The Paradox of Being Both Behind the Future and Ahead of It

           

            On Friday when I went to PARC to teach my yoga class, Shelly was downstairs in her Halloween get-up, singing her head off near a guy who was playing the piano. It was a bright green costume with a cape and animal ears but I couldn’t quite recognize what she was supposed to be. Maybe she was a green cat.

            As I was sweeping the floor of the Healing Centre, a guy with a Germanic accent who introduced himself as Eduardo came to inquire about the yoga though he didn’t seem all that interested in taking my class. He said that he does yoga someplace else on Saturdays anyway, plus he was wearing restrictive jeans. He told me he’d come to PARC looking for the drawing class and since he couldn’t find it he was considering the yoga. He went away and didn’t come back, so I think he found his drawing class.

            Shelly came, but only stayed for half an hour because she wanted to tell everybody her “bat story” downstairs. So maybe her costume was meant to be a green bat.

            After the class, the weather was nice, with lots of big clouds in the blue sky, so it would have been a good time for me to take a bike ride to continue exploring southern Rosedale. But I had a prose analysis writing assignment for Children’s Literature class that had to be handed in electronically by Saturday at midnight and I didn’t know at that time how long it was going to take me to finish it. I worked on it till I had almost twice as many words as required and then I started whittling it down. I was fourteen words over the limit by dinnertime.

            While eating dinner, I watched the Buster Keaton directed silent film, “Battling Butler”. It was a bit difficult to follow though because the story text of my copy of the film was in Spanish. However, I was able to figure out the main plot. Keaton played, Alfred Butler, a spoiled rich guy who still lived with his parents. They decided that he needed to get out of the house in order to learn how to be a real man, so they sent him off on a hunting and fishing trip. So he leaves with his trusted valet in his expensive car, pulling a large trailer full of amenities. We next see him in the wilderness but in an apartment sized tent full of all the luxuries of home. There is a stove with an oven, an icebox, a four-poster bed and even the canoe that he brought with him serves as a nice big bathtub.

            While he’s bumbling around in the woods, trying to hunt, he shoots his gun backwards and almost hits a local girl who is out for a walk. She’s pissed off at first but begins to like him over the next few encounters and they begin to court. She has however two very large brothers who don’t approve of the union. Meanwhile there is a major sports story in the news about a boxer known as “Battling Butler” who has a big fight coming up. To impress the girl’s brothers, Alfred’s valet tells them that Alfred is the battling Butler. So to maintain the ruse, Alfred has to go to the city while the fight takes place so the girl and her brothers won’t think it’s not him. They listen on the radio to the fight and the Battling Butler wins, and so when Alfred returns to the mountains he gets to marry the girl. But then the brothers read in the news that the Battling Butler is going to the city to train for the championship bout and so Alfred has to leave again. His bride however follows him. Meanwhile Alfred meets the real battling Butler, who decides that Alfred can do all the training and he will just come in and do the fighting at the end. Alfred proves himself to be comically inept at both sparring and training. But on the night of the fight, the real Battling Butler comes to Alfred’s dressing room and starts picking on him. He knocks him all around the room for a while until some heretofore internalized instinct for fighting in Alfred breaks through to the surface and he beats the crap out of the Battling Butler.

I finished my prose analysis of a section of “Tom’s Midnight Garden” just before bed and sent it to my professor. Here are the main points:
            “There is also a paradox for someone visiting the past that they are both behind their future and ahead of it.

This section holds a convergence of extremes. They have reached the top of the tower, at the end of the file, at the end of the day, at the end of the year, at the end of Tom’s holiday, at the end of Hattie’s childhood, and at the end of Tom’s time travelling.

Looking down from the tower of Ely, which is unaffected by the stream of time, they reflect on both their journey from Castleford and their travels through life so far. They can see both the past, upstream from whence they came and the future, downstream, simultaneously. The river winds out of sight toward the unseen, unfrozen, unknowable future of the sea. The river disappears into three obscurities: distance, mist and evening. Tom, for Hattie, has also been gradually disappearing from her perception. Where the river has not disappeared it is gleaming in the sunset, promising illumination and understanding at the end of the story.

The river’s flow is frozen, mirroring Tom’s desire to be able to freeze time and stay in childhood.

The only sounds coming from below: the wind’s breath and the train’s puff suggest that these elements are alive. Trains follow schedules in linear time, while the wind is less predictable. Just as there exists a river of time; there is also the wind of time or change. Though the river of time is frozen, the wind of change is not, as Tom can hear it breathing. This heralds the changes that will soon occur.

The wind is bending the smoke from the home fires, which are symbolic of warmth, family and life continuing. The fact that the wind is only slightly bending the smoke suggests that change will occur, but familial warmth will continue.”