Free Soul of the World by Christopher Dewdney Page A

of the night before. But the flowers on the rhododendron in my back garden had begun to unclench. They had been reluctant all week amid the fading glories of the daffodils and tulips, holding their spade-shaped buds closed like pointed temple domes. By noon I could see small, crimson puffs where the petals of individual flowers were emerging from their clusters. I sat down on the lawn beside the rhododendron and improvised a special state of mind. I slowed myself down, became calm. I tried to remember what few shreds of meditation I had learned years ago to slow my metabolism. It was so quiet that I could hear the buzz of insects orbiting nearby flowers.
    I don’t know if I convinced myself that I could see the rhododendron flowers actually blooming, yet I’m sure I watched them open a little in the half-hour I sat looking at them, although knowledge sometimes corrupts experience. Maybe I superimposed memories of flowers blossoming in a time-lapse film I’d seen once. Or did I indeed slow my own time scale to a speed that accelerated the rhododendron’s opening? It didn’t matter in the end. The flowers were a cellular extravaganza; they inflated like miniature lavender thunderheads as myriads of cells divided and divided again inside them. Each petal was granular, with water-plump, semi-transparent cells. The flowers were soft, velvety to the touch. Within them a powerful surge of liquids and sugars pumped them larger and larger. Yet it was slow.
    I got up and went back into the house. The interior was cool compared to the backyard, and the oak staircase leading to the second floor was fragrant in the humidity and slightly moist to the touch. I worked for a few hours and later that afternoon went out to look at the rhododendron. Six flower clusters had now fully opened. Their purple petals were glossy and perfect in the hot sun, and the tips of their stamens, deep within the cool, amethyst chambers of their cups, were already dusted with pollen. Everything else was blossoming as well: the lilies,the hostas, even my neighbour’s mock orange. But the maples were way ahead. They had lost their flowers, and clusters of winged seeds hung from the branches amidst the leaves. Too soon, it seemed. Sooner every year. A flower in the tree, a seed in the flower, a tree in the seed.
    T HE S TANFORD P EGASUS
    One sunny June morning in 1878, at a racetrack in Palo Alto, California, the world changed. Eadweard Muybridge stopped time. The cameras he used to freeze a galloping horse in mid-stride had been invented only thirty-nine years earlier by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, and by today’s standards the photographic technology of the Victorian era was still very primitive. But Muybridge was a visionary and an inventor. He tweaked an extraordinary performance out of his modified daguerreotype cameras and that morning they revealed a new realm of time. Within days newspapers around the world were printing handdrawn copies of his equine photographs (newspapers could not yet reproduce photographs), and Muybridge became famous.
    An inventor as well as a grand eccentric in the Victorian tradition, Muybridge had immigrated to America from England at an early age, settling in San Francisco. As a young man he became fascinated by the new medium of photography and quickly developed a reputation as a landscape photographer. Over the previous two decades photography had revolutionized portraiture and landscape art. People unable to afford paintings of themselves or their children or of picturesque landscapes could now hire photographers.
    There was something magic about photographs, particularly of people. These were not painted interpretations, but direct images. Time was arrested at the point at which the photograph was taken, allowingpeople to revisit the past directly, through these little windows into history. It was the beginning of a kind of virtual time travel that we now take for granted. We hardly ever marvel at the fact that when