Stop Beaming Me
Up!
I was flying my
proton ship
over the
boiling forests of Venus
when my
telephone rang.
Damn! More
aliens!
Machines
Arched brows
aside,
those rhetorical
"whys?"
and breathless
sighs—
you’re
ever-so-dry is
once-linked and
now ties
some holding,
some binding,
some late
winding up of
your precious,
shattered clock.
And so, the
machines will roll.
They’ll toll:
they’ll badger and stole
from eagle and
mole
diamonds and
coal,
all in vectors of neglect.
So save your regrets,
your puny half-mets,
those latest upsets
your privilege abets.
Just write your last text
on what will come next
(your favourite pretext),
all in that script you learned
so well in school.
Before
Before
slipstreams
and the
rocket’s red glare.
Before the ALL
CLEAR siren.
Before the
darkness comes.
Before the red
light turns green
and steam rises
from the hood
of your car.
Before summer rains
wash clear the smoky streets.
Before the
raging.
Before the
wipers clear the
windshield.
Before
accusations and omissions
and slips of
the tongue.
Before the
dropped stitch
and getting
lost
between the
silences.
Before dark
eyes and skin.
Before the yearning
and the great
distraction,
and trembling together
beneath alabaster
skies.
Before things
like hopscotch
and bubble gum.
Before you.
Before me.
Before
anything.
Before the land
and sky
and the
lushness of it all.
Before the
Garden.
Before
mountains and canyons
and rivers and
rain
and clouds and
air.
Before the
sound and the fury.
Before.
Beyond
Beyond appetite
and stale greetings,
pale suns and
evening shadows.
Beyond a moon
whose weak rays
shatter in
reflections.
Beyond the open
door
where time’s
jungle closes round.
Beyond a day, a
lifetime.
Beyond rainbows
inside an hourglass
and waves along
a beach,
thimble shells
full of sun
and cathedral-caves
with their
green, limestone pools—
days filled
with honeyed airs,
warm rains, and
time!
Beyond fields
of rock,
crumbling
slowly
by seed husks
and grasses,
and hurried by
swirls
of impatient
winds.
Beyond thunder
claps
and the silent
grace
that comes
after storms.
Beyond the edges
of a dream.
Beyond the
rinds and eggshells
of a life cast
adrift
upon a distant
shore.
Beyond
waves washing
across your
feet.
Beyond.
Guarantee
Forever and
a day.
It gives
eternity a number,
some human
scale to things.
We need that.
After all, summer
nights
don’t really go
on forever.
And pain lasts
only as long
as you can bear
it.
Pleasure too.
That’s what
they tell us.
They also say
your
fingernails and hair
will keep
growing
after you die.
But other than
that,
most things
stop
sometime before
forever.
At least I hope
so.
Not This
Not the hot
sand
that reddens
the eye
with the grit
of ancient dreams;
nor heat from
the barking crowds
that line the
stone walls,
begging for
judgment.
Rather instead
the numbing
cold,
the cool,
silencing white—
armies that so
completely annex
purposefulness from the world
(and with such
joy!) that surrender
to the season’s
first snow storm
is all but
inevitable.
Creation Moth
A moth turned
from along its
way,
and
accidentally blew
a world away.
Touch
Let my words
cool your
heated brow,
ease my way
to your soft
kisses
and scented
skin.
I THOUGHT I WOULD PUT UP A FEW poems for the reader’s perusal before they’re
tossed into the garbage bin of Time. Though, perhaps it would be better if they
were recycled. Or else, put into a time capsule with instructions to be opened in
the far-distant future. Maybe Morlocks can get some use out of them if they
stop snacking on Elois for a bit.
TIME seems to
be a theme with several of them, and I just happen to be reading a Sci-Fi tale on that very topic. “Another Story, or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea”, by
Ursula K. Le Guin, is from her Hainish Cycle stories*, and is set in a far-distant future
where the ancient Hains, who have “seeded” their race on dozens of worlds in
the past, including Earth, now head a loose confederation of planets called
“the Ekeume”. One important aspect of the story is that people can travel in
spaceships at near-light speeds. But there’s a catch—the whole time-slowing-down-as-you-approach-the-speed-of-light
thingy. So, if you were to undertake to travel the vast distances between
Hainish worlds, you will age weeks or months, as a rule, aboard ship, but
(depending on which planet you leave from and journey to) the duration of your
trip might be tallied in decades or centuries for those you leave behind. Thus,
to travel interstellar space as a diplomat, scientist, historian, or trader
means you will leave your past behind; you’ll leave all those you know and love
behind. And if you were to return, after only a few years at your secondment,
you would find your family gone and your world altered by a significant passage
of time.
