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Ah time, weird thing time. Tonight when I phoned Kid Bro to wish him a happy birthday, we talked briefly about age. I asked if he had turned 34 now? He said he thought so. But wasn't sure. Time seemed to no longer have much meaning and the years just flow together. I said, that'll change now that you have a kid. But it was an oddly coincidental response, since earlier that day, I had the following conversation with a friend I met online. We'd meet in person once before this. We were discussing Angel's cancellation and Dark Shadows and she said the following:
My friend: "You may have been too young to remember it but there was a second Dark Shadows with Ben Cross-"
Me:"Too young?" (This caught me by surprise since I knew I was two years older than she is, at least) "How young do you think I am?"
My friend taken aback: "27"
Me: "Uh no, I'm 37."
My friend: "You are KIDDING!"
I took it as a compliment of course. But it hit me as odd and made me realize how weird age and time are. Also made me wonder how much her perception of me changed within those five brief minutes. Do we change our perceptions of people when we learn what age they are?
We seem to track our lives by days, weeks, months, years and if you live in the Western Hemisphere and happen to be Christian - your yearly cycle starts on Jan 1, New Year's Eve, and it is now 2004. And the Calendar begins with Christ's Death (AD, or BC (before his death).) Yet, in China, time may be judged differently. And the Jewish Calendar has another New Year's date. But everyone more or less follows the Christian linear calendar to keep confusion to a minimum.
We think linearly - so for us time flows in a straight line or our perception of it does. Yet, what if it didn't? How chaotic and confusing that would be. Jarring in fact.
And if you think about it - how we perceive time may have a lot to do with how we perceive destiny. If we believe it runs in a straight line, we may believe it is cause and effect, that each event equals another one, an inevitable string.
Memory is also affected by time. Our memories are after all sequential. Not scattered. And over time the earlier ones fade and the later ones grow more pronounced. Is it choice on our parts? Do we choose to forget the moment we are born? Or is it inevitable? And Memory does make us who we are in a way. Each memory building on the next one, and as memories melt away or fade or become repressed, we change as well. Take one memory away and it's like pulling a thread on a piece of frabric or tapestry, unraveling the whole thing. I remember watching Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, which like most movies about memory makes the same mistake - the view that you can remove one, without removing or changing all the others, so that person themselves change completely. Think about it. If I were to say remove any concept you had of riding a bike or what a bycycle was - how would that affect all those other memories? Yet time does remove memories, doesn't it? And how we perceive time is partly due to our memories, how we perceive reality is based on the trajectory of memory. Even Eternal Sunshine makes this point. The protagonist states at the start of the film how he didn't seem to do much the last two years, they feel blank to him, empty of movement. (The movie itself plays with time btw, it starts in the present, then we flip to the past, then flip even further to the distant past, then back to the present again. The flips are jarring.)In the film, a vital memory is removed from the protagonist at his bequest. It shows how memory does inform who we are and without it - we cannot learn. We cannot adapt. We are doomed to repeat the same loop. (The movie ends differently than that, but to say more would spoil people who haven't seen it and it's unnecessary to this analysis.)
Angel 5.19 deals with the twin concepts of time and memory, it also deals with our perception and ways of dealing with them both.
( Angel 5.19 spoilers )
My friend: "You may have been too young to remember it but there was a second Dark Shadows with Ben Cross-"
Me:"Too young?" (This caught me by surprise since I knew I was two years older than she is, at least) "How young do you think I am?"
My friend taken aback: "27"
Me: "Uh no, I'm 37."
My friend: "You are KIDDING!"
I took it as a compliment of course. But it hit me as odd and made me realize how weird age and time are. Also made me wonder how much her perception of me changed within those five brief minutes. Do we change our perceptions of people when we learn what age they are?
We seem to track our lives by days, weeks, months, years and if you live in the Western Hemisphere and happen to be Christian - your yearly cycle starts on Jan 1, New Year's Eve, and it is now 2004. And the Calendar begins with Christ's Death (AD, or BC (before his death).) Yet, in China, time may be judged differently. And the Jewish Calendar has another New Year's date. But everyone more or less follows the Christian linear calendar to keep confusion to a minimum.
We think linearly - so for us time flows in a straight line or our perception of it does. Yet, what if it didn't? How chaotic and confusing that would be. Jarring in fact.
And if you think about it - how we perceive time may have a lot to do with how we perceive destiny. If we believe it runs in a straight line, we may believe it is cause and effect, that each event equals another one, an inevitable string.
Memory is also affected by time. Our memories are after all sequential. Not scattered. And over time the earlier ones fade and the later ones grow more pronounced. Is it choice on our parts? Do we choose to forget the moment we are born? Or is it inevitable? And Memory does make us who we are in a way. Each memory building on the next one, and as memories melt away or fade or become repressed, we change as well. Take one memory away and it's like pulling a thread on a piece of frabric or tapestry, unraveling the whole thing. I remember watching Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, which like most movies about memory makes the same mistake - the view that you can remove one, without removing or changing all the others, so that person themselves change completely. Think about it. If I were to say remove any concept you had of riding a bike or what a bycycle was - how would that affect all those other memories? Yet time does remove memories, doesn't it? And how we perceive time is partly due to our memories, how we perceive reality is based on the trajectory of memory. Even Eternal Sunshine makes this point. The protagonist states at the start of the film how he didn't seem to do much the last two years, they feel blank to him, empty of movement. (The movie itself plays with time btw, it starts in the present, then we flip to the past, then flip even further to the distant past, then back to the present again. The flips are jarring.)In the film, a vital memory is removed from the protagonist at his bequest. It shows how memory does inform who we are and without it - we cannot learn. We cannot adapt. We are doomed to repeat the same loop. (The movie ends differently than that, but to say more would spoil people who haven't seen it and it's unnecessary to this analysis.)
Angel 5.19 deals with the twin concepts of time and memory, it also deals with our perception and ways of dealing with them both.
( Angel 5.19 spoilers )
