Our Last Butterfly Takes Off

The late one, the fifth Black Swallowtail we’ve managed to raise this summer, broke from her pupa today—and took off. The time was exactly noon. The glass jar, read “the hospital,” is the same one that travelled with us to Traverse City. The video lasts for one-and-a-half minutes and will not win any prizes, but here it is, for the record.

Cultural Atmospheres

Ages have an atmosphere formed by consensus. On Babylon 5, the SF saga, areas are set aside for aliens so that, in a jocular aside, Commander Sinclair (Michael O’Hare) tells a visitor to watch it: “Stay out of the methane toilets.” Breathing the public air is dangerous for unbelievers, as it were—for heretics to the common faith. But a corollary of this situation is that genuine participation in collective life is actually denied us—unless we share in the consensus. Oh, it’s possible—if difficult to speak through gas masks. One gets used to it. So much so that temporarily visiting another time, as in, say, reading European documents and letters produced eight hundred years ago, one is startled to find oneself in an era where quite another atmosphere prevailed. On Babylon 5 cultures whose members live in “special quarters” do not take much part in the action—although members of the station’s management sometimes visit them, donning masks to do so, when something is going haywire, as always seems to happen.

Sibyl

The Sibyl came into my view again the other day when I was looking into the Tarquins (here). The prophetess known as the Cumaen Sibyl supposedly approached Tarquinius Superbus (that’s Tarquin the Proud) and offered to sell him nine Sibylline Books of prophecy. He didn’t want to pay the outrageous price that she demanded. She then burned three of the books—and renewed her offer. Once more The Proud hesitated. The Sibyl burned three more. At last Tarquin yielded—and bought the remaining three at the original price. It is such tales—and never mind their factual underpinnings—that draw temperaments like mine to the study of our cultural past.

I think the Sibyl first came into my view, curiously enough, while studying English Lit, specifically T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Eliot used a quote from Petronius as the epigraph for that poem, rendered in Latin, but my good fortune had been to study English in an environment where teachers could render Latin—or Greek, for that matter—into English. The epigram contains two Greek pieces too. Here it is:

Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Sibylla ti theleis; respondebat illa: apothanein thelo.

Now the Sibyl at Cumae I’ve seen with my eyes
She pended, she hung there in an ampule of glass.
And when boys who’d there gathered addressed her and asked:
“Sybil, what do you want?” She said “I want to die.”
     Petronius, Satyricon vii

What a weird picture. It left an impression. All early Sibyls as it happens were priestesses of Apollo, and Apollo truly loved the beautiful Sibyl of Cumae so much he offered her near immortality (another recent subject here). She could live as many years as there were particles in a presumably full handful of dust. But the Sibyl forgot to ask Apollo also to preserve her youth. Thus as the seemingly limitless years passed, she grew older, and smaller, and thinner—becoming a tiny shriveled old woman who could pend herself into an ampule, a longish sort of glass. The image stayed with me. The Waste Land (nice introduction to my times, by the way) did not. But cheerful Eliot did leave one quote firmly planted in my memories, if from another poem, also appropriate to this age:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar.

All set for Modernity.

This post, however, while triggered by the associations I’ve just cited, is here to prepare for a future one, scheduled for September 17. That one will be, I promise, much more uplifting. In support of it I thought I’d put some notes here on Sibyls.

The name’s origin is unknown but dated by the Encyclopedia Britannica to the religious period (800-600 BC) predating the Greek classical era. Female prophets arose in that time. An early one must have been called Sibylla, and others took or were assigned the same name. The best-known ancient prophetess was Sibylla of Marpessos, a little place near Troy in what is now Western Turkey. She lived in a period overlapping the sixth and fifth centuries BC, thus at the dawn of the classical age. The EB quotes Heraclitus (535-475 BC) saying of her: “with her maddened mouth … she reaches a thousand years with her voice by the power of the god.”

In the times that followed, Sibyls arose everywhere—and each region claimed its own. The Romans had the Sibyl at Cumae, a place in southern Italy near Naples. Did this tradition die out in the centuries that followed. In a way, yes. After the classical came the Hellenistic (323 to 30 BC), after that the Imperial, and after that the Christian age. Prophecy thins as we advance—but is reborn again in the new religious age that took firm root after Constantine.... To be continued, God willing, in September.

