Prelude: In this five-part essay, I will share a series of interlocking stories of how time broke and how you can take advantage. Each week I will release the next part of this essay.

 

Part I: Jazz

 

We once had an Atlanta girl in our college music classes who watched James Cameron’s masterpiece, Titanic, a dozen times the first month it opened. The score. The cast. The effects. The story. Each drew her young heart in, as it did many young girls of the late nineties. The guys were drawn in by the artful sketching.

 

When I reflect on the movie’s story’s importance, I had a few ideas of the ship’s meaning. 

 

Events endow meaning to time. Time then constrained my events toward meaninglessness. 

If true,  could I break free of undefeated time? 

 

Virginity and indestructibility enhance artistry; unequaled in seductive purity. 

To be unknowingly undefiled, yet invincibly known. 

 

Youth preconditions innocent endurance, but obliged in lovely strength. 

 

And as the world’s brilliantly flowered wealthy boarded that fabled ship a story-ridden century ago, they carried within their dreams progress’ budding hope. 

 

Herculean vessel, 

Science promised unsinkable. 

Maiden embarkment across the Atlantic.

Covenantal engineering feat. 

 

Filled with the previous generational elite’s most precious cargo, recalling not:

Naked I came, 

Naked I depart. 

 

It was a prodigious oceaning craft, said to be larger than any other, embarking on her initial voyage. Maidens always young, virginal, and subtly shimmering with glow. 

 

April 

Night, the 

Unsinkable boat, 

Struck an iceberg, in the

Atlantic. 

 

Sinkable transported unsinkable. Unsinkable transformed sinkable. I imagine watching it again as that iron maidened tomb, proceeded towards her muddy entombment, as boatless sailors nearby still read the letters “T-I-T-A…”.

 

Perspective

And as all directors and cameramen know:

Where you float brings what you shall intuit. 

 

Where you stand begets what you shall see. 

 

Order matters.

 

I knew from my movies that time is purely perspectival. Seeing those crashing letters entering the sea in that order (“T-I-T-A…”) required a specific perspective, at a necessary time, coordinated wave rhythms seen from a specific side of the ship. 

 

Time matters. 

 

Dave Brubeck’s Take Five on the Time Out album, the time meter is 5/4. When listening to his interpretation of Take Five (the song) on his Take Five (the album), the meter is the standard 4/4. An additional beat of time gives rise to the necessary interest. Only the notables can easily improvise over a 5/4 pulse. I wasn’t good enough to improvise through it. 

 

Perspective matters. 

 

A pridefully studied saxophonist remains trapped to improvise only in standard 4/4 or 3/4 meters, or their derivatives. Enslaved in standard time. In a way, the reality of the three plus two being five, is overshadowed by the hairy five printed in the staff. It conquers professional jazz artists forced to generate fresh material; the rote quotes and flourishes upon which they leaned, rendered impotent in the new time. 

 

New meters make men new. 

 

The innocent saxophonist, however, who has done his listening of the greats, letting down his guard, realizes the 5-meter is really a three plus a two. His listening, through vulnerability, leads to an epiphany: he can transcend over the meter if he only exposes it. 

 

The primordial listener emerges from his metered shackles to evolve into a double-metered man.

 

And as the two and the three are learned well before the five, so too reality has more than once been foreshadowed. 

 

Reality is itself shadowed forth. I read that in Plato. I spoke with symbolist Jonathan Pageau and discovered:

 

Meaning shadows material into our existence. 

 

Just like the apple. (see: Intrada to a Truer Life (001))

 

That’s how we all receive. 

That’s how we all perceive. 

 

For I had not been speaking of the story of the 1912 sinking of the Titanic, but of the sinking of the Titan with all the details above actually took place in 1898 – 14 years prior to Titanic. 

 

Published as a short story in 1898, The Wreck of the Titan told of an unsinkable ocean liner christened the Titan. The luxurious ship carrying society’s glamorous struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage. And on this cold April night, the Titan devastated to the bottom of the North Atlantic sea. 

 

From what I could tell every major detail, from the general ship dimensions to the month of the sinking, was published over a decade before the actual historical event. 

 

Not just published, distributed. 

 

Likewise, another story by the same author foretells a sneak attack by Japanese Naval Forces on the United States Naval Fleet stationed in Hawaii. This led to America and Japan entering a war. 

 

This fictional story, published in 1914, foreshadows true history decades later in 1941 in Pearl Harbor and well before Japan ever had such a capable Navy. 

 

Morgan Robertson, a former sea-faring merchant and later a diamond-setter in New York City, penned these and many other sea stories.

But could I consider a man like Robertson, who was eventually found dead on the floor of an Atlantic City hotel room with drugs in his system, a prophet?

 

If you have not yet read the introduction, you can do so here: Intrada to a Truer Life (001)

 

Part II of Time-Wreckers is next!