OUR METHODS DEMAND BASICS

U of Chicago Div School

“What’s your method?” was always the first question at U of C Div School.  The idea was to establish a stream of precedents that were already known, so as to impose limits and a sort of spine, a line of thought.  In the best of worlds, that strategy would yield an essay that was coherent and intelligible.  Of course, if you chose a method no one liked or understood, you were doomed.

This morning on Aeon.com I ran into a new question:  “Then what?”  In Div School terms, this is teleology.  It depends on what your goal might be.  

https://aeon.co/essays/could-we-reboot-a-modern-civilisation-without-fossil-fuels?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=feca0f6557-Daily_newsletter_weekend_edition_16th_January_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-feca0f6557-68600437  

Lewis Dartnell

What happens after the accepted methods of our civilization — like exploiting fossil fuel and centering everything on profit — are exhausted, no longer apply?  What methods will save us?  When one is on territory unknown (terra incognita) the question becomes even sharper but the methods benefit from being fuzzy, wandering, and mixed.  This Aeon piece was derived from a blog based on “The Knowledge”, a book or series of books or nested blogs that seem to have their source in a man named Lewis Dartnell.  He’s handsome, young, and smart enough to star in a BBC series and my only question is “why isn’t he?”  The title, of course, is from the knowledge of London streets a taxi driver must have to pass a certifying test; it’s a “where are we going” question.

But here’s where I’m really hooked.  It’s a subject I met in seminary: the wilderness in the city.  Most of my classmates thought of it in terms of people: savage mental pygmies, I guess.  But like many others I’ve always been easily seduced by what some call “ruin porn.”  That is, abandoned industries and housing that are being reclaimed by the “natural” world.  http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/ruin-photography/  This link should take you to examples of how transient anthro-construction can be.  We’re used to seeing Aztec pyramids and Asian mega-statues overwhelmed by jungle, but now we’ve added catastrophic evacuations (Chernobyl) and resource-exhausted communities (abandoned mining towns in the West).  It's not hard to imagine the U of C quads as ruins.

In fact, strictly speaking, my own buildings qualify, since two of them were temporary knock-ups used during the rebuild of Swift Dam, one a shop and the other the caretaker’s shack.  Nature and time are dismantling them, as well as this modest house built in the Thirties with an add-on bathroom and garage.  But my earliest and most vivid images are from the trail in Macleay Park in Portland where my family went to hike in the Forties and Fifties.  It was a WPA project with a lot of stonework, including a little bathroom which became a sin center and then was burned and buried, though the stone walls and arched entrances remain.  Our teenaged babysitter hanged himself nearby, in an earlier wave of alienation among young men.  Our movie horizons are full of post-apocalypse landscapes. 

Macleay Park

A periodical related to this complex, called “Ernest Journal” ,(http://www.ernestjournal.co.uk) guides this line of thought with optimism:  how would we rebuild?  Actual practical information.  How to make glass.  How to make breakfast.  How to survive an asteroid strike.  I have a friend who’s a bit of a survivalist — he just survived major cancer surgery and is restored to his health of years earlier — which means being a bit of a pack rat.  The secret here is knowing which rat to pack, and that means a grasp on basic technologies like electricity wiring, water piping, and gardening.  

Here in Montana where the grid is thin and weather gets cold (it’s generally already very windy at any temperature) one learns quite a bit about dust physics, insulation, smoke management, cooking over fires (the coals, not the flames) and other dynamics.  The traces of earlier civilizations — drag marks of travois, bits of metal or glass beads on the hill tops where bodies were left for the sun to take back, pictographs on stone — are either durable or gone.  They are not likely to be smothered by vines but the boulders are embroidered by vivid lichens, plant extremophiles.

In England which is wet and sitting on what once seemed an inexhaustible mountain of coal, the industrial revolution got a good headstart on a lot of forces that have ended now: colonies, factories, railroads. ships — all of which led to a demographic shift, an influx of people not accustomed to industrial life, a demographic apocalypse that will be the irresistible force that changes immovable Britain.

As it happens, I know quite a lot about molten metal and even a bit about ceramic kilns   In Oregon there were always glass-casters nearby.  They liked to build their studios near the beach for the sake of the cool breezes, the same as we used to prefer casting bronze in the winter, during weather just like this: snow on the ground and zero temps.  With the big fans going, the furnace and the protective gear were bearable.  Technology at this primitive level does not depend upon instruments, except maybe a pyrometer until you learn to tell temp by the color of the molten metal.  It’s a matter of human senses and internalized knowledge that comes from experience.  Less dramatic is woodwork or pouring concrete, or maybe animal husbandry which adds the dimensions of empathy and persuasion.  These are “methods.”

Sci-fi loves this sort of thing, and so do the paleoarcheologists who try to imagine the steps between the last hominid and the first modern human.  Of course, there is no “step”, no “break”, but a series of small developments that folded back on each other, became culturally contagious, used the environment instead of just surviving it.  Some of those uses were glass, stone and metal.  These survive even humans and the pre-ag aeons are named for them.  (Aren’t we the Glass Age, if you count silicon and sky scrapers?  I’ve never forgotten photos of an experimental house built only from scavenged car windshields.)  And now we turn to gravity energy in the tides, solar energy on the roof, volcanic energy in Iceland, and microbial energy in our sewage lagoon.  Clearly, energy is where you find it.

