Captain’s Log, Stardate 11312.31

Well, let’s see now. If Star Trek is any kind of guide on how we shall measure time in the distant future, thus  roughly from the next century onward, it appears that a kind of chaos of dates will dominate and every household will have to accumulate, at the beginning of each year, a quite diverse set of calendars. A quite amazing welter of mostly opaque information on Star Trek dating awaits the avid fan. I’m something even less than a rank amateur. Therefore, to mark this last day of 2013, I will stick to the dating convention that began with Star Trek, The Next Generation—a phrase that experts abbreviate as TNG.

The dating in that series was based on a five-digit number and a single-digit decimal. Suppose the stardate was 42437.5. In that case the digits have this meaning:

4          [Twenty]-fourth century

2          Star Trek TNG Season 2

4          { A three-digit number ranging from

3          { 000 to 999, advancing in

7          { uneven intervals through the season.

.

5          Time of day expressed as a decimal fraction. 0.5 is noon, thus half of a day.

The first stardate used in this format was 41153.7 for the first two episodes of TNG. The last was 47988—without a decimal point, therefore suggesting midnight of the release day. The stardate I’ve parsed out above is the date of the sixth episode of Season 2, “The Schizoid Man,” which so happens to feature Darnay’s disease (link).

Needless to say, there is no way to march from a stardate to an actual year except by searching the dialogue in each episode. In some of them actual dates using our own calendar—and presumably still in use then—are mentioned. And for the avid fan, this produces hours, days, even years of useful occupation.

The Powers that Be behind Star Trek’s creation, not least Gene Roddenberry, wished to avoid repeating actual years some 200-plus years in the future. People might then be tempted to speculate if such and such a technology could or could not as yet have been invented.

My own rationalizing attempt in that title is to bow respectfully in the direction of obfuscation. Therefore I use 1 for the [twenty]-first century, two digits for year, two for the month, and two digits beyond the decimal to indicate a day. That’s good enough for dates up to the twenty-ninths century into the future until a new convention must be introduced. And no pesky annotations like Anno Domini or Current Era need clutter up the pristine screen.

Happy New Year!

Depth Beneath

Right now I feel as two-dimensional as our friends out there—in the universe, but barely aware of it. Just trying to survive…on instinct.

By the way—the next time you call me “aristocratic”…

                                         [Two quotes of the Star Trek character, Counselor Deanna Troi]

Counselor Deanna Troi, played on Star Trek by Marina Sirtis, has long been, for me, the best-known paradigm for the culture of emotion. It isn’t the facts that interest her but how the other party feels. Troi is a great symbol. First of all she is a mixture, half Betazoid, half human. Betazoids have extra powers; they are emphats and telepaths. Next she is a counselor, presumably a fully-trained psychiatrist. That profession, needless to say, is Modernity’s equivalent of clergy. Not quite last she is a woman, the gender thought best to represent the somewhat secondary feeling state—secondary because, of course, episodes where feelings are the focus are quite secondary to the more robust Make-it-sos of most of the Star Trek episodes. Not quite last, as I say, because this figure of pop culture points at greater depths beneath. I try to point toward them in the two quotes that I produce up there taken not quite at random from this source.

A while back now I managed to transcend my irritation and disgust with the culture of emotion when the realization suddenly dawned that it’s a symptom of our culture’s decadence—but the turn toward emotion is itself a positive movement, even if it isn’t quite there yet. The culture of emotion at least restores the necessary duality of our nature. We’re all half-Betazoids—and sometimes, especially when things go wrong—we know it, too. The culture elevates emotion from the status that Modernity assigns it—namely glands releasing chemical signals, when sensitized by external events, the flood of hormones, and the actions that they trigger in turn. It asserts that emotion has another dimension—without teasing out what it is and giving it a name. That it is or at least exhibits something beyond the glandular is brought home by giving the emphat telepathic powers—which modern science only marginally credits to exist in the work of its marginal side-kick, parapsychology.

Now, of course, if you were born long enough ago, and therefore you have managed to have your intuitions confirmed by society—namely that you have a soul— then the culture of emotions will appear peculiar and limited. It never seems to point beyond the physical—which is what emotions seem to be. And when it does so point, as Deanna does, in the first quote above, the words uttered are swallowed up in action. TV series don’t give us much time to reflect. But yes. We do sometimes feel two-dimensional, present in a greater world but unawarely. The traditional understanding of reality has more dimensions—and they are arranged hierarchically. Is it then surprising that Deanna Troi is thought to be aristocratic? Not at all. She represents that hierarchy. That she should oppose that classification is also understandable. She is what she is, Deanna Troi, counselor. But please treat her like any ordinary Jane.

