Back in time

Dear Indiana,

Until 2005, you had the good sense not to observe Daylight Savings Time, and in that resistance, you shaped my eyes and spirit in beautiful ways.

While growing up on your western edge, I didn't think much about Daylight Savings, though I was proud that my otherwise-bland state had at least one mark of distinction. During my first semester of college, however, I experienced a "time change" for the first time, when my roommate insisted that we change our clocks in order to satisfy some sort of enforced chronological economy.  I was troubled to think that we could so recklessly rename and tamper with the hours and minutes. How arrogant, I thought, to wrench the clock away from the sun, conforming instead to railroad tables or agricultural conveniences. I wanted the hours on the clock to be a perfect language, signifier conforming sweetly to signified. Instead, I faced a truth I was learning, at the same time, in my first linguistics class: that human languages were arbitrary, flawed systems for stumbling into meaning, not pure and perfect lanterns shining into the truth of things.

Perhaps because I associate my first time change with such philosophical and spiritual dislocations, I remember my eighteen years of Indiana-time so fondly. I realize that you had plenty of good economic and logistical reasons to join the silly Daylight Savings Time bandwagon, but by waiting so long, you gave me something precious.

As a child, I could look out our kitchen window and name the hour perfectly. Each year, daylight slowly, slowly contracted toward the December solstice, then slowly, sweetly grew toward June. Our house faced due east, and I could measure the season through the shadows that fell through curtain laces and tree branches.  Living through these slow hours, winter never surprised us, and summer was coy, offering her delights only after we had endured a patient and penitent spring.

Very few men and women my age have enjoyed this privilege of slow time, seasonable time. Instead, most members of my generation were born into a world where time is all chronos: humans  at war with their clocks, wrangling time into systems that can mandate hours at the office, but which make little sense to children and morning glories and other wise creatures.

But you, my dear, backward Indiana, let me grow up in kairos, the appointed seasons of the sun and  the Holy Spirit. If this means that I often find myself, to borrow Wendell Berry's words, "bewildered in our timely dwelling place," so much the better.  The disorientation reminds me that I should always  mistrust clocks, for they never mark the times that matter.


Your prodigal daughter,

Bethany

Indiana sky: my first and favorite timepiece

     

How to travel back in time

1. Consider the reasons for your pilgrimage. 

Some of the earliest games I remember playing involved going back in time. In first and second grade, I would arrange my dolls and myself into "Victorian" family photos. A little later, my friend Elissa and I undertook countless treks across the yard as 19th-century pioneers. In fifth grade, I tried to build a time machine to take me to the 1940s.

As a teenager and adult, I have loved history for its exotic ways and values, but most of all because in history I find so many alternatives to the hurried, harried, heretical ways many people live their lives in the twenty-first century. I know that no time in history is without fault, but I treasure history as the source of meaningful traditions -- that is, creatively sustained ways of thinking, loving, doing, eating, building, and living.

More recently, I have continued to study history for the sake of empathy. If can feel the life of a woman from 1384--however briefly--I am better prepared to understand and love my neighbor in 2012.

2.  Assemble an outfit. You'll do better in the days of yore if you look more or less like you belong there. Do you research, but remember that you just might have everything you need for a 600-year-old ensemble waiting in your own drawers and cupboards. 

Here I am in my homemade medieval dress or "kirtle." The kirtle itself is fairly authentic in its construction, though the material and accessories are not. However, I only spent $5 on this outfit -- the price of the shoes I found at Goodwill to complete the outfit.

3. Take a road to its utter end. If possible, take several roads until you can take them no further.  

When I was very small, too young to go beyond the sidewalk of our city block by myself, I would sit on the street corners and strain my eyes, wondering where South 9th Street or Grant Avenue ended. I was convinced that wonderful things must happen when roads End. Last Saturday, I took I-65 south to Exit 0, then drove further south on Alabama 293 until it ended, and finally, I drove on Dauphin Island's Bienville Blvd until I reached the end not only of the road, but of the island itself.

The end of the road.

4. Travel in good company. Find friends who know they way back, or who are willing to explore with you. 

5. Savor all that is obsolete, strange, and lost. 

I spent this weekend camping at an event called Gatalop, sponsored by the local chapter of the Society for Creative Anachronism. We spent the weekend at Ft. Gaines on Dauphin Island, Alabama. Amid the tournaments, meals, music, revelry, and markets, I spent most of my time trying to see, smell, hear, and feel as a medieval woman might.

I attended to the creak and slap of wooden shutters in the wind; to the crisp snap of canvas tent flaps; to the sound of drums in the night; to the sight of a piper standing atop the fortified walls; to the  warm shadows of firelight as I drifted to sleep; to the snug tension of a rope bed; to the precious weight of wool on a cold day.


6. Bring the past back with you. 

On an ordinary day, I might lead one group of students through a 14th-century text, discuss a 3000-year-old epic with another, then come home to knead bread according to a nineteenth-century recipe and knit a sweater from a 1940s pattern. It is difficult to feel lonely when so much history comes to rest in my small rooms.

Do you ever travel back in time through books, movies, music, or perhaps even reenacting? What sort of presence does the past have in your daily life?