THE RIVER OF TIME
I was watching a documentary on the History Channel recently about the Bermuda Triangle, yes I know - seen it all before, but I always hope there will be some new information one way or the other. There was some new (for me at least) info on Flight 19, which offered a plausible explanation as to why they were flying east instead of west. There was also a theory offered of a worm hole in the earth claiming that is you go from the BT straight through the centre of the earth, you would come out off the coast of Japan. OK so far but they then claimed that every time there is an unexplained incident in the BT there is also one in this area off Japan, you guessed it, no other details or dates to back it up.
Well this got my little pea brain going off on a tangent and thinking what if there were time wormholes here on earth? This is certainly the type of theory used by Tim Powers in The Anubis Gates where the main character Doyle goes back in time only to become no other than Samuel Coleridge. A book that every book reader should either read or be shot! I think that last statement is due to heat exhaustion, the third day in a row of century + heat and it is currently 40 C, I cant even think what that is in degrees F. I have a tee-shirt wrapped around my head to keep the perspiration from dripping onto my glasses, Tasmania sounds like a good cool place to live at the moment. The same sort of idea was recently used in the British drama series Life On Mars.
Enough of the complaining and getting back to where I was heading - The River Of Time. There is a beautiful piece of prose in The Anubis Gates I would like to quote here:
The old man sighed, ran his fingers through his thinning hair, and then gave Doyle a hard stare. "Time," he said solemnly, "is comparable to a river flowing under a layer of ice. It stretches us out like water weeds, from root to tip, from birth to death, curling around whatever rocks or snags happen to lie in our path; and no one can get out of the river because of the ice roof, and no one can turn back against the current for an instant."
"Picture it, now: if you could stand outside the time river, on some kind of bank, say, and see through the ice, why then you could walk upstream and see Rome and Nineveh in their heydays, or downstream and see whatever the future holds. Now - pay attention, this is the important part - sometime, something happened to punch holes in the metaphorical ice cover. Don't ask me how it happened, but spread out across roughly six hundred years there's a shotgun pattern of gaps . . . . . and if there happens to be a gap when and where you are, it is possible to get out of the time stream at that point, and re-enter at any other gap."
"I have discovered how to do it."
On the next page is a quote from Heraclitus, "No man can step into the same river twice, for the second time it's not the same river, and he's not the same man." Now that has WOW factor plus.
Well, I didn't say it was going to be a short blog entry! On to phase two of The River Of Time according to Luxovius Saggita.
I collect rather an eclectic range of music with one of the subjects being the early '70s West Coast sound preferably on vinyl. There's something about vinyl: you can actually smell it and each one has its own unique smell, also you have to treat it the way you would treat old mechanical machinery and to do that you have to love it. CDs are such sterile objects that have no smell and can be repeatedly abused and still work; the big drawback with vinyl is that it's such a pain to transfer music from them to an MP3 player!
So I got hold of a 3 LP set "Fillmore, The Last Days", some beautiful stuff on there including a group called Lamb, no - not the recent group also called Lamb. A look through my old and mutilated Schwartz (or was it Schwantz or even Schwann?) catalogue showed they had previously released 3 albums; all deleted, available on import only Downunda, and this was pre Ebay. Garage sales were a big attraction for me back then and one day I struck gold, New Riders Of The Purple Sage, The Elvin Bishop Group, some obscure Frank Zappa stuff, and Lamb - all imports. It was the last of seven such garage sales I had attended and late in the day, most of the popular type vinyl had been sold so the lady let me have 5 of her son's LPs for $1.00 each, I tried to look like I was doing her a favour while at the same time trying not to wet my pants with excitement, WOW! I was a bit disappointed with the Lamb album at first as it was the third and final release and they had been reduced to a folk-rock duo but I soon grew to like it a lot. The singer Barbara Mauritz later did a solo album, I'm still trying to like it but that really was a crap album. On the Lamb LP is a song called Reach High written by J Cain & J Corbitt that I would like to transcribe here too:
As life passed by you
on the river of time
Calls out your number
and throws you a line
Set sail for the sunrise,
fear not in the night
And if you feel yourself sinking,
reach high with your light
Seek love and friendship
and understand its ways
Because love never costs you
as much as it pays.
If anyone else has river of time stories, I sure would like to hear them.
