THE
CHRONOVISOR Notes Regarding Time, Time Travel, & The Viewing of Past and Future Events
Los Angeles, CA
Institute For Paranormal Psychology
2011
THE
CHRONOVISOR Notes Regarding Time, Time Travel, & The Viewing of Past and Future Events
Notes Compiled By Janice Lee & Laura Vena
Los Angeles, CA
Institute For Paranormal Psychology
2011
What is the Chronovisor? The chronovisor is a machine for viewing past and future events. or
In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. – Albert Camus
The chronovisor is a scrapbook, newspaper, fortuneteller, curse, small god, danger, atlas, orthographical projection, broken dance, glass eye, enigma, father, series of constellations perceived by the retina from peripheral positioning, tomb, telescope, celestial trampoline, gateway, secret, Victorian dirigible, theory, sorcerer’s folly, drug, phenomenon accompanied by a chemical firing in the brain, toxic euphoria, rough ride, mummified breath, sinking in, cause of human decline, poisonous ether, optic illusion, evolutional slippage, misaligned chakra, trick... or
A Benedictine priest, working at the San Giorgio Maggiore monastery in Venice, also a musicolost, had invented a machine called a chronovisor which enabled him to travel into the past. A group of eminent scientists was helping him with this machine.
The chronovisor is hidden, waiting to be found, emitting flashes few mental ranges can distinguish.
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It is repeated by some that the source of Madame Blavatsky’s power emanated from a secret metal tube that she kept locked away in a secret location of her house. She came across the object on one of her travels to Egypt, and friends report that upon her return, “she just seemed different.”
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Geno Turco, a farmhand on a vineyard in ___, Italy, reported to fellow workers, that while pruning vines in the SE corner of the property, he discovered a strange futuristic device hidden in one of the tangles. Afraid of touching the foreign object, he ran back to tell the others, but when they all gathered around the location, it had disappeared. Acquaintances of Turco credit the incident to his heavy drinking after the sudden death of his wife. Others report seeing a strange bright flash in the sky a few hours later, and insist that the town was visited by other worldly beings that day.
Writings On the Chronovisor •
The chronovisor is an instrument of the Devil. It poses a direct question to its user. Will you be consumed by the corruption of time, knowing that God sees you, even in between the folds of time. Will you give in to the bestial transformation, the bodily eye of time that transports you out of the present of the present, and into the present of the past? The heroic kingdom is full of citizens like you, keeping time through the incessant ticks knocking on the interior of their skulls, the illusion of a golden reign over a marvelous wealth and form, yet not sanctioned, not instituted, and not blessed by the one true God.
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The chronovisor can be handled by no single man alone. It destroys those who even desire its touch, infects them with a noxious babble, pouring the chrysalis of eternity, an infinity of possibility that ought only be kept in the timepiece of God, a sprawling, endless evil that consumes its host like a parasite, so that he is cursed with seeing the splendor of God at every turn.
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Aristotle purported to visit the Orient after his disciple Peter reported certain, fabulous accounts of a machine he claimed could transport him to any location in the world. Aristotle’s trip revealed the accounts to be false and proclaimed that the disciple’s stories described “the kinds of mythical events found readily available in those outrageous oriental myths and folklore” and “he had probably read about the fantastic tales and took them to be truth, forgetting how adaptable those Orientals are to new technologies and systems.”
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In the town of ___ a few kilometers away, two sisters claim to have clearly heard a crying baby in the reeds near the river. When they approached the broken reeds, they could find nothing there, but found that the cries became increasingly quieter as they approached, and louder as they walked away. The younger sister begged the older sister to turn back for fear of evil spirits or ghosts. When they returned to the site later that evening with their father and brother, they found and heard nothing. The younger sister thought she saw a bright flash in the sky, similar to the one witnessed in ___, but none of the other family members saw anything. On June 8th 1971, ___ ____, a scientist working at the Institute For Paranormal Theories of Mind in ___, Italy, claimed to have built a working time machine, an ingenious device that fit in the palm of one’s hand and could transport the operator to any era of the past. A colleague, __ __, mockingly asked, “What will you call your invention?” __ __ answered, “Chronovisor.” To which the colleague responded by furrowing his eyebrows and solemnly replying, “That’s not your invention.” No present records indicate that either men ever worked at the Institute. No records exist for them anywhere.
