to understand the sub-atomic world.
In the same vein, scientists are pursuing the goal of cloning a Neanderthal by reversing the arrow of time. Neanderthals were our close genetic cousins, differing from us in about one in ten genes. They too used tools, buried their dead and built fires. Although they were bigger and stronger than us, our own ancestors vanquished them: the last Neanderthals were wiped out about 35,000–50,000 years ago. Harvard biologist George Church has proposed reverse engineering a Neanderthal by beginning with a modern human genome and working backwards. Just as Pinter reversed chronology on the stage, biologists would rewind human evolution to create a Neanderthal stem cell, which could then be implanted in the womb of a compatible female host. Church’s idea is still speculative – but it is another example of the brain manipulating the flow of time to create new outcomes.
Some creative bends are intense; others are more minor. In the 1960s, artist Roy Lichtenstein paid homage to Monet’s cathedral paintings. His silk-screened images are grainier and more monochromatic, but the tribute to Monet is readily apparent.
Roy Lichtenstein’s Rouen Cathedral, Set 5
Similarly, in visual caricatures, signature features are exaggerated for comic effect – but not so much that we cannot tell who it is.
But when the distortions are more extreme, sources can be obscured. It is not easy to tell that the two paintings by Monet (next page) are of the same subject: the Japanese bridge at his home in Giverny.
Claude Monet’s Water Lilies and Japanese Footbridge
The Japanese Footbridge
And in Francis Bacon’s portraits, faces are blurred and mangled, the jumble of features fully disguising their subjects’ identities.
Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Portraits (including Self-portrait)
The capacity to bend a source beyond recognition solved a problem at the birth of the television age. As televisions became fixtures of American homes in the 1950s, broadcasters wanted people to pay for watching shows. But this was long before cable television, and there was no way to get the programming directly to a specific home; networks had no choice but to beam their paid programming in all directions in the air. How could companies get viewers to pay for something that could be latched onto by every antenna? The solution: engineers devised ways to scramble the signal, something like what Bacon had done to his face. In one encryption system, the analog lines were shuffled. In another, a randomized delay was added to each line, making them unsynchronized. To watch first-run movies or premium sports matches, subscribers to Paramount’s Telemeter “Pay-to-See” system dropped coins into a box, while clients of the Subscribervision service inserted a punch card.2 For the paying customer, a decoder box would unscramble the signal; for everyone else, it was bent into an unwatchable blur. For Bacon, twisting the image gave his portraits psychological depth; for television broadcasters, it protected their bottom line.
THE END OF TIME ILLUSION
Many of us fall prey to the “end of time” illusion, in which we convince ourselves that everything that can be done has already been done. But the history of bending tells a different story: there is always infinitely more to squeeze out. Human culture is forever a work in progress.
Consider knives. The oldest stone blades, with chips or a sharpened edge, date from approximately two million years ago.
Gradually, our ancestors molded the knife into a longer edge and handle, which allowed for greater force to be applied. From those humble beginnings, knives have been bent into countless forms, their family tree thick and endlessly branching. Consider that these diverse knives from nineteenth-century Phillipines are a collection from a single culture and time period.
Likewise, umbrellas and parasols have existed since ancient times. Early Egyptians made theirs out of palm leaves or feathers, the Romans out of leather or skins, the Aztecs out of feathers and gold.3 The Roman umbrella was collapsible, as was that of the ancient Chinese; in contrast, the royal umbrellas of the Indians and Siamese were so heavy that they had to be supported by an attendant as a full-time job.
In 1969, Bradford Phillips patented the design of the modern folding umbrella. Phillips’ model has enjoyed considerable staying power. Still, it is not the end of the line: the United States Patent Office continues to receive so many patent applications for umbrellas that it has four full-time examiners to review them.4 For example, the Senz umbrella’s asymmetric shape gives it better wind-resistance; the unBrella inverts the usual design, with the flaps folding upwards and the ribs on the outside; and the Nubrella is worn like a backpack, making it hands-free.
Just as with knives and umbrellas, there’s no endpoint in the arts. Classics are constantly renovated. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has been turned into a ballet, an opera, a musical (West Side Story), and adapted more than forty times for film, including the animated movie Gnomeo and Juliet, in which the star-crossed lovers are garden gnomes.
Jazz great Bobby Short sang and played piano for thirty-five years at the Café Carlyle in New York City. Yet no matter how many times he played standards such as “I’m in Love Again” or “Too Marvelous for Words,” no two performances were alike. For a jazz artist, there is no definitive performance, no final outcome. Instead, the goal is continual renewal: the same song never the same way twice.5
Similarly, Sherlock Holmes has proven to be a popular favorite for reinvention. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s novella A Study in Scarlet, the police discover a dead body with a message written in blood on the wall: RACHE. Scotland Yard’s Inspector Lestrade enlists Holmes to help him solve the baffling case. Combing over the scene, Lestrade interprets the bloody scrawl:
Why, it means that the writer was going to put the female name Rachel, but was disturbed before he or she had time to finish. You mark my words, when this case comes to be cleared up, you will find that a woman named Rachel has something to do with it. It’s all very well for you to laugh, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. You may be very smart and clever, but the old hound is the best, when all is said and done.6
But Holmes continues to study the crime scene and, in a flourish, announces a dazzling series of deductions:
There has been murder done, and the murderer was a man. He was more than six feet high, was in the prime of life, had small feet for his height, wore coarse,