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The1983 DynaTec8000
|
But Le Guin uses a plot-sweetener she calls the “ansible”, a device
that enables instantaneous communication across space, which gives the Hains
the ability to hold together their alliance of worlds in a semblance of order. There is
some interstellar trade, but it’s done keeping in mind what you are selling will
have (relativity-speaking) a short life span, and so, your newest brainchild
would have to be relevant and usable in a world that might be decades or even
centuries in the future. Presumably, Le Guin’s “ainsible” communication device sorts
some of this out. Thus, while the Hainish worlds are interconnected, they remain
mostly independent and unique in their character and development.
IN THIS RICHLY TEXTURED coming of age tale,
the main character, Kideo remarks that there are different kinds of knowledge:
the local, that which is found at the community and family level; the
broader, more abstract, historical knowledge (for historians, politicians,
etc.), the scientific, and so on. And the point is that each type is valid
in the world view it understands and expresses, and in its beliefs and
customs, perhaps reflecting the looser, confederate nature of the Hainish
Ekumen itself. In the story, twenty-one-year-old Kideo leaves his home world of
O to study in the new field of “transilience” and the theory of instantaneous
matter transmission (IMT), and the experimental “Churten” technology that makes
it possible. At least in theory. Over the next decade Kideo studies on Hain as
a student of this esoteric science. When he returns home for a long-postponed
visit, travelling on a NAFAL (Nearly As Fast As Light) spacecraft, due to the
time dilation effect of near-light speed travel, an additional eight years
have gone by on O (four years each way from O to Hain and back). Thus, he
arrives on O after being not ten, but eighteen years away. As Kideo
observes, “…the faces and bodies of the people waiting for me at the station in
the hot sunlight were not the same.” (217) His parents have become middle-aged,
his sister married with children and his first love, Isidri, is now older than
he by nearly a decade and married to a religious scholar named Hedran. When
Kiedo leaves O for Hain to continue his research, it is with the knowledge he will never return.
Using the local
“ansible” communication service he tries to transmit his report to his
colleagues back on Hain but can’t get through. Over the years, he would
check news reports from distant Hain but never found any mention of either
himself or the scientific studies he’d worked on. It seems “Churten” technology
and IMT theory remained undiscovered in this new timeline. It was as if the
last twenty years of his life had been erased. As if he had been erased.
His past-future life did not exist anymore and so he chose instead to live his
future-past life. It’s a tad confusing, granted.
One-time, Kiedo
discussed his theory of instantaneous matter transmission with his mother, an academic in her own right:
I nodded. “A mile or a light-year will be
the same. There will be no distance.”
“It can’t be right,” she said after a
while. “To have event without interval…Where is the dancing? Where is the way?
I don’t think you’ll be able to control it, Kideo.” She smiled. “But of course,
you must try.” (220)
In his previous
life on Hain as a scientist, before he’d made the fateful decision to “skip” home to O, his
supervisor had tested the “Churten” device himself, travelling instantaneously
around the Hainish world. It worked, Gvonesh said, but “[t]he rhythm is wrong.” (226)
And the “wrinkle”
or “unbalance” or “wrongness” IMT travellers felt during their experiments, calling it the “Churten
experience”, seems to have been self-correcting. Time’s smooth fabric, "wrinkled" by Kiedo’s experiments, in effect “folded back” on itself and was smooth once
more. But in doing so, it erased much of Kiedo's past. At the same time, however, he'd been given a
gift, for he has been able to travel down two roads in life—the road he (originally)
took and the one he had not. Not many of us can say that.
 |
Ursula K. Le Guin
|
And I’ll
conclude this jabber that’s gone on much longer than I intended with one other thing
I think Le Guin is saying here: namely that both paths Kiedo took, the
path of science and, later, the path of family and community are valid and valuable,
different but equal in their importance, the knowledge gained from both sufficient for each. I should mention that I’ve not discussed
her richly detailed descriptions of family life and kinship customs, and the
peaceful and orderly communal life of Udan, the village where Kiedo was born. In the end, I
think Le Guin favours this local knowledge—call it wisdom—that’s gained from a
life of family and community, over just about anything that science or politics, or what’s
found in history books can offer. I think Kiedo
would agree.
Cheers, Jake.
_______________________________________________________
*The “Hains” are
an ancient humanoid civilization who “seeded” many planets in the distant past
with their genetic stock. They are our ancestral race, who assist their various
progeny though an organization called “The Ekumen”, which is like our United
Nations, or perhaps the EU here on Earth.
And the journey
of two roads in life that Kiedo is so fortunate to have been able to take recalls
a poem by Robert Frost, perhaps his most famous: “The Road Not Taken”:
The Road Not Taken
by Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Le Guin,
Ursula, K. The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. le
Guin. Saga Press. Simon &Schuster, Inc. N.Y., N.Y., 2016.
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