The biological energy we have not mastered — maybe I should say supported — is human beings.  What a waste for people to be drowning in the Mediterranean, starving in Syria, dying of exposure in the streets of American metropolises.  Why can’t we figure out how to address this gradual apocalypse?  This erosion of life?  What if our goal was not to restore the world as we know it, but to find a new way to be in the world.  This is not the first time the question has been asked. It’s teleological. 

Darnell embracing a Martian friend

Here’s Dartnell speaking:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbbvf-GkJcA

"GENOCIDE" by Tim Barrus: A Review

This is a set of reviews of eleven short stories anthologized in “GENOCIDE” by Tim Barrus, published in 1988 by Knight's Press.

Ten of the stories are accompanied by a poem, which will be considered as a group at the end of this series. These stories are written in the context of radical gay men (as contrasted with conventional gay men) during the Eighties, when the expansion and experimental edge of the culture was still persisting, but in the face of the terrible plague of HIV virus.  The language and descriptions are on the edge for the mainstream, but not for the community of the author.

Do not expect to find out what is true and what is not.  When a writer is working, the two are both raw material for the story.  That’s the way it works.  If you don’t like it, don’t read fiction.  Maybe you shouldn’t read nonfiction either.  Maybe you shouldn’t read at all, since reality is always filtered and composed.

When these stories were published by Knights Press, leatherfolk were still mostly underground.  You could not yet get the directions for extreme sex on YouTube.  One literal arson holocaust was at the gay Upstairs Lounge in New Orleans in 1973.  32 people died. 

“The Dependency of Variables”

Two cosmonauts are sent into space in an “intelligent” spaceship.  The ship, like the predecessors “Hal” or “Mother,” will define concepts if asked.  “Genocide comes from the ancient Greek word: genos, meaning race or kind and refers to the systematic extermination of a people.  The Romans bastardized the word and turned it for their own cultural purposes (they were very good at committing genocide) into: genius.  A genius was a powerful guardian spirit assigned to a person at birth.  Genocide connotes destruction while genius connotes an influence over destiny.  End of definition.”  

The ship, named Tsan, who appears to also be male, becomes jealous of the two humans, who are lovers, and freeze-locks one of the crew behind thick glass.  The other broods masturbating in the crystal nose-cone where the ship can’t “see” him until he can’t stand it anymore and breaks open the glass on the freeze-locker.  

The ship is very upset, so the two men allow him to come into the bow to deep-empathize while they make love.  Before that, the ship defines love as “Damage.  Pain. To give.  All is program.  End of definition.”  

After the experience the ship defines love as “Lacking limits or bounds.  Extending beyond measure or comprehension.  Endless power.  Greater than finite.  Burn.  Faster than Tsan. Madness.”

It’s an effective compact plot with an excellent philosophical point to make (jealousy comes from not understanding) but what makes the story remarkable is the language, a mix of terminology from math, science, and intensely romantic poetry.  “This part of the virus universe was dense with the light from stars; it was fluid-like and white.”

“Chinatown Chinatown”

If you take Auschwitz and a leper colony, mix them with Vegas and any small town traveling carnival (carne = meat), then think about Guantanamo, Japanese internment, and all the other attempts to confine and destroy some category of people, you’ll have the premise of this story.  It plays out in terms of two boys (Star and Adonais) who are “body scrapers” whose job is to pull body parts out of the slush sump under the thriller rides.

Scraping was best at graytime.  Most INCAMP, most Newkoomer, slept during graytime, that silent betweenspace which breathes with quiet unquestioning lust in the place where the night is not the day and the day is not the day.  Graytime in the desert literally seethes with graytime shadow when the heat is not the heat and the bite-me cold slowly heroin warms itself into the stark reality of morning.”   Think “dissociation,” when one’s mind goes some other desolate place in order to escape the unbearable.  Think the Plains Indian Sand Hills.

Goya, the dwarf and wiseman, is there to give advice.  He tells about Isaiah (who is an even more resourceful computerist and wizard).  This is an apocalyptic story so they find Isaiah, and that’s the end of the story.  (Both Isaiah and Adonais are ancient names for the Jesus figure.  Star is the name of a Blackfeet equivalent hero.)

This vision of the deadly carnival -- or something very like it -- was brought to life in the movie “A.I.”  (Artificial Intelligence.) by Spielberg with Jude Law as a sort of “goat-footed balloon-man” leading us along. A few days ago a young man got his head knocked off on the Batman roller coaster.  This story is not as extreme as it might seem.  In fact, that’s the point.

“Trespass”

Angel Island is more remote than Alcatraz and the location of a detention center for immigrants, often from China and therefore “other”.  They were detained unreasonably for long periods of time, even years, under harsh prison conditions.  The author takes his lover on a tour there.  They dawdle and are locked in.  This is a real life experience that is buttressed with library research, universalization through the knowledge that this cruelty and suspicion is still repeated around the planet.

“Today the deserted streets of Angel Island seem ethereal.  Echo echo.  Many of the long dormitory structures have been fenced off.  Trespassing is forbidden.  This place is somehow windswept moon-sweet silent soundless like the desert.”

He summons up the figure of an old man once confined there, Yu of Taishan.  When leaving, he looks back, “the forms and shadows saddened me; upon seeing the landscape I composed a poem.”  The prisoners had scratched such poems on the walls of their confinement.

“Pull”

This unrestrained Henry-Miller-style ecstasy of sex and terror works both as an account of the Weimar Republic just before the holocaust and as a portrait of the unrestrained gay obsession with wealth and privilege just before the HIV plague triggered rumors of quarantine camps like leper colonies.

