“whence it appears that in the smallest particle of matter there is a world of creatures, living beings, animals, entelechies, souls. each portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants and a pond full of fishes. but each branch of every plant, each member of every animal, each drop of its liquid parts is also such garden or pond.”
Category: quotes
0280 – A Sound of Thunder (2005)
spacetime coordinates: Chicago, 2055 > the cretaceous
A Sound of Thunder is a 2005 science fiction thriller film directed by Peter Hyams, and starring Edward Burns, Catherine McCormack and Ben Kingsley. It is a co-production film between the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, and the Czech Republic.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318081/
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a classic example of “failed return” or “no return” cautionary tales is A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury published in 1952. on a personal level i love both the EC comic book adaptation with artwork by Al Williamson and the 2005 movie adaptation by Peter Hyams that was a box office flop and has receive mostly negative reviews by critics. the original story features one of the first instances of the butterfly effect, in particular as applied to time travel paradoxes and uncontrollable evolutionary/ political outcomes. this was way before it became a meteorologic mainstay of chaos theory after its use by Edward Lorenz to describe stormy ripple-like effects on nonlinear systems, seemingly very sensitive to minute initial conditions.
the movie A Sound of Thunder features a time travel tourist agency from the year 2055. Time Safari Inc. is a chronocapitalist enterprise that organizes prehistoric retro-hunting expeditions to far-off epochs where dinosaurs roamed the earth. in order to do that, mankind is cheating on the big dinosaur mass extinction. long after humankind has killed most of the big game life on earth it tracks down other, more elusive and ferocious megafauna. the whole ‘hunting’ for the ultimate predator T-Rex (or an Allosaurus in the movie) turns out to be a very complex business. the paleo-poaching is based on hiding your acts under the cover of natural occurrences, trophy hunting pretending to be a mass extimction event. in order to fake the killing shot one must plan ahead every retro-killing move. practically Time Safari Inc. is cheating evolutionary history by trying to synchronize with ‘naturally’ occurring death events and extract entertainment value out of impossible inter-species encounters, normally separated by enormous gulfs of time. (…)
geohistory becomes a perfect crime scene – where the time traveling expedition has to erase all traces – all influence that might otherwise impact the future with definite catastrophic (especially anthropic future) results. as often, humans are kind of role-playing hide and seek with natural selection. in this bizarre and strange inversion of the anthropocenic stratigraphic proof – masquerades as natural force, where a devious human causality is trying to hide behind a pre-human mass extinction event. it is almost the same principle guiding the climate denialist that pretends to hide behind previous catastrophic climate fluctuations.
as one might expect, it’s a chronoclysm waiting to happen. all the clients of Time Safari Inc. are prone to making mistakes, and not only do they leave marks (the absolute no 1 rule of time travel is non-intervention) but they also bring back something (the 2nd most important rule) basically invariably smuggling the prehuman past into the future. somehow a prehistoric dead butterfly makes it through the biofilter (a great example of what I would call New Wallace Lines) that is scanning every living reentry into the present, every possibility of warping the timelines. the alteration of the past produces a chronoclysm that manifests itself as a rhythmic, rapidly accelerating ‘time waves’ that transform the city and its denizens. more to the point in the Peter Hyams movie, the first divergence is a sudden appearance of teeming swarms of beetles and a gigantic strangler fig-like tree bursting through a Chicago high rise building, while the main characters Ryan and Rand make a narrow escape. it is by no means accidental that swarms and insect swarms in particular are associated with time waves. multiply proliferating and and highly distributed, swarms are chronoclysmic purveyors that help carry and suffer the radical effects of timeline distortion.
there are reports of global increases in temperature and humidity and plant life seems to prosper, while this time warped climate change suddenly seems to be echoing sweltering hot pre-human conditions of long gone geological epochs and dead jungles. (…)
stefan tiron – Cosm/c Dr/ft & T3mporal D/vergence (2016)- EXIT THE PORTAL: The Strange Comeback to a Weird Earth
272
“flame-recognizance,
hermeneutics of autumn, time’s
continuities tearing us apart.”
http://spiritandteeth.tumblr.com/
246
“…Consider the Platonic distinction between body and soul. Consider Descartes’ implicit suggestion that other animals are furry robots. Consider what Dostoevsky saw when he visited Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace: he found in it a metaphor for western civilisation, an immune system that brought the world’s most diverting flora, fauna and industrial products under one roof, while whatever remained outside (war, genocide, slavery, unpleasant tropical diseases, human waste, expendable life forms) dwindled into irrelevance.”
242 – The Circle (2017)
The Circle is a 2017 American techno-thriller film directed by James Ponsoldt and written by Ponsoldt and Dave Eggers, based on Eggers’ 2013 novel of the same name.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4287320/
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“What are you most afraid of? Unfulfilled potential”
“SECRETS ARE LIES.
SHARING IS CARING.
PRIVACY IS THEFT.” the circle
210 – Unacknowledged (2017)
207 – A Quiet Passion (2016)
spacetime coordinates: 19th century Amherst, Massachusetts
A Quiet Passion is a 2016 biographical film directed and written by Terence Davies about the life of U.S poet Emily Dickinson. The film stars Cynthia Nixon as the reclusive poet. It co-stars Emma Bell as young Dickinson, Jennifer Ehle, Duncan Duff and Keith Carradine. Despite its title, the film isn’t quiet at all.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2392830/
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“Goodbye to the life I used to live,
And the world I used to know;
And kiss the hills for me, just once;
Now I am ready to go!
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The carriage held but just ourselves –
And Immortality.
We slowly drove – he knew no haste
And I had put away
My labour and my leisure too,
For His civility.
We passed the school,
where children strove,
At recess – in the ring –
We passed the fields of grazing grain –
We passed the setting sun –
Or rather – he passed us –
The dews drew quivering and chill –
For only gossamer, my gown –
My tippet – only tulle –
We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground –
The roof was scarcely visible –
The cornice – in the ground –
Since then – ’tis centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity –
This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me, –
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.
Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!”
TimeSpace Warps 