Invocation

When pundits don’t rely on ordinary argument, their stock in trade, and reach out to Science for their authority, my reflexive expectation, before I know anything more, is that the subject will be a clash of values, the focus on evolution or global warming, and that the sciences involved will be of the softer kind—not those that reach their certainties by experimental demonstration. Precisely such appeals to Authority, but coming from the other side, turned me into an atheist in youth just by reflex—until I had had time to do my own homework.

Outside the Box

A feature in the NYT today (“Imagining the Downside of Immortality,” by Stephen Cave) again reminded me: the cosmic models people hold entirely determine how far their thoughts can reach. The hypothesis the author examines? Suppose we conquered death somehow? Would it be a good or a bad thing? He thinks that physical problems (like overpopulation) could be overcome, but that the end result would be a psychological disaster. All human progress, aspiration, effort, and achievement (in his view) is motivated by the fear of death. That fear drives all of our behavior, consciously or unconsciously. He views all religious concepts of immortality as projections—efforts to cope with our fear. And he underlines that all of us, religious or not, seek immortality. The only difference is the modality of that search. It produces civilization, hope. False hope, to be sure. Cave’s underlying hard conviction, of course, appears to be the sophisticated orthodoxy of materialism. To be sure, if all that is worthwhile is just illusion pursued in dread of death, a rather pathetic picture of life is unveiled. But at least it’s grimly realistic. My questioning all of this Cave would no doubt assign to my own naïve dread of disappearance.

Amusing to read such articles in a world where breaking all the rules makes you a visionary and thinking outside the box is highly touted.

The Visionary

The inspiration for this post (to use the wrong word) was Steve Jobs’ resignation from Apple. As oil-rich necessarily accompanies any mention of a sheikdom, so Steve Jobs necessarily invokes the visionary tag. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not attacking Jobs or belittling his accomplishments. It pains me that his health problems have forced this move. The subject is pop-culture and language.

The root of that word, of course, is vision, and Wikipedia’s take on things is that the vision can involve the supernatural. Wiki’s first-mentioned visionary is Hildegard of Bingen—followed then by Mohammed, St. Bernadette, and Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism). In the modern understanding of the word, a vision of the transcendental has been replaced by a vision of the future, a future so compelling that it leads to a transcending of the rules. Thus an op-ed today in the NYT states that Jobs “violated every rule of management.” Hildegard of Bingen did a little bit of that as well—the rules in the twelfth century being that a woman must keep herself out of sight. Interestingly, I note, when Wikipedia turns its attention to technology, the person at Apple it cites as the visionary is Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder, the man who actually designed the first personal computer. It was Wozniak who had the vision—and strove mightily to give it birth. Steve Jobs’ contribution to that revolution lay in negotiating low prices for components and mounting the very successful sales and marketing campaign.

The practical visionary is also well-advised to live in wealthy times. The word’s etymology (from Online Etymology Dictionary) dates to the 1650s, meaning then the ability to see visions. By 1702, however, the word had begun to carry the meaning “one who indulges in impractical fantasies.” I date the Age of Oil (read fossil fuels) to 1748—when coal mining began in the United States. It would take a while before “impractical” visions regarding the material dimension could lead to visionary status.

Another interesting take on this is the use of the word over time, provided by Google’s Ngram viewer. Here is a link to that. The word peaked early in the 1820s, declined thereafter to about the late 1940s (wars and such?), began a little climb late in the 1960s, and then began rising again to prominence in 1980 as computers created the new visionary environment. But should we celebrate the inventor of pop-computing or the pitchman who brought us to the booth?

Added later: Well, all right. Prejudices are showing here, and I might as well come clean. Here are two older posts on the old LaMarotte on this subject, best read in the following order: one, two.

The Lens of Attention

Attention is a magnifier—and a kind of resource. That on which we focus becomes large and hence important. The neglected largely disappears. We’re biologically programmed to notice change and, to conserve resources, to ignore that which just stays the same. But let me single out one word above: important. If attention bestows importance, those who wish to be, important, strive to get attention—and they do so ultimately by hyping threats or pleasures.