“Haunted the deathsoaked spirit of autumn in a place where mist pulled at your eyes, your conscience, and pulled at autumn as if autumn could be budged.  The seaside gloom, the mist of France, could not be permeated.  Not even by an over accumulation of rumor.”

“Midnight’s Knock on the Madness Door”

The simple version is that a Chilean young man needing help because of politics knocks on the door of two lovers.  All are paranoid because they are “outliers,” “Others” -- stigmatized.  It is dangerous but the two lovers willingly expand to a triangle.  Then the refugee becomes very ill, which means getting him into a clinic.  But they manage it.  What they must do is terrifying, but it is balanced by the ecstasy of sex mixed with love, graphically and poetically described.

“Sometimes it is a fulltime job keeping the madness on the other side of the door; sometimes it is impossible and the madness comes in and takes a seat, has a cocktail, sometimes two.”

At present homosexual acts are punishable by death in some African countries.  Technically, homosexuals were forbidden in Sochi during the recent Olympics.  In those places, no one wants to hear a knock on the door. But being gay is not the only way to be marked for death.

“Warrior”

Yes, this is Native American warriors, two of them, lovers, and armed with modern firearms.  They are resisting genocide in a time of dystopia.  “Their morality was the morality of survival.”  This time there is a ten-year age difference between the lovers, which seems to play out in a man/woman (top/bottom) sort of way.  Both hunt (with bows and arrows) but Tewa, the softer one, cooks.  Pawnee restricts Tewa as a way of protecting him.  They are doing well enough that they become the nucleus of a tribe, but they end up digging a lot of graves.

“Sometimes it seemed as if a powerful light emanated -- blazed -- from every grave they dug.”

“Demonic Baptism”

The premise of the story is that two lover/brothers are in a post-apocalyptic time when the world is radioactive and lack of water has reduced the land to sand.  “The only extremes left to it were the extravagant temperatures of natural extremes.”  Human babies, if they lived long enough to be born, were “twisted and twisting in grotesque and strangulated forms of pain.”  

The boys live by killing sand wolves made man-eaters by consuming the debris from burning virus camps, burnt to sterilize and eliminate.  Stumbling, sharing body fluids, they barely make it to an oasis and find there a man named Zealot, another of those Hebrew/Greek blind visioneers.  He asks them to make love so he can witness and experience their desire second-hand.  Then he dies, content, and they bury him.  It is a Dionysian defiance of death before the planet dies. 

A figure called Athanasia (A-thanatos, NOT death) appears.  “Above their canyon, Athanasia with her carnivorous skywinds sang and laughed and danced and bitched with her inevitable treachery.”  The story ends:  “It had once been a great planet of war and slavery.  It had once been a great planet of demonic fools.  Genocide.  It was now a great silent baptised planet of eternal sand.  Lullabye lullabye.”

“A Farewell to Love”

A successful writer is old enough to be gray (48).  He’s living in New York City in a winter like this one and he’s got writer’s block.  In the time of the book, one had to have papers about HIV in order to travel between countries, but his are in order.  He goes to Mazatlan, which is very rural, at least at this time.  Naturally, he falls in love with an innocent beautiful Mexican boy whose toothlessly grinning mother sends him over.  The time comes for him to return to Manhattan, but at the last minute he decides not to go, which means -- probably -- he will never be able to go back.  It’s an erotically baroque fantasy fit for Zorba the Greek.  The title is ironic.

“The first time is always an explosion of awareness that is better than any fantasy could hope to be.  Better even than death’s malicious promise of an orgasm.  Worth the risk.”

“Renegade”

Leatherfolk iconography includes a motorcycle, black leathers, ordeal flights across the country, revisiting old haunts, including all races but only one gender, being always a fugitive from capture, and experiencing service in Vietnam where all the rules were broken.  In this story a white man with a black lover must flee to a Native American former lover.  He hides with Jimmy Dog until the Indian man takes the motorcycle to go into town, where he is captured, never to return.  All three are united by being faggots.

The lonely sound of trains on the prairie is conflated with the box cars that once transported Jews to crematoria.  “It was after three, somewhere off the road.  Somewhere quiet and inviolate.  Somewhere where the owls stood watch.  The Harley cooled with an almost evil seethe.  Sean could hear the soft, enigmatic sound of a train in the raving distance.  The whistle of the train.  The far-off approaching rhythmic horror of the train.  The trains were always full of faggots.”  The men who escape do not weep.  They stand drenched in rain, “renegade soaked in the pouring rain.”

“Rainfuck”

Rain is the theme and symbol of this story.  It could easily be a Sam Neill film.  A repressed priest (that’s Sam) and a wanton young male lover (Jude Law?) who is the indulged son of a French Marquis are coincidentally and for different reasons banished to a small Polynesian island.  The priest tries to get control of the Marquis’ son -- and himself -- but instead is thrown into madness.

Joseph Joseph is the native lover of Justin Bovee, the son of the marquis.  “His culture had many stories about gods (and such) who had made love in rain.  It was supposed to be somewhat magical.  The two of them often went to the grassy spot when it poured.  As the water fell, and the forest around them steamed with aquatic humidity, Joseph Joseph showed Justin Bovee other things that he had not yet learned.”

