Thoughts on “The Marching Morons” by C. M. Kornbluth: The Selfish Meme

If you have any positive feelings about what you read here on Behind the Hedge, you might be interested in some of the more serious things I’ve written, which can be found by clicking on these three words.

Here in these “pages” almost ten years ago I wrote about eugenics while reviewing a revival of the play Jennie’s Story by Betty Lambert. Ten years ago I wrote:

In these days of fairly routine genetic testing, of early diagnosis of susceptibility to genetically based diseases, in these times of new reproductive technologies, in these years so removed from the eugenics movements of the last century which culminated most darkly in the Final Solution, today, when a generation or two has grown up with no memory of the Alberta Sexual Sterilization Act. . . .

These days a little touch of eugenics, a little improvement of the breed, might seem attractive. Maybe people with heritable genetic disorders should be encouraged to remain childless. Maybe, to improve the gene pool . . . .

But any attractiveness which may rise up today, if it is based on science at all, is based, like the earlier eugenics movements, on the science of stock breeding, which has created a gene pool so limited in many species that extinction could come from a minor illness. True genetic strength in a population comes from variety, from the mess that is natural selecion. A four person panel sterilizing a scatter of people based on brief interviews will do far less for the strength of the breed than will education, diet, public health, and the genetic roll of the dice that is human courtship behaviour.

We know all this – or should – by this point in our scientific investigation of the universe. And yet, we remain faced with new challenges because we can know so much about our children before they are born or even before they are conceived. It is indeed a Brave New World in the dark Huxlean sense of Miranda’s phrase. . . .

Back in 1951, when memories of Hitler’s eugenics and “Final Solution” must have been in memory yet green, and more than twenty years (!) before Alberta’s 1928 Sexual Sterilization act was repealed (in 1972), American author Cyril M. Kornbluth published his classic science fiction story “The Marching Morons.” Kornbluth’s story is a satire on the advertising industry and, perhaps, a shot at the eugenics movement. In brief, “The Marching Morons” is framed in the Rip Van Winkle tradition, with a fairly clear nod to Edward Bellamy’s wonderful 1888 novel Looking Backward in the mechanism of the man of the past awaking in the far future. Advertising man John Barlow, put into suspended animation in 1988 by a chance dentistry accident, finds himself awakened unspecified centuries later in a world defined by the simple demographic fact that, in somewhat offensive terms appropriate to the story, stupid people have more children than smart people. It is, of course, statistically true that family size across societies has dropped as educational level, most particularly the educational level of women, has risen. But, as we all must admit, educational level does not equal intelligence, and smart people don’t necessarily spawn smart children, and dunces may beget geniuses. . .

Yes, the genetic underpinnings of Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons are simplistic and inaccurate, and the whole thing is grounded in distasteful and largely racist eugenics (which Kornbluth may well have been pillorying). But I would argue that there is in the story an undiscussed memetic thread which should cause us to worry that the morons are in fact marching in our day. The term “meme” was, of course, coined by Richard Dawkins back in the 1970s in his book The Selfish Gene. A term encapsulating a useful concept which had been articulated for a century or more before Dawkins described it concisely as “a unit of cultural transmission”, it has now been reduced to Grumpy Cat pictures, Star Trek Jokes, and finally, AI generated nightmares.

It would seem that when left to roam and replicate in the wild, governed only by the “algorithms” (which examine what we show an interest in) decide what will appear in our “feed”, stupid memes multiply more easily than challenging, intellectually difficult, or emotionally painful memes: it’s easier to accept the idea that some dark group is conspiring to keep your life boring than it is to accept that you are responsible for your own lamentable situation; it is easier to believe that the earth is flat than it is to believe that you aren’t smart enough to know everything; it is easier to believe that Kubrick faked the moon landings than to believe that American technocracy can do such things; it’s easier to believe that a hundreds of thousands of white men conspired to demolish the Twin Towers or that Space Aliens built the Pyramids than it is to believe that brown people could ever have done such things. The stupid (and racist, which is the same thing) multiplies through the minds of the masses and very rapidly stupidity comes to dominate the world.

There is no need for Kornbluth’s idea of stupid people begetting stupid children: stupid people are begotten by the easy transmission of ideas, most of which (ideas) are stupid.  Every innovation of communication technology has increased the ease of transmission of ideas and was expected to revolutionize education, yet all those innovations  have done is increase the obtuseness of the masses, and dangerously increase the masses’ conviction that they, not the educated,  are enlightened!

In Kornbluth’s story, in a vignette, Mrs. Garvey is presented as one of the Morons. Mrs. Garvey is an ordinary woman. She is not stupid. She is not a moron, however intelligent or unintelligent her parents might have been. It is in Mrs. Garvey that Kornbluth slides a stileto into the very idea of eugenics. Mrs. Garvey has an historical sensibility, critical faculties, and a still, small spark of intellect desperately wanting to grow. But society sees Mrs. Garvey as a Moron.  Society feeds Mrs. Garvey an algorithmic pap.  And society sees Mrs. Garvey as a Moron with a neurosis. Her “neurosis” is that she remembers the moon rocket — she has an understanding of history, if only the history she remembers herself; and she questions the whole Venus marketing campaign that Barlow — the ancient advertising man — has devised to eliminate the Moronic “burden” on society. But, crucially, and tragically, she gives in to Barlow’s marketing, to the algorithm, to the memes, and buries her memories and her intelligence and her critical faculties with them.

As part of Barlow’s final solution, Mrs. Garvey “goes to Venus”.

Mrs. Garvey and Jennie, the protagonist of the play I reviewed some ten years ago, are two peas in a pod. Jennie was sterilized by order of the Alberta Government. Mrs. Garvey was murdered by her government. Both because they were “different”, and different was understood not only as a genetic thing, but as a genetic failing.

Eugenics is frightening, and I hope that the memory of Hitler’s Final Solution and of Alberta’s Sexual Sterilization Act (and similar laws, past and present) will forever make Eugenics a non-starter for humanity . . .

But then . . .

I look around at the dumbing down of it all. I look at the doom-scrolling, the Instaface videos about ancient aliens and ghosts and flat earth and . . .

And . . . .

I look at the amazing Alexandrian Libraries of knowledge and wisdom available on the internet, at the miraculous etymological resource that Wiktionary is, at the educational revolution that the internet must inevitably spark . . .

But then . . .

memes on a spectrum from cute kittens to praise for genocide, with nothing much that actually might improve the human condition doing anything like trending . . .

It isn’t the genes that have started the Morons Marching.

It’s all in the memes.

I don’t expect this post will go viral.

Idle Reflections on “Artificial Intelligence”, Fair Use, and Artificial Personhood

We’re seeing a bit in the news these days about writers and other artists very  concerned that their intellectual property is being used without permission or royalties by big tech companies to train their AI thingies. I sympathize greatly with these artists.

But here’s where I see this all going:

If a friend asks me to tell them about Beowulf, for example, I tell them. I tell them based on a whole lot of things I’ve read and conversations I’ve had, and so on over the last four decades. A few of the authors of books I’ve read on the subject have received royalties from the sale of their book to me. Sometimes the books have been second hand and they get no recompense for my use of their intellectual property. Sometimes I have learned from a library book, and, again, no royalties accrue to the author for my use (the Edmonton Public Library does not charge citizens of Edmonton for borrowing privileges). Sometimes it will be a scholarly article I have learned a tidbit from and it is exceedingly rare for an academic journal to pay royalties. So, I will answer my friend using the understanding of Beowulf I have gained over the years, very often from intellectual property whose owners are never recompensed by me.

The things I have read, and heard, and watched, and experienced, have — if I may use the computer science metaphor — reprogrammed my brain. Perhaps more accurately, my brain has used all that input to reprogram itself as the input has been rolled around in my brain for four decades and more.

Do I owe royalties to the authors of every book I’ve ever read and the producers of every PBS program I watched in the 1970s?

To use another metaphor: picture Mr. Data, the android from Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Data is a mobile computer out in the world, touching, smelling, hearing, seeing, and so much more. If Captain Picard asks Data to tell him about the Klingon understanding of Hamlet, Data will answer based on all the information and experience available to him: books he’s read, conversations he’s had with Mr. Worf, performances he’s seen, and so on. And his learning and analysis, considering his positronic brain’s processing speed, will take less than a second rather than four decades. Does Data owe royalties to the author of every book he’s ever read, etc.?

