The „timelessness“ vortex

It was actually some time ago, months at least, that I “cracked” the “timelessness” vortex. Back then, I was excited for, maybe, five minutes and never got round to writing about it because, as soon as I finally understand, this kind of thing gets quite boring. Like something I have always known anyway.

Maybe it is useful to look back to the beginning of my blog where I introduced the “text vortex” as, in fact, THE key concept of my text theory. (“Theory” I don’t like much, but there has to be some kind of guideline and concepts for thinking and speaking about non-evident things intelligibly.) Even though the READER figured prominently, I was never that interested in them (that is: me) but – as readers are! – in the TEXT. Readers are people who love to get involved with stories as something that is somehow anchored in their own lives but with this huge potential of carrying them beyond it.

So, readers are usually fascinated with and immersed in the text = the story and the fictional characters. And it is such a tangible, “real” experience that I always wanted to know if it can be described and understood more generally and exactly than this. But I never got anywhere near it until I drew the concept of a TEXT VORTEX into my orbit. The concept is deliberately vague because it is exactly the point that the experience is slightly or considerably different in any single instance of reading. It has to describe some kind of MOVEMENT because we are getting “moved” by the text, if we are really reading it. Something has to happen FOR US at some point – ideally something we didn’t expect. And it changes us, if only for a moment.

THIS movement is the only thing we can be certain of – the only thing we can say with CERTAINTY about a fictional text because it is entirely within our own experience and we cannot be mistaken about it. If we can describe it, we catch the way the text actually worked on us, the way it became reality. The categories of description we have acquired in our life as a reader inform our experience and its description – no text could come into being without these other texts we have already read – but what we really want of THIS text we are just reading is something we haven’t experienced before. We want it to be a singular, exciting experience. At least when we are really reading, not just “checking on it” to find out what it might be about. We can call this experience whatever we want. The “vortex” is, I believe, something a poet used to describe how his poems work, and that was how it came to me when I read Shakespeare’s sonnets. But I could never verify its origin. It proved very adaptable, though, and I began to use it to describe the movement(s) a text creates inside me and which I can describe. The act of describing appeared unfamiliar because we usually never do it. Or so it seems, but I suppose it happens unnoticed more often than we think, inside us, on the way home from the cinema, or explicitly, having this chat at the tube entrance after the show or trying to persuade somebody else that something is worth watching or reading.

(Same with CRITICISM: people who actively produce text - as writers or actors - had an extremely intense relationship with this text which has also been really dynamic. For them their text has been a process which might not really have come to an end. So, the last thing they want is to have someone pin categories on it and thus “kill” the process. What they might be genuinely interested in is our subjective experience – a description how their text moved or changed us. They would want to know if what they were trying to do worked on other people as well as on themselves. I suppose this is why criticism is mostly disappointing and damaging for the creator of a text or a fictional character. They took it extremely seriously – which we love! -  and therefore have a right to expect SERIOUS criticism which - because of the nature of fictional text - always involves THE PERSON who criticises. I try never to say: “This is good or bad” but always that I liked it or disliked it – but this is just the beginning. It’s difficult to say something personal about reading that is also intelligible and substantial. If we got into the habit of describing the text vortex instead of ticking boxes, we’d do exactly that. And on a level that is objective enough to be taken seriously. “I loved your text” is certainly what people want to hear – what I wanted to hear as an author and never did. But even if I had – even if “everybody” loved it – I’d probably found this unsatisfactory. I most certainly would have wanted to know why!)

So, the description of a certain text has to capture how it is SPECIAL, but of course there is REGULARITY as well. Authors know how to move us from experience. Certainly, the more regular a text gets, the more boring, at least for the type of reader I am who would try “anything”, looking for new experiences. (Therefore no Marvel – though the unexpected surfaces even in an environment like this once in a while, and my Olympus of amazing fictional characters would be substantially diminished without Tom Hiddleston’s Loki!)  On the other hand, there are these PATTERNS of movement I do expect – like theatre doesn’t really come alive for me until it reaches a certain level of spontaneity and presence between actors on the stage, so that I can get involved. Another example is that, in poetry, there has to be this singular poetic invention that shows me a certain aspect of reality in a different light. (It occurs seldom enough for me, which is why I have given up on poems, but when it happened these were some of the best fictional experiences I remember.) Or when I am reading a thriller, I always count on being mightily surprised at some point by some audacious but intelligible plot twist (and am therefore usually disappointed). And so on …

One of these experiences I am endlessly fascinated with I came to call the TIMELESSNESS VORTEX. It is one of my favourite text vortexes. It is also kind of complex, but the core feature is this UPDATING PROCESS I also began to describe in a recent post. And the core question about the updating is: Why does it work? Why can we empathize with people that are so totally unlike us because they are Elizabethans, or Greek people from antiquity, or even people from the Neolithic!? – The obvious answer is disappointingly simple: Because “we” haven’t changed that much.

