Thoughts on Frederick Turner

I have often thought about the power of the written word and how it allows us to communicate with not only other people, but other cultures and different times as well. This theme kept going through my head as I listened to Mr. Turner read his poems. Especially the first third of The Undiscovered Country. I thought that through writing, the man can learn the memories of his previous life and maybe glimpse who he was. During his second narrative, in which Turner recalls his trips around the world and to the Gallapagos Islands, this theme is there again, as he thinks back not just on the places he has been, but his writings as well. The line that sticks out with me was the one in which he remembers that at nine "I learned I could write what I felt" (I think that's the correct line, if not it is something very similar!)

What I found interesting is that just today I had been thinking about how writing helps us communicate across time, but how sad is it that the dialogue is very one sided. And then I downloaded Genesis (a poem referenced by Linda in her introduction of Mr. Turner) and read the introduction, and Turner writes:

Since that moment I have from time to time returned to the question of whether information could be communicated from the future into the past. Alain Aspect’s work in quantum theory and Richard Feynman’s time-reversible particle diagrams suggest that on the quantum level physics would permit, if not direct backward communication, at least a sort of timeless harmonic integration of information that we observe at different times.

Mr. Turner seemed to hypothesize that the voices that we hear from time to time, the ones we usually dismiss, may be messages from the future (or at least he does for the purposes of his book). It's a very unique way of looking at things and working on the problem of the one-sided conversation throughout time.