The TIME TRAVELER: an Artist's Quest Through the Past and Future

VOLUME 2 of 5: This lavishly illustrated, large-format, five-volume memoir, written over nearly six decades, documents the extraordinary life of artist, writer, and philosopher Michael E. Arth, who has had careers in fine art, architecture, construction, urban design, filmmaking, politics, and public policy analysis. Although the memoir is written chronologically, Arth often slips outside of linear time, as well as outside of clearly defined roles.Beginning with memories of the womb and his family’s move from England to New Mexico at 17 months old, the memoir traces a life in unusually close conversation with time itself. It moves through childhood in New Mexico and Texas, a coming-of-age marked by rebellion and discovery, a fine-art career launched through exotic botanical etchings, years of world travel, visionary experiences, experimental architecture, public policy work, documentary filmmaking, fatherhood, love, and a lifelong attempt to understand how the past and future speak to each other through a holographic block universe.The series follows Arth across continents, relationships, houses, artworks, ideas, and multifarious projects. Chapter numbers roughly correspond to his age, giving the memoir the structure of a life unfolding incrementally through brutally honest, often hilarious, personal stories.Volume I: Coming of Age, 1953–1973Arth begins before birth, with vivid memories of the womb, then moves through childhood and adolescence as the oldest of six, later seven, children in a Catholic family shaped by conflict, strict religion, right-wing politics, first love, humor, and danger. Reared in sixteen places in four countries and anchored by written and photographic journals, he leaves home at seventeen, works as an illustrator and portrait artist, and spends nine months as a street artist in Europe.Volume II: In the Wild, 1974–1980From age twenty to twenty-six, Arth establishes himself as a fine artist through original prints, paintings, and posters. He lives in Austin, briefly marries his high school sweetheart, rebuilds and sells a house, travels twice around the world, moves to France, and begins having nonordinary experiences that intrude on ordinary life.Volume III: Hollyweird, 1981–1991Arth lives in Paris, Austin, Colorado, and Hollywood while designing and building “habitable sculpture,” including a house beneath the Hollywood Sign that he shares with actor Keanu Reeves. A novel begun in Paris starts to come weirdly true in late-1980s Hollywood, amid difficult relationships, visionary experiments, and a fasting journey to Peru that ends in a strange encounter at a deserted Machu Picchu.Volume IV: The Labors, 1991–2008This volume moves from the upper Amazon basin, where Arth nearly dies while investigating out-of-body experiences involving ayahuasca and ketamine, to Los Angeles, where he builds a mountaintop villa, with Madonna as “the girl next door.” He begins The Labors of Hercules, marries, founds New Pedestrianism, rebuilds a Florida drug slum into the Garden District, and becomes the subject of New Urban Cowboy.Volume V: The Heart, 2009–2031The final volume turns toward love—personal, paternal, civic, and universal. Arth raises his daughter, writes Democracy and the Common Wealth, cycles across Florida while running for governor, develops LOGOS, divorces, reconnects with someone from his past, and finds the love of his life. The memoir then extends into future projections, democratic reforms, and a hypothetical 2028 presidential run.The Time Traveler is not only a memoir but an archive: a personal record of art, architecture, family, eros, mystical experience, failure, love, and the stubborn hope that memory, imagination, and public engagement can still help bend the future. It is also an archive of world culture and history, as seen through the lens of an artist, grounded in both reality and empathy. Read more