Time. Loop.

There’s a road junction in St Budeaux that acts like an elongated roundabout. The effect of this is that a car heading in one direction can stop for you at the zebra crossing and then as you walk on thirty seconds later you can see the same car now seemingly heading the opposite way.

On one side of the road there used to be an old style advertising billboard – every few months someone would come along and paste up a new advert to replace the existing one. A couple of years ago the billboard was taken down and replaced with a modern equivalent – electronic this time. When it was first installed it was all black, presumably awaiting the first electronic ad to be launched on to the screen.

Two years later it is still black. It’s become its own black hole. Capitalism has sucked so much out of the world that there’s nothing left to consume or no one left who can afford to consume it. (Either that or it’s a very clever art installation). When I traverse this neighbourhood I always walk on the opposite side of the junction. I know it’s not a real black hole, it can’t suck me into its gravitational vortex, but it never hurts to be too careful.

Time loops are everywhere and the reoccurring cars on that junction is the least of them. Every day is a loop of sunrise and sunset. The months and the years come around again in a measured process. Déjà vu. We’ve experienced all this before. We’ll probably experience it all again.

The most famous time loop is to be found in the film Groundhog Day, but decades before that film hit the screen there was also a famous example of the time loop in Philip K. Dick’s 60s novel Martian Time Slip. A crucial scene at the heart of the novel is replayed multiple times, each time the scene plays out in a subtle and an ever more disturbing form.

Most books Dick wrote in that fertile period of the 1960s are worth reading and this one certainly remains so. The ideas of schizophrenia are now perhaps outdated, as are the notions of autism, a subject that is much more understood now than it was 60 years ago. But then even when the book was published, the idea of colonising Mars and there being an indigenous population to displace would have seemed unrealistic.

As with a lot of fiction, you have to submit to the internal logic of the world the author has created and then enjoy the book from there. Interestingly enough, had Phil Dick set his story on a Mars-like planet somewhere in the wider universe, the story could’ve worked equally well or better. There are some similarities between Martian Time Slip and Ursula Le Guin’s award winning short novel The Word For World Is Forest. Dick’s novel would’ve fitted perfectly into the Hainish universe that LeGuin created and used across much of her work.

The other obvious literary time loop for me is found in the works of Charlez Schulz, creator of the Peanuts cartoon strip. Characters evolve in the first few years of the strip, a few early characters leave and a few regulars don’t appear at first, but once the strip is fully established, there we find Charlie Brown and friends stuck in an eternal time loop, never aging.

Just like for us, the seasons will come and go. In spring Charlie will have his heart broken on Valentine’s Day. Summer brings inevitable failure on the baseball mound. Later in the year he will once more attempt to kick the football held out to him by Lucy – and every year he will fail as the ball is pulled away from him.

Is this the saddest time loop of them all? Characters do have rare moments of triumph and Snoopy mostly gets to enjoy himself at all times, but the underlying pathos of life is never far from the surface.

I did set out at one point to write a short thesis comparing the works of Schulz and Dick, but I never quite found the thread to kick it off. What I came up with was mostly statistics – how the two writers were born around the same time, how both documented a certain period of mid to late 20^th century America. How Dick completed around 50 novels in his lifetime and Schulz drew his comic strip for a similar 50 years.

Both wrote about what could be categorised as ‘the little people’ – in Schulz’s case, literally the children and in Dick’s case the ordinary man, the small man. Adults are heard but never seen in Schulz’s cartoons. The corporations of the future in Dick’s worlds are often faceless. It would be facile to see Peanuts as a primer for the works of Phil Dick, a junior version, a sort of Phil Dick for kids – not because there isn’t a nugget of truth in there, but because the works of Charles Schulz are not just for kids. Trust me, there’s plenty in there for readers of all ages.

Peanuts is funny, but then so too is Phil Dick. It’s easy to focus on the drugs, paranoia and all the weird futures that he conjured up, that became his trademarks, but there’s a lot of humour to be found in his stories. In certain contexts you can read Dick’s books as Franz Kafka with added jokes. But that’s perhaps stretching this whole literary analogy a little too far.

Anyway, I never finished the piece on Dick and Schulz. Maybe the opportunity to do so will come around again at some point.

Everything’s a loop.

The circles just get shorter or sped up, as we head inevitably down the plughole that life sucks us towards. It’s scary, but not as scary as that black hole advertising sign out by the road junction in St Budeaux. I’m steering well clear of that. And so should you.