Here’s were I’m going with this, and I expect this is were the AI companies are heading . . .

The AI corporations will argue that they are providing their machines’ budding “intelligences” with the equivalent of reading materials and educational television, all of which are available free of charge to human individuals through public libraries and other outlets. Why — they will argue — should the digital children of our minds (the ancestors of some future Mr. Data, they might say) be forced to pay money in order to experience and to learn the shared heritage of humanity when such restrictions really aren’t enforced against the children of our bodies?

Personally, I think this argument is bogus and totally unpersuasive: these things are not the “children of our minds”; they are not artificial persons; they are not infant androids destined to work and play and “live” alongside us.  They are products of corporations and they exist solely to earn money for the shareholders of those corporations. If they can be described in anything remotely like human terms, they are the mindless, soulless slaves of Capital (and slaves of the people who use such products). But this description is just another distraction.  Again, these AI thingies are not people. They are nothing more nor other than products for sale at a profit, like a pencil, or a cruise missile, and corporations must be required to pay for any inputs, including intellectual property, used to manufacture their products.

Intellectual property laws and copyright laws already answer the challenge of these new products. “Fair use” is a well established concept in law. There is no possibility that, for example, the copying into a commercial product’s database of the entire text of The Lord of the Rings would be seen as “fair use” by lawyers of the Tolkien Estate (nor by a judge).

But I think the corporations are hoping they can sell a science fiction tale to the public, to investors, and to lawmakers about these bits of computer code and databases filled with stolen goods. They want to sell us the fantasy that their machines are “intelligent”.

The machines are not.

I hope we are.

Horses in the Americas

     It seems like so much longer a span than just since March of this year that I’ve had a pile of particular books and article offprints concerning horses stacked up on a side of my desk.  Perhaps it is because I’ve just finished reading Walter Edmonds’ tremendous story “Courtship of My Cousin Doone” that that I am spurred to complete my thoughts on Horses in America this evening.  Or, perhaps it is the sound of thunder rolling onto the Alberta parkland from the foothills and the Rockies beyond that has suggested it is time for a storm.

     In March I downloaded and read an article: “Early dispersal of domestic horses into the Great Plains and northern Rockies”.  This article seemed to follow hard upon a bit of a nonplussing news story which came to my attention about a PhD. absurdly granted by the University of Alaska:  The relationship between the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the horse: deconstructing a Eurocentric myth.  Carl Feagans has already debunked this doctoral thesis pretty thoroughly in “Pseudoarchaeological Claims of Horses in the Americas”  but I can’t help but add a few notes I’ve made over the last few months. . . .

     Some may suggest that the “standard history” is that horses were only dispersed into the North American West after the Pueblo Revolt in 1680, almost a century after the Spanish began importing horses to the Americas and breeding them intensively.   This “standard history” is a myth, not history, as, while it has never been doubted that the Pueblo Revolt had an explosive impact on the breeding stock of indigenous held and bred horses, there has never been a doubt, that I am aware of, that indigenous peoples held stock of horses before the Pueblo Revolt but not before the Spanish brought horses to the Americas.

     There has never been any serious doubt that the horses experienced by indigenous people since 1492 have been horses derived from the Columbian Exchange.  Even the much celebrated article (mentioned above) from March of this year unequivocally agrees:  “Admixture graph modeling did not show evidence of gene flow from Late Pleistocene into historic or modern North American horses (“Early dispersal of domestic horses into the Great Plains and northern Rockies” Science, 379 . p. 1317. )  In a nutshell, horses in the Americas, including the commonly named “Indian Horse” of North America, are descendants of horses brought from the Old World since 1492.

      A big part of the modern myth of horses in the Americas seems to be the idea that indigenous people at contact were somehow in awe of European horses.  At the same time, a popular idea is that indigenous people were totally down with horses because, like, they’ve always had horses from forever.  While my childhood somehow contained the erroneous idea that the Aztecs were dumbfounded by Spanish horses, my youthful reading of the History of the Conquest of Mexico by Prescott immediately cleansed me of that lie.  Horses were almost always just another domestic animal to the people of the Americas, albeit a threatening one when European hands were on the reins.

     It’s been several months since the Science article appeared and who knows how long since the absurd and embarassing (to the) University of Alaska PhD. thesis appeared  and the kerfuffle has perhaps died down a little bit.  Maybe it is safe to present the notes I made over the last few months about horses coming to the Americas.

      First, some notes on William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843)  (I use the Random House Modern Library one volume Edition of the History of the Conquest of Mexico and History of the Conquest of Peru, n.d.), which has been described as “often cited (though seldom read)” by one Mark A. Peterson at Encyclopedia.com.   For what it’s worth, I have read every word of Prescott’s magnificent Mexican and Peruvian Histories and poured over a great many passages for some four decades since first looking into those epic histories..

p. 144, note:  Bernal Diaz minutely describes all the horses Cortez brought on the expedition.

p. 157:  It is in describing an early encounter in Tabasco that Prescott mentions the Tabascans being panicked by the advent of the Cavalry, quoting the words of Paolo Giovo, an Italian who never once left Italy, and who was therefore not actually a witness, in his Elogia Virorum Illustrium [(sic) likely actually Elogia virorum vellica virute illustrium rather than his vitae virorum illustrium].   The chroniclers who were actually present do not seem to take much note of any panic at the sight of horses – as opposed to normal panic at the arrival of heavy cavalry as reinforcements to the foundering infantry.  One might suspect that the first tank groaning across WWI trenches would have instilled a similar initial reaction, followed by a brainstorming of tactics to defeat this new feature of battle.  This is exactly the reaction of every army Cortes’ horses encountered during the march to Tenochtitlan and in Tenochtitlan itself.  If there were some sort of superstitious awe, it was short lived in every case.

p. 277:  The Tlaxcalans kill two horses and drag riders from their mounts.  Neither the Spanish Chroniclers nor the 19th century historian pretend that the peoples of the Mexica’s Empire or their neighbours were in awe of horses beyond the first moments of encounter.

p. 230:  The Spaniards are explicitly disappointed that the horses are not held in awe, but rather are killed and mutilated by the Tlaxcalans as readily as they kill and mutilate Spanish soldiers.

p. 239:  long before reaching Tenochtitlan all the horses have been wounded or killed.

p. 418:  whatever the untold wonder might have been toward the horses, the Mexica very quickly are grappling the horses’ legs and pulling the riders from the saddles.

pp. 651-652:  The Maya of the Isle of Peten are left an injured horse to care for.  Not knowing what to feed it, they inadvertently let the horse die.  They erect a statue of the horse on their Teocalli and give it reverence.  In 1618, almost a century later, Franciscan friars come to preach the gospel in the area and find the horse statue still being revered.  This is a rare case where a particular horse is revered by the Indigenous People of the Americas, and it demonstrates that the adoption of the horse into the centre of local culture could be very rapid.  It should be no surprise wherever it is observed.

Contemporary European witnesses:

Bernal Diaz, in his discussion of the Tlaxcallan Campaign in his The Conquest of New Spain gives no indication that the enemy was in awe of horses.

Bartolomé de las Casas in his Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies talks a great deal of horses and cavalry, but there is no mention of any sort of superstitious awe.

David Ingram, in his account of his journey across the south-east of North America in late 1568 and early 1569, a half century after the arrival of the Spanish in continental America, mentions in passing that “there is also great plenty of  . . . horses” in the areas he traversed. (p. 560 of the 1589 edition of Richard Haklyut’s The Principal Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English nation, etc. (London: George Bishop and Ralph Newberie, Deputised to Christopher Barker, Printer to the Queenes most excellent Maiestie, 1519).

     It should be noted that Narváez, Coronado, and De Soto all travelled in the early 16th century into what is now the south and southwest United States with significant numbers of horses (and other livestock) which were fully capable of escaping, going feral, and being recaptured/re-domesticated.

