DIGGING TIME

After several days at the dig--Arbeia Roman Fort on Tyne, South Shields, England--I frequently experienced momentary mental flashes of the layering of time that matched the layers of soil and occupation we were laboriously unearthing. As I held a shard of Roman pottery, I gazed out of the pit at present-day, street-level England aware of the time-collapsed passage of centuries and realized that I was doing menial labor moving the same earth where others, stretching backwards in time 20 centuries or more, had also performed their labors, whether as Celtic agriculturists, Roman soldier-builders, Medieval plowmen, or Victorian-era laborers.

Perhaps my diachronic sense of the passage of time--the mental flashes of someone from a time-space in which the temporal sense operates mostly in present tense--only could have occurred while standing deep in an archeological pit holding a shard of Roman pottery.

The raucous gulls on the roofs across the street seemed to mock, in full-throttle disdain, my pondering the meaning of time.

MIDDLE EARTH IMAGINARY

Having recently visited England, I disagree somewhat with J.R.R. Tolkien's statement that "subcreation" is the invention of a totally imaginary, fully articulated world. In truth, it seems to me that the "subcreation" springs from the physical world and landscape in which one already lives and usually is not "totally imaginary." At least in Tolkien's case, the philologist of medieval Scandinavian languages lived in a land of ancient trees and ancient Druidic mysteries (England) which informed at least some substrate of his fertile imagination.

Could Middle Earth have been subcreated in the Outback of Australia, if one had no knowledge of rural England? Tolkien, it seems to me, remade--subcreated--the England he knew into a fanciful fantasy land and used biblical themes of the ultimate struggle between forces of light and darkness. His English sense of (real) place became the Middle Earth sense of imaginary place.

To me, England wears antiquity like Sherlock Holmes wears his overcape (coming to a theatre near you [starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law]).