“The Forest and the Echo”

Star and Adonais return in another story.  This time they have escaped INCAMP, which is described in the most horrible of terms.  The desert they must cross is an ordeal that nearly kills them.  Just in time they are rescued by the quiet ones and agree to be enslaved by Coriaceous (Leather) Pawnee, who is the head of the tribe.  Lawrence of Arabia has found the Tauregs.

“It was now safe for the brothers to look into the fired redness of the witchy indigo sun.  It was the wonder of wonders; Star and Adonais could read into themselves to look at themselves in sweet rich starless midnightblue fuckingboy awe.  Lullabye lullabye.   Heroin razzle heroin dazzle.”

SCI-FI TAKES ON SCAPEGOATING

A friend gave me a copy of Ursula LeGuin’s “The Unreal and the Real,” selected stories, Volume Two, “Outer Space, Inner Lands.”  So far I’ve read (actually reread, since I read them when they first appeared)  three stories.  The first is “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.”  It’s an excellent example -- in fact, quite a well-known one -- of philosophical sci-fi in which a theoretical concept is made vivid by making it “real.”  The idea of this tale is something like Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”  That is, social scapegoating.  Punishing or depriving a minority for the sake of a majority.

In this version the little town of Omelas is happy, pretty, healthy, prosperous and all the other things that little towns try to be.  But this is only because confined to a dungeon is a miserable little being who suffers on behalf of everyone else.  The story was written twice, once in 1976 and then revised in 2001.  The revision adds the “ones who walk away,” adolescents who -- with the awakening of their moral consciousness and realizing that a child is suffering -- simply walk away from the guaranteed happy town and never return because they cannot accept the arrangement.  I feel confident that LeGuin rewrote this story in response to protests from her readers, many of them probably adolescents.

The second one is “Semley’s Necklace” which a paraphrase meditation on the kind of empire established in the great sea-going time when the European countries, desperately greedy for riches, sent wind ships out across the oceans -- some of them never to return and some of them to return years later after their families had died, their sponsors had been deposed, and everything had changed.  All they had was gold and silver.   It’s a template as old as Odysseus. 

The third one is the most subtle, “Nine Lives.”  At first it seems to be about a couple of those explorer anthropologists who went out to strange places in the 19th century, except that the classes that so obsess the English are now separated into biological species.  One man is black and the other is an English type, as LeGuin puts it, products of cultural fairness which yields different results than simple evolution: sort of eccentric.  Two of these equivalents to the Hudson’s Bay factors of the fur trade have been lonely fellow workers for a long time and are getting replacements.   The new people, ten of them (five male, five female), are counted as one because they are clones.  Except for the gender differences and slight variation in their training, they are identical and as splendid as the person Hitler wanted to be -- tall, blonde, beautiful, athletic.  The story slides the reader into realizing that they are not content -- they are bored silly with each other because of their sameness.  But the odd couple, who are so individually unique that they “spent seven hours out of ten misunderstanding each other,” in fact loved each other for their differentness, their “otherness.”  And the clones came to love them, too.

So I think I’ll write an Ursula LeGuin story with a social lesson something like these.  This one will be about a creature I’ll call the “Empathizer.”  

She was a grayish, rather shadowy person who had the ability to slip inside people and feel whatever they were feeling.  We’re always so curious about each other, but she could actually act on her curiosity and “be” them for a while.  It was quite interesting but she learned to choose her “host” rather carefully.  In fact, this could be considered a horror story -- from several points of view.  But then, many sci-fi stories are ways to talk about horrifying things and even make them humorous.

One day she saw an old woman on a porch swing reading with her cat beside her.  Obviously an intriguing identity to visit, so she slipped inside her mind and body, only to find that the woman was in chronic pain.  But the Empathizer was curious about pain, so she stayed.  In a while the old woman went into the house, took a handful of pills, had a simple supper, and took a nap.   The woman went back out to the porch with the cat, but by then it was too dark to read.   Shadows gathered in the woods near the yard and one by one they came to visit the woman, speaking quietly with her.

They were pariahs, all young.  They were feral, not very mannerly and often snarling with rage.  They demanded, they wept, they stormed, and sometimes the woman held them.  In the end she would take paper from her big apron pocket and write (without any light) something she gave to them.  Then the shadow would slip away and another would come.  It didn’t even seem as though they walked -- more like they were on wheels but somehow able to glide across the spongy grass.

Inside the woman, feeling her intense empathy for these youngsters and feeling the writing -- though the words weren’t quite perceptible -- the “Empathizer” slowly realized that she had gotten inside a Writer.  She should have known -- reading and writing are so intertwined that she ought to have known.  Writers are empathizers so the “Empathizer” was feeling THROUGH the Writer to the insides of the visitors.  They were in turmoil, almost too confused and unfocused to feel the pain from their obvious damage.  But when they thrust that page of writing into their pockets, they seemed to be a little relieved.  Finally she figured out that what was on each page was each one’s own story.  The story recognized the suffering, gave it names, pointed out that they deserved to have relief, and suggested that they seek ways to join with others like them.

This was the kind of enlightenment the Empathizer appreciated but she thought that as soon as the Writer went to sleep, she’d just leave and go on to the next person.  People are like books, she thought, and reading one made you want to read more.  But she couldn’t get out of the Writer, even with the Writer sleeping.  The cat felt the Empathizer struggling because it slept right up against the Writer.  It sat up and watched and mewed a little, but didn’t intervene.  In a while the Empathizer realized this was something she had never experienced before.  Maybe she would stay.