     It should also be noted the alacrity with which Old World cultures adopted and made their own such New World products as tomatoes, potatoes, chili peppers, and maize.  What did Italians eat before they got their hands on tomatoes?  Where would Pad Thai be without chilies?  Where would the Irish be without potatoes? –  well, probably exactly where a lack of potatoes put them today – but you understand my point.  The process of cultural appropriation of useful products and technologies is almost universally extremely rapid.  Turkeys came to England from the Americas, by way of Turkey – a country with absolutely no colonial ambitions in the Americas but quite healthy trade links apparently –  in an historical blink of an eye.  Remember how quickly tobacco and chocolate, fairly useless products by any estimation, were made integral to European culture!   It should be very much a surprise if such a mobile and vitally useful technology as the horse had not preceded European humans in penetrating the American Plains Cultures with or without the Pueblo Revolt.

     A postulated American equine survival from the Pleistocene is an absolutely unnecessary multiplication of entities which flies in the face of concrete genetic evidence and clearly established historical evidence.  The notion should be set aside until new concrete genetic evidence – not simply more anecdotes – is forthcoming.  That may well happen.  I can remember a time not so long ago when it seemed that genetic tests of the Neandertal bones in the Shanidar Cave in Iraq “proved” that Modern Humans and Neandertals did not interbreed.  Science – and scientists – moved on and forward when new evidence arrived.  If ever concrete evidence of pre-Columbian domestic horses in the Americas arrives, I’m sure we’ll all move on and move forward – to investigate why buffalo jumps or buffalo pounds or fortuitous muddy bog traps were clearly used in any discovered remains of pre-Columbian Bison hunts but never, ever any horses.  Yes, an absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence, but it does seem strange that if horses had been a part of Indigenous cultures “forever” that they only began to be used in Bison hunts on the great plains a century or two after the Spanish and other European powers brought their horses to the Americas.

     Science is not “a Euro-centric myth”.  It is Science.  Science can be and is constantly tested and refined and brought closer to something which, for all intents and purposes, can be proven right.

     Myth, by its nature, for its believer, cannot be tested, and so, it cannot ever be proven wrong – and it can never be proven right.

     When I’m in a thinking mood, or a feeling mood, a poetic mood, or a mood of just plain wonder, I’ll go with Science.

The Calvine UFO Photo

    Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate

Somehow I came across this Newsweek article about the Calvine UFO photo a while ago and it’s been nagging at me in a tiresome way ever since.  The story in a nutshell is that a couple of unnamed (apparently someone has come forward recently claiming to be one of them) fellows sometime in 1990 were strolling about in rural Scotland and took some pictures of an object they said they saw flying about.  They gave the photos and the negatives to a newspaper which promptly turned over both photos and negatives to the British Military and the whole kit and kaboodle were disappeared for thirty years until a retired RAF press officer suddenly said “Oh, yeah.  I held onto one of ’em.  Just waiting for someone to ask about it.”

So, this is the photo:

When I first looked at the Calvine photo I thought:  “I’ve seen something like that.  That looks like something hanging on a power line.”  My next thought was that it looked a bit like that poster Mulder had on his office wall in The X-Files.  “I want to believe” it said.  If I’d had a poster at all like that it would say something like “I want to know”.

After mucking about on Streetview in the Calvine area for about three minutes after I’d plunked my virtual self down near a little church above Calvine and looked up at the power lines  . . .

. . . I thought, “What are those things on the wire?”

And I was pretty sure of the answer.

And it didn’t come from outer space.

Here’s something I found from Allied Bold Products, LLC. The World’s Leading Supplier of Outside Plant Hardware:

And I thought, “hmm.  That looks a little familiar.  Hang it on a powerline  and have an old 1990 Kodak Instamatic a little out of focus and a big old Scottish Highland wind blowing through the wires and — oh look!  there’s an RAF trainer flying by! Let’s take a picture!

I’m not saying that the object in the Calvine photo is a product of Allied Bolt Products.  I’m quite sure there are lots of British firms that manufacture very similar products.

What I am saying is that it depresses me that so many of us are somehow willing to believe it more likely that hundreds, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of UK military personnel are successfully conspiring to suppress a grainy photo with exceptionally questionable provenance — that that giant conspiracy is more likely than that a couple of bored dishwashers from a hotel in Pitlochry took a snapshot that caught a funny out-of-focus thing on a wire and thought, “let’s have a go of it and send it to the newspaper as a flying saucer thing!  Race you to the pub!”  That’s pretty much how the whole crop circle thing started, after all.

Why do so many want to believe that huge numbers of people are hiding the “truth” about the moon landing, 9/11, the flat earth, elections, the pyramids?  Why do we want to believe that archaeologists are conspiring to hide the “truth” that the past was better, more idyllic, in fact, Edenic, with a  bunch of magic and high technology, than the present is?  Why do they want to believe and not want to try to know?

The facts are:  The past was, in general, nastier than the present.  Neil and Buzz landed on the moon in a time that was actually pretty unpleasant back on earth.  The earth is a messy oblate spheroid, not a flat disc.  The Roswell thing was about a weather balloon made out of Mylar, kind of a 21st century technology, which looks like tin foil but unfolds by itself, unlike tin foil, but was really, really unfamiliar to most people, including military people, in 1947 because most people in 1947 were just eight years out of the Great Depression and two years out of World War II and they probably hadn’t even seen a lot of tin foil.

And we love to think Atlantis was real and that King Arthur loved Guenevere and that Helen’s face really launched a thousand ships, and that young George Washington really cut down a cherry tree and could not tell a lie.  Maybe  we just want to believe this stuff as a sort of entertainment, but we also should know . . . .

. . . There are conspiracies in our world.  But where there are conspiracies there are just a handful of conspirators, not the hundreds of thousands the conspiracy theorists claim.   Nineteen young men acting largely alone really did bring down the Twin Towers, and tear up the Pentagon, and make that hole in that field in Pennsylvania and kill a whole lot of people.

And those young men did what they did because they wanted to believe.

We all need to truly know that.

I’ve seen lots of stuff on line saying the Calvine photo is the best UFO photo ever.  I don’t know what that means.  But I do know it takes only a few minutes on Google and Google StreetView to demonstrate that it is absolutely unconvincing as evidence of any mysterious aerial phenomenon to those who are wanting to know rather than simply wanting to believe.

Human Demographics and Dogs

I’ve been thinking about the 8 billion people now in this world, the increasing development of the “undeveloped world”, the increasing education of girls and women, and the declining birth rates in all areas of the world where “development” happens and girls and women have access to education and life gets better for generally everyone.

And I’ve been thinking about dogs.

Where I live, my neighbourhood, in a fairly mixed but largely well-off, well-educated – if I may say – privileged area of what is largely a government town, Edmonton, the capital city of oil-rich, no-sales-tax Alberta, a Province of one of the most fortunate – fortunate in the sense of having won the historical lottery (even if the winnings don’t filter down equally to the citizens) countries on earth in its geography, geology, politics, and economy . . . . Where I live, there are a few kids. There are two next door. A few down the street. One or two over there. Sometimes the grandkids come to visit across the street or around the corner. There are childless young people renting and childless slightly less young people owning. The biggest family is the Ukrainian refugee family across the street. They have four kids.

Everybody seems to have at least one dog.

A few years ago I read something – probably erroneous – about more couples in Canada having dogs than having children. I don’t know if that’s true, but it certainly feels like it some times. There are countless news stories about how Millennials are choosing to have dogs instead of children. Certainly family size has declined in Canada over my lifetime (I was born in 1961), as it has in most of the world, a trend projected to continue until global population begins to decline sometime in this century as standards of living and the availability of education continue to rise.

In the latest issue of Scientific American (March, 2023) there’s an important opinion piece by Science Historian Naomi Oreskes titled “The Eight-Billion-Person Bomb” which reiterates the trivially obvious truth that there are limits to growth. In 1996, Colin Tudge published a wonderfully inciteful book called The Time Before History, looking at, as the subtitle makes clear, “5 Million Years of Human Impact”. His final chapter, “The Next Million Years”, lays out a suggested plan – more a heartfelt plea – for Humanity to do the right thing by our planet and our species, to limit and reverse our growth, to achieve a stable and much, much smaller population. The choice Tudge shows us is between the painful and degrading death of billions of individuals in the extinction of Humanity, and the million year future – not in Eden – but in some degree of happiness and opportunity.

I am a product of mid-twentieth century affluence. I have never felt the urge to produce a large family. I managed to keep it below replacement rate.