This after some days away, almost devoid of media, drawn by company, the new, the strange, the beautiful. Libya, Syria, elections? The moon-rise over Grand Traverse Bay—and a night-sky filled with stars, so rarely visible in detro-metro-land: they had our attention.

When Monique worked in cement and therefore barges struggling up the Mississippi were important, conditions on the river all the way down to distant New Orleans figured very large in our lives. Now working on the publishing plantation, news that McGraw-Hill is about to dump its core business, textbooks, is on a par with tornadoes in the south or floods in Missouri. Attention is the lens. It goes where we live. It magnifies into giants what countless others do not even see.

Libya, Syria, elections? Are you really all that crucially important for us, here, essentially powerless to do anything concrete? They seem to be because to have the power, people need the attention of the masses—and the media, its social dispenser, beats its endless drums to catch our vague attention—by threats or fake triumphs (We’ve won in Libya)—ultimately to sell eyeballs to advertisers who hope and pray that we will buy.

Sweep, Sweep

Sweep, sweep. Sweep, sweep. Now sweep the yard
In steady rhythm, carefully,
Not too easy, not too hard.
The Summer has begun to fall.
Not that our Spring had failed to shed
Its seed on bed and lawn and all.
Sky’s overcast, the wind is cool.
Some wrinkled leaves, branchlets galore
Are underfoot and more dead things,
Obsolete; decay begins its rule.
Sweep, sweep. Sweep, sweep. Now sweep the drive.
Grey caulk around the house is worn.
I note: The plastic dust-bin’s lid is torn.
My broom sweeps sand and thus disturbs a hive
Of very, very tiny ants.

A Day of Butterflies

Four of our five Black Swallowtail butterflies have hatched, migrated outside, eventually into the air, and away... One came last night, three hatched rapidly this morning. Above pictures of them still indoors. The last image is that of an empty husk with but a faintly perceptible slit through which these winged creatures first force themselves into the daylight. One of them, sure enough injured a wing—and gave us some worries for a while.

The migration continued outdoors. The one on the concrete was the first out, last night, and spent his night under a stool in a great down-pour. This morning it was time to dry up. Once dry, they all proceeded to take little trial flights--first to the top of flowers, then to the fenced tomatoe yard, finally into the heights. The last photo shows our last Swallowtail, indeed the one with the injured wing, way up high on a leaf. He rested there for some hours and eventually also flew away.

So does this mean that our butterflies days are over for the year—aside from the last, the fifth, still in chrysalis and a couple more weeks to go? By no means. Around 10 in the morning came a NEW KIND. It stayed for several hours feasting on the blue flowers of our basil plants. Heavy research soon yielded its name. It was a Junonea coenia, better known as a Buckeye—and in the politically insensitive word of nomenclature, sometimes rendered as the Common Buckeye. Not common for us, let me tell you! So long did that Buckeye linger here, we wonder if another campaign may be in the offing. We already know that Buckeye’s caterpillars are very, very black. We shall be inspecting the basil plants daily soon, on the lookout. Herewith some views of this first-time visitor:

We’ve had to use small pictures here to show a good many, hence detail is not immediately visible. But clicking on the images will enlarge them very nicely.

A Tarquin Unmasked

The bathroom door was locked so he banged on it, and called, “Time’s up.”
     “Who is it?” said a voice.
     “Oh, I’m sorry,” said George, retreating a step or two from the locked door in his agitation. “I thought it was Sylvia.”
     “It’s only me,” said Edith. “I’ll be as quick as I can, but the bath’s so slippery I can’t get out. Your water is so soft and I used too much soap. I shan’t be long” and a sound of splashing told George that the guest was keeping her word and he went back to his room feeling himself a Tarquin unmasked.
     [Angela Thirkell, Enter Sir Robert, 1955]

Reading that passage last night—in what was a popular novel intended for a predominantly female audience—reminded me how very much popular culture has evidently changed in the last sixty years or so, here as well as in Britain. Angela Thirkell was a very prolific and popular novelist; more on her is on this blog here; I have a great admiration for her and am slowly reading all of her work. Clearly Thirkell not only expected that phrase, “feeling himself a Tarquin unmasked,” to illuminate and to enlarge this seemingly innocent scene—but also to signal feelings inside George, the lead male in this novel, towards Edith, the lead female, not evident on the surface.