The chronovisor is not an object but a state of mind. Simply put, it does not exist.
The chronovisor is the path to God’s one true church.
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New York Times Letter to the Editor December 2, 1875 By Sarah Hellen Whitman or a biographer
The American Journal of Psychology January 1941 (excerpt)
I was in the parlor of Edgar [Allan Poe], with my dog, Mr. Whippit, sitting in my lap, waiting for the poet to greet me. I heard an awful sound as if gears were being grinded, or like a train being derailed, from a room below. I jumped up, throwing Mr. Whipitt to the ground and started to turn knobs and look behind doorways. In the floor of one room, I saw a trap door. Steam was coming from its edges. I stepped slowly towards it, and as I reached to pull it open, it burst open, and out ascended Edgar, surprised so by my presence, he became flustered and tripped. Before the trap door came crashing down, I peeked at the bottom of a dark stairway, a large body of metal, shuddering as if from exhaustion, pouring vapor from its surface, blurring my view of it. Edgar fell to the ground, out of breath, with his clothes torn. Recovering quickly, he picked himself up, dusted off, and invited me back to the parlor for tea. Others arrived and a lively conversation of poetry ensued.
…A Dr. Ricketts out of Suffolk was recording oral histories of the zingare, or gypsies of the hills of Castrolibero. He came across one interesting subject who he believed to be delusional. This individual, who inhabited abandoned buildings in the old hilltop village, swore that he came across a bewildering discovery when he entered an old chapel on the edge of town. A monster made entirely of metal, it groaned and shook as if with the world’s oldest anger, it held its arms and legs close to its body, and it appeared to have swallowed a man whole, who was still alive and screaming “aiuto!” as the terrified gypsy fled in horror. In a Mayan codex held in the Brussels Museum of Modernities, there are elaborate sketches of a metal contraption with a man sitting in its heart. Along with the codex and other sacred items of the Mayas, such as golden necklaces and pottery, were three metal bolts, forged by technology not available until the Industrial Revolution. The codex and bolts disappeared from the museum in June of 1931.
The chronovisor is my only connection to him. Through it, through thinking of it, tracking it, reading about it, touching it, I feel him.
The chronovisor is the keeper of memories, voices spilling and dissolving into the air, recollecting shadows as it is passed from hand to hand.
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How to Use the Chronovisor? To use the chronovisor one must be able to follow through on all actions. Following through and considering the quiet of the ether of time, allowing the chronovisor, a sensitive device, to attach itself momentarily to the mind acting with it. Be clear that a moment with the chronovisor is no ordinary moment, the terraces and pedastals of time curving inward and creating a hierarchy we have no measure for here on this plane. Many often attempt to clear their minds through meditation, or purge themselves of regrets and sins through prayer, and in a way, the chronovisor is in itself a sort of confessional booth, activating strange growths and brain activity when in motion. The chronovisor detects the radiation left behind from past events, detects dream-glimpses of traces to be left in a future time, and this effect can be detrimental, perplexing, nerve-wrecking, for an average human mind.
lost memories, lost loves, and no library could hold the horrors that are hidden in these corners. Whatever ordinary-seeming place the chronovisor seems to take you, beware of the dim suggestions that the shadows of time leave behind, blink often, and recall your worst nights of sleep. The details you remember from your worst and most horrific nightmares, they will aid you here.