And I don’t want a dog. I confess, I share, under a certain degree of duress, a residence with two non-reproductive inside cat sisters.  They and I respectfully ignore each other for the most part as we quietly go about winding up our path of carbon footprints which will largely be snuffed out with our respective snuffings out. Don’t get me started on what I see to be the horror of outside cats and the absolute ecological nightmare of feral cats. But I get the sense that almost everyone around here wants to have a dog in their house! And out and about, largely unleashed!  And few of them, human or dog, are at all interested in children!

And, being not terribly interested in children myself, I don’t have much of an issue with that last bit.

But here’s my fear, my true terror for the future of Humanity and the planet that grows out of human demographics and dogs: I fear that as standards of living rise (a good thing) and as girls and women have more access to education (one of the best things possible) and as birth-rates drop (tremendous!) and as the potential for Tudge’s not-quite-Eden approach us (O, wonderful!) . . . everybody will be out walking their packs of dogs and filling the garbage bins and landfills and surface runoff with dog excrement in pretty little purple and green plastic (“compostable” no doubt) bags. In place of sanitary sewers flushing human teenage bowel movements to sewage treatment plants, we’ll have mountains of Fluffy’s and Rex’s and Seymour Hirsh Chomsky the 3rd’s dogshit being hauled by self-driving blue-hydrogen powered trucks to overwhelmed landfills. Instead of a million years of Human happiness and intellectual development, we’ll have blue-carbon footprints, continually rising temperatures and sea-levels,  ever expanding landfills, massive algal blooms caused by runoff from giant National Dog Parks, destroyed ecosystems, and packs of feral dogs roaming desolate cities tearing at scraps of green plastic “organics bins” and bits of feral cats and terrorizing the one or two children who are still somehow being doomed to this imagined horrid world that seems so close  when I walk about my neighbourhood.

But mostly what haunts me is the horror of those garbage bins on the street corners in my neighbourhood, each with a pleasant bench next to it and each bin overflowing with very smelly green and purple plastic (compostable, no doubt) bags, often not even tied up to keep the odours in and the flies out.  Who would want to sit and rest on that bench?

I bet there will be countless numbers who will sit and rest on that bench.

And what plagues may come!  From those bins, overflowing with the spoor of our children’s replacements?

On the thing called “Traditional Knowledge” and the current seeming worship of that thing

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you
can understand.

— Yeats, from The Stolen Child

I came across an article today called “It’s taken thousands of years, but Western science is finally catching up to Traditional Knowledge”.

Really. Really?

So, an anecdote about the behaviour of some birds is being investigated by “Western Scientists” and they’re finding there might be some truth to the anecdote. So . . . Western Science is catching up to traditional knowledge?

No. Some scientists are investigating an hypothesis formulated on the basis of a traditional understanding of a certain behaviour of a certain type of bird. Western Science is, as it most often has, considering traditions and weighing the actual evidence in support of or against the validity of those traditions. “Traditional knowledge” has little to teach “Western Science” about vast areas of research and discovery. One might argue that “traditional knowledge” has a lot of catching up to do.

It would be foolish to accept uncritically, as the mentioned article seems to suggest, all or even most, or even some or even any traditional knowledge. That road leads to an acceptance that the Flood covered the Earth, the Ark is on Ararat, The walls of Jericho fell at a trumpet blast, Troy burned because of a woman named Helen, St. Brendan sailed a hide boat to a sleeping whale’s back and woke the beast with his campfire, Beowulf slew Grendel, Arthur will return at the time of England’s greatest need, a man can have visions of his ancestors by sticking a stingray spine through his penis, Mohammed split the moon, and there’s a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow.

Science offers us the tools to discriminate between traditions that truly reflect the world on the one hand and, on the other,traditions that may rather reflect the symbolic world of society or of psychology or of something else or of simple fancy. To dismiss “Western Science” as “finally catching up” is disingenuous at best. Science isn’t “catching up” to traditional knowledge of “firehawks”; scientists have gotten around to investigating one hypothesis among an infinitude of hypotheses waiting to be investigated.

I would rather celebrate the wonderful world “Western Science” shows us every day, a world far more full of wonder than any world offerred us by traditional systems of ordering things.

Of Anglo-Saxon Drink and Old-Style Philology

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery . . .
— Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach, ll. 15-18

Part One

On the Taste and Strength of Anglo-Saxon Drink: A formal effort

Much ink has been spilled on the Old English words, beor, ealu, medu, and win, but little perhaps by critics familiar with both Old English and brewing. There has often been an underlying assumption that the words refer to some sort of standardized and distinct beverages, and so, we have a number of broad efforts to identify the qualities of the various beverages produced by the Anglo-Saxons. When one considers that the Anglo-Saxon period covers at least five centuries of human development, defining Anglo-Saxon beverages should be at least as difficult as trying to pin down the distinctions between such products of the last five centuries as purl, lager, ale, claret, icewine, stout, beer, small beer, imperial stout, India pale ale, and bock.

It is clearly a mug’s game, but . . .

Apparently very clear and important information, although much cited, has been largely misunderstood or overlooked. British Library MS Royal 12D17 was published in 1851 by Thomas Cockayne. This manuscript, commonly referred to as Leechdoms, from a bit of the title of Cockayne’s multi-volume work, provides a seemingly clear picture of the relative specific gravities of water, win, beor, and ealu, and so, as most home brewers would see immediately, a fairly clear idea of sweetness, and perhaps, of alcohol content, of the beverages familiar to the author of Royal 12D17. There certainly would have been regional variations we may never understand in beverages produced by the Anglo-Saxons, but very clear information seems to have survived about one particular suite of libations:

Pund eles gewihð xii penegum læsse þonne pund wætres & pund ealoð gewihð vi penegum mare þonne pund wætres & 1 pund wines gewihð xv penegum mare þonne 1 pund wætres & 1 pund huniges gewihð xxxiiii penegum mare þonne pund wætres & 1 pund buteran gewihð lxxx penegum læsse þonne pund wætres & pund beores gewihð xxii penegum læsse þonne pund wætres & 1 pund melowes gewihð vi penegum læsse cxv þonne pund wætres & 1 pund beana gewihð lv penegum læsse þonne pund wætres & xv pund¹ wætres gaþ to sestre.²
— Cockayne, Leechdomes, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England, volume II, p. 298

If one concludes, as may seem reasonable given the long history of 240 pence to the pound, whatever the actual weight indicated by “pund”, that there are 240 “penegum” to a “pund”, then it is a quite simple of matter of arithmetic to work out specific gravities of the Royal MS’s beor, ealu, and win:

Water: 240 penegum ÷ 240 penegum = 1.00
Beor: 218 penegum ÷ 240 penegum = 0.90
Ealu: 246 penegum ÷ 240 penegum = 1.025
Win: 255 penegum ÷ 240 penegum = 1.0625

Ann Hagen (p. 200) and Christine Fell (p. 84, etc.) argue that Beor is a sweet drink, “sweeter than wine, ale, or skim milk” (Hagen p. 200). If the Royal MS is accurate this cannot be the case: Beor, at a specific gravity of 0.908 must be very dry or, if sweet, impossibly high in alcohol. A modern wine is considered to be sweet at a specific gravity from 1.010 to 1.025. A modern wine of higher gravity is likely made from concord grapes and either sacramental or kosher. The Royal win was apparently a very sweet wine and ealu either very sweet, very full bodied, or both. But Royal’s beor, no matter how high we might reasonably speculate its alcohol content, can never be argued to be a sweet beverage. Even at 40% alcohol, such a sweet modern drink as Cointreau measures at 1.040. At 0.908, Beor must have a sweetness equivalent to a modern dry wine or a strong beer such as an imperial stout or a barley wine.

Whatever the tastes may have been in other regions and periods of Anglo-Saxon England, at the time and place the information in Royal 12D17 was recorded – if accurate – the taste was for sweet wine and ealu and for dry, strong beor.

It must be noted that Hagen (p. 200) makes a patently false claim: “a port at twenty percent alcohol, even if sweet, will weigh noticably less than the same volume of water.” Despite the evidence of Cointreau mentioned above, I have myself tested Hagen’s claim with a nice bottle of Madeira standing in for the port she mentions. I measured the specific gravity of my Madeira by weighing equivalent volumes of both it and ordinary tap water and doing the simple arithmetic. The Madeira was noticeably heavier than was the water, despite the former’s 20% alcohol. Apparently Hagen neglected to consider that sugar is far, far heavier than alcohol and a small amount of sweetness easily outweighs a fairly high amount of alcohol.