In the next weeks the Writer felt a surge of energy and had many more ideas than usual, things she hadn’t ever thought about.  She got a book about creative daemons.  Then for a while she had Writer’s Block and couldn’t think of anything.  She thought it was flu and then she thought depression, but it was really the Empathizer trying to get out again.  In the end, because the Writer wasn’t going out to the porch to talk to the shadows, the Empathizer gave up and melded her identity into that of the Writer, for the sake of all of them:  the suffering, the story-makers, and slow deep understanding that would one day change the world.

POST-EVERYTHING

I’m developing a meta-theology which has to be either a philosophy or a cosmology since I don’t accept a theos. Not even one defined in abstract terms. God is dead. There is no such category in my thinking. All you people who think that since I’m a “nice lady” -- whatever that is (I suspect it means that you think I’m like you and would approve of you) -- I must deep down believe that god is love or the ground of being or some other abstract thing. Some master principle that unifies everything.

Why do we need a master principle? Why isn’t everything simply itself? Whatever it is. If no one can really conceive of it whole, why should we trouble ourselves? A recent correspondent was worried about the idea that there is no reality, but it has long been established that each of us takes from the universe what we can perceive and then -- with a little guidance from the culture and our genetic endowment -- maybe a little cultural input -- we set up our categories. Some will never vary over a lifetime, preferring to ignore any evidence that contradicts their favorite ideas, esp. those that put a crimp in our egos.

I’ve entirely missed some ideas that come from the language of popular cosmology, taking the “felt” issues to music. The U of Chicago Div School’s Monday essay was about “Death Gospel.” There has been some debate over the religious relevance of the genre's title. In February of 2012, “Professor M. Cooper Harriss of Virginia Tech published an article about the genre and its connection to modern culture. In it, he concludes that "‘Death Gospel’ offers an interesting rejoinder to a culture that denies death and decay, insisting instead that particular individualities require a universal point of convergence; it addresses a generation of young adults (and their elders) who, despite their spirituality and electronic connections, feel alienated from their traditions (religious or otherwise), from their humanity, and from one another. "

Surely we all see the world collapsing around us, the young more sharply than those of us who have already survived a lot. But these guys seem to have a craving for the end days, a “Jones” for apocalypse which they see as a kind of cleansing that will let them live. In the meantime, they are energized by the excitement of all those explosions, all that suffering, death everywhere, the skulls and swastikas that have so symbolized the holocaust and Pol Pot’s killing fields. If that’s what it takes to get our attention, they’re up for it.

The roots of this seems to come from the South, from country Western gospel, and Bob Dylan whom Harriss claims once said the message of his songs is “Good luck, I hope you make it.” And you should spend your last time and energy in a consuming, tragic, super-intimate, fusion of love. I’m handicapped by not knowing pop music, but isn’t there a Japanese tradition of melancholy and ill-fated love: the archetype for the “Blue Willow” plates off which I ate my childhood meals in the Forties?

I’ve said again and again that sin is a human construct (“dark matter” in space is neither good nor sinful) and pop genres do not shy away from that. The music analysts claim that rap music is the most moral of genres, demanding accountability by reporting in the snapshot way of smart phones, not extended reflection. In an essay called “Cultural Approaches to the rhetorical analysis of selected music videos” by Karyn Charles Rybacki and Donald Jay Rybacki, the claim is made that music videos are not seen for the commercials they are. (“The world economy has been shaken -- quick! So shopping!”) “With nary a reference to cash or commodities, music videos cross the consumer’s gaze as a series of mood states. They trigger nostalgia, regret, anxiety, confusion, dread, envy, admiration, pity, titillation -- attitudes at one remove from the primal expression such as passion, ecstasy and rage. The moods often express a lack, an incompletion, an instability, a searching for location.” Too often that location is either the mall or the dangerous urban streets, “using any number of techniques in order to appear exotic, powerful, tough, sexy, cool, unique.”

But now the tide seems to be changing. A call for papers for the Modern Language Association in January, 2013, asks for “Environments in Science Fiction: Beyond Dystopias.” Science fiction, a genre of writing that thrives among roughly the same demographic as rock music, is asking for what amounts to a religious vision of sustainable life on the planet, a melding of desiderata and the world as cleansed by fire, brimstone and horseback angels.

Harder than you might think, when one takes a viewpoint that includes the whole continent, the planet, the solar system, all possible conceivabilities. One begins to think that the only hope is just to wipe the board clean and start from scratch. We cannot destroy the world. But we can eliminate ourselves by failing to adapt to new conditions, even the ones we’ve caused ourselves.

We may have to give up our conviction that all this is for us or about us. I’m convinced that the next religious step has got to be leaving anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism. It is not about us. Everything is in play, including all our behavior, and we certainly have ideas about how we want it all to turn out, but on the scale of eternity we cannot persist. To survive is to transform. Too much transformation and we don’t recognize ourselves anymore (do we recognize ourselves now?) and that’s the same thing as death, which is only physical, only means that this specific arrangement of molecular community that supports my identity is going other places for other reasons.

It’s unthinkable, insupportable for many people. Maybe most of all for the generation just a little older than myself that has had the idea that they could earn the future, if not for themselves then for their children, their nation, their kind of people. It took a long time for the UU’s to find new hymns that weren’t all about God or Jesus taking us for a walk in a garden of love. I’m not sure what music expresses surrender to the inevitability of change that is felt as loss. For me, it’s neither “Death Gospel” nor rap. “Space music?”