My own recall of Tarquins was thin enough to amount to almost nothing. Something to do with Rome—yes, despite that odd spelling. Etruscan kings? And then, with effort, rose a small flag suggesting that a famous rape had led the Romans to abolish monarchy in favor of republican rule. Thus far my vague response to Angela. Naked Edith in a tub? Thoughts in George of sexual congress. That seemed to fit. But as for masks and such, not even the glimmer of a glimmer.

Here in a nutshell the story. Yes. The first Tarquin (Lucius) was a rich Etruscan immigrant to Rome; later he became a popular king. The second, known as Lucius Superbus, was his son, better remembered as Tarquin the Proud; he gained the throne by the assassination of his father’s popular successor, a Roman. Superbus’ son, one Sextus Tarquinius, raped the wife of a Roman nobleman by name of Lucretia. Here is the story of The Rape of Lucretia as told by Livy—the cause, ultimately, of the end of Roman monarchy.

Now in that story Sextus visits Lucretia while her husband is still away at the war. Lucretia receives the king’s son with due hospitality. But late at night Sextus enters her chambers and gives her a choice: She can make love to him or she can die. If she refuses, he proposes to kill her, kill a male slave, and place them in bed together suggesting that she was entertaining the slave while her husband was at war. She chooses to live and suffers his violation. But later, in public, she reveals his deeds before the king himself and then commits suicide with a dagger. Thus, in a way, she “unmasks” the Tarquin. (The painting shown is Titian’s version.)

But this sort of symbolic unmasking, it seemed to me, is a bit too obscure for the general reader. I went to search out a more vivid representation. A painting, perhaps? In no time at all I discovered what must have been Angela Thirkell’s reference—a play called Le Viol de Lucrèce by André Obey. In this play masked narrators, one for the Tarquin, one for Lucrece, voice the inner thoughts of the actual Tarquin and the actual Lucrece during that crucial scene. And at the most dramatic moment in the play, the narrator-Lucrece takes off her mask and addresses the audience to plead for the character. In a book titled Masks in Modern Drama, the author, Susan Valeria Harris Smith comments as follows (p. 75):

The brief unmasking humanizes and personalizes the action, catching the complacent and removed audience off guard. The departure from the stylistic ritual mode allows Obey to use the mask diversely without violating the mythological context he carefully creates in the first three acts.

The play, written in 1931, was very meaningful in France in that, as Smith points out, the Tarquins’ violation of Rome represented to the French the later German violation of France. The play was turned into an opera in 1946—and the play was undoubtedly produced again in connection with that event; indeed, I found a recent performance of it in 2006 in France. Obey himself became head of the Comédie-Française (1945-1947). In Thirkell’s time, therefore (most likely) that mask-scene had some standing in popular recall, and Thirkell’s use of the phrase consequently produced the intended poetic echoes in this humble scene in her novel. In my case it lead straight to the Internet so that I could unmask the Tarquin for myself.

The First Black Swallowtail

As reported before we left, and again this morning, we’ve had the Black Swallowtail pupae with us in Traverse City in a little fishtank. We arrived home late last night, and as already documented, Brigitte released the pupae again and installed them high above some old parsley plants still riding their chosen sticks.

Then, for good measure, Brigitte affixed a huge (from their perspective) plastic butterfly to the window by means of a suction cup. She’d bought the object in Suttons Bay, just north of where we’d stayed. Brigitte thought this “graven image” might “encourage” her charges. Here is Brigitte “archetype”:

Tonight, to our astonishment, the first Black Swallowtail, by coloration a little boy, sliced itself a very narrow opening in its pupa and came out. Brigitte came screaming to get me, and here is a good picture of the new arrival as seen from the side, wings closed, in other words. Meanwhile we’d moved the tray to a more central place in the sunroom. Here he is:

An hour or two later our friend took flight—but only temporarily. At first he crashed against a wall in an unhappy attempt to plunge himself into a lamp. He crawled up the leg of a stool. Brigitte put the stool on the table and took this photo of our friend. Notice that his wings are now half-open.