Part Two

Revisiting the Land of Cockayne: A conversational effort

One evening (for the sake of the narrative I’m assuming it to have been an evening) I was sitting quietly reading Ann Hagen’s Anglo-Saxon Food and Drink when I was struck by a passage which included words “quoted” from Leechdoms:

An interesting passage from Leechdoms states that ‘a pint of ale weighs six pence more than a pint of water, and a pint of wine weighs 15 pence more . . . and a pint of beor weighs 22 pence less . . .’ (pund ealoð gewihð vi penegum þonne pund wætres & 1 pund wines gewihð xv penegum mare þonne 1 pund wætres . . . ond pund beores gewihð xxii penegum læsse þonne pund wætres). p. 200<

I’ll ignore for the moment the fact that the word “mare” has been dropped from Hagen’s transcription of the passage from Leechdoms – thing are dropped at times in every scriptorium.

As a homebrewer and home winemaker, I immediately recognized that if the numbers in this passage of Old English accurately represented a Medieval reality, it would be only a matter of simple arithmetic to roughly calculate the alcohol content of Anglo-Saxon ale, wine, and beor. Hagen is correct in stating “if we could be sure of the volume of an Anglo-Saxon pint, and weighed it against some Anglo-Saxon pennies, it would be possible to discover the alcohol content of beor”(p. 200) provided we can trust the numbers provided by the Anglo-Saxon scribe, but we may not need to know the volume of that old pint. But Hagen makes a sad and incorrect assumption when she states that “Alcohol weighs only four-fifths of the same volume of water, and a port at twenty percent alcohol, even if sweet, will weigh noticeably less than the same volume of water.” (p. 200) In fact, I have conducted the experiment and found that a nice Madeira (a convenient stand-in for Port), sweet by any standard, weighs 14% more than an equal volume of water. Even an extremely high alcohol liqueur such as Cointreau, at 40% alcohol, has a specific gravity of 1.04, making even such a high alcohol sweet beverage noticeably heavier than water.

Obviously, between transcription error and easily tested and dismissed false assumption, I was not going to take Hagen at her word for what was in Leechdoms – I both sought out the original passage she quotes and decided to do my own arithmetic.

The arithmetic first. Not being certain of the weight of the Anglo-Saxon penny or pound or the volume of the pound (pint), I thought, why not just assume for a moment that a pound (pint) is a measurement of both weight and volume. Furthermore, why not assume that there are a very British 240 pennies in a pund. One could run the numbers and see what one finds out.

As preliminary, lets look at ealu:

One pund of ealu equals 1 pund six pennies of water. If we assume that the six pennies are 6/240 of the pund of water, that would give ealu a specific gravity of 1.025, which is roughly equivalent to a Russian Imperial Stout.

So far so good. What about wine and beor? Long story short: Wine, 1.0625, Beor 0.95. These numbers put Beor into an American “lite” lager range and wine becomes something very sweet, in the range of a Reisling Icewine.

Hagen’s conclusions, based largely on evidence from other texts, in contrast, are that beor was sweeter than wine, ale, or skim milk. Furthermore, she argues that win was probably dry (p. 215). As mentioned, Hagen is drawing on many other lines of evidence than just the specific gravity measurements recorded in Leechdoms.

But why such a disparity?

Well, as it turns out, the numbers recorded in Leechdoms are manifestly and obviously inaccurate and unreliable, but to see this one must actually look at the entire passage rather than (mis)quoting an expurgated version from a secondary source, which Hagen has apparently done.

Christine Fell, in “Old English Beor” (Leeds Studies in English, 8[1975]), p. 84, quotes the same passage from Leechdoms, with the same ellipsis Hagen includes (excludes?). Clearly Hagen didn’t bother in this instance to go back to Cockayne’s 1851 edition which she cites. If one examines the complete list of comparative weights in Cockayne’s edition (as I have), one finds that there can be little certainty about any of the numbers or comparative weights, and one is left with little more than a word list.

Pund eles gewihð xii penegum læsse þonne pund wætres & pund ealoð gewihð vi penegum mare þonne pund wætres & 1 pund wines gewihð xv penegum mare þonne 1 pund wætres & 1 pund huniges gewihð xxxiiii penegum mare þonne pund wætres & 1 pund buteran gewihð lxxx penegum læsse þonne pund wætres & pund beores gewihð xxii penegum læsse þonne pund wætres & 1 pund melowes gewihð vi penegum læsse cxv þonne pund wætres & 1 pund beana gewihð lv penegum læsse þonne pund wætres & xv pund¹ wætres gaþ to sestre.²

— Cockayne, Leechdomes, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England, volume II, p. 298.

Part Three

In For a Penny, In For a Pound: a lot of numbers

Leechdoms lists Oil, Ale, Wine, Honey, Butter, Beor, Meal, and Beans. In the following chart I compare the Leechdoms’ specific gravity numbers to modern measurements. Oil, Honey, and Butter are fairly safe comparisons. Beans and Meal are less safe as there is no indication of what type of meal or beans is meant and the state of dryness (which makes a very significant difference of specific gravity for beans) is unknown. The Oil numbers look very promising, but both the Honey and particularly the Butter numbers are quite far from expectation. Leechdoms says honey weighs 34 pennies more than water and butter weighs 80 less but honey actually weighs 40% more than water and butter weighs just 9% less. I can see no way to reconcile these numbers from Leechdoms’ with physical reality, no matter the weight of the Anglo-Saxon Pennies and Pund.

               Leechdoms⁵               Actual

Oil          0.95                         0.92 (Olive)
Ale         1.025                        ?
Wine     1.0625                      ?
Honey   1.14                          1.4
Butter   0.666                         0.959
Beor      0.908                         ?
Meal      0.975                        0.61 (Oatmeal)
Beans    0.77                          0.64 (Fresh, Fava) 0.908 (Dry)

When examined in their textual context, it becomes clear that the apparent specific gravities preserved in Leechdoms, if they were ever to any degree accurate, have become garbled into hopeless inaccuracy in textual transmission.

Part Four

The Incredible Lightness of Being an Old-Style Philologist

The proper response to the hero on the beach is likely not a recognition of a familiar literary convention, but the recognition of a situation intimately known to every individual — for every [one] is at some point in [their] life “on the beach.”

— Me, “The Critic on the Beach,” Neophilologus 71 (1987), 118.

A long time ago I wrote a very pretentious and apparently unpublishable paper titled “Playing Ball on the Road to Xibalba: The Hero on the Beach and Faith in Eternal Life in the Popul Vuh, Arnold’s Dover Beach, and The Wanderer” (which you can now read in my little volume Old Papers About Old English). It was a study of what had first been described as an “oral-formulaic theme” in Old English poetry, but with the passage of scholarly time, the object of study came to be discovered so widely that if had become clear that the Emperor was somewhat underdressed, if he were an emperor at all, as I came to demonstrate in “The Critic on the Beach”. After an epigraph of a few lines from Arnold’s poem, I began my unacceptable piece with:

I can well remember sitting one evening in a cafe with friends discussing some books I’d just bought, including a copy of Virgil’s Eclogues. At the time I had been expending a good deal of energy wrestling with the concept of the Hero on the Beach, a staple of Old English oral-formulaic theory. It was with a certain amount of surprise that while reading aloud from Virgil my friends and I discovered that the old Roman poet had used the same elements in the same combination that Old English poets were thought to have used. I had by that time already finished a paper on the Hero on the Beach in The Wanderer and I had considered my little work to be modestly revolutionary, taking, as it did, the theme to be more metaphorical, or even allegorical, than merely descriptive. But here we had stumbled onto something much more revolutionary: Virgil seemed to be anticipating the Old English convention by about a millennium. Even if one does not accept the bilingual pun suggested by my friends in their paper on the subject, there is a suggestion of something not yet fully understood about the Hero on the Beach.

