in my body). It’s about thanatopsis. I could call it Morimento and see if poetry still has the power to create slang.

I’ve been looking for this piece of writing for over a year. As I read more about time and space and scientific progress I have been remembering this idea that I wrote down. I remember I was in bed in our apartment in Boston and my baby was in his basinet next to me. I remembered the first line and what it looked like on the page — “I am a time traveler.” — but I had no idea where it was. And I also remembered that in the piece, I posited that time travel could only happen at certain inflection points, and it really didn’t make sense to me. I couldn’t remember what my possible justification was for that idea.

Well. I found it. The notebook was inside an envelope next to a bunch of parking tickets inside my husband’s glove compartment, where I realized after some forensic investigation of the drawings inside the notebook, I must have stashed it in 2021 on the way home from a road trip to the desert. Now that I’ve reread it, I have a bunch of observations: 1.) man, I am consistent. I’ve been having the same ideas over and over again for years, and they do get fleshed out and get better, but they are also just very fixed, which is a crazy fact of identity, 2.) the theory that underlies why time travel as memory (or what I have been referring to in my mind as “natural time travel,” as opposed to sci-fi time travel where we actually have some contraption that can control time) can only occur during certain memories is about attention, and actually makes sense, if you accept the premise (which is a big if), and 3) that really I should do a better job of keeping track of my ideas.

Here it is in full, in text, and read by me below. Give it a listen if you have any illicit time to spare!

Time Travel, Motherhood, Eternity, and Morimento, 2016

I am a time traveler. 
Every few days I go back to a different time and place 
full of strangers and strangeness. 

What, you thought it was impossible? 
You were lied to. 
You do it, too. 

There's a kind of memory that is time travel. It's those moments before you became a completely different person. It's really only these instances, these periods that you can travel back to: the moments preceding a change. 

It's funny to me that I do this -- that I think we all do -- because I used to firmly believe that people could never change. Now I know I just wasn't imaginative enough about what change could be. Sure, people don't change some core parts of them. 
Introverts won't suddenly love to talk everyone's ear off, and people who speak before they think won't suddenly slow down, nor will people who hate being told what to do one day crave and adore authority. But the thoughts we can hold in our heads change. The way we are able to understand the world changes. The things that obsess us change. 

And the new obsessions make the old ones trivial and small. 

Before I had a baby, I didn't think of how close to death I was. 
I didn't think of every breath and every Itsy Bitsy Spider as a point plotted on a graph laying out the finitude of my short stint. 
It's as though the moment he was born, my present moments became snapshots in an album he’ll one day show a friend who will politely not care enough about how young I looked despite my grays. And so I visit the person who existed before that sepia-toned album started being collected. 

She lived in a bigger apartment than this. She wrote a book. She wrote short stories in tiny script in a big black notebook in between staring jags and whiskey shots, with her feet up on the sill in the bright afternoon light. 
I go back and watch her waking up that day and feeling deep down inside a part of her body was awake that she'd never felt before. Never before or since have I wanted to use the word “burgeoning,” but when I felt that spark in what had to be my uterus, I lay under the covers thinking burgeon, burgeon, burgeon and Oh God, what have I done? 

Once, then, I wasn't a mother. 
And now I am. 

To feel her feet rubbing together under the covers, 
to smile her smile on TV, 
to write hunched over, 
the pain in her shoulders deep and wonderful, 
is to time travel back to a different world, 
to leave these shoulders 
stiff from lifting and playing and swinging and pushing, 
to spy on younger limbs that had no sense 
of their impending duties. 

And it's not just the period before I became a mother that I visit, replaying the choice over and over, the giddiness. No. When we first moved to Boston, I visited the year before we decided to move, 
before the fight, 
before Boston was even a word. 
I watch those two cook in the kitchen under the stairs. I watch them open presents on Christmas Day, matching sleeping bags. 

When I moved to Idaho at 9, I time traveled back to 7 and swam in the pool in L.A., 
not worrying that mom and dad had lives of their own and could destroy mine. 
I picked flower petals off the blooming succulents and scattered them across the snail-slimed stairs, the stucco glistening with trails. 
I still visit there, though the house is different and many families have come and gone since we erected the place and then tore ourselves down.

It doesn't matter. 

I can visit that girl.
And the high school pothead she became, and the college druggie she stopped being so she could learn to be herself, and the lover she turned into when she met her guy. 

I visit them all, when I brush my teeth.
I don't want to tell them anything. 
I don't need to speak or change them. 
I just like to watch, and sometimes when there's no one around and no reason to fear interruption, I'll go back to wherever it was that she secretly cried in that world. 

And I'll watch that, too, standing in the far corner of the closet 
or the storage unit bathroom, hoping she can sense my presence and that it soothes her. Why worry about the present when the ghost of your future is standing quietly behind you?