DO NOT READ THIS BOOK

I don’t think I was supposed to read “The Mad Man.” Someone told me that Samuel R. Delany was a major sci-fi philosopher and writer so I bought a second-hand copy of this one of his works by mail. Once I spend money on a book (I think it cost a $1), I read it. The beginning, a “proem” about a huge obscene roc/griffin monster, was wild and impressive. The rest was a little hard for nice ladies to relate to. I’m not recommending this book.

Luckily some parts of my life have not been nice. In the nineties I lived in a decrepit apartment in Portland. There were three of us in the building who were or had been ministers. Me; a divorced guy with teenaged kids who lived in a basement studio; and up on the top back corner a black guy, not unlike Andre Braugher. Bald. Intelligent. His apartment had a hole in the ceiling/roof big enough for a vampire to fly out of at night. He told me about it (I tried to be friends with him) and I tried to get a city inspector to take a look, but the occupant wouldn’t open up. This third minister had a special ministry for people with AIDS. I still have his card in my Rolodex, but I doubt he still exists. A sweet little old white lady would come to drive him to church on Sundays. He didn’t have a car. He was civil but not friendly.

When he left, the manager of the apartments was outraged at the horrendous mess -- not the hole in the ceiling, but the stinking trash bags of beer cans and takeout boxes stacked to the ceiling that crammed the kitchen and in the front room a huge avalanche of AIDS materials: books, curriculums, handouts. On top of the four-foot-high heap was an upside-down emerald green velvet Victorian settee -- a beautiful thing. Probably a gift from a little old lady. The manager raved, “This guy had to be insane! What does this mean? How could he do this?”

I said, “He was one helluva mad man.” Double meaning.

The trashed apartments in this book are not just a mess. They are also full of excretions of every male human kind. From the description I would say I saw (and smelled) two places like that in my career as an animal control officer. One was a house inhabited by more than sixty chihuahua mixes and one old lady. There was a three inch layer of dog shit on top of everything, which included a lot of boxes of Salvation Army clothing. In the end they bulldozed the house and burned it. The other was a house where a young woman who had nine Great Danes had to let them go in and out the window because the door was blocked by a layer of shit six inches thick. The guy who contracted to remove it took out four pickup loads. I’m saying this book is supposed to be fantasy, but maybe not.

People just underestimate how easy it is, once such things get out of hand, to get used to it. But that’s not quite what this book is about: it’s about street people, abandoned, repellent, rejected, and yet somehow able to form bonds among each other. But there’s more to it than that and probably someone will tell me about it.

The MAIN thing I get is a kind of riff that might be only my own: the preoccupation of high-flown literary academics with the down and out. We three ministers in the apartment building, who hardly knew each other, were of the same type: liberal by principle, academic by preparation for the ministry, and do-gooders as justification. There’s a kind of symbiosis between the theories and the realities. It’s almost like crime fiction, except that for that one needs a head for plot, some narrative skills, and so on. A theological education is more like philosophy. Why people do stuff, what will redeem them. Any of the three of us could have been the main narrator of this fat novel, who is dedicated to investigating the work and death of an older philosopher, but is captured by his low life. None of us would have gone to these lengths. I THINK. (I'm prevented by gender.) It was the dawn of the AIDS danger, but the guys in this book were more in danger of dying of e. coli or hypothermia from being soaked with various substances.

The great advantage of buying a used book is that someone already made notes that are often very helpful. (The disadvantage of a used book is that this one smelled like pee and I had to spray it with “Pet Stain and Odor Remover” to tolerate it at all.) An educated guy with a ballpoint pen had drawn a line alongside the notable paragraphs. He wrote neat remarks like: “NB: not only rel to rev -- to norema’s revelation & mirror -- strat -- also a new angle on waste -- def where ‘chaos’ etc. comes in now.” The reference escapes me. I did catch another one about Heraclitus though. And I rather liked a quote on in the inside of the back cover: “Why If You Must be a Savage You Should Be a Noble One.” (It might be a title.)

I’m not sure these guys quite qualify as noble savages. Neither have I figured out the meaning of the Old Poet, who was a female in a wheelchair living at Big Sur -- a friend, scholar, and preserver of manuscripts by the philosopher/poet we never quite know much about. The Old Poet is white. (Race winds in and out. Delany is black.) She seems to be a person of privilege and status in the old-fashioned academic world, whereas the narrator is one of the great mass of people who have done all the work for their Ph.D. except their thesis.

Delany himself says explicitly that the book is not about homelessness or it would be far harsher. (There are no winter scenes.) He says, “It is quite sobering to think that the Great American Novel to come will have to be so little to do with the “American Dream” but will have to be far nearer a contemporary Les Miserables.” This was 1994. Was “Les Miz” on Broadway then? The book ends with a serious (seroconversion) medical warning about AIDS, dated 1987, originally printed in “The Lancet.”

Is it better or worse that now the misery books are on an electronic device that will serve up photos, video interviews, relevant music (what is the relevant music for AIDS?), movie clips, and maybe a link to “thebody.com?” The male liberal intellectuals are still endlessly curious and intent on slumming. There probably really are street guys out there who are a cross between Paul Bunyan and Peter Lorre, as envisioned by Grace Metalious. If they can get access to the meds they need by now.

Somehow, the most realistic and convincing figure is that taurine gargoyle crouched, reeking, glinting of metal, scaled and feathered, tufted and spiked, too obscene for me to describe exactly here. Oddly familiar to some of us. Pogo, who knew his swamp creatures, would recognize it.

