FIRE AND RAIN; On Time Travel and Sombreros

           So, you’re going about your business, happy or not--thinking of something important or nothing at all.  And then it happens--the chance playing of a song that absolutely shreds you.  If you have been alive for, say, four decades, you have been around for long enough to know what I am talking about--the sudden intrusion of the past into your present.  The unbidden, unexpected injection of a powerful past emotion into your current life, bringing about a moment so charged you can hardly breathe.  

         This is not nostalgia, which my dictionary defines as “a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.”  Nor is it to be confused with the purposeful playing of a song to bring back fond memories.  

         No.  There is no longing here.  No volition.  It is not an attempt to bring back the past.  It is the past breaking through—not a wrinkle in time, but the rending of time.        

         Anyone who says there’s no such thing as time travel is simply too young to have experienced this phenomenon.  For me, today, it was James Taylor’s Fire and Rain.   February 1970.  For those too young to remember, you can find it here.  

         I wish I could tell you why this song.  Why today.  I have loved James Taylor since I first heard him, and have loved this song, with its melancholy wistfulness, in particular.  The lyrics have always been evocative, and they mean even more to me now (at an age where the losses are piling up) than they did in 1970.  Still, I would not have predicted that the song would have the effect it had when I chanced to hear it today.  

         This wasn’t a reaction to the lyrics; this was me transported. This, from the first few notes, was me momentarily inhabiting my 20-year-old body and psyche, feeling a set of emotions I haven’t felt with precisely this sharpness in decades.  Of course, I have known fire and rain; there have been plenty of highs and lows.  But there is a quality of emotion that can only be felt by the very young when the world is new and everything is before them.  This was me at 20 again, if only for a moment.

         So, was the moment a blessing or a curse?  Maybe it was neither.  Maybe it was simply a glimpse at the nonlinearity of time; maybe it suggests that time runs in loops, rather than a straight line. 

         I’d like to think so. 

         The older I get, the less interested I am in straight lines and the more open I am to curves and loops and waves.  After all, there are few straight lines in nature; so, why should time hew to the linearity of our calendars?

         The poet Wallace Stevens understood the limitations of right angles and straight lines.  He had this to say:

         Rationalists, wearing square hats,

         Think, in square rooms,

         Looking at the floor,

         Looking at the ceiling.

         They confine themselves

         To right-angled triangles.

         If they tried rhomoids,

         Cones, waving lines, ellipses—

         As for example, the ellipse of the half-moon—

         Rationalists would wear sombreros.

         

         And so I leave you with this wish:  May your sombreros be wide and round, and may your past break through just often enough to work some gentle curves into your straight lines.