And The Moon Be Still As Bright.

In response to Carrie's previous post:
I think the best solution to this problem of being utterly forgotten in the future is to freeze yourself for a few hundred years so that when you thaw back out you can be like, "Hey, remember when I just jumped out of that time capsule? That was awesome!" Hopefully others will agree but in any case it is doubtful they would have forgotten that you did that by the time you popped that question. Unless the world as we know it had been destroyed by a sudden violent uprising of goldfish. Hmmm, I guess it isn't a foolproof plan after all.

I also want to share a short passage from The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury:

"His name was Benjamin Driscoll, and he was thirty-one years old. And the thing he wanted was Mars grown green and tall with trees and foliage, producing air, more air, growing larger with each season; trees to cool the towns in the boiling summer, trees to hold back the winter winds. There were so many things a tree could do: add color, provide shade, drop fruit, or become a children's playground, a whole sky universe to to climb and hang from; an architecture of food and pleasure, that was a tree. But most of all the trees would distill an icy air for the lungs, and a gentle rustling for the ear when you lay nights in your snowy bed and were gentled to sleep by the sound."

Sound familiar? A hippy tree-hugger who is colonizing Mars!

I'm going to take this moment to reveal something that I feel all the she-man science-fiction haters out there don't seem to understand. Science Fiction is simply a method of looking outside your self by stepping into a world where all your unrelenting prejudices, assumptions, and preconceptions are rendered completely irrelevant and thus melt away like so much of your face near the sun's corona. From this vantage of such facelessness we are able to view with eyes so blinded by impossibility ourselves but now without the things we thought we could see getting in the way of how things are. And now, since the future is really just a fiction for us so far yet our predictions of it firmly rooted in extrapolations of what we seem to have experienced logically in the past that it can be deemed science fiction by nature and thus this post is applicable to this blog. SF isn't about making it with sexy aliens or blowing up insectoid mother ships or traveling into the past, it is about the fact that we want to make it with sexy yous and blow up mothers and win the lottery. I think I got that right, right?

Also, for all those who don't like to check all the time and be disappointed that no new posts have occured there is a nifty little feature at the very bottom of this page where you can "subscribe" to this blog and therefore be notified of updates through "Google Reader". This exciting old technology is called an RSS Feed and is available for many other sites and it's pretty convenient so checks.

History

A Stone Jug

A bulldozer digging a pond
on my mother's family's land
unearths two stoneware jugs
buried four feet in the ground,
one broken and one intact.
Who put them there? When? Why?
We suppose, but can't explain.
Those who have come and gone
are gone. How lost to us
they are whose lives passed here
in the sun's beauty and sorrow!
And who in a hundred years
will know us as we are
in our present living and dying
here under the very sun, lost
to the future as to the past?

-Wendell Berry

The more I discover about The Future (that the world will end in 2012, snakes of zero thickness will continue to eat themselves, there will be no fresh water, holodecks will be the next Lynagh's (or we will go to Lynagh's via holodexing!)), the more I find myself thinking about the past.

What about time travel to the past? No way. I think the first time travelers to the past will be fun-ruiners, spying on everybody with wide eyes and writing things down and taking pictures with their futuristic image-capturers and always suggesting better ways to do things.

So I wrote a poem about the things I've been thinking about for the past few hours here in a coffee shop in Louisville.

Rumors

And who in a hundred years
will know us as we are
in our present living and dying
here under the very sun, lost
to the future as to the past?
(Wendell Berry, "A Stone Jug")

This is what the first man thought
as he pierced the skin of the first roaming animal
and watched her children scatter
as she sank to the earth.

This is what the first woman wondered
as she dropped the seeds of the first fruits
and watched the sprouts bloom
into a tree she wouldn't outlive.

They pondered the assurance of this constant renewal aloud,
quietly, in a language we no longer understand,
a simplicity we have forgotten over time,
as instantly as a twig is stamped, snapped.

This is an assurance growing steadily weaker
as we forget the future, as the land ever changes,
as it is dug and excavated,
developed and exhausted.

This is what we know:
only what has been passed down.
Stories and symbols,
artifacts and imprints.
Still, they are only rumours.