The Time Out of Joint Investigation

I’ve spent the last few weeks visiting my hometown. I haven’t lived here full time in over twenty years, though I spent the first eighteen years of my life here. Of course, the point of going home is to see the people I love, but from another perspective, I see it as a natural experiment in consciousness.

I’ve been thinking about this recently since looking back at Alphonso Lingis’s Trust, which is a weird book (weird book by a weird guy — my favorite Lingis anecdote (possibly apocryphal) is of him visiting a graduate class to read an essay on Deleuze, which he delivered over a soundtrack of Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” on loop while wearing face paint, a miner’s helmet, and pants with the seat cut out). The way I read Trust is of Lingis setting out a series of vignettes that subtly treat travel as a vehicle for teasing out insights into the mechanics of human consciousness.

It’s a sort of phenomenology-in-action: by inserting oneself in different settings at different times, we disrupt our normal routines in a way that can help us to notice things about how our minds operate that we might not otherwise, and which, in turn, might provide some insight into the type of thing we humans are.

Trust is a book that focuses on travel to foreign places, and as an expat, it resonates with me on that level — I plan to write a companion post to this one that will more directly riff on Lingis’ book and the experience of travel to foreign locales. But, of course, we travel to places that are familiar just as we do to unfamiliar ones (indeed, isn’t it interesting that I still unthinkingly refer to my hometown as “home” despite “home” in any meaningful sense having been elsewhere for some time now).

I was thinking about all of this on a recent trip to my childhood mall. It had been well over twenty years, so I wasn’t sure how I would feel visiting it. I’ve had so many layers of experience in relation to it — and since — that I didn’t know what to expect. Would the feelings of my earlier adolescence win out and lead me to feel nostalgic? Or would I respond with a dismissal bred of the glib cynicism of my older adolescence? Then again, maybe the temperate diplomacy of my middle age would surface and yield something altogether different.

I decided to run a test and investigate. Truth be told, the idea of the test came second. As is generally the case in life, the material conditions carried the day: even this relatively mild New England winter is still a New England winter. It’s cold, man. When the idea of a heated walk in the mall hit me, it seemed too good to pass up, so on one particularly dreary day, I found myself engaged in my own phenomenological investigation at that now-fading citadel of American consumerism.

At one time, the idea that you could have an emotional attachment to a specific chain franchise, or a cluster of them as the case may be, would have seemed absurd. Chain stores are strategically designed to be bland and interchangeable. I suppose I would have understood someone developing an attachment to Dunkin’ Donuts as a brand in general, but the idea of developing an attachment to a specific Dunkin’ Donuts restaurant would have seemed a stretch.

In hindsight, that was a naïve view. Humans are meaning-making machines, and we make meaning of specific physical spaces — no matter how vapid or tackily consumeristic — just as much as grand settings, artworks, people, or anything else. The gas station where I worked as an attendant one summer has as much emotional resonance for me as any place I’ve been (though certainly not all fond).

So, I carried out the test. Pulling in, I couldn’t help but notice the basic infrastructure hadn’t changed much, though I availed myself of the new parking garage. Inside, many of the same stores were there but in vaguely new garb, seeming like an uncle you haven’t in a while and who has put on a little weight. For some strange reason, if the signs were to be believed, a branch of the local library had apparently relocated to the mall, but it was closed on the I day went, and from what I could tell by peeping in the window, might have moved on to greener pastures.

I can break down my history at the mall into a few key epochs: ages 10–13, it was a gathering spot for hanging out. This was the era of playing lookout as my friends made off with Spencer’s Gift keychains gotten via five-finger discount (one sticks with me: “Look…my key ring says shit on it.” And I wonder why I still feel like I’m making up for having gone to public school). I wouldn’t go so far as to say I enjoyed the mall itself during that period, but I spent a lot of time kicking around there, and it’s tied to vaguely positive memories that are generalized in the way repeated experiences tend to blur together.

Later, as a somewhat older adolescent (say, 13–18), the mall became the far-too-obvious target of my far-too-obvious rhapsodizing on the dangers of consumerism as cribbed from Adbusters and threads of primitivism that I found illuminating in a way that in retrospect might not have suggested top-shelf mental health. I didn’t visit the mall much during this period, though it was definitely on the periphery of my perceptual horizon as something I rejected. Later, say, at 21, my teenage targeting of the mall seemed a little provincial and sad (which now itself seems a little provincial and sad for different reasons).

