RANT: FALL AND OLD BONES

 

 

A Demonstration of Echoes  

A demonstration of echoes

once flocked along these walls,

swirled among the chimneys

chattering in the halls.

They paraded on cobblestones—

such clopping ‘neath the hoof!

Rudely waking masters

while raising up the roof.

They would chorus through our churchyards,

bellowing at the bells,

japing sleepers’ matins

with cockcrow sunrise knells.

Around the town, their self-same song

gave airs to fleeting gifts:

bouncing balls and laughter

and what comes after it.

Among the houses row on row,

‘mid clamour of the days,

such came round to greet us

to task our better ways.

 

But when raucous, corbelled courtyards

‘last yield to time-pocked stone,

mansions torn of rafters

will shout their every groan.

 

And so with fall, when winds do raise

low moans before the moon;

under bridge and belfry,

they sound their time-worn tune.

 

The fall of rock, the cry of wind,

the tree's death in the wood;

calling nature’s echoes,

so late misunderstood.

 

 

Of course, it’s different when you’re old. Funny, I can’t even say “when you’re older”, anymore. Somehow, that rings hollow. It seems there’s a line you cross—it’s there at different times for different people. It’s the one that’s always imagined—until it’s not. It’s real, and enough like a knife edge to cut you as you cross it. It’s that sharp reminder, telling you how little time you have left and how precious each moment is—when each moment should contain everything! Yet so many simply pass by.

Hmmm, I guess I’ve been watching too many leaves fall these days! Well, autumn has begun in earnest and the trees are turning their age-old colours; it’ll be colder in a while and  time to get the long johns out of mothballs. I was hoping to do a book report on William Gibson’s 2014 Sci-Fi novel The Peripheral. The book jacket credits him with being, “one of the most visionary, original, and quietly influential writers currently working” (Boston Globe), and I’ve read a number of his earlier “cyber-punk” novels that he’d written in the 1980s. But I have a confession to make: I just can’t read William Gibson, anymore! I read along for 50-60 pages and find myself losing the plot. (Is there one?!) His details drive me crazy! Gibson is a fantastic word sculptor, if I can use that term. He’s very environmental. By that I mean he depicts the physical setting—objects, structures, processes and so on using crisp, interesting, at times oddly juxtaposed, even oppositional, descriptors. For example:

 

“He was watching one of Lev’s two thylacine analogs through the kitchen window, as it did its stiff-tailed business beside an illuminated bed of hostas. He wondered what its droppings might be worth. There were competing schools of thylacinery, warring genomes, another of Lev’s hobbies. Now it turned, in its uncanine fashion, its vertically striped flank quite heraldic, and seemed to stare at him. The regard of a mammalian predator neither canid nor felid was a peculiar thing, Lev had said. Or perhaps Dominika had a feed from its eyes.” (39)

The cowboy's magic lasso got out of hand.

 

Here is his trademark envisioning of advanced technology as it intersects with the human world and our social orderings—powerful technologies of machine learning, robotics, IT, and genetics. I rushed to my dictionary to look up “thylacine” and learned it was a recently-extinct (1933) carnivorous marsupial from Tasmania (also known as the “Tasmanian Tiger.”) In this passage, we learn that Lev, a rich Russian socialite, has two genetically-reconstituted thylacines as pets and guard dogs or, more accurately, 'guard marsupials'. In addition, they have been genetically engineered and may even have miniature cameras implanted in their eyes. Gibson presents us with settings, actions and characters that are often cryptic and opaque. We learn this is a future time, several decades from now, when a new technology called “quantum tunnelling” has been developed which allows communication with the past. However, the earliest they can go back is around 2020. Just why they can communicate no earlier than this date is a bit of a mystery.

Thyacine: "Tasmanian Tiger" (c. 1933)

Gibson develops two parallel time settings with two sets of characters, and his plot centres around what happens when they intersect. He has an interesting twist on the ‘time travel’ motif wherein each communication with the past creates a distinct time-line, so that their own (future) time is not altered by any changes they might make in the past. (Question: If you can alter the past without changing the present does that make you a god?) 