BUG-EYED MONSTER FILM FESTIVAL

I had a Bug-Eyed Monster film festival last weekend because I got out of sync with Netflix and the Valier library had a lot of donated movies. I checked out "Solaris" and "Alien," then discovered "Predator" was packaged with "Alien." When Sigourney Weaver stopped being their narrative thread, the Alien producers tried a few collaborations with the Predator producers, sort of like Godzilla meets King Kong.

“Solaris” was interesting, a love story reminiscent of the first sci-fi love story I ever read, which was an H.G. Wells tale about an EXTREME shrinking man, who became so small that the gold ring on the tabletop where he was standing became a universe and a gold atom became a solar system with a planet on which lived (remarkably) a woman with whom the man fell in love. Which was all fine, but he didn’t stay shrunk. Well, life is like that, and he had the pain/pleasure of grieving for her the rest of his life. The “gimmick” of Solaris was fabulous casting and the slow realization that a planet can be a creature -- the Gaea principle -- which is a mixed sort of phenomenon.

“Predator” had both Arnold Schwartzenegger and Jesse Ventura (political monsters) in it, plus a few other bulgy fellows who en masse required the re-casting of their monster, because the first stunt man was dwarfed. Actually the monster is pretty ingenious, personifying a bit of forest in an eye-dazzling trick. Arnold left for two weeks in the middle of shooting in order to marry Maria Shriver. Everyone is incredibly young-looking. It was 1987.

“Alien” was the one I wanted to watch because of Ridley Scott, who has a hard-headed Scot attitude towards special effects. He is interested in the consciousness of the viewer, not the expertise and expense of the set. The precursor here is “The Thing,” filmed in Cut Bank which was expected to be like the Antarctic for script purposes but turned out to be having a winter just like this one, so that snow had to be trucked in. Aficionados know that the Thing itself was James Arness in one of those suits that let you be set on fire. My father believed kids should see horror movies, so he went with us though my mother stayed home. He fell asleep. His snoring sort of interfered.

Most people have a sci-fi period in their lives, roughly about junior high school age when everything seems like sci-fi anyway. Mine coincided with the earliest Heinlein books. Now that genre books are what sell and “predator” is the name of an armed drone and “alien” is simply an immigrant, I’ve doubled back to see what I can understand.

On the last expedition to Great Falls, I bought a couple of mags: Asimov’s Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Most of the action I was aware of these days is girl-fantasy: werewolves and vampires, but there is also an offshoot in graphic books and mags like Heavy Metal which follow up on the exaggerated body theme of Predator. My friend, Tom Foral, www.tomforal.com and thomasforal.com is an artist I’ve known since undergrad days at the end of the Fifties. His work is in several streams of subject matter, one of which is “beefcake,” the bodies of weight-lifters, beyond ripped.

At first he was just admiring the development possible, but over the years drugs came into the picture, steroids and then addiction, as men became more and more impossibly, mindlessly, ultra-muscled to the point of parody, even mockery. We don’t usually think of this as science fiction, but steroids can be a jungle-drug, not meant to make one hallucinate but to go beyond Charles Atlas to an inhuman level of incarnation. The great irony is that the same drugs shrivel their reproductiveness. "Predator" is monomaniacal, destructive of the actors, basically plotless, and gruesome in its awareness that humans are flesh.

"Alien" features Tom Skerrit, who is non-stereotypically Native American, as a thinking, protective leader, and ironically shows the destruction of an imitation human. The official monster is a French surrealist lizard in a cat suit that drips KY jelly. (So did the Predator, but it was KY mixed with whatever is inside glo-sticks.) Over the years of Alien series the monster is gradually seen as a “mother” and a second android becomes “human,” not of flesh but of emotion and attachment.

All these stories are attempts to understand how it is that human beings are self-aware, what lives are worth, and what it means in terms of the universe. (Not just “Mr. Universe.”) Vital stuff. Even theological.

I haven’t read much in my sci-fi mags but in Asimov’s Sci-Fi, I found “The People of Pele” by Ken Liu, self-described as “a liminal provincial in America, the New Rome.” http://kenliu.name/ He lives near Boston. The story picks up a crew, something like the Alien crew, and deals with the time element, since these people can only sensibly travel to planets that are light-years away by staying in suspended animation. By the time they get to their destination, everyone they knew on earth is “a bag of bones in a box,” but they get periodic messages from home in the proper time sequence, just impossibly out of date.

We hear about the geology of this planet: it is smooth and flat with shallow lakes, the wind blows all the time, there are two moons -- one big and one little. Far away on the horizon is a constant moving twinkling and when the explorers go to see what’s there, they find crystals with odd striations and bumps on them. They are all round and the wind is rolling them along. The explanation is so beautifully and gradually given that I’m reluctant to paraphrase it, but we’re not talking Bug-Eyed Monsters here. We’re not talking steroidal or interspecies humanoids or a planet with plans. This is a kind of poetry, what one might call Daoist ecology. A little like east-of-the-Rockies prairie pothole country. Liu's wife, Lisa, www.lisatangliu.com , a photographer, is into cowboys. I think maybe she’s been here.

If I see glittering bits on the wind, I will greet them. Maybe I should carry a mirror. Somehow the least humanoid creatures are the most appealing to this human.

