The BBC Science Hour played
a segment within weeks of Secret History’s release with Geologist Ross Stein,
who was explaining the system of fault lines that were creating the large
number of earthquakes suddenly wreaking havoc across towns in Italy.
In the specific situation Stein spoke of, he said the
tectonic plate Italy called home was being compressed until about a million
years ago. Now it’s being stretched so its faults are trying to figure out how
to do something different than it was born to do and they’re reorganizing.
He said the lines were “little broken shards of faults that
haven’t been organized by repeated earthquakes into a long continuous smooth
fault, so that means if you jostle one faultline, you tend to move the others
around it, and no one fault is able to rupture for a very long distance and
produce a very large earthquake, so we get these little groups or families of
moderate sized events.”
He also explained that aftershocks happen randomly over
time, but the magnitude of release does not strengthen or weaken over time. It’s
more likely to have earthquakes hours apart than years apart but there’s still
that possibility. All these earthquakes are part of a conversation between
faults.
The continued danger after an earthquake are aftershocks,
and there will be aftershocks.
They are generally smaller than the first shock but sometimes aftershocks
are bigger. When this happens, the semantical trick the scientists use for their
terminology is that the largest shock is considered a Main Shock, while smaller
quakes that contribute to the main shock are now called foreshocks. Faultlines that
have been loaded by any shock at all are closer to fail than they were before
these events began.
Looking specifically at Secret History, reread everything Stein just said
but instead of “faultline”, substitute with the name of someone who’s had an
interaction with the lodge. And every time you hear “earthquake” substitute
with “timequake.”
Every time one of us meets a lodge denizen, or we reach into
one another’s worlds, our realities scrape against each other at a proverbial
faultline and it becomes charged. Enough meetings like that, and the line
between our realities will slip and a reality quake shakes up time.
I’d have to say the original main shock in Twin Peaks, and
the reason I’m so keen on this earthquake metaphor in the first place, occurred
when (fire-based) volcanic activity in the Twin Peaks area formed Blue Pine and
White Tail mountains. Deer Meadow Radio’s Mark Givens is fond of mentioning the
Michner-style book Frost wanted to write as early as 1990 that would begin with
the formation of the mountains and focus on the weird electrical energy that
settled between them, so I feel good saying this was on Frost’s mind the entire
time he was writing Secret History.
So what do the shocks do? They cause ripples through time that, if you could see them, would look like a lake after a rock skips across it. It would look like the rings of a tree in a cross-cut.
The points of time captured on the crests of the shockwaves,
on the rings of the trees, would be Ed and Norma’s distance from each other
when Laura died. The points between the ripples, or between the tree rings, are
the less solid details of Norma’s family and how Ed actually met Nadine. The
most important details (the details closest to the moment of the shocks) rise to the top, are indelible, while the less important
details can be re-remembered. Just like our own memories.
This matches up with Joel Bocko’s
observation on Twin Peaks Unwrapped: character cores are the same in Secret
History. Alternate universe stories usually change characters entirely, but
here different beginnings come to the same outcomes rather than the same
beginnings coming to different outcomes in usual parallel universe situations.
Which is why I think it’s more about metaphysical geologic events rather than
parallel universes.
If you make it about timequakes and shocks to our reality,
that can credibly explain how one dossier can contain blatantly inconsistent documents
from seeming parallel universes. If we were dealing with multiple realities,
the dossier would be internally consistent within one alternate reality only,
and there’d be at least fifteen similar-but-inexact dossiers in play. In this
model time is overwritten, but not before documents are written and
immortalized. Think how there are copies of rough drafts out and about, earlier
moments than the “final” products (the Star Wars Trilogy and then the Special
Editions let’s say) and you can put them both in a dossier next to each other
if you want to. They all exist, but one is the more official version according
to history.
Reality timequakes allow for canon changes to fit within the
same canon. It doesn’t require multiple worlds, but it does make multiple
realities exist within one world without needing to find a way to travel
between the realities. This allows for a certain kind of dream logic, allows it
to work intuitively rather than explicitly, which should be right in Lynch’s
wheelhouse. It doesn’t require time travel but it sure allows for it. It’s
science-leaning and magick-leaning, and finally allows for the different
versions of Twin Peaks to coexist peacefully in their solar system. And even if I’m somehow exactly right about this, it’s just a framework: there’s plenty of room for so many more possibilities and surprises to come.