More recently, approaching middle age, I’m much more forgiving of all of those periods. More than that, I see elements of all of them surface in my thinking at various times and in various ways. It’s a weird type of almost Hegelian totality where all of the strains of my past development and their corresponding negations surface and resurface in different iterations, informing how I think and feel. Sometimes this influence is fairly direct, and other times it’s subtle. I believe it’s in Rabbit is Rich (1981) that Updike mentions the idea of selves dying. I’ve certainly felt that way, but when I zoom out, it’s the Hegelian angle that fits my experience. I don’t feel so much that my successive selves have died as that they carry on a peculiar afterlife that takes many — often unexpected — forms.

I’ll open a weird parenthetical: (When I was ninth grade, we read “Eleven” by Sandra Cisneros (“What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one.”). I remember my English teacher Mr. Seible saying he had been thinking of me when he chose the reading. As I write this, I think of him, and of Hegel, and of what he saw in my thinking that has made my preoccupations so bizarrely consistent over the years.) And now I’ll close it.

If pressed, I would have guessed the 40-year-old version would have won out as my experimental result. But, instead, something totally different happened.

My response was predictable given my experience of the last few years, though would have been unexpected otherwise. Since getting back from China in 2020, I’ve had occasional bouts of a peculiar disassociation. I haven’t quite worked out the terms of it, but the temporality of the whole thing is weird — it’s a kind of present-as-projected-future-of-the-past. I guess part of what I mean by that unwieldy hyphenated construction is that in those states, I experience the present specifically in relation to the past. This might sound obvious, but if you think about it, it’s not: just as often, you project forward from the present to a future state of affairs, focus more specifically on the present, or experience any number of other orientations toward the passage of time. Instead, in this case, the present is felt as the realization of a variant of the future as expressed in the vocabulary of the past.

I don’t think I understand the dynamic well enough to articulate it with the precision I’d like, but I hope what I’ve said captures something of it. It’s a strange feeling. The metaphors aren’t perfect, but it’s the sort of lived equivalent of the Pottersville scenes in It’s a Wonderful Life or the ones in Back to the Future Part II where Marty visits a future in which Biff has taken control. In those works, the central characters feel their present as a distinct outcome of a range of possible futures or worlds as judged from a version of the world they take as default.

Thinking about it now, I guess The Man in the High Castle would be another suitable example. I suppose, in a sense, this is a way of digging into the “parallel world” literary trope to identify the ways it serves as a metaphor for a certain lived experience of time. The Man in the High Castle, both the book and the vastly superior show, obviously traffics in social critique and broad metaphysical musings, but I guess this line of inquiry brings us to an existential reading of the text.

Furthermore, all three of those works similarly capture the dystopian dimension of the experience. It’s an open question if this type of temporal experience will inevitably take a dystopian cast, I don’t see why it would have to, but it has often done so with me. I’m hesitant to pass off this feeling as sociological insight, though it can feel like sociological insight.

I had expected those episodes to pass after I’d gotten over the reverse culture shock of getting back from China. Up to a point they have, though they still occasionally surge up. Doubtless at least some of the trigger behind this particular instance was the state of the mall. It had a pronounced zombie wasteland feel: barren and creepy, with at least 20% of the stores vacant. All of the anchor stores except Boscov’s were closed. It was also a lot smaller than I remembered, but I think that was just the result of me getting older.

At the risk of stating the obvious, all of this fed a certain apocalyptic feeling. Again, I’m inclined to see this impression as a tepid basis for cultural criticism, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t experience it as gesturing toward the direction of things. On that front, I couldn’t shake the sense that what we’d had before had been hideous, and we’d had no choice but to find meaning on its edges. There’s a certain burdened beauty in that. While what we’re replacing it with has its merits, I couldn’t help but feel that large swaths of the current order are an elaboration on the worst undertones of what had come before.

However, at the end of my walk, as I returned to my car in my weirdly dissociative haze, I was hopeless to separate existential insight from sociological intuition.