It's the OBVIOUS answer and has to be kept in mind in spite of the entirely different experience contained in the question: “We” have changed A LOT! Immeasurable distance in time and, consequently, environment and mindset is exactly the point of the timelessness vortex. When I was effectively living in Middle-earth, I tried to imagine what it would be like to look a dwarf or an elf in the eye and noticed that I couldn’t do it. But what Tolkien does is that he makes us BELIEVE that we can. The time distance “deepens” the notion of FICTION even more, I think, because we BECOME AWARE that we are dealing with a DIFFERENT reality whereas “fantasy” is different from the start. We know perfectly well that, if we could look a Neolithic human in the eye, we would not recognize them as the same kind of person we are. Maybe we wouldn’t even recognize them as a person at all – even though I think there would be this disturbing glint of “human” that would make us even more aware of the unbreachable chasm. Even if we could meet a person from the nineteenth century – or from the 1980s, for that matter – there would be this feeling of strangeness, incompatibility, a being fallen out of time …

It is this absolute opposite of REAL WORLD and FICTIONAL REALITY that makes the timelessness vortex possible. We KNOW that it is absolutely impossible to know what a person from the Neolithic, from Greek antiquity or even from the 1980s – if we haven’t really lived there ourselves yet! – is feeling, experiencing and thinking at any given moment, but we readily embrace the MAKE BELIEVE the author is creating. Obviously, there are quite different levels of make believe. With the help of my bookseller sister my historical project progressed beyond expectation and I have left the Neolithic and proceeded towards the Celts, reading the first book about Boudica by Manda Scott. And, I almost regret to say, she is still way better than Cornwell at making me believe that I am really walking the meadows in the year 33 A.D., smelling the keen smells and hearing the unfamiliar sounds of nature around me, even feeling materials covering my body I don’t recognize. Similarly - as an example for a historic text - reading the “Iliad”, after a while I could hear the sounds, the noises of the chariots, of fighting, see the flurry of hooves, the glint of gilded armour and helmets, even smell the sweat, the blood, feel the frustration, the triumph, the pain, all kinds of pain. There is a lot of very visceral and interesting feeling in the “Iliad”, and remembering it all gets me back there in the blink of an eye, whereas the “Odyssey” always felt like cartoon figures painted on a wall in bright colours but not even moving. I didn’t “believe” a word of what I was reading.

So, these “primitive” features that we still share with our ancestors, like feeling pain or a sense of smell, facilitate the belief that we could go “back there” – the illusion of actually doing it. Similarly, the “updating process” works because of a mechanism that hasn’t changed as well and which I took over from Vivian Dittmar in a recent post: we recognize a situation, a reaction, an event, a position we are in and automatically put an interpretation on it. This makes us feel (or know what we feel) and this induces us to react and/or act spontaneously. When I read this description, I instantly got convinced that this is how we “work”, even though it felt unfamiliar and most people seem to reject the idea. If I don’t, it also serves as an explanation of how empathy works. We recognize the position somebody else is in and put an interpretation on it which makes us feel for them (or know what to feel = the “sociopath” version! 😉) and (eventually) act on that feeling. It is this common mechanism behind the “timelessness vortex” which is in fact a subcategory of a general text vortex based on the assumption that we can understand other people – which is always more or less far from the truth! It is just the conscious breaching of a time chasm – the unlikeliness of the updating process – that makes it such a big thing, something like the roller-coaster of text vortexes.

I had a really great experience of an updating process recently about watching “Medea” at the Sohoplace Theatre, which I described in a recent post. As usual with “classics”, I know the story so well that it is boring. The only pleasure I got in the beginning was from the “external” updating, seeing it kind of fitted into this brand-new theatre – which I enjoyed more than if I had seen it in a Greek amphitheatre, but in truth it wasn’t THAT different! So, there was a strong “historic” feeling of a kind, but then I suddenly picked up the interpretation given to Medea’s predicament = that she is desperately trying to regain control. This I could totally relate to, so this was the moment the timelessness vortex kicked in and I became genuinely excited.