The other day, I was listening to Fresh Air on NPR and heard an interview with the screenwriter for the new movie about Lincoln. He talked about Daniel Day Lewis getting into character yet at the same time still texting with him. He referred to himself as Lincoln's metaphysical conundrum. Not only did texting not exist back then, neither did movies. Perhaps the best analogy for Lincoln would have been receiving messages via the telegraph from a playwright.

Yet even with that, there issues of communicating across time remain puzzling. When we write, it is people in the future, thinking of time as an ongoing sequence, that will read what we wrote, not people in the past. Texts somehow made available to an earlier time present interesting issues. Could someone from the future, somehow, share with us text that we will write in the future? Perhaps a biography or some literary criticism of something we are yet to write?

Really, this isn't that new of an idea. There have always been fortune tellers, but they are rarely thought of as bearing messages from a future biographer or a future literary critic. There is the whole realm of the unconscious. Can we learn something about, or perhaps possibly shape our future by discovering or exploring what is in our unconscious?

I wrote the other day about the unconscious that perhaps exists in our Facebook groups. Are there messages from the future somehow contained in our Facebook walls?

To bring this back down to earth, yesterday, Kim asked if I wanted to see Neil Gaiman at the CT Forum in a couple weeks; a message about the future. I went and checked out a YouTube video of Gaiman giving a commencement speech at the University of the Arts. He was speaking about the future, "Make Good Art".

Of course, the question of how we make good art remains. Where does inspiration come from? How do we better incorporate creativity into our education system or our work lives? Perhaps a future biographer or critic can give us insights.