While on the path only dictated by the element of time and the machine’s discourse, the mind does not realize that ghosts are real and that the groans in his dreams were of a different world, rather, he comes to feel that he has known these things all along, like running one’s fingers along some curious carvings and instantly remembering the emotional state in which they were etched so passionately. There are technical details, like opening up apertures, and focusing in on little details, but mostly the driver need only allow its ears and eyes to accustom themselves to the purposeful influence of the machine, and the chronovisor has already navigated these grooves before, continuing to form itself in the ever-arriving future, the ever-arriving past, the ever-arriving present. Know that the chronovisor is a sacred object, but not for the reasons you may think. Time itself is full of those sweeping visions that wind through dark corridors, the gods themselves often chasing their
The chronovisor is the instigation of an intangible act, that of accessing those records only the gods can see.
The chronovisor is not to be mistaken for a method to erase regret or to eradicate society’s ills; it is a dangerous proposition with ramifications far beyond our imaginings.
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Instructions On Using the Chronovisor Researcher:
The researcher’s ultimate goal would be to get her hands on the travelers’ journal. This is impossible, of course, unless one can come into contact with the machine. This is highly unlikely, as even a witness can not experience the machine firsthand. For the non-traveler, the temptation is just too much. Only one, the machine’s caretaker, is allowed to be in its company. Others who have tried, have met with various sanctions, from mild to severe. Also desirable would be access to witness accounts, or better, a witness, herself. The problem with this plan is that witnesses are, by nature, secretive and protective of information about the machine or travelers. Any researcher who is lucky enough to come across a self-identified witness who entertains questions about the chronovisor is most likely in the presence of an imposter. There are a number of tertiary sources of information about the machine and its travels, which can be found in libraries, monasteries, and on the Internet. All claims made within these contexts should be considered suspect.
concurrent obsession with what the witness would do herself with the machine—the places she would go, the events she could change—may leave her in a perpetual state of enchantment.
Traveler: A traveler should always hug her knees while in flight, or she may become nauseous and foul up the machine. If one’s trajectory should alter unexpectedly mid-passage, press the blue button and proceed with extreme caution upon landing. If your travels are dictated by remorse, you are doomed. Accustom yourself to a state of flux by wearing a different hat each day, or by frequently changing your hairdo. And while travelers can resume regular breathing during flight, they should avoid pandicultion while on board.
Witness:
You must first close your eyes to all vision, block out all possible light, and abandon from yourself the sense of sight. Then listen. Then taste the air. Then move your fingers across the spine. Then smell the perfumes of other times / other skins. A witness must never cast her gaze upon a traveler, but only find them in the traces that they choose to leave behind (they may, though, signal to them with a flashlight through a complex arrangement of mirrors). There is a way to see without watching. One can bear witness to time travel by being in a room that served as the point of embarkment for the machine. Even as the dust still settles, one may be present to hear the departing whirs and clicks, or a final exhalation. Most importantly, the witness must protect anonymity at all cost. The witness bears the mortal burden of so many bodies in locomotion and the potential fate of becoming suspended in time, as if hypnotized. Knowledge of the travels and the often
The chronovisor is something that was never meant to be found.
The chronovisor is a window whose view changes as you shuffle your feet ever so imperceptibly this way or that and shift your perspective in measured degrees.
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Notes On the Nature of Time There is no harmony in time.
Ordinary memory itself, is a paranormal phenomenon.
Everything falls away. This inability to translate past’s ability is dictated by the terms of what is occurring in the present. The straightness is foreboding.
It is possible to see and hear what lies in the memory of inert particles.
The asymmetry of the moment is due to two inertial frames: one on the way up and the other on the way down. Switching frames is the cause of the difference, not acceleration. Every change of velocity brings with it a change of gesture, vertigo, a sharp drop in the stomach.
