SAVING TIME IN A BRAIN

 First, a pair of juxtaposed quotes:

Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.

Why couldn't the past, present and future all be occurring at the same time-- but in different dimensions?

The first quote comes from one of the most famous graphic novels of all time, the 1986-87 Moore/Gibbons WATCHMEN, and the sentiment expressed, about the relativity of time, is "intricately structured" as one of the narrative's main themes.

The second comes from a very obscure Lee-Kirby story in AMAZING ADVENTURES #3 (1961), "We Were Trapped in the Twilight World." It wasn't reprinted until the twenty-first century and I doubt that even its creators remembered it after they tossed it out within the pages of a title that was finished in three more issues.

Not only was"Twilight" probably tossed off to fill space, the idea of the simultaneity of past, present and future isn't even important to the story's plot. Shortly after the handsome young theorist expresses his time-theory, he drives away with his girlfriend. A mysterious, never-explained mist transports them both back into Earth's prehistoric past. While the two of them flee various menaces, the scientist theorizes that entities from the past sometimes entered the mist and showed up in modern times, so that ape-like cavemen generated the story of the Abominable Snowmen. Grand Comics Database believes that "Twilight" is one of many SF-stories plotted by Stan Lee but dialogued by his brother Larry Leiber, so, failing the discovery of original Kirby art, there's no ascertaining which of the three creators involved generated the line.

In both stories, the simultaneity of all times has one common function: to cast a light on the limits of human perception. But is there any truth in it?

In the sense of the bodies we occupy, not really. Our common experience as human beings is that our bodies are totally enslaved by the unstoppable progress of the future, remorselessly eating away the present the way age eats away at our bodily integrity. And yet, one organ in the body defies future's tyranny and that's the brain.

Only in the brain are past, present and future truly unified-- though one may question if Moore's correct about how "intricate" the structure is, even assuming that the paradigm applies only to fully functioning human brains. And time is only unified in terms of a given subject's own memories. I don't necessarily dismiss such things as "memories of a past life" that are usually cited in support of reincarnation. But those type of memories are not universal enough to draw any conclusions.

My ability to "time-travel" in my memories is similarly limited. I can summon a quasi-memory of being on a family vacation and finding MARVEL TALES #11 at an out-of-town pharmacy. That comic book would have been on sale in 1967, probably a few months prior to its November cover-date. I *think* this was probably the first SPIDER-MAN comic I bought, but my memories of reading the comic for the first time aren't that specific. I hadn't been buying superhero comics for even a year before late 1967, having only started doing so after the debut of the BATMAN teleseries in early 1966. That show would have finished its second season in March 1967, at which time I might have felt venturesome enough to sample a superhero I'd never heard of. Now, for me to be correct on that score, I would have to have bought MARVEL TALES before the 1967 SPIDER-MAN cartoon debuted that September, since it's also my memory that I watched that TV show when it first aired. But can I be *absolutely* sure that I didn't see the cartoon before buying the comic book? Not in the least. I *seem* to remember that I'd bought enough back issues of SPIDER-MAN or MARVEL TALES that when the cartoon debuted, I recognized how some of the cartoon-stories had been adapted from the originals. But that memory is not reliable.

In the WATCHMEN chapter referenced, Doctor Manhattan can foresee future events as accurately as he can memories of the past-- or at least, whatever past experiences are important to Moore's narrative. And in "Twilight," the protagonists live through the past so as to clarify events in their present. But total narrative clarity is denied real people. However, what our functioning memories do preserve are not just every single experience we have, but the IMPORTANT experiences. 

Humans can travel in time from SIGNIFICANT THING #1 to SIGNIFICANT THING #4566 via chains of mental association. Some of these associations might be subconscious. I once noticed that Robert E. Howard's barbarian hero Kull first appeared in print in the August 1929 issue of WEIRD TALES, about three or four years before Siegel and Shuster collaborated on their landmark hero Superman. We know that Siegel named Superman's dad after himself, making "Jor-L" out of the first syllable of the author's first name and the last syllable of his last name. But whence comes "Kal-L?" Did it come from... "Kul-L?" Even assuming that Siegel read the Kull story, there's no way of knowing if he consciously remembered reading it. But IF he read it, maybe something about the hero's name appealed to Siegel, and he simply recycled that appeal when it came time to name his own hero.

We do not know if anything survives the demise of our physical forms. But while we are alive, it's entirely logical to build up our stores of significant memories, whether we can take them with us or not. To borrow from the title of an old English poem, those memories provide us with our only "triumph over time."

One last Significant Thing: the last issue of Marvel magazine AMAZING ADVENTURES was cover-dated November 1961, the same date assigned to FANTASTIC FOUR #1. So that arbitrary date becomes something of a threshold between the Old Marvel Way of doing things, and the New Approach, which would, as I've argued elsewhere, saved the medium of comic books from extinction.

SELLING INVENTORIES

One peculiar phrase from this Tom Spurgeon essay caught my attention, due to its puzzling content:

The model that dominates comics discourse is self-inventory.

Though in the same paragraph Spurgeon passes remarks on the oddness of the comics medium, he never defines qualities he found in other media had that struck him as more normative. Maybe he made some mention of "l'difference" in other essays, but I find it interesting that he didn't think he had to prove his case. To the extent that many of his essays were directed at the sort of comics-readers who clustered about THE COMICS JOURNAL-- which admittedly used to include me-- it's a shame that he didn't think he even had to prove his case.

For me the peculiarity of the phrase is that it doesn't seem to take into account how much "self inventory" factors into all of human culture. I'm reminded of this quotation from Friedrich Nietzche on the matter of memory:

The so called unconscious inferences can be traced back to the all-preserving memory, which presents us with parallel experiences and hence already knows the consequences of an action. It is not anticipation of the effects; rather, it is the feeling: identical causes, identical effects . . .

As far as I can see, what Spurgeon calls "self inventory" is indistinguishable from Nietzche's concept of "the all preserving memory," with its idea that "identical causes" must align with "identical effects." It occurs to me that Spurgeon may've had some idea that comics fans were given to self-inventory because of the fandom's emphasis on checklists and completing issue-runs, though he does not make this express correlation in the essay. But how is that type of inventory different from any of the many "self inventories" that literary authors undergo to produce the fiction that's important to them. Hemingway was obsessed with the nature of masculine action, so much of what he wrote has him making inventories of how actions of courage or forbearance impacted the people in his stories. A poet like W.B. Yeats made inventories of the myths of many cultures, trying to tie them into one another in a grand pattern, while Faulkner was concerned with defining the American South. In all of these examples the authors drew upon their memories of whatever was important to them-- more or less in line with what Nietzsche calls "identical causes"-- and from that their creative priorities explored "identical effects," in which each artist saw his own face reflected in his fictional mirrors.

In a less artistic vein, "self inventory" seems to me the main way in which we take stock of our own natures. If an individual deems himself a good person, doesn't he take inventory of all the good things he's done? Or if that individual is down on himself, doesn't he do the opposite, inventorying all of his failures or embarassments? 

I frankly can't see any way that any person, whether interested in comics, Russian literature, or jai alai, doesn't resort to making inventories from one's memory in order to validate (or invalidate) himself. Maybe there are individuals who "live in the now," not resorting to delving into memory on a regular basis. But they would be rare individuals in the history of humankind. Perhaps this is why Nietzsche also wrote on the subject of memory:

it is possible to live almost without remembering and live happy, as evidenced by the animal, but it is still impossible to live without forgetting. Or more simply, there is a degree of sleeplessness, rumination, the historic sensibility that is harmful and ultimately fatal to living things, be it a man, a people or a civilization “