I was destined to build a time machine
I am destined to build a time machine
I built a time machine
But where has it gone?
Where have I gone?
Where am I now?
Magnets and geometry
Converging lines of force
All of these I used, I knew, I
understood
But where has it gone?
Where has knowledge gone?
I wrote this poem the other day when
dreams I had when I was very young of building a working time machine
started flooding my memory. I was maybe five or six when I had the
first dream I recall.
I had build something like a wheel,
something that might resemble a Captain's wheel on an old time ship
wherein the lines of force converged on a central hub.
In these dreams, though it seems like
it was only one but I have differing memories, sometimes I am both in
the central hub and on the outside rotating the wheel in a certain
directing. Then a whole opens up in the hub and I go back to a time
of dinosaurs. Sometimes it is my brother who is rotating the hub.
The time of the dinosaurs appears much
like the the “Dawn of Man” chapter of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A
Space Odyssey even though I would not see that movie or even know
about it until after Star Wars came out.
Later, after seeing George Pal's
version of The Time Machine, I had the idea to make a working model
of my time machine using an empty tin of mixed nuts and magnets,
unfortunately, I did not have enough magnets and although I could see
other parts, mechanical springs and the like, I had no idea how to
acquire them and work them into the tin.
So then, this last week when so many
old influences started to converge in my life once more, the idea
that I was destined to create a time machine came to me and I wrote
this poem. The idea being that if it is destiny then it has to happen
and if we are dealing with the very collapse of time itself, then it
has already happened. And the knowledge of this is like an empty hole
in my memory. The only evidence, the wind that rustles the leaves of
trees.
