One of the mixed blessings of social networks such as Facebook is the way it includes you in the random stream of consciousness of persons you have not really spent time with for years, maybe for the better part of a decade. It can be a more satisfying form of conversation than the old fashioned face to face method. Be honest. How many times have you rehearsed a conversation in your mind ad nauseum, only to have all your careful strategies dismantling with the other person's first response, and you leave, after half an hour, feeling vaguely cheated, feeling your mind is still unspoken. Well, no more. Most of us have fiercely embraced the practice of thought broadcasting, probably with a secret so-there-now-they-know warming our hearts.
Earlier this week, a woman whom I've seen only once briefly in the past ten years, asked in her status line: does love have an expiry date? And that got me thinking...
I once read about a British couple who kept a 29-year old meat pie in the back of their freezer... because they bought it from the place they met just before it closed down... obviously the meat pie had long ago ceased becoming useful as food, but it had transcended into something completely different for them. Just like society institutionalized the messy madness of spirituality and mysticism and called it religion, it claimed the insane chaos of love and called it marriage...
In our ever-changing universe, everything changes our world and by extention, us, because we are ourselves the change flowing through our universe.
In the past week, an intriguing video trended on youtube and in news media. The clip, showing one character in a 1928 Charlie Chaplin film talking animatedly into what appears to be a cell-phone has at least some viewers speculating whether this can be taken as proof of the future existence of time travel. Believers site other mysteries, such as the discovery of a Swiss watch found inside a Chinese grave sealed for 400 years, while unbelievers point to a 1924 Siemens patent for a hearing device that somewhat resembles a cell phone. If you haven't seen it yet, here's one of the clips:
Charlie Chaplin was an entertainer known for exerting a high degree of creative control in his movies. From 1917, he operated as an independent producer, using his own studios. He had been one of the founders of United Artists, a corporation dedicated to distributing the works of himself and other similarly minded actors such as Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. Some of the people who worked with him, joked that if he could have played all the parts in his movies himself, he would have. For 'The Kid', for instance, he shot more than fifty times the amount of footage needed in his quest for perfection. Leading a person to wonder what he would have made of the unscheduled appearance of an 'extra' extra from the future...
The movie that features the alleged time traveller is called 'The Circus'. Although it won him his first Academy Award in 1929, it is not mentioned at all in his autobiography. According to the website www.charliechaplin.com, the production was plagued by various misfortunes. Gale force winds destroyed the set before filming began and later on, a fire destroyed sets and props. Bad handling at the laboratory rendered much of the early footage unusable. At one stage, footage already shot was in danger of being seized by lawyers as assets of his studio became a matter of dispute in his divorce from Lita Grey. The legal battle also delayed filming by several months. Just before completion, part of the circus rig was stolen from the set as part of a student prank. Could all these stresses have contributed to a slip in his notorious attention to detail...?
As commented to some of the videoclips, Charlie Chaplin was highly creative in adding visual gags and testing his audience with visual riddles, people behaving oddly. In the same movie, for example, he included a boxing match between identical twins - which was filmed using the same actor and double exposure techniques. If this shows the unexpected synchronicity of strange behaviour depicted in a film from the past prophecying a future reality, one has to remember Leonardo da Vinci, who sketched helicopters and parachutes.
Theories abound. If the 'time traveller' is talking on a cell phone, that has to suggest a second time traveller somewhere, i.e. the person being spoken to. Or it this a ghost from the future? A time slip such as was apparently witnessed by two British ladies visiting Versailles in 1901? One of the more complicated theories suggest a holographic visitor, who is projecting from a future location, and makes much of comparing the density of the shadow of the 'time traveller' with that of the person preceding him/her.
Or perhaps it's just the cosmic joker at play again, teasingly lifting a veil to reveal the true nature of cosmic consciousness underlying and underlining all our actions.
If you are interested in scrutinizing a copy of your own (or just appreciating a gifted visionary from the past)...
I believe (secretly) that I am probably one of the weirdest people you are likely to run into. For years, I compulsively read SF and fantasy - mainly because I was looking for that species of aliens/faeries/elves or whatever who had somehow left me behind here on earth. Now I know different. We are all strangely beautiful beings full of our own magic and mysteries. I would not say, I have secrets... rather, I have become one... I play in this oddly flawed reality as I listen to the sands whispering through my hourglass. When they are all gone, I will wake up into the infinity that is my true home. Until then, I write, play guitar and create art.