I was watching a documentary on the History Channel recently about the Bermuda Triangle, yes I know - seen it all before, but I always hope there will be some new information one way or the other. There was some new (for me at least) info on Flight 19, which offered a plausible explanation as to why they were flying east instead of west. There was also a theory offered of a worm hole in the earth claiming that is you go from the BT straight through the centre of the earth, you would come out off the coast of Japan. OK so far but they then claimed that every time there is an unexplained incident in the BT there is also one in this area off Japan, you guessed it, no other details or dates to back it up.
Well this got my little pea brain going off on a tangent and thinking what if there were time wormholes here on earth? This is certainly the type of theory used by Tim Powers in The Anubis Gates where the main character Doyle goes back in time only to become no other than Samuel Coleridge. A book that every book reader should either read or be shot! I think that last statement is due to heat exhaustion, the third day in a row of century + heat and it is currently 40 C, I cant even think what that is in degrees F. I have a tee-shirt wrapped around my head to keep the perspiration from dripping onto my glasses, Tasmania sounds like a good cool place to live at the moment. The same sort of idea was recently used in the British drama series Life On Mars.
Enough of the complaining and getting back to where I was heading - The River Of Time. There is a beautiful piece of prose in The Anubis Gates I would like to quote here:
The old man sighed, ran his fingers through his thinning hair, and then gave Doyle a hard stare. "Time," he said solemnly, "is comparable to a river flowing under a layer of ice. It stretches us out like water weeds, from root to tip, from birth to death, curling around whatever rocks or snags happen to lie in our path; and no one can get out of the river because of the ice roof, and no one can turn back against the current for an instant."
"Picture it, now: if you could stand outside the time river, on some kind of bank, say, and see through the ice, why then you could walk upstream and see Rome and Nineveh in their heydays, or downstream and see whatever the future holds. Now - pay attention, this is the important part - sometime, something happened to punch holes in the metaphorical ice cover. Don't ask me how it happened, but spread out across roughly six hundred years there's a shotgun pattern of gaps . . . . . and if there happens to be a gap when and where you are, it is possible to get out of the time stream at that point, and re-enter at any other gap."
"I have discovered how to do it."
On the next page is a quote from Heraclitus, "No man can step into the same river twice, for the second time it's not the same river, and he's not the same man." Now that has WOW factor plus.
Well, I didn't say it was going to be a short blog entry! On to phase two of The River Of Time according to Luxovius Saggita.
I collect rather an eclectic range of music with one of the subjects being the early '70s West Coast sound preferably on vinyl. There's something about vinyl: you can actually smell it and each one has its own unique smell, also you have to treat it the way you would treat old mechanical machinery and to do that you have to love it. CDs are such sterile objects that have no smell and can be repeatedly abused and still work; the big drawback with vinyl is that it's such a pain to transfer music from them to an MP3 player!
So I got hold of a 3 LP set "Fillmore, The Last Days", some beautiful stuff on there including a group called Lamb, no - not the recent group also called Lamb. A look through my old and mutilated Schwartz (or was it Schwantz or even Schwann?) catalogue showed they had previously released 3 albums; all deleted, available on import only Downunda, and this was pre Ebay. Garage sales were a big attraction for me back then and one day I struck gold, New Riders Of The Purple Sage, The Elvin Bishop Group, some obscure Frank Zappa stuff, and Lamb - all imports. It was the last of seven such garage sales I had attended and late in the day, most of the popular type vinyl had been sold so the lady let me have 5 of her son's LPs for $1.00 each, I tried to look like I was doing her a favour while at the same time trying not to wet my pants with excitement, WOW! I was a bit disappointed with the Lamb album at first as it was the third and final release and they had been reduced to a folk-rock duo but I soon grew to like it a lot. The singer Barbara Mauritz later did a solo album, I'm still trying to like it but that really was a crap album. On the Lamb LP is a song called Reach High written by J Cain & J Corbitt that I would like to transcribe here too:
As life passed by you
on the river of time
Calls out your number
and throws you a line
Set sail for the sunrise,
fear not in the night
And if you feel yourself sinking,
reach high with your light
Seek love and friendship
and understand its ways
Because love never costs you
as much as it pays.
If anyone else has river of time stories, I sure would like to hear them.