Early large horizontal format TCF chamber
‘The dangers and discomforts of the TCF process should, then, be emphasised. It is for the best that it has been criminalised in most Western nations. In any case, TL’s lack of due caution in the initial experimental phase continued into what might be called a social recklessness. His walk around the future campus of Harvard University—anonymous, as if he were merely a curious visitor from the Midwest in slightly anachronistic (and damp) clothing, as he put it—caused an uproar. The anonymity itself was as surprising and difficult as many of those early encounters with the future: the trip became famous enough that surely crowds would have been there to await him. By his own account, TL talked to as many people as he could, but they were the limited conversations that one has with strangers. He was in a state of euphoria, unable to concentrate on the details of what was said, and unable to remember much afterwards—though he had time to be impressed by the diversity of people he talked to, their intelligence, their articulateness, their expressiveness. He described the satisfaction of seeing the familiar places from his own life, given an intensified aura by understanding that they were also the places of another time. He described the pleasure of entering Gund Hall, which was in his time only a foundation, and was now a completed, functional and even venerable building, hardly given a second glance by passersby.
‘The experience had, we can guess, a visionary tinge and a transformational effect. He returned not as a scientist but as an advocate for the experience of TCF. He wanted travelling companions—or, more, a mass movement. He saw TCF as some vague solution, we suppose, for an equally vague social dissatisfaction—the source of revolution, even.
‘This public campaign was abetted by the scientific fact that remarkably low energies were required to establish a lens. No momentum in the traditional (Newtonian) sense was imparted to the object. The lack of “Newtonian” movement was, no doubt, what gave rise to the only partially accurate impression that two times were brought together in the lensing process—and so to talk of “bending” time, of “temporal contours” and so forth. The materials involved were also relatively accessible in most industrialised nations—there was no need to build a whole synchrotron to establish the conditions necessary for lensing. The most difficult aspect of setting up a TCF facility for human use was the synthesis of the lysergamide tracing fluid—this required a laboratory of some sophistication and a degree of knowledge of chemistry. Needless to say, despite the criminalisation of human TCF, a “street trade” in this compound arose, at least in many parts of the United States. We believe it was also, after some time, possible to obtain illegally an entire basic TCF facility. TL bears partial responsibility for this state of affairs, which has surely led to much harm of a nature that is yet to be understood.’
Marcus first met Pen, years before, at the Resistance Bookshop. He had walked into it not long after moving to Wellington for the final years of his psychiatric training. He was busy then, either driving north to Porirua Hospital or working at the central hospital outpatient clinic, but he had few friends here, and the small community of the bookshop reminded him of his time in the anti-war movement down south. The community involved him again in a movement, a broader one, and he began to take part in a wide range of protests. He acted mainly as their medic: he brought his doctor’s bag and hung back, ready to help with any injuries sustained during scuffles with the police.
Alongside the camaraderie and rebelliousness, the bookshop offered something else: it was a place to talk about the books he had been reading—‘anti-psychiatrists’ such as Thomas Szasz, Erving Goffman and R. D. Laing—and push for the those books to be included in the shop’s stock. When other members of the shop hoped for the overthrow of society, it was the overthrow of the psychiatric profession that Marcus had in mind. He remembered talking late with Pen once, or more than once, about psychiatry and the way madness was caused by social conditions. Pen had agreed. If the subject was radical psychiatrists, Pen preferred Frantz Fanon. He thought that Laing and the anti-psychiatry movement suffered from a lack of wider analysis, a lack of understanding of social class. Pen said, for example, that Laing’s clinics and communal houses in the UK, designed to give psychiatric patients an environment in which to become ‘normal’, could only cater to handfuls of people, and could do nothing for the millions being driven mad by capitalism. And, more and more, Laing had turned to bourgeois experimentation: LSD, yoga, TCF and mysticism. Fanon—now there was someone who hoped to transform the whole colonial system…
Pen seemed to like disagreement more than anything. He was always open for a discussion, and Marcus was new to the city. Marcus never needed much sleep, and he found the meetings energising, not tiring. He did whatever study he needed after he got home. But perhaps he saw it all—the study, the protests—as part of the same thing, all part of believing in people, believing that systems needed to be overthrown. It meant being interested in people’s circumstances and helping them; it meant trying to stop the state from crushing lives. Soldiers were being sent to Vietnam. There was this tremendous shared feeling that the world needed to change, that there was some ugly machinery that captured people within it. Marcus, then, wanted to offer something to the people. Maybe it wasn’t quite a whole, consistent theory, how his psychiatric or anti-psychiatric practice could fit with his political interests. But he wanted achievable things, real things. He wanted to work as a therapist. It all made some kind of sense to him, all of it.
Pen was younger. He’d been in trouble because he hadn’t signed up for the military service ballot. Eventually he did sign up for it. They were afraid—everyone was afraid—that things might change and conscripts might be sent to war. It was pretty unlikely in retrospect. But neither of them was called up anyway.
Sometimes Pen scared Marcus, not with anything he did, but with things he said. He wasn’t opposed to the use of violence. And what disturbed Marcus was this: although he couldn’t agree with Pen’s belief in violence and his half-expressed itch for some great physical conflict, he also noticed a thrill in himself at the thought of it. He still meditated in those days, and he noticed it in those still moments—a quivering beneath the surface, an urge simultaneously to turn inwards and to lash out. Pen was—was he?—correlated with a bleak part of himself, as if he were its wild outward projection. Pen would laugh though. He’d have another drink. They became quite a pair. They were close. It was only five or six years ago, but they lived a different life then.
Despite Janet’s notion that they were best friends, Marcus and Pen had not been so close since they had all had children. Or perhaps it was since Marcus and Lilly had, a year or so later, bought a large house and invited others, including Pen, Janet and Peter, to live communally with them. Pen had turned the offer down—though, it had occurred to Marcus, he never heard Janet’s views on the matter.
Still, he felt as if he should know where to look for Pen. What investigations could he carry out? Who could he talk to? Janet had mentioned their days in the protest movement, but he couldn’t remember any similar absences then, or at least anything unexplained. Pen—unlike Marcus—had spent a few night in police cells for his protest actions, but he didn’t remember anything stranger, any sense that there was another life, other activities that Pen kept hidden. Where had Pen gone? And Marcus’s own sense of righteous anger, and his quiet inward fury—had he lost all that too?
‘The collapse of aviation, the closing down, one by one, of the world’s airlines and air travel routes altered the situation for us here. We were already far from everything, far from the Russians and Americans. Our situation in New Zealand and countries like it showed perhaps some of the starkest effects of the technology. Just as the new jets promised increasing connection to the rest of the world, we found ourselves cut off again. At least to a degree. The sense of being on the edge of the world had begun to fade; there was an increasing feeling that the world was drawing together through the networks of air travel. The
n, over the course of a year or two, that feeling steadily drained away. We slipped back into our own past, a past of sea voyages, of isolation and distance.
‘The implications of TCL and TCF technologies led to a series of conversations among members of left-wing and countercultural groups. I understand similar conversations took place in the US, and presumably in many other parts of the world. They were informal at first, simply ideas thrown around here and there. I remember a stark division among leftists, in particular, about the technologies. The Marxist line advocated total abstinence from TCF “travelling”, but I think the Marxists themselves were split over the use of TCL images, photos of the future. The most hard-line Maoists supported the initial use of future imagery for anti-capitalist propaganda purposes, while others disagreed, implicitly agreeing that the publicity of the images had been a mistake and tacitly endorsing the July 1969 US–Soviet agreement to limit any further state-directed TCL research to the purposes of scientific enquiry. Another influential Marxist argument against TCF held that there should be no shortcuts to the future—that it could only be built through the living labour of the people. To leap ahead to the future was to exploit the labour of those who had worked between now and then to create that future (HISTORICAL TIME = THE ACCRETION OF LABOUR).
‘Anarchists and other activists were more open to the technologies. TL’s extreme advocacy of TCF was only taken up by a few hippy capitalists at the fringes of the political groups; but I think there were less ideological TCF users among the groups. TL’s notorious “Harvard walk”, though, did offer what some hippies and some activists both came to describe as a “counterfuture”—a positive, even utopian image of the future to contrast with the frightening reality presented in the Soviet images. How was it possible for this COUNTERFUTURE to be a non-capitalist future, when much of the Harvard campus that TL described was identical to the currently existing one? What picture of change could the “walk” offer? Marxists claimed, of course, that a walk taken around an elite, private university campus would seem utopian, no matter what era it took place in. Others were less literal, taking the walk as a source of a feeling, a sense of the possible. The difference between the present and the future lay not in time itself, but in the AURA of the future. This was partly evident in the contrast some made between the image of the falling World Trade Center towers and the smaller Gund Hall on the Harvard Campus. For some, the sloping glass roof of Gund Hall came to represent a crystalline potential inherent in the future itself: a sheltering structure, a shape of thought, a hymn to possibility. On its completion in 1972, this otherwise unassuming university building became something of an icon, a symbol for the PRESENCE OF THE FUTURE, HERE AND NOW.’
‘In my recollection, there was both enthusiasm and unease about the future. Both at the same time. There was always this discussion where we took sides, but it was also there I think in each and every one of us. I remember the controversy when, during one of the big protests in 1969, some people held up placards with the Soviet images, the World Trade Center images. There was controversy because we all felt the power of those pictures. Of course we were all uncertain, as leftists and activists. Was something given to us or taken from us? Some of us felt, no doubt, that the future was our property. But how to get to it? And what great empty landscape did it promise? No doubt there were images of voyages, of arrivals, places peopled only by themselves. Indeed for others there was nothing but the present of the TASK AT HAND. It is difficult to measure the sense of loss that the new technologies brought to these groups.
‘We were always marginal. There was never a stable current of leftism in our small, conservative country. The unions were strong at times, and the Labour Party, but we stood outside all of that. For a while, it seemed like we might become more relevant—with the protest movements and general unrest. We were, I suppose, willing outsiders. There was an undercurrent of tragedy for us. The future, now, was held in discontinuous images and impressions—it fell, even when it contained hints of possibility, in scraps, as if from a collapsing CITY IN THE SKY. The technologies simultaneously promised and destroyed the future. They hurled a future at us, stunning us with it, so that, for all our talk, we were immobilised. In that sense, our situation here in a small, oceanic nation far from the centres of the world—suddenly distant and cut off—was strangely typical, at least typical of those comfortable Western nations unable anymore to orient themselves to the future. We felt most strongly the shock that broke us all up, sent us off into our own, stunned worlds.’
‘Was there also something positive about our situation in New Zealand?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose there was also something else about our country and our situation. We have always been a site of SOCIAL EXPERIMENTATION. It wasn’t entirely bad to be thrown back again onto our own resources. In some ways, TCF and all that reminded us, or could have reminded us, that we were the future, had always been thought of as the future, not as some isolated backwater. It was the place of new thoughts and new attempts.’
‘But those new attempts took the form of colonialism.’
‘That’s true. But by gaining and losing a future at the same time—by being cut off, wasn’t there an opportunity to address, at the modest level of our small, isolated economy, even those issues?’
‘I don’t think we can be so confident.’
‘It’s not that we were completely isolated. After all, most of our imports and exports continued by sea. Rather, I’m thinking about the level of feeling—and, I hope, of action. I’m not talking about nationalism. I’m just talking about the scale at which results might be achieved, at which the people might actually take control.’
‘Is he back?’
‘No.’
‘It’s been five days.’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes.’
‘He hasn’t been away this long before?’
‘No.’
‘We should call the police.’
‘I don’t want that.’
Marcus cancelled his outpatient therapy group that afternoon to visit the university. He talked to Pen’s colleague and former supervisor Heather Ford. Marcus knew her a little, and had always enjoyed talking with her.
‘He’s been missing for a long time.’ Heather said that it was currently the student break, so Pen’s absence would hardly have been noticed by anyone. Certainly Heather herself had not noticed it. After a long pause, she said, ‘I don’t know what might have become of him. I’ve known Pen a long time, but I have no idea. I don’t know if it’s out of character or not.’
‘Yeah. Well, isn’t it?’
‘There’s something unknowable about him.’
‘What do you… well, isn’t there something unknowable about everyone?’
‘It was as if I couldn’t read him, or didn’t know what he was thinking. Oh yes, something unknowable about everyone. Well, you’re not going to find him anyway just by thinking about him.’
‘You think there’s nothing we can do?’
‘Oh, Pen is off on his path. We all are, but Pen seems sometimes like he’s careering around more than most, under his own inertia. That’s what it feels like to me.’
Marcus looked at her. ‘I know what you mean.’
‘Well, maybe he’s fine. Yes, that about everyone being unknowable…’ She looked at him. ‘I guess the way we can think about it—I mean, people are different in different situations. That’s what our work tells us.’
‘Yeah.’
At the end of his frequently interrupted studies, Pen had ended up with a graduate degree in social psychology, and was teaching in the department. His Masters thesis had been on the relationship between personalities and situations. Marcus remembered him talking about it, about how he had been unable to come to any clear idea of whether personalities could escape their situations. In the end the whole question seemed to lead nowhere—but the teaching was at least a way to earn money.
‘But if
Pen is in some situation we don’t know about, then we’re not going to know anything about how he is in that situation. Or who he is.’
‘Like he’s a different person.’
‘That’s what I mean—unknowable. So maybe you want to try to understand Pen, to work out what might have happened from what you know about him. Maybe it gives you a feeling you can do something.’
‘I think I should call the police.’
‘Maybe you should. If you want the police to be part of the situation that Pen is in.’
A silence.
‘I guess Pen had himself in some situations that we don’t really know about. All of us lead a number of lives.’
Had he run off, then, or was he in trouble? Was there any difference? And what was Heather suggesting? Marcus asked if it would be possible to see Pen’s office—that much, at least, was possible. Heather stood slowly—she had a bad hip—led him to it and unlocked the door for him.
‘I don’t think there will be anything to be found in here.’
The office was untidy, with books and papers piled loosely on either edge of a desk. The typewriter was pushed back and didn’t look to have been used for some time. Marcus remembered Pen talking about going bush as a way to avoid registering for the conscription ballot. Janet was, to be sure, wrong that they had been the closest of friends. Even though Pen was younger, he had already been around twenty when Marcus met him. What other friends did he have?
Heather returned to her office, asking Marcus to return the key on his way out. Marcus searched for some object, some token of Pen, to take with him. The desk had drawers down one side of it. The papers were all scientific studies of human behaviour.
Our Future is in the Air Page 3