Gibson describes the growing disparities between rich and poor, how in our time technologies that will become powerful and ubiquitous (particularly for elites) in the future are just now in their infancy. We compare and contrast, and judge as well, the two sets of characters and their worlds, each from a different time period, yet connected by a “Gordian knot” of interwoven technology that may yet prove harmful to them all. Interesting premise, but my main bugaboo with Gibson is that his characters are the same as all the other characters from his past novels—the lone computer hacker, tech-savvy wiz-kids, indolent rich, and so on. And his often bleak vision of human society composed of atomized and estranged individuals who struggle to survive in an increasingly hostile web of technology and manipulations by powerful elites is something I find off-putting. The people in his novels are most human and relatable when they disengage, or are freed, from their technological bindings.

His novels are dark, with little humour and lots of irony; still, he paints his literary canvas with crisp, enigmatic images, evocative settings and puzzling problems.

But, I have difficulty reading Gibson for another reason—I just don’t believe in his future. When we think of the wide range of today’s technologies, from GMO/mono-crop agriculture (I’ve been thinking about that lately) to drones, nuclear weapons, advanced AI and so on, we seem to be caught in a “monkey trap” and can’t let go. The technological fix we’re in, a product of our big brains at the expense of the rest of us, is what he’s writing about, of course, except the quandaries he imagines are fictional, while ours are very real. Where I go down a different path than Gibson is that I see our current suite of technologies (or most of them at least) as having relatively short shelf-lives. Yes, it’s true that future generations will have to contend with, for example, the by-products of our so-called “Green Revolution” in agriculture and its ultimately destructive and short-sighted land-stewardship practices. And there’s a whole list of technologies and their unintended consequences I won’t bother listing now; you know the drill. I just don’t think such technologies--many of them key in keeping our civilization running--will remain viable in the future, and we will either choose new ways of doing things or be forced to accept them, going forward. Gibson’s vision of a dystopian technological future just doesn’t resonate with me.

So I put down The Peripheral and picked up Salman Rushdie’s fantasy novel Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. It is a delightful story about Dunia, a “jinnia” princess who falls in love with the twelfth century philosopher and translator of Aristotle, Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Dunia is a fantastical creature, a “jinni” or as we would say “genie”, those beings from Arabian folklore who inhabit lamps and grant wishes. Rushdie describes how, from time to time, the worlds of the jinni and human intersect. (This involves rips in the space-time continuum and wormholes!) It is a story that also involves two different time periods, one describing Dunia’s life with Ibd Rushd in the twelfth century, and her new love, the gardener Raphael Hieronymus Manezes, in the twenty-first. Raphael is actually her great, great (and a bunch more greats) grandson, and a descendant of Ibd Rushd. He is of a special breed of humans who have latent magical powers inherited from Dunia. I’m reminded of how this contrasts with Gibson’s technologically-enhanced humans who have computerized devices embedded in their bodies or else they control advanced computerized machinery. It’s the human quality, the attention Rushdie pays to how his characters interact, how they feel, what they believe in and think, how they love and grow, all within a fantasy story framework, that make the book appealing. The story is framed as a legend passed down generation after generation to some future story-teller (and our story's narrator) hundreds of years from our own time—one thousand and one years in the future, to be precise (not one thousand years, as even numbers are considered inauspicious in Arabic numerology.) Of course, Rushdie’s title references the famous One Thousand and One Nights* tale of Scheherazade from Arabic literature, with that number used as a recurring motif in the novel. I’m currently at the point where the boundary between the jinni’s world and the human is breaking down and the two are colliding with increasing chaos in both. The outcome of this potentially catastrophic meeting, we’re told by our future historian, is what has shaped that future time. I can hardly wait to find out what happens!

I guess I should say something about the poem. I was thinking about what we've seen over the last few years of all those bombed-out cities in the Middle East. Aleppo, an ancient city, one with a population in 2010 of some four million is one particularly hard hit. During the recent Syrian civil war, great swaths of it were destroyed in an effort to fight ISIS. And I was thinking about the sounds around us and how sound echoes, is carried by the wind and so on, and how these returning sounds inform us about where we are and who we are. It's our paltry version of bats' echo-location ability. A city wracked by war sounds different than a peaceful one, even long after the guns and bombs have stopped. And all the sounds of life, including their reverberations in the world and in the man-made world, remind us how those sounds change over time; they change in good times and in bad, and we often forget to listen to them, even forget they'd ever existed. We forget them even as they make their presence known to us time after time. We need to listen more, especially to sounds the world chooses to return to us. 

 Cheers, Jake. 

 

 

 

   *Which is 2 years, 8 months and 28 days.

Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, Alfred A. Knoff, Canada, 2015. 

William Gibson, The Peripheral, 2014. G. P, Putnam's Sons, New York, N.Y.