The Sun of York

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

On this last day of Winter, the words from Shakespeare Richard III reverberate. But we discover in the first line already, if we read it closely, that the subject here is really discontent, not the season that, just now, buds energetically in a young but still weak sun. Comes the second, punning line. The sun of York was King Edward IV of England. He’s dubbed the sun because he later adopted a blazing sun as his badge. And he was the son of York because he was the son of Richard Plantagenet, third Duke of York. Richard III, briefly king of England himself, was Edward’s youngest brother. Edward’s dates were 1442-1483, a mere 41 years. Despite living in a violent time—much of the violence caused by his own good self (but in a good cause, as always)—he died of natural causes. So much for life expectancy then. And though a king of England, he was born in France. Now to provide the flavor of the fifteenth century, here is Edward’s early resume as brought to us by Wikipedia: “Before becoming King he was 4th Duke of York, 7th Earl of March, 5th Earl of Cambridge, and 9th Earl of Ulster. He was also the 65th Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece.” (Image source is here).

What sort of world was the fifteenth century? Here in the Americas, the big name was Moctezuma. The Aztecs had reached their pinnacle—but the European ships were heading out their way. Just nine years after Edward died, Columbus landed. In the Old World the Ottomans were just beginning their great expansion into an empire. The Hunnish Golden Horde had invaded Siberia a couple of years before Edward was born. Joan of Arc was a big name, but she was burnt alive (at 19) eleven years before Edward was born. In Edward’s time, and under his rule, civil war raged in England, not between the haves and have nots but between the House of York and the House of Lancaster. That was the War of the Roses. Other wars? How about the Thirteen Years War? In that conflict the Teutonic Knights buckled under and Poland seized Prussia. There was the Hundred Years War, the Valois v. Plantagenets (to the latter of whom we are related, in this post, by way of Edward’s dad). The Sikh religion was founded in 1469 with Edward just 27.

Now some footnotes. The Order of the Golden Fleece was a chivalric order founded in 1430 in Burges in Flanders. That word in the quote, lour’d? It comes from Middle English louren. One of its meanings is to lie in wait; another is to look sullen or to frown. And thus the line might be rendered modern by saying “And all the clouds that frowned upon our house.”

Now our distance in time from the Sun of York’s ascension to the throne (1461) is 550 years. And his world looks very, very different from ours—except for the important things, the wars. So I got to thinking. What might it be like 550 years from now, thus in the year 2561. I was hoping that Star Trek would help me. But it happens that the farthest-out episode in that glorious series, in this millennium, anyway, is 2387. Now around our clan we like to sigh, or acerbically remark, that we’ve not yet achieved a Star Trek level of civilization. And, indeed, I rather suspect that we won’t. But what we might achieve is whatever blazing glory Edward IV represented. And with that in mind, the winter of our discontent might ease up just a little—especially since the sun will dawn on Spring tomorrow.

Darnay’s Disease?

Idly watching a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode last night, I was startled into full awakeness by hearing a major episode figure characterized as suffering from Darnay’s disease. Woah! I was sitting straight up. This occurs in Episode 131 no less, “Schizoid Man,” meaningful to a numerologically skewed sort of person like me. The year is 2365, and a certain Dr. Ira Graves—scientist, genius, warrior, cyberneticist—is dying of Darnay’s disease. He has no more than a week to live—but in that week he succeeds in transferring his consciousness to Lieutenant Commander Data, the android, who promptly becomes annoyingly arrogant, paranoid, and a skirt chaser. Wow, I thought. Darnay’s disease. I’ve been suffering from it all my life long, but something in my genetic makeup keeps me from succumbing to its usual prognosis.

Still Repeated in the 23rd Century

In one of the Star Trek films or episodes, one of the characters (Lt. Saavik, I think it was) explains the word sabotage saying that in ancient times people wore wooden shoes, sabots. And when labor disputes arose, they used to throw their sabots into the machinery to stop it—hence the word sabotage. Delightful!

That word, sabot, is a thirteenth century French word, by the way. And, by the way, this etymology of the word sabotage is not accepted by the experts—although they do confirm that the story has legs. Of course it does! Great story—and still told in the twenty-third century…

Evidently the real origins come from careless or clumsy behavior—not least making too much noise when walking, which you would do if you walked about in wooden shoes. The word came from saboter, to bungle, to handle clumsily. It is also found in contexts of playing music badly. Perhaps those who could not afford leather shoes were in a lower class? And lacked refinement? And managed to mess things up?

Like the Star Trek crowd, I for one prefer the vivid picture of angry laborers taking off their clogs and stopping the damned machines in an upsurge of sawdust.