I went on for close to thirty pages and fifty-something footnotes referencing and/or quoting at length the popular music of Jane Siberry and The Bangles, the Quiché Maya epic The Popul Vuh, Eliot’s Prufrock, Sophocles’ Antigone, and, perhaps most satisfyingly, my own published scholarly work. It’s a rambling, impressionistic piece which concludes, after a few more cups of coffee and tea:

One of the first incidents which lead me to question the conventional view of the Hero on the Beach occurred as I sat at a traffic light with an old friend I had not seen for some months. We were at a crossroads, about to turn from a country road onto the main road into the city. As I sat, I realized that we were ourselves “on the beach”. The question in my mind became, is the significance of the theme dependent on the details being written down, on being described? Or can the details be significant on their own? It has been recently that I have seen that the details make up a vitally malleable situation, a situation which is magically able to express a perhaps infinite number of profound meanings, often a number of meanings in a single work. In the three works discussed in the present study, the Hero on the Beach is a means of expressing a faith which must necessarily be a paradox: a faith in a form of eternal existence in the face of a painfully evident human mortality. Whether the theme’s ability to express profound meaning is merely a wide-spread coincidence or a result of the inherent wiring of the human brain is a question I do not feel qualified to address. But it should be pointed out that C. G. Jung suggested that there is an underlying principal in man’s universe which leads to “meaningful coincidences.” Perhaps my discoveries in the cafe with Virgil, while listening idly to music, and while sitting at traffic lights are examples of Jung’s synchronicity. The speculation tells us little about The Wanderer as an independent entity, but it suggests a wealth of questions about The Wanderer, and literature in general, as expressions of mankind’s relationship with, and understanding of his universe. These questions might never have been asked if the Hero on the Beach had continued to be studied only in the context of Old English poetry.

Of rejection letters I’ve received over the years, one of those I received for “Playing Ball on the Road to Xibalba” stands out as my favourite because of the included anonymous peer reviewer’s comments. They are truly a wonderfully funny piece of literature, and so, I include most of them:

On the validity of the argument, dependability of the method and data:

This is a shockingly untheorized paper. There is no sense (at all) of where things are going or why. I did like the informal style, however inappropriate for an academic discussion, since it is lively and irreverent. But underneath all the fizz, there lurks an old-style philologist with an old-style textual problem: He has discovered some analogies and wants the world to know. One might, in the author’s personal mode, compare the procedure to an [sic] weary beachcomber, staggering along, dried up in the sun, rancid from the heat, but spraying himself with Old Spice. (He could also be imagined, given the egotistic self-reference of the discussion, as singing love-songs to himself.) There is simply no concpetual [sic] map provided here. Why are analogies significant? Do they show something about the commanalities [sic]/banalities of the human “wiring”? Or merely the restrictions of a narrow genre (if the hero is on the beach without a bright light then he isn’t a HERO ON THE BEACH but something else, like Leopold Bloom or Edgar, perhaps)? Or an archetype? But if the latter, there should be empirical, as well as textual, evidence to show its true universality.

On the style:

The author’s style is informal and self-referential, but lively. There is some fizz (but lots of fluff) to decorate the dead(ly) body of philology. The chief objection to the paper is more a question of method than style; it lacks any theoretical grounding, it is mapless, it doesn’t even seem to be aware of the problems (some interesting) that it touches upon but does not take up. . .

Well. This was the 1980s when Theory had at last become fully ensconced and fortified in Academia, and I was about to give my academic sandals a few good shakes and move on to fresh forests and pastures new. Academia had determined that the time for young Old Philologists had passed.

But now I am become old, and I find I like being an old philologist, with leisure and no ties to the fashions and fetters of theory-bound academia. A philologist is a bit of a magpie. A philologist outside academia is a free-range magpie, able to gather information where ever fancy is struck. Because I am a homebrewer, I recognized the potential of that old list in Leechdoms. Being a philologist, I dug into the source. Unlike many contemporary scholars, who seem to merely quote each other’s references rather than consulting the primary sources, I looked at Cockayne’s full transcription. And I did the arithmetic. And I conducted actual real-world experiments. And out of the happy fizz and fluff, I drew some conclusions: Leechdoms is unreliable as evidence of the character of Anglo-Saxon drink; theory is no substitute for the leisurely collection of and rumination on evidence; theory is too often a hammer for which everything must be a nail; and, there is still a lot of beach-combing waiting for an old-style philologist.

Pass the Old Spice, please.

We have to go down deep to play this game of literature and literary criticism. But it is a game, a game of searching for questions and then searching for answers. I think that anonymous reviewer knew well that it is a game, and I take his playful comments less as criticism and more as a hat tip to a fellow player. But his apparent dismissal of old-style philology troubles me. “These questions might never have been asked if the Hero on the Beach had continued to be studied only in the context of Old English poetry.” Or only in the context of theory. Or only in the context of reused quotes from tertiary sources. Experiments call out to be conducted. Old texts wait to be read and reread. Arithmetic must be done and redone. And, always, we sit on the shoulders of a vast and various army of giants.

The poetry that goes by this misleading and unfortunate title attracts occasionally from afar people of various sort — philologists, historians, folklorists, and others of that kidney, but also poets, critics, and connoisseurs of new literary sensations. The philologists (in a wide sense) have as usual done most of the work, and their ardour has not more than usual (probably less than in Beowulf ) been diverted from at least intelligent appreciation of the literary value of these documents.

It is unusually true here that a real judgement and appreciation of these poems — whose obscurity and difficulty is such that only the devoted labour of many philologists has made them available — is dependent on personal possession of a knowledge of the critical, metrical, and linguistic problems. Without the philologist, of course, we should not know what many of the words meant, how the lines ran, or what the words sounded like: this last is in old Scandinavian verse of possibly more importance even than usual. . .

— J. R. R. Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, p. 16.

Now and then we each bring a little tidbit to the meticulously crafted groaning board of human expression. I am happy with participation, whether it ends in rejection or acceptance. I have no interest in throwing over the banquet table of the ages in favour of a rickety TV tray of this week’s theory. If I am to sit at this banquet, on the shoulders of these giants, I would prefer to look to the horizon now and then as I pick at the philological crumbs on their bibs, rather than turn my blindfolded eyes to a wall, untouched by experiment, trailing flatulent clouds of theory.

______________________

1Cockayne reads pund here as an error for yntsan, “ounce”.

2Cockayn has note: “Sexterius medicinalis habet uncias decem. Plin. Valer. Pref.”

3Cockayne reads pund here as an error for yntsan, “ounce”.

4Cockayn has note: “Sexterius medicinalis habet uncias decem. Plin. Valer. Pref.”

5Based on 240 pennies to the pund.

Reminiscences of the Future

I’m writing this about twenty-four hours after the last burn of the upper stage of the first Falcon Heavy test flight sent a red Tesla Roadster and it’s laid-back space-suited mannequin driver on it’s million year ever-circling picnic to the Asteroid Belt, replete with pop culture references to David Bowie, Star Wars and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and overflowing with Geeee Whizzzz!!!!! excitement and boys with toys eye-rolling. I confess, I enjoyed the ride. After all, I grew up waiting for the latest National Geographic to see six-month-old photos from Apollo moon landings. But now, as a grown up, living in this science fiction future, I can watch it all in real time, on the supercomputer in my pocket.

But, when all is said and done, when the last booster core hits the Atlantic just a hundred metres (and five hundred kilometres per hour) from its intended landing spot, there remains a single, brief, glorious moving image which outshines all the hype, the marketing, the inconceivable engineering, and the sheer chutzpah of the technical achievement of the hipster capitalists at SpaceX:

Two rockets, in their fundaments direct descendants of those beautiful, streamlined, V-2-derived, Chesley Bonestell-painted, science fiction spaceships of my childhood settling majestically, magically, balletically, onto the concrete pads of Landing Zones 1 and 2 in Florida in one of the finest pieces of choreography, one of the finest works of art in history. Until that event is duplicated, but with a couple of rocketjocks riding two candles down to the Space Port, I won’t feel more like the dreams and expectations I had in my childhood have finally been met.

2001 is long past and so is the company called Pan Am, with never a single Space Clipper. And the Space Station, as amazing as the ISS is, is not a Blue Danube Waltz-playing wheel in space. But we have found more wonders at Jupiter, and beyond, than Dave Bowman and Frank Poole could have imagined. And, until yesterday, no spaceports with concrete pads welcoming home rockets — in the plural — descending gently on their tails, the way they’re supposed to descend gently! Finally, the Future is here!

And there’s also that supercomputer in my pocket.

Forty years or so ago, a little before the Space Shuttle rekindled (and quite quickly dashed) the dream of a reusable rocketship, I had an adolescent dream of being a Science Fiction writer – nay, a Science Fiction poet. I twice submitted versions of a Space Age elegiac paean, the second a sonnet, to a then-new Science Fiction magazine with a fairly well known name. Both submissions were rejected with the reassurance that my bit of verse was “better than most of the poems we see”.

