Filed under: Connections, General Musings, Health, Predictions, SCA, Society, Survival, Violence, Writing stuff
The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.
William Faulkner.
I’ve read my share of Faulkner, as appropriate for someone getting through a high school English class in the 1970s. And then I read a lot more in graduate school. Always loved his use of language, but I never really ‘got’ that quote, though it nicely sums up one of the major themes of his writing. Partly, this was just being young. Partly it was because of a conscious effort on my part to forget some of the worst aspects of my own personal history.
Oh, sure, I understood how the past shapes the future. In fact, that was a big part of my interest in both economics (one of my college degrees) and the SCA – knowing history allows you to understand how things develop in the ways they have, and can provide analogs which can be useful to understanding new situations when they arise. (That is discussed explicitly in Communion of Dreams, in relation to the the industrial archaeologist brought onto the research team.) But for me, the past has always been the past: dead, immutable.
Until now.
* * * * * * *
As mentioned previously, we’re in the process of dividing up Martha Sr’s estate. This includes the household items. When someone has lived in one house, and raised a family there, for over 50 years, lots and lots of stuff accumulates. In an effort to be completely fair and above board, we’ve had assessors in to evaluate the furniture and household items, so that each family member involved can be sure that they get their share. This coming weekend my wife and her siblings are going to go through and divvy everything up. Then over the coming weeks stuff will get moved out and we’ll deal with whatever no one wanted. Eventually, only those things which are ours will remain, and my wife and I can proceed to actually getting settled here.
Because when we sold our house and moved in here to care for Martha Sr, we wanted to disrupt her home environment as little as possible. We wedged ourselves into rooms which she didn’t use much, put a lot of stuff into storage. It was a pain, but one we were willing to put up with while we cared for her.
Now, of course, I am looking forward to actually getting settled. As I told a friend recently:
It was frustrating to be shoe-horned in here the last six years, but I was willing to put up with it for Martha Sr’s sake. As I have been recovering from the care-giving, I have been wanting more and more to feel less and less cramped up here – I can only put up with this level of chaos and annoyance for so long.
But of course it is a little different for my wife, who now sees her childhood home being split up, her memories associated with this or that piece of furniture bereft of a physical connection.
* * * * * * *
I never met my father in law. He died before my wife and I got together. But he was something of a local character, and over the years here I have had many people tell me anecdotes about him. Seems most people either loved him or hated him. He evidently carried on a number of long-term feuds.
One such was with a local builder, who is now the executor of a family trust which owns the property next to us (part of a large tract in our neighborhood which has caused some grief for people here). For various legal reasons (limitations on the trust), this property has always been undeveloped. But now those reasons are being resolved. And it turns out that what we thought for some 50 years is part of our property is actually part of the trust. This includes a substantial strip of our lawn and even a chunk of my garden, about half of the fenced in area I created for my dog, and a substantial number of huge trees. My wife’s family has maintained and used the strip of property for that entire time.
So for the better part of the last year we’ve been involved in some legal wrangling to settle this issue. Because, you know, the matter couldn’t be settled simply, due to the aforementioned feud. And yesterday things came to a bit of a head, as the son of the executor came onto our property to ‘do some maintenance’.
I had words with him.
OK, let’s recap: I, who never met my father-in-law, had a potentially dangerous confrontation with the son of a man who had a feud with my FIL.
Given my current attempts to recover from prolonged and excess stress, this could have gotten stupid very quickly. And I spent a lot of time afterwards carefully considering the situation. And somewhere in there last night I realized that I finally understood just exactly what Faulkner meant. Now I know why border disputes and blood feuds are carried on for generations, pulling people in who otherwise would react in more sane and rational ways. Because, without desire or intent on my part, I am in the middle of exactly one such episode of history intruding on the present.
This is insane.
* * * * * * *
My wife and I discussed the matter at some length last night, once I had stepped back from the adrenaline stew that had me jumped up. Our attorney will seek a restraining order on the other parties to prevent them from doing anything to the disputed strip of property until the matter is resolved in court – to just keep things ‘status quo’. I have asked for specific instructions from our attorney about what I should do in the event that we have a recurrence – ignore it, call the cops, confront them, what?
But beyond that, I have decided that I am going to try and disentangle myself from this historical mess. I just want a resolution to the matter, and of the feud, so I can get on with my life. But I cannot make that resolution – this is a problem for others to sort out; their problem, not mine. Because I finally ‘got’ what Faulkner meant, and understand that unless I disentangle myself I am likely to contribute to a perpetuation of this feud, damaging my own sanity and soul in the process.
Jim Downey
Via Brian at Liftport, a link to this site hosting the entire series of James Burke’s The Day the Universe Changed. As Brian said in an email:
Jim,
You’re written before that you admire James Burke’s work on television.
While I don’t condone piracy, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out
that a blog is hosting a download of the ‘Day the Universe Changed’.
One episode per day, file will be up for a week and then it’s gone.I put the first episode on my laptop, let it play and .. my kids liked
it. Which is what I expected but .. you never know.I might be kidding myself by I think it was firing off neurons in my
13-year old son’s brain. I have no idea what my eight year old really
thought (he said he liked it) but he’s not the type to just watch
anything on TV; if it’s boring he’ll wander away and play with legos
or his dinosaur collection or go fool around in the backyard