There the new-born sat for a while, calming down. But the light was still drawing him ever on, ever on. Taking wing again, he landed (happily for the photographer) on the rim of the lampshade and, exhausted from this effort, rested with wings completely opene:

And that was also—probably—the last we shall see of Aristo One of 2011. He took wing again, fell once more, and once more climbed up the leg of the stool. We then decided that we’d set him free—and took the stool out into the night. Good-bye, young one. You’re back in your element again. A happy, happy flight to you in your brief but splendid, fascinating life...

And the two of us came in again, bent over from all of the tensions of the night...

Unpacked

Our butterfly pupae made the trip to Traverse City in their fishtank home (see a few posts back), spent their time in mysterious and continuous meditation, and are now back again—unpacked! Much the same thing happened with Aristo/a last year, although the destination was Canada. We'll keep the doors to the sunroom shut at night and anticipate, one morning soon, to see one or more butterflies trying to get throught the windows into the sunshine.

Le Grand Traverse

Every year a rugby tournament takes us to Traverse City, MI and then in turn to the Sleeping Bear Dunes. But our bonding with this region began soon after we moved to Michigan in 1989 and our very first excursion to see the state took us to this region. On the left of the embedded map you see the Leelanau Peninsula. It is one arm embracing the Grand Traverse Bay. French explorers first called the distance between the peninsula and the landmass to the east “the long crossing.” The region was originally named after Omeena, a legendary Indian maiden, but Grand Traverse took over later and, of course, gave its name to Traverse City.

[Map Courtesy of BING. Have replaced embedded map because it sometimes fails to work.]

We often hear the words, “Words fail me,” but on this trip “Pictures failed me.” I had two cameras but somehow nothing much came out of them. Hence I bring you here the best of the lot. They show images from the Grand Traverse Lighthouse, located at the tip of Leelanau Peninsula.

Here is a view to the north-north-east.

Here the rock-strewn coast-line.

Last year I showed one picture under the heading “If I had to pick one.” Here is its equivalent for 2011 showing Brigitte, all in white, adjusting her sweater against the cold wind.

And here, finally, a more distant view of that same bench with our party, John and Monique Magee flanking Brigitte, me behind the camera, and the 1858 lighthouse visible in part behind them. The actually lighthouse is to my right but is nothing much to see.

Mind you, this was a great trip full of adventures and delights: a midnight moonrise, a thrilling Old Boy’s rugby game (it ended in a tie), sailing on the Schooner Manitou, excursions, tours, and laughing a lot about a merchant who obsessed about fake C-bills. Not least we crowned our tour by visiting Sleeping Bear Dunes. As luck would have it, the audience of Good Morning America voted the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore the “Most Beautiful Place in America” the very weekend we were there. Oh, yes! We knew that already. Too bad my pictures failed me. The map shows you two islands west of that lakeshore, North and South Manitou. They are the two sleeping bears, little and big.

Okay. You thought I was just faking it—as with that C-bill. Not so! We really were on that boat! And here is a picture to prove it:

Yes, that is John on the left. And if you don’t believe me, you will clearly see the words Detroit Rugby on his sweatshirt!

Dalrymple on the Riots

A few days ago I mentioned Theodore Dalrymple in the context of the London riots and wondered what he would have to say about it on one of his venues, City Journal. Well, here are two answers: August 10 and and August 15.

Packed, Ready to Go

The image you see here is the mobile home of our five future Black Swallowtail butterflies. Yes. This is another post in that series. Last year Aristo was in her pupa stage when necessity compelled us to take a brief Canadian trip. (And yes. Aristo was a she. Brigitte’s found a site where boys and girls of this variety are separately shown, and now we know we should have named last year’s creature Arista.) This year we have five we cannot simply leave to their own fate. Four of them are in the chrysalis stage, one about to enter it. So last night Brigitte prepared a temporary habitation for them during our more or less annual trip to Traverse City, Michigan. It begins today. Three of the creatures are visible. That sign at the bottom was intended for me. As I went to bed last night, Brigitte said she had an idea of how we should house them. “I’ll tell you tomorrow,” she said. Well, the answer was waiting on the stove this morning.