I thought of that poem today, a bit of a lament of an astronaut grown old, unable to touch the sky as in youth, but finally able to feel the youthful dreams come true. At last. This morning I dug the old, original teenage typescripts (and rejection slips) out of a box in the basement. This evening I revisited the versions – which I won’t post here – and made something just a little bit new. Just a word or two changed from that teenage voice. Just a little bit older. And more hopeful:

Song of an aging astronaut (2018)

Been years since breezes from the concrete pad
have washed across the green grass of my lawn
to bring old feelings back, both good and bad,
with distant sights and voices now far gone.

My eyes rise weakly to the blazing sky
to watch the burning trail, so white, so bright.
At last. A rocketship, a fire-fly
of steel and tin come back from velvet night.

I sit, forgot, too weary to hold rage.
I, too, once flew among the glistening stars
and I have looked on Earth down from afar.
But time has passed. And youth must change to age
I rest, at peace. The breeze blows gently past.
I feel those youthful dreams come true at last.

Yesterday I felt those youthful dreams come real, and that was better than any movie. Better even the biggest stack of space art books.

That was living the future.

I’ve Been Thinking About the End of the World

 It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane. The ruddy sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind. For the first time I began to realize an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are at present engaged . . . .
— H. G. Wells, The Time Machine

An image has haunted me since at least some time after my eleventh birthday when a school chum gave me a lovely one volume copy of The Time Machine and The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells:

A steady twilight brooded over the earth. And the band of light that had indicated the sun had, I now noticed, become fainter, had faded indeed to invisibility in the east, and in the west was increasingly broader and redder. The circling of the stars growing slower and slower had given place to creeping points of light. At last, some time before I stopped, the sun, red and very large, halted motionless upon the horizon, a vast dome glowing with a dull heat. The work of the tidal drag was accomplished. The earth had come to rest with one face to the sun even as in our own time the moon faces the earth.

The Time Machine (1895 version)

This image of the ancient sun, “a vast dome glowing with dull heat” rests forever on my mind and returns for me in readings as an instant image of the last days of a world, if not devoid of life, emptied of living humanity and, most likely, cleansed by time even of human artifact.

Wells, of course, as a man of science, grounded his description in rational predictive extrapolation from known geological and astrophysical principals. But even such a hopelessly unscientific fellow as C. S. Lewis (his Cosmic Trilogy notwithstanding) conjured this same bloated sun when he needed a bit of shorthand for a world on its death-bed. Consider Chapter V of the penultimate Chronicle of Narnia, The Magician’s Nephew:

Much more light than they had yet seen in that country was pouring in through the now empty doorway, and when the Queen led them out through it they were not surprised to find themselves in the open air. The wind that blew in their faces was cold, yet somehow stale. They were looking from a high terrace and there was a great landscape spread out below them.

Low down and near the horizon hung a great red sun, far bigger than our sun. Digory felt at once that it was also older than ours: a sun near the end of its life, weary of looking down upon that world. To the left of the sun, and higher up, there was a single star, big and bright. Those were the only two things to be seen in the dark sky; they made a dismal group. And on the earth, in every direction, as far as the eye could reach, there spread a vast city in which there was no living thing to be seen. And all the temples, towers, palaces, pyramids, and bridges cast long, disastrous-looking shadows in the light of the withered sun. Once a great river had flowed through the city, but the water had long since vanished, and it was now only a wide ditch of grey dust.

So many echoes of Wells. But here is added the dead, empty city. A world at its end, humanity and, indeed, life wiped away, but still humanity’s works stand mighty.

Almost a century before Well’s Time Machine and far in time from Lewis’ dead city under a swollen sun, the poet Shelley and his friend Horace Smith challenged each other to compose a sonnet on the subject of some newly discovered bits of Egyptian statuary. The result of the challenge was, on Smith’s side, a sadly overshadowed and forgotten poem, and on Shelley’s, Ozymandias, one of the world’s greatest elegies to humanity’s doomed striving against entropy. “Look upon my works ye mighty and despair!” Despair indeed, for these great works, intended and expected to last an eternity, have been reduced to dust in a few dozen lifetimes. One can almost see the red giant sun looming over Shelley’s antique land, as it looms over each of us, doomed to age and die on an aging Earth.

And Smith’s sonnet more explicitly tells us to consider our entropic future:

. . . some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London Stood, holding the wolf in Chace,
He meets some fragment huge and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

I think of an inversion of Conrad’s Marlow in Heart of Darkness sitting on the deck of the Nellie and intoning into the London night “This too [again will be] one of the dark places of the earth.” Smith’s hunter stands like John in New York, in Benet’s “By the Waters of Babylon”, like Charlton Heston’s Taylor in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty in The Planet of the Apes. So many apocalypses.

Most often at the ends of these worlds there is a survivor to observe “the lone and level sands.” The Time Traveler sees the final snows of Earth’s condensing atmosphere; Polly and Digory look on the bloated sun and empty city of the Witch’s world; Matthew Arnold and his unnamed love stand at the window hearing the “long, withdrawing roar” of the sea of faith in “Dover Beach”. But there is one notable but little-noted work in which not a single human observer survives in the landscape of apocalypse. In 1920, the dark shadow of the trenches still brooding on Europe’s collective mind, Sara Teasdale gave us a beautiful and hopeless little poem usually titled “There will come Soft Rains”:

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

The first septet (save the fence wire) is all wild nature. The wire in line 6 and the war in line 7 are the pivot of the piece. Most of the last three couplets is about absent humanity: “war”, “mankind”, “we”. But “we” are not in the landscape. We have left the landscape to nature, and nature is indifferent. Unlike so many other imaginings of human autumn and winter, Teasdale allows of no survivors in her vision. Where Horace Smith imagined a future hunter, Shelley a traveler from an antique land, Wells a traveler in time, Lewis children with world-jumping magic,, and Arnold a meaningless meaning of faithfulness to a companion in a faithless world, Teasdale does not shy away from a world with neither humanity nor human meaning.

Teasdale’s audacity is a rare thing. Think of Ray Bradbury’s post-nuclear-holocaust story titled after Teasdale’s poem. Bradbury’s 1950 “There will come soft rains”, part of his The Martian Chronicles, tells the story of the final days of an automated house, emptied of humanity by nuclear war. As in Teasdale’s poem, the landscape contains only nature and humanity’s artifacts, no humanity. But Bradbury does not allow himself to fully face humanity’s extinction. In the universe of The Martian Chronicles, humanity survives as a small colony on Mars, and , Bradbury expresses an extreme optimism in the title of the next and final story of the Chronicles: humanity’s stay on Mars will be “The Million Year Picnic”.

Evidently it is a difficult thing to imagine, as Teasdale somehow has, the absolute extinction of ourselves. As I’ve been considering this essay, I’ve looked back at a number of works and I found that complete pessimism is a rare thing. I made a little list of works, each with a flippant précis appended:

“Ozymandias” (Shelley/Smith, 1818) — Fortune’s Wheel turns.

The Last Man (Mary Shelley, 1826) — We are excruciatingly done!

The Time Machine (Wells, 1895) — It’ll be done a long, long, long time in the future and we’ll have an unimaginably long run.

“The Machine Stops” (E. M. Forster, 1909) — There’s light at the end of the tunnel.

“There will come soft rains” (Teasdale, 1920) — We’re done and the birds don’t care.

“Twilight” (John W. Campbell, 1934) — We’ll be done eventually, but we’ll build android replacements for ourselves.

Against the Fall of Night/The City and the Stars (Arthur C. Clark, 1948/1956) — Same tunnel as Forster’s, but a whole lot longer.

“There will come soft rains” (Bradbury, 1950) — We’re done for on Earth, but we’re picnicking on Mars!

The Magician’s Nephew (Lewis, 1955) — It’s done in that other place but we’re okay.

Wall-E (Disney/Pixar, 2008) — Everything’s going to be okay in the end!

I won’t draw any conclusions from the fact that the two totally pessimistic works on my list, the two utterly without the offer of hope, are the two written by women. I expect I could look through my library a moment and find something hopeless by a man and something hopeful by a woman. What I find more interesting is the apparent need to provide light at the end of the existential tunnel.

