"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.]
Because
America has a more centralized federation than Canada, its education system is
run by a federal department located
in Washington D.C., with its current head Nancy Devos. Devos is a billionaire
Republican whose programmes have come under much criticism since she took office
as Secretary of Education in the Trump administration in 2017. Her policies
emphasize defunding of public schools in favour of charter schools and “vouchers”
so parents can have more ‘choice’ where to send their children to be educated.
As an example, her reorienting of Detroit’s schools following that city’s financial collapse and bankruptcy some years ago
resulted in a fragmented and dysfunctional system that fails to serve the needs
of students and their communities. Detroit is listed near the bottom of the
nation in terms of test-scores and graduation numbers. “Motor City” has had a
long ride down and Devos has done little to slow its slide.