"FIREFLY" -- A VIRTUAL WORLD

People still wonder what happened to get the sci-fi sit com “Firefly” canceled. It was a warm, funny, sometimes gorgeous (the CGI of space), occasionally near-outrageous and always sexy show. The Suits are always saying that the demographic they want is young, educated, and hip -- but it appears that this time they got what they asked for and then couldn’t handle it. Joss Whedon, the master mind, is from a family of series-devisers and script-writers: father, grandfather, and two brothers. One can only imagine the dinner conversation. Maybe the suits couldn’t even manage that.

Joss’ best-known series might be “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” which I haven’t seen. The title is a tip-off to his basic strategy: contradiction. The name “Buffy” summons up a little twinkie blonde with too much money and probably a dog in her purse, all blonde and sun-streaked. Quite the opposite of a vampire and quite unlikely to know how to slay one. Seemingly. Surprise is the name of the game.

In “Firefly” the incongruous characters are gathered around a “congruous” one, who is meant to suggest Harrison Ford in “Star Wars.” Far from the cleancut aircraft carrier crowd of “Battleship Galactica,” which is a kind of WWII movie, all military and upright, the “Firefly” looks like a bug, esp. when the “glow” is fired up. A professional prostitute rents one shuttle and a “shepherd” (clearly a Methodist minister) is a passenger. The crew is a tough-mama veteran soldier with a Hawaiian-shirted beach cutie husband plus an escapee from a spaghetti Western with a fetish for strange hats. This ship’s version of Scottie is a Daisy May who channels her ship’s every gear and cog. Scottie would love her -- but be afraid to show it.

But the two who drive the plot are a rather stiff, if handsome, young doctor and his sister. The sister embodies one of the most emotional sci-fi questions. There’s the human vs. machine problem that drives Battleship Galactica. There’s the cultural relativity vs. evil problem that always preoccupied Star Trek. There’s the human vs. other species that rivets Aliens together. This one is about the hidden powers of the human mind. The doc’s frail, pale, vaguely Asian little sister has psychic powers.

Ironically, aside from the brother who is determined to “heal” her, the crew mostly sees her as a hazard. They don’t even understand what it is she tries to tell them when she can “feel” or “see” or whatever it is she does -- and so they discount her, brush her out of the way, and when the results are really bad, want to just dump her somewhere.

But the “bad guys,” believe everything she can do and have tried to turn it for their own uses, surgically meddling with her amygdala in a way that leaves her out of control, too vulnerable to bring order to her own mind. Who hasn’t felt like that? Even with a perfectly functional amygdala? But this is worse -- echoing the “bad trips” of the Seventies when people tried eating everything chemical or fungal, without preparation, protection or any assurance that they wouldn’t go crazy.

In some ways this ship is the way the counter-ists hoped life could be somewhere, maybe in a commune. Free-flowing, anarchic until the crunch comes and then an effective team, the cheerful galley with the Mexican taxi-driver’s decoration aesthetic is as much the heart of the ship as the elitist officer’s mess in “Master and Commander.” This is a crew we recognize. We “get” them.

Chinese viewers are at last included through an on-going joke. The writer kept a Chinese speaking woman busy researching how to say in Chinese such things as “you inflamed baboon butt” -- not that the cast was admittedly equally able to remember the words, much less pronounce them correctly. On “Battleship” the censors were evaded by saying, “Frack you!” On “Firefly” they say “rammin’” but the mysterious Chinese is even more effective as a sidestep, as well as a swipe at the arbitrary condemnation of Anglo-Saxon words.

The sexual values are those of the halcyon days, as the historians say, between the Pill and AIDS. But it’s meaningful that the whore asks NOT to be called a whore and is actually called a “companion.” There’s a good deal of wit about it, and one whole plot turns on a brothel in a desert, suggestive of a Clint Eastwood send up. In fact, bottom line, this is a Western. I’m not sure whether it qualifies as “steam punk,” which is the future bent back into the past when steam engines ruled the world, taking people across the oceans and continents to strange new places. There are actually horses in this sci-fi.

Getting back to the “spring” of the story -- or should we say the digital quartz of it -- it appears that what Joss is moving towards is the need for a human being, even an enormously gifted person like River who can read minds, to be in a community and to play as a child. The two girls, River and Kaylee, actually play tag and jacks. The married couple do have sex and they do have spats and they do get jealous. It’s like a family with a couple of tough uncles and an exotic aunt. But most of all, it’s about the counter-culture ethic that continues to survive: scruffy, suppressed, mocked, and losing but going on being subversive while too many people get rich and smug.

"Firefly" is what I’ve been trying to define as a “virtual world,” that is, one that is not “real” -- and the difficulty here is trying to define “real,” -- but certainly convincing, even after we know how the set was built, why the actors were cast and so on. Maybe the “realness” of it is related to our sympathy with Joss’ deepest assumptions which have to do with the Alliance as oppressors and the “reavers” as cannibals. They can only be survived with the help of a dedicated group of people attached to each other strongly enough to risk protecting each other. More family than circle of friends.

And what’s scary about it is that Joss and “Firefly” are indeed at the mercy of “Alliance” producers who think THEY know what the public wants (more explosions and violent fights) and it’s even scarier to understand that they are probably right and the “Reavers” public DOES want violence and sex rather than talk and understanding. But what not everyone has realized is that values like the mestizo comaraderie of “Firefly,” which is much like the relationships among cast and crew while production lasted, probably did as much to change the culture as court-imposed busing did.

The work of the arts is to mirror the world in a way that renews it, whether through criticism or example. Often a virtual world is subversive in ways that the Suits with their eye on the dollar never value. And not every viewer is a reaver.