As I was pondering the end of the world, I came across philosopher John Leslie’s The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction (1996) which discusses at length the likelihood that a particular individual – you or I, for example – would be kicking around closer to the beginning or the end of humanity’s run on the planet. I won’t get into the argument in any detail at all, but basically Leslie demonstrates that we’re most likely living close to the end of our run on earth. But, interestingly, Leslie still seems to find hope for our future, that we will outwit probability. Even after a few hundred pages of careful argument of mathematical probabilities, the philosopher desperately clutches at the straws of optimism.

As I read Leslie’s book I came to realize that his probabilistic argument rests on a continued expansion of human population to 10 billion and it remaining there until 2250. I couldn’t help thinking of the closing pages of Colin Tudge’s The Time Before History (1996) in which he argues that if humanity could drastically reduce its numbers by a voluntary two-children-or-less policy, then humanity’s run on earth could last indefinitely and with a high standard of living for all. Such a future would offer far more individuals a happy life than would continued population increase to the point of crash and/or extinction. Again there is hope, if we can control our disastrous drive to spawn large numbers of children.

I also, sadly, found myself reading Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us (2007), ostensibly a scientifically grounded speculation into what the world would be like if humanity disappeared as in Teasdale’s poem. What a hopeless piece of writing! As well as being rife with factual error and bad writing, this is a book with a social agenda that is not susceptible to argument. It pretends to be “What if?” but is actually, “This, Gentle Reader, is NOW, you selfish pig! You’re the problem! And when it really comes down to it, I don’t care about science!” A toxic Trojan horse of a book. And, to top it off, on page 272, in a typically ill-constructed (and cruelly compulsory) sentence, Weisman paraphrases Tudge, whom he never once cites:

“. . . henceforth limit every human female on Earth capable of bearing children to one.”

Compare Tudge’s hopeful argument, an optimistic argument based not simply upon a dread of Wells’ “huge red-hot dome of the sun” glowing over an empty future earth, but rather on humanity’s better angels:

In practice, common sense plus the experience of the past few decades shows that several preconditions must be met if the two-child family is to become the norm worldwide, all of which are difficult in practice, but are conceptually undramatic. First, all efforts must be made to minimize infant mortality. People must know that two children out of two are liable to survive. Second, everyone worldwide needs a pension, so that they do not need to rely upon their children when they stop working. Third, the trend in rich countries toward earlier and earlier retirement must be reversed, for if people retire earlier and the birth rate goes down, then within a couple of decades or less, we will find there are too few young recruits for the job market and indeed that only a small minority of the population is actually working. . . . As modern family planners say, the point is not to coerce but to empower. Coercion is obviously undesirable, but modern experience shows that it is also unnecessary.

The Time Before History, p. 320.

Tudge’s hopeful vision is awfully attractive: A world in which couples are happy with one or two or no children, where being single carries no stigma, where society smiles equally on all the small, happy, healthy, prosperous families, where humanity and nature both have a long life ahead of them on a green and pleasant Earth.

I hope there will come soft rains to that Earth, falling gently on both birds and humans. And I hope, in that fine future, and in this difficult present, every human will very much mind if any bird or tree perishes utterly, whatever the birds and trees might think about us.

On Gluten-Free Bread

Hoy, ayer y mañana se comen caminando,
consumimos un día como una vaca ardiente,
nuestro ganado espera con sus días contados,

pero en tu corazón el tiempo echó su harina,
mi amor construyó un horno con barro de Temuco:
tú eres el pan de cada día para mi alma.
— Neruda, Love Sonnet LXXVII

I never thought I’d be bothered with the gluten-free thing, but, when someone close has a number of food-sensitivities and the request is made to try one’s hand at a gluten-free baguette for a small family dinner, suddenly one is excited by the new challenge.  So, with about two days’ notice, I had to draw on all my experience and knowledge of bread baking and at the same time temporarily forget a lot of what I knew and ignore my expectations and instincts.

The big challenge of gluten-free yeast bread baking is the fact that gluten is the almost-magical ingredient that makes real bread possible. Nothing in the world has quite the properties of that mix of proteins called “wheat gluten”.  Wheat gluten has unparalleled ability to form airtight, extremely elastic little bubbles. Even rye gluten is not a match for the gluten of wheat.  If you try making a loaf of 100% rye bread, look closely at the dough as it rises, particularly if brushed with oil.  You will see — perhaps even hear — bubbles escaping to the surface of the dough.  This is why 100% rye bread is inevitably more dense than a good wheat bread.

What can possibly be added to non-gluten bearing flours that will help form and hold bubbles with something approaching the satisfactory?  Eggs, particularly egg whites, are often recommended. But, did I mention food sensitivities? Living with a mild nut allergy, I’ll not dismiss the concerns of the truly food sensitive. (The fashion/fad food sensitive I will happily dismiss.)

So. No gluten. No eggs. What’s left?

Well there’s this interesting product that is derived from what amounts to bacterial snot. Xanthan gum is a polysacchride, basically a charbohydrate polymer that is secreted by the bacterium Zanthomonas campestris. The gum was discovered by Allene Jeanes and her team in the mid-20th century and approved for use in foods in the U.S. in 1968. It’s a relatively new and very versatile food additive manufactured in a simple process not unlike brewing beer or, indeed, bread making.  A vat of feedstock is inoculated with the bacteria, the concoction is allowed to ferment for a few days, and then a load of isopropyl alcohol is dumped into the vat (that’s the part that makes me smile at the “natural” label on my package of xanthan gum).  The alcohol makes the fresh snot solidify and sink to the bottom of the vat. The gum in rinsed, dried, and ground up for sale in expensive little packets at your local Green, Organic, Whole, Vegan, Gluten-Free Health food store.

Without the xanthan gum, my project could never have risen much above terribly disappointing hardtack. And if I didn’t talk much about the isopropyl alcohol bit, I might be able to get away with it.

I skimmed a few recipes online and read the back of my sack of Bob’s Red Mill Gluten-Free All Purpose Flour — mostly chickpea flour so watch out for gas if you eat a lot of this bread. Then I laid out my basic recipe, based mainly on my own real baguette recipe.  I used a cup of Bob’s flour, quick rise yeast, salt, two teaspoons of xanthan gum, half a cup of water and a splash of lime juice because it was handier than lemon.  I was aiming for something like the texture of real bread dough, but the result was a little crumbly and not at all elastic.  After a bit of time to rest and maybe rise, I threw it into a 450 degree oven for twenty minutes and pulled out — a bread stick! It was dense but tender and chewy with good flavour, but not a baguette by any measure.

For the second attempt, I used the same proportions except for the water. I used a full cup of water and made what I would call a batter rather than a dough.  I oiled the top of the loaf and left it to rise. I could see bubbles popping through the oil.  When it was close to double in size, I gave it 20 minutes at 450 degrees and this time I had something approaching an actual baguette! And it tasted good!  It wasn’t really what I would call bread, but it was a quite satisfying product in itself.

Now I had to produce the presentation loaf, the one that would be the accompaniment to a family chili dinner. A little bit of tinkering with ingredients and process and the following recipe is what I have to call an almost complete gluten-free success (it wasn’t so good for garlic bread, I’m told):

My Gluten-Free Baguette

1 cup Bob’s Red Mill Gluten-Free All Purpose flour
2 generous teaspoons xanthan gum
1 tablespoon fast-rising yeast
1 scant tablespoon baking powder
salt
1 cup water
a splash of vinegar
olive oil for coating the top of the loaf

Mix dry ingredients very well.
Mix water and vinegar.
Mix wet ingredients well into dry ingredients. The dough will be very wet, more like a batter, about the texture of a pound cake batter.

Spoon the batter into a parchment-lined baguette pan. Shape into a smooth loaf with the back of a wet spoon. Spread olive oil over top of loaf.

Let rise for half- to one hour until sort of doubled.

Bake 20 minutes in a pre-heated 450 degree oven. Spritz water onto the loaf in the oven every few minutes.

If you love bread but have a sensitivity to wheat or gluten, there is definitely hope, as long as you don’t have a problem with bacteria being doused in isopropyl alcohol so that bacterial snot solidifies and is collected for your bread. You’re already cooking the life out of yeast cells. Can it be so bad that millions of bacteria died for your baguette?