Still Struggling to Learn Newspeak

I learned today that Nigeria is another state that I must begin to dread. The New York Times headlines “Islamist Threat in Nigeria Grows With Qaeda Help” (no less). I also learn that “Bashing E.P.A. Is New Theme in G.O.P. Race.” Ah. A former Shining Knight turns Darth Vader? That one starts getting personal—in that I labored some years at that agency. To be sure, that then (and still) tiny lop-off from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (those days) wasn’t exactly the darling of the Nixon administration either.

Reminds me of lessons I learned quite early in life in books titled Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), the first George Orwell’s generic and the other his specific description of his times. I’d read these books in the 1950s, a time when individual authors could still be heard. The noise was still quite low. In 1984 I learned that that there must always be an enemy, that the enemy can change overnight, and we must immediately shift attention, when Big Brother nods, and hate the one we loved the day before. Having made peace with Communism, the shift came to hate Islamism—which new hate is still unfolding nicely. But hating the EPA, the new internal enemy, why that one will be a bit of a wrench for me, a lesson in learning self-loathing. The effort is daunting. I think I’ll start after the brief vacation on which we start today ends again next week.

Pierre de Fermat: Happy 410th

French mathematician Pierre de Fermat was born August 17, 1601. Google dedicates its search logo to the event today, the reason why I know. As in the case of all the great mathematicians, I greatly admire Fermat without grasping anything he tackled—much less why he’d bother. But I’ve looked into his life—as also the lives of several others over the years—because they are in some ways kin. I’ve spent my life pondering great puzzles, but in my case none is solvable whereas, in theirs, many were, if not by ordinary humans.

Fermat is most famed for his Last Theorem. The theorem is that there are no whole number (integer) solutions for this equation:

xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ if n is greater than two

…which is what Google’s logo reproduces. Fermat jotted into the margins of Dophantus’ Arithmetica the following famous phrase. “I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain.”

The issue goes back to Pythagoras’ theorem, namely: “In a right-angled triangle the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides,” which makes:

x² + y² = z²

Finding numbers that satisfy this relationship became a preoccupation in mathematics; there are endlessly many, among them 3, 4, and 5. What Fermat claimed was that no such triplets were possible if the power is greater than two.

Fermat wrote his intriguing teaser in 1637. He never published his “marvelous proof.” It took 358 years before Andrew John Wiles, a British mathematician, published a proof in 1995. The story of that proof is told in Fermat’s Enigma, by Simon Singh, Walker and Company, New York, 1997. I got my copy from Brigitte as a birthday gift, my 62nd, in 1998. It’s a truly fascinating but, in the end, a not very satisfactory story. Wiles’ proof takes more than 100 pages to present and makes use of the most modern techniques of numbers theory—which, believe me, are not at all accessible to mere mortals. The margin of Arithmetica was not enough for Fermat, but two or three pages of parchment presumably would have been…

Committing Futurism

In the 1950s (I’m talking about a narrow slice of fantasy and science fiction) our genuine futurists projected two kinds, one aggressively primitive, the other aggressively progressive. The first envisioned worlds where Conans the Barbarian dwelt, the other a world were all of us commuted in fancy little flying machines and the post-war bureaucracy of the 1950s had morphed into an oppressive ant-heap challenging real heroes to revolt.

My own instincts were in the primitive direction. The scientific stuff essentially bored me. Jules Verne had already done that in the nineteenth—projecting technology. And technology, per se, does not a story make. Conan had seen the light of publication in 1931, a bit later. But that projection, rooted in human behavior, promised more fruit. SF, strictly speaking, was not imaginative enough. I never encountered a story in the 1950s, for example, projecting a future in which young people—and the not so young—would expend their free moments staring into tiny mirror-like objects, all alone, isolated by togetherness, as it were, indeed even when with others, even in crowds. Naw. Instead of that writers improved big outer things (transport, city scapes) and dangerous things like weapons.

But there is a reason for all this. It is extraordinarily difficult to imagine radical shifts in the river of existence that carries us in time. The motion is forward. In the 1950s the technologically New was still spreading. Air travel was taking off. Plastics. I still remembered a family transition where horse-drawn carriages moved our furniture. I still remember heating with wood. Experiences of progressive change had a grip on writers of hard SF. The other side, informed by intuition, had more history to look back upon—in which cycles displaced each other, and after the glories of Greece and Rome, Conans did, again, ride their steeds through overgrown countryside. And looking at the social, rather than the physical landscape, the early signs of trouble were already there. Even the primordial science-science fiction writer (after Jules Verne, of course), Isaac Asimov, saw this himself—when he shifted his view to society—through the eyes of his character, Hari Seldon. Seldon, the psychohistorian, foresaw the Decline and Fall of the Galactic Empire too (Foundation).

