RANT: A LITTLE HOPE IN THE NIGHT

"Last night, when I escaped from the neighborhood, it was burning. The houses, the trees, the people: Burning.

     Smoke awoke me, and I shouted down the hall to Cory and the boys. I grabbed my clothes and emergency pack and followed Cory as she herded the boys out.

     The bell never rang. Our watchers must have been killed before they could reach it.

     Everything was chaos. People running, screaming, shooting. The gate had been destroyed. Our attackers had driven an ancient truck through it. They must have stolen a truck just to crash it through our gate.

     I think they must have been pyro addicts—bald people with painted heads, faces and hands. Red faces; blue faces; green faces; screaming mouths; avid, crazy eyes, glittering in the firelight." (Parable, 154)

I WAS READING THE SCI-FI NOVEL Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler late one night. Protests and looting were happening in a number of American cities over the outrageous killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis. Protests were growing in other cities, in other countries, too, including Canada. Every siren or loud voice I heard in the street outside my window made me scrunch down a little lower into my blankets in case there were any wayward bullets flying about. Fact and fiction were at a dangerous crossroads, it seemed.

Well, I really don’t have to worry about that happening around here, but there are places, quite a few actually, that do. And that’s real and that’s terrible.

Much of the subsequent protests here and around world—Black Lives Matter, Defund the Police, the demands that certain statues be removed from public spaces and so on continued throughout June and into July. Covid-19 still hammers away at some countries like the United States, now Brazil and India, with outbreaks of active cases spiking in areas that previously saw declines. And to say that economies are struggling to recover from months of downtime is an understatement; we just don’t know what the other side of this will look like. How many jobs will be recovered? How many lives will be restored to some semblance of normality? It’s too soon to tell. We’re on the knife-edge of change and things will probably have to go pear-shaped first before the costs of this pandemic, and the social and economic consequences are fully fleshed out and understood. 

As the ever-entertaining Max Kaiser on RT America’s Kaiser Report news show opined recently:

"We’re heading into a global depression which, what we are saying here, might be a good thing because values come back. In other words, during a period of global expansion with fiat money, values go out the window and conspicuous consumption becomes the most obvious way people display their character to  each other, and now as we head into a global depression that will be done [with], and we have will have more values again [meaning], people will bake more at home, knitting, crocheting, doing blanket-weaving…but that‘s actually a good thing you know, because people are more comfortable with a world based on human values instead of conspicuous consumption… It’ll be kind of painful for a while, but at the other end of this will be something a lot more humane and enjoyable [for] humans." (The Kaiser Report, E1562)

But, instead of sitting in my bathtub with a razor blade, I decided to read another book: John Crowley’s The Deep, his first published work of science fiction that came out in 1975. Again, I read it under the covers, late at night, hiding from the torches and clubs of looters outside my window, and the book took me to a strange and claustrophobic world  divided between two factions—the “Reds” and the “Blacks”: dynasties that timelessly battled for supremacy on a world that was strangely bounded and circumscribed.

Crowley is a master prose writer (and I so envy him!) who depicts a world in miniature which nevertheless embodies complex human societies and interactions. Think: two factions of medieval warlords, each struggling to grow and acquire power, land, armies, etc. Over time, one becomes dominant and rules the world from the “City” that sits at the centre of their world. Gradually, over time, the other faction grows in strength and stealth, and eventually it becomes the ruling party of the world—Red then Black, then Red again, generation after generation; rinse and repeat for millennia in a seemingly endless cycle. But in this world of Crowley's devising there is also room for beauty and small enchantments as, for example, when he describes the royal bedchamber:

   

"There are seven windows in the Queen’s bedroom in the Citadel that is the center of the City that is on the lake island called the Hub in the middle of the world.

Two of the seven windows face the tower stones and are dark; two overlook inner courtyards; two face the complex lanes that wind between the high, blank-faced mansions of the Protectorate; and the seventh, facing the steep Street of Birdsellers and, beyond, a crack in the ring of mountains across the lake, is always filled at night with stars. When wind speaks in the mountains, it whispers in this window, and makes the fine brown bed hangings dance." (Deep, 12)

As Crowley develops his characters and plot, and describes the complex social layers found in his world, elements of repetitiveness and ‘bounded traditionalism' become apparent, leading the reader to wonder why the same things are done over and over. Crowley reveals the reason [spoiler alert!] in the ending chapters as two main characters, “The Secretary” (also known as “The Visitor”), and the assassin, Nyamè, journey to the literal edge of the world. Here we learn that their world is the creation of an alien being with vast, god-like powers. It is a giant disk situated upon “The Deep”, like a sundial atop its pedestal (minus its gnomon or arm), floating somewhere in space with an artificial sun and moons orbiting it. The Visitor plays an important role in maintaining balance in a world which should seem like a mere plaything for a bored and errant god, yet doesn’t. Again credit is due Crowley for his ability to create real, breathing landscapes and complex characters. We learn that the world has existed in this manner for many thousands of generations, neither progressing nor regressing beyond certain limits. This is due to periodic interventions by "Visitors"—robots devised by the world’s creator to ensure there will be continual conflict between the Red and Black factions, essentially ‘culling’ the human population so it does not exceed the carrying capacity of the disk-world. 

The circularity and sameness of their institutions, their goals, attitudes and beliefs are now understandable. But this circular history, where people live in cycles of repetitive warfare and empire building is coming to an end by the novel’s climax. Nyamè returns from her experience at the world’s edge as a half-mad religious visionary whose utterances may someday engender a new set of beliefs and insights about the world for her people to adopt. And the Visitor, who was damaged upon its arrival to the world, has failed to ignite the standard fighting between Red and Black, who consequently have stood down their forces and entered into a new era of peace, thus breaking the mould that has kept their society in stasis for millennia.

What will happen when their history unfolds unimpeded by ‘divine intervention’ is an open question. But their lives now hold new possibilities undreamt of before. Sennred, the king’s younger brother, in the wake of the new world that is dawning before him, no longer feels bound by the constraints of perpetual conflict. He is free to leave the past behind, with its centuries of rutted tradition, and to think of something else.

     "He stepped carefully past the grinning kings [portraits on the wall] to the door Defensible, newly widened that winter. His laughing servant held a brand-new travelling cloak for him.

      And what if it was not madness at all, not ephemeral? What if Time had indeed burst out of his old accustomed round, gone adventuring on some new path? Would he know? And would it matter if he did?

     He took the cloak from his servant. He would see Caredd [the beautiful, young widow he loves] soon, and that did matter, very much." (180)     

Love indeed matters. As does a life not bound by tradition, but one instead that grows tall and strong from its roots. Ah! Crowley. He gives us a little hope in the night…

Cheers, Jake

"Edge? What edge? Hah!"

--Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower. Grand Central Publishing. The Hachette Book Group. New York, NY, 2000, 2007.

--John Crowley, The Deep, Doubleday and Co., Inc., New York, 1975

 

[a Note for fans of Chris Hedges. Earlier this year, Hedges and several other writers and staff were summarily fired from their positions with the online newszine Truthdig which may no longer be in operation. You can find his writings at Common Dreams and at the new website SheerPost.]