Time and the Machine All this is a type of psychic phenomena, and though perpetrated by no one other than time, it would only support a case of fraud to forget the memory itself, or a more distant one, like the one of when the chronovisor first appeared. The chronovisor might magnify one’s path as much as possible, and though a mind would adapt and learn to navigate the ridges, it is the chronovisor that is able, with almost divine wisdom, to find the rifts and folds, hide in shadows, and bring other shadows to the surface, like a complex crochet pattern through the fabric of time. Though it operates like fabric, a giant sheet of cloth, only parts are visible at once, though the chronovisor can keep track of the visible and invisible parts simultaneously, the operator becomes victim to the disgorging of multiple memories, of rampant words in multiple languages, of being unable to walk but being forced to use one’s lefts. For the operator, it operates much more like a shroud, hiding the ends that are to come, frayed loosely, a horse shot during battle, the tumultuous ages of creation of the physical universe and the history that burdens an operator’s mind down, but not the chronovisor. An operator can’t even witness the string that holds her memories together without the machine, needing to earn the respect, and with risk of sounding derivative, pour one’s secrets out to please it. It’s not alive. No, but it is luminous, it builds, it rests in the bliss of non-being, and like an eternal parent wrapped in a magnificent cloak, it calls me, the child, into its arms. I’m called you see. Each time I recall – which is not the same as remember – I feel pulled, constantly, and there is something integral that I have lost and must get back. The pull gets weaker, as does the memory, but the influence it exerts never loosens its hold. The clock continues to strike and my cheek feels swollen. There is no time to sleep.
The chronovisor is madness.
The chronovisor is a classification tool, as it classifies its wielders as sick, monstrous, and delusional.
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Notes From Time Travelers And Other Artifacts, Residue, Echoes Following the Viewing of Past and Future Events Between the final instant of conscious memory, and the first gleam of a new life, time stops, disappears, an instant stretched out into a history of eternity. Everything happens faster in a dream time. In a second up here, is lifetimes, ages, down there, and I have to get back, find what I’ve lost.
I now become pilgrim.
A time machine is not so different from a flesh machine, the rumbling of the senses, a pain in the trigger finger, by what criteria do we locate these sensations, correlated with lapses in time and mind.
I have searched and researched, but never found out what becomes of you if you fall from the chronovisor in the midst of its flight.
The chronovisor is something I’d very much like to see once.
The chronovisor is a large confessional, capable of accessing the layers of your being.
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Darkness alone fills a universal mind, I can’t seem to grasp the ideas, the causes of misery that circle around like newly greased wheels or vultures in the sky. I wanted to say more to her, but she wouldn’t understand. And yet, in the back of my mind, I know she would understand completely. This is, in a way, not unlike the pilgrimage she once intended for herself. It’s easy to get ensnared in work like this work that is so close because it is of the mind and the heart and of time and of reality, yet too distant, precisely because they entangle those things together. Time was not, and then it was. Or, is it the other way around, is it sleeping in the eternal bosom of duration, the chronovisor only tapping at its door. What then is the difference between time and duration? Who is the eternal parent of time and what does he wear on his wrist to keep time? Where were we when we weren’t here? How can I be sure that all this that surrounds me is real? And then again, even if it isn’t, even if it is a veiled tangle of artificial patterns, will it not still reveal something about the Father who seemingly controls it all? I am drawn to the chronovisor, and have been since I learned of its existence, yet am still not completely sure of the void I am trying to fill.
or, a failure of imagination or, so hard to believe in tomorrow or, we’ve waited so long.
A spinning wheel to contain it, to produce it. Father, mother, and son were once more than one, and the son had not awakened yet, but will be awake soon.
I have a darker darker side. It only shows in one of these worlds, I can’t recall which, as the darkness covers my face and exposed the cracks of time on my bedroom wall. It is impossible to tell if I am in the dream of if the dream is in me. And if I take my eyes off it, just for a second, it will lunge into me at a ferocious speed. I can’t stop it. I can never stop it.
My memory lapses are growing. the last thing i recall is this morning, was it this morning? As I sat drinking my coffee a man walked up, gait unsure, and sat at a table across from me, he inside and me out. I saw him in profile through the glass. He set a can of Tecate down. He was young, lost and fearful in the eyes, as if nothing was familiar to him but the dulled chill of the can. And the can brought me to another memory, of another young man, laughing, lost, squatting on his hind legs near an old oak, digging a hole to search for the Tecate he buried near the roots four hundred years later and his eyes, too, seemed lost… I can’t account for huge chunks of time.