All this by way of saying that it is extremely difficult for us to imagine, staring at a five-inch flicker of a feed, how the world is likely to change when the oil finally runs dry. I pondered some of the basic on a humid August walk and offer some here for would-be SF writers. But before I do, what about the timing of that drastic change? Maybe not in fifty years, but certainly in seventy or eighty. And writing stories about the 2180s, 2190s would be science fiction. The alternative, fusion energy, certainly still is fiction, and if it ever comes to be, it won’t be a solution; if you don’t mind some technical detail, here are the reasons as I summarized them a while back. Now some notes.

It is said that the world is getting smaller. When oil runs out it will magically become enormously large again. Distances, as measured in time and cost, will become very much greater. Transatlantic travel, except for the super-rich, will be long, tedious, and done under sail again.

A correlate of that is that large institutions (private, public, government) will become small. Centralized powers will lose power, decentralization will be the new New. Anticipate initially de facto, later de jure break-up of the United States. Regions will assert themselves defensively—say California its agriculture, the Great Lakes region its water—to protect themselves from redistribution, by a higher level, of their core wealth to others.

Naturally fertile, naturally moistened land will become the greatest single object of value—and society will arrange itself to hold and guard it. Various forms once known, now considered forever gone, will come back: centrally ruled river systems, forms of feudalism.

Careers like mine—functionally centered on working with symbols—will be very rare, poorly compensated, and possibly, as in the Middle Ages, celibate. Symbol manipulation will have lost most of its economic value; it has it now because we’re operating at a great distance from physical reality—and able to do so by symbolical commands.

Most people will once more work with their hands because an absolute die-off of machines is in the offing—unless they’re smart enough (the machines, I mean) to run on water or the energy of wind.

When my grandchildren are raising their children, it will be well for them to insist that their offspring acquire high skill in crafts along the lines of carpentry, iron work, leather tanning, weaving, and the like. Want to be in advertising? Learn to paint or carve attractive signs. We must remember that in those times things as simple as nails will be hard to get, and skills to build things without them will be prized. No oil, disappearing coal—where’s the fuel to smelt ore or melt down the corpses of machines?

Rare the panel on C-Span that discusses such eventualities seriously. When we occasionally see one, the participants talk about planning for that future, arranging things, changing current institutions. No way, José. In the run-up to that future, conflicts will mushroom. Indeed we may be in that time already, unknowingly. In the turmoil of those times such words as planning and societal change will no longer carry any meaning.

But, living as we do in the Age of Flickr, I’ve written too much. Virtually no one will read this far down, so I ought to bring this to a close.

Eat Fruit

Brigitte has always excelled in getting us to eat healthy food. Once it was greens hidden within pancakes and omelets, now it is fruit using pudding (sugar free, fat free, and all the rest) as the temptation. Today’s artful decorations are home-soaked rum raisins, bananas, apples, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and peaches (the last home-grown at Monique’s). Mint crowns the mandala.

A Small Down-Spiral Slide?

A story this morning (New York Times, “Starved Budgets Inspire New Look at Web Gambling”) suggested a slide down the spiral of social senescence ahead. That story also illuminates the oft-repeated problem of unanticipated consequences. One consequence of faith-based tax-cutting (as one might label it) is budget collapse. But while the right hand wants tax cuts, the population shakes its left fist when states or cities curtail or stop services. In consequence “novel” or “innovative” ways of raising revenues appear as pressures build. Gambling and fees are contenders. The first is regressive—because the poor gamble more. The second is arbitrary; it taps sub-groups of the population using some facility or consuming some category of services or products in order to fund the whole.

I liked what one of our Detroit mayors said when trying to defeat a casino measure a few years back. He suggested that we should legalize prostitution too. It might turn out to be even more popular than gambling, he said. And not least with convention visitors, I might add. The mayor eventually caved, alas, but he’d made a good point.

Give us this day our daily bread…and deliver us from “innovation.”