Transcript

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

If memory serves me correct, as a kid, after morning cartoons in Philadelphia, I watched old movies that aired on VHF channels. One of my favorites was the 1960 adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. From that moment on, I’ve held an interest in parallel worlds and the space-time continuum.

Which has brought me to ponder the question: Given the chance, what period would I travel back to? My most consistent answer is New York City, late 70s/early 80s. I picture myself a denizen of the East Village art scene, or hanging out at CBGB’s.

I am prone to romanticizing any number of time periods that gathered poets and novelists together as a scene: The Harlem Renaissance in 1920s, the North Beach San Francisco Beat scene of the 1950s, Umbra Poets in the 1960s. Writing that last sentence, I realize I almost never say any time before 1865, although bearing witness to the Italian Renaissance would have been cool. There are some eras I would visit as a participant and some as an observer.

In some instances, artists use their art to not travel backward but to go forward in time. You can put Prince’s album 1999 in this category. And others call out to the future, conscious of their place in what is, at the time, the present.

Recently, I watched Jean Cocteau’s film “Jean Cocteau Addresses the Year 2000.” I was amused by Cocteau’s brilliant idea to speak to the future about life in the 1960s. He looks into the camera and says “We remain apprentice robots. I certainly hope you have not become robots, but on the contrary that you have become very humanized.” Later, he states, “I don’t know the dance you’re dancing, but the dance of our time is called The Twist.” It’s hard to know whether his hopes have been answered, or denied, but at least we still dance.

Poetry has a way of collapsing time, and by working the senses, having us experience an era. In the blues rhythms of Langston Hughes’ poetry, I hear early twentieth century New York, and going back, I hear the plurality of America and its citizens in the poetry of Walt Whitman who explicitly said he heard singing. In a way, poems are capsules from the past that open whenever we read them.

Today’s short poem refutes the possibility of carrying forward a sensation, but what it shares is an emotional landscape. The speaker urges a future reader to live in their moment, but to realize what connects us, indeed what connects all of time, is the experience of nature.

The Gardener 85
by Rabindranath Tagore

Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.

From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.