There really are those worlds reflected in an infinite pinpoint of light, between the first and final moments, or, between the final and first moments, depending on your point of view. The past is always easier to believe in, one of us has been there once before. I am not a religious person, but time is a religious process. It reveals and hides, like the God who is exposed only at the points of trauma. Failed exposures, underexposed, over mulled. These are the tears and flashes of light. In dreams I can see Him clearly, but I repeat: I am not a religious person, but dreaming is a religious experience.
My biggest concern is what all of this has done to me inside.
Father Milazzo / Ernetti (at different times) are watching a group of doves or pigeons pecking at the cobblestones in the same plaza.
The chronovisor is something very dangerous indeed.
The chronovisor is taking its toll on me. I know I live too much in the past. For it alone I know that I suffer.
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I was “in” the (mind of the ) machine for days before I realized it...
The vatican is hiding the machine.
A single act will change everything. I don’t know that I’m to be trusted.
The god does not hear you; there is no mercy for your prayers at hand!
These voices out loud make the past scatter. There is something about an empty church, like a solitary forest, that has more religion than a thousand worshippers.
Did he have any right to speak with the dead?
Save me.
It was believed that man, totally in touch with the etheric substance within himself, once flew like a bird through the ether of the universe. It was believed that he had once known how to pull energies of the conscious, thinking stars and planets down through the ether to the earth, to use for his own purpose.
“What about the resurrection? Did you witness that as well?”
“Yes... and it is very difficult to describe. We saw it as if in silhouette, as if it were a shape seen through a thin film of illuminated alabasteras if we were seeing it through a crystal.”
with seeing comes the nausea, and if my skin doesn’t age, still these visions weigh on me. how heavy are they? always the odor of sulphur persists. or only a murmur, if you resist. I have this sinking feeling. we tell ourselves whatever we have to.
All the accounts have become one, and I am the single traveler. I know this is impossible. I even can faintly recall a time when I could separate one from the other, and all from me. But in keeping the records, in interpreting them beyond the call of duty, in possessing them and being possessed by them, I find this paradox a fable I can embrace. I have seamed together a puzzle of moments and circumstances, and recast myself in each. There is no contradiction because there is no symmetry—only continual acceleration and deceleration. I keep in my pocket my father’s watch, which he left behind, probably because its timekeeping is unreliable. Its weight on my hip grounds me to the Earth enough to remind me of my name and of the daily tasks I do to maintain myself.
The chronovisor is available today only, from 4-6 pm behind the rue de Chartres, adjacent to the cathedral beyond the red-orange gypsy curtain.
The chronovisor is a complex hoax engineered by a diseased mind.
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How is Time Travel Possible? Time travel is not possible in the most traditional sense (ie. this is not an H.G. Wells story, though (s)he was on a better track when s(he) delved deeper into the teleportation of the mind, and not of the physical body), as time does not operate with the rules of physical science, rather it is a cognitive effect, a dream effect, where actual journeys are full of trapdoors, false leads, trickster shadows. Remember that in the realm of time, which isn’t so different from the realm of dreaming, that there is no god to offer mercy. In that respect, it is best to have asked for mercy, atonement, forgiveness, etc. before embarking on these travels. The glimpses you often catch in your dreams, they are closer to that place then you think. Though in dreams, we can wake up, become reabsorbed into the banality of everyday life, and because the transition is often so jarring, we usually forget the important details of what we dreamed. Though beyond this, it may seem like an embedded security device, and what we remember to be the important details, really are only those details that resemble this life already. Those details like the smell in the dark corner of the house, or the feeling you got when you tried to open the locked door, these are the real elements of time’s platform. And because dreams too deal in the strange impressions that time also feeds on, the real dreamers make the best travelers, though of course, what this usually means is that we seek the “sick,” the “psychotic,” the “schizophrenic,” etc. These terms label those individuals who often seem to be blurring the line between reality and fiction. But the truth is, that those individuals, unknown to any tools of scientific correlation, are in actuality picking up on the echoes, voices, sounds, residue of the ether. This is why the insane are the best suited to travel, though how they might translate their sightings to us is another issue.
Though this doesn’t exactly explain how time travel is possible, it explains the nature of the juxtaposition of these various realities. Mathematics would have us believe that time is fixed, linear (though many new theories are finally starting to see the complexity of what we’ve termed the fourth dimension), but it’s not a simple measurement we use to understanding the passage of moments, it is not a reference point, rather it is much more the reverse. Though this may make little sense to the average reader, it is most pertinent for those for whom this makes complete sense. Regardless, the easiest way to understand the world of time, will be to allow yourself to fall into the beckonings of your dream-glimpses.
Note: The human brain (unbounded) is designed to take our bodies (trapped) beyond their boundaries and casings limited by spatial restrictions. Our very chemistry encourages inner oscillation from point to point, while our geography rejects it.
The chronovisor is not capable of a simple rewind or fast forward function. There is no pure experience of an other time that can be lived or relived in a vacuum. Everything is changed by our meddling.
The smoke of Satan has entered the Sanctuary. – Pope Paul IV, 1963
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On the Nature of God God was once a bear, paws pointed outward, waiting to give his sons and daughters the happiness of his hugs, paws soaked in the honey of the earth and the happiness of being God. God was once a ball of coal tar, emerged out of the deep fissures of a smooth earth, smooth as the bottom of a newborn baby, God was. God was once the Sun, soft like a bear and sticky like tar or honey, stuck in a fixed path across the sky, predictable in his happiness. God was once a newborn baby, with a childlike face smiling, hands pointed toward the honey in the sky, and happy in the wisdom and answers of the sun. God was once a symmetrical shape, a structure for spherical ants and bears and newborn babies, smooth like honey and pointed like a bear’s snout looking up at the sky.
The Relationship of God to the Machine What this means is that patience must intersect the passage of time, to find that moment, that paradoxical instant for which time is suspended and the dead may return to their families and the primordial chaos is reactualized. Time has become habit. But at the same time, habits don’t exist. Everything begins over again at its commencement every instant, every instant that goes by, time soaks each object with its passage, each twinkling purpose a mirror or manifestation of the invisible tick-tock. At the center of time may sleep God, but God doesn’t exist here, on this plane, and cannot be a habit either. He lurks between the minute folds; one tries to squint, but squinting won’t help. The past is a prefiguration of the future. And the future is a prefiguration of the past. That is why it is possible. There is a pattern at work here, and the losses of certain lives – though there is nothing new under the sun, and the same for life – cause an incredible burden to time, history needing to renew certain moments, waiting for an eternal return that may never arrive but will always have already arrived. Certain gestures might reveal different angles of light, reflections like retellings, consisting of the cross-stitches we sew in our sleep when we sit on the brink and act as if we are narrating all this with perfect clarity. I make another pilgrimage. Each night I make another one. Averting my gaze to the opposite side of the axis I am sitting up, I also know that time has something to do with the category of faith. Our dream has always been to be freed from the dominion of time, a stranglehold that at moments of wakefulness feel like gentle caresses, like polyphonic poetry, and yet it was Abraham’s faith that states for us that for God everything is possible, and consequently, for Time everything is possible, and we hope that for Man everything is possible:
The chronovisor is the translation of ghostly improbabilities into dark and hopeful suggestions, the unveiling of the residue of the ages, and the absorption of all those sonic echoes that bounce around in the ridges of time, the traveler wielding the chronovisor much like a compass, or a bat’s echolocation to locate lost memories.
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The chronovisor is an instance, a conundrum, an empty flood of resistance.
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Have faith in God. For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith. Therefore I say unto you. What things soever he saith. Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them. (Mark 11:22-24) And in a way then, the freedom we so seek at the bottom of each of our souls, is a creative one. We must create to be freed, we must destroy to create, we must create to destroy, and begin again. Ours is a religion of the fallen, and the fallen are often doomed to cycles of repetition, forever contemporary with they myths they recall once every other autumn when the winds stretch across the city and a silver fork reflects the light from the window at just the right angle to illuminate the red apples in basket on the floor. It is the mythology we must hold on to, not the future, that is what ensures the possibility of creating a new one. We must sit with our eyes and windows wide open, sit in contemplation of our own skeletons, and know that though nothing is ours to keep, it is our to create.
time. God has a number of memories, too, and when our thoughts turn to him, delightful encounters don’t seem so anymore and the memories seem to negate themselves, push away, like opposite magnetic poles, and the holes that get left behind, the absences, are what we feel, so that memories become voids and must be recreated and that our psychic mechanisms only tune themselves to the frequency of time when the light is right, and certain metamorphoses may occur during dream-time but the familiar proportions tie us down to this plane and this plane only but we can continue to search because all these things are there, right there, right under our noses.
God is there, each moment of time that passes, it is God who is so immersed in time that he has begun to reflect it. The truths of the universe, the lucky numbers, the marvelous and the radical, seem endless to Him because he realizes the value of something that is written down. Duration is the key, and that is why patience is such a large part of all this. We all feel a slight attraction between our body and certain objects, especially in the calm of night, and this is just the “myself ” communing with the “Himself ” and the fragments of chipped time in our bones vibrating to certain frequencies the wind creates when it is lonely. We restrict ourselves to safe areas, though these areas are the least coherent and when you try to focus on the most important memory, it slips away, like the hand of God. We are indeed compelled to remember and remember over and over again, but the when seems beyond our control. We fail to recognize ourselves sometimes, and need to look into the mirror to verify the “myself ” that is destroying so many moments of
Now that I am exalted, I will draw everyone unto me. - Christ
The chronovisor is a castaway, lost itself, in the ether of time.
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2. Suzanne, d. August 14, 1932
The Relationship of the Dead to the Machine
“There are a pair of special spectacles one must wear while in the machine. If the glasses should fall off or one foolishly chooses to remove them in motion, she will gaze upon an ominous terrain strewn with corpses, and bear witness to suffering too vast for the human heart to endure.”
1. Matildhe, d. November 26, 1896
[did you follow the rules? are you divided by landscape?]
“The machine can resurrect a view to the dead, but the machine can not return to you a lost loved one. But to do so, even to catch a glimpse, would leave one undone.”
3. Benjamin, d. May 5, 1963
[Even though I have never traveled myself (or, have I?), I know through the memories of others, and I imagine the burden. Inside, I imagine you fall into an abyss, death-like. I imagine a hum, not a bleeding rhythm or a poetic rhythm, but a vortex. I imagine some inescapable sunset. I imagine a spherical window opening, a scream heard as a whisper. I imagine falling. I imagine your courage may abandon you.]
“There is nothing natural about traveling so far in the space of a day, there are times you may see a sunset twice within a few hours and you will suffer circadian disruption, internal temporal chaos. Am I awaking again, or has the darkness abandoned me?” [cognitive rhythm cacophonied by disjoint, 1000 lux striking the retina, photopigment, light sensor, blue wavelengths time lost in the oesophagus, lungs, liver, pancreas, spleen, thymus, skin.]
“God is in the desert.” [ our destiny, dust but, to find in one wing span oceans, cities, deserts, ideas made of flesh]
4. [I am zeitgeber, synchronizer, time giver. I keep clocks, hundreds of them, and signal to all potential travelers (for I can never know who they are, where they lurk) who may be set adrift by a recurring sunset, unexpected tidal acceleration, diurnal leaf movements of a tamarind tree, changes in temperature so that the rhythm persists in the absence of cues.
“It’s the smell of the devil,” she said.
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Still, what I wouldn’t give for even just a glimpse.]
“Not at all,” Melquiades corrected her. “It has been proven that the devil has sulphuric properties and this is just a little corrosive sublimate.”
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The texts contained in this pamphlet are excerpts from a collaborative project by Laura Vena and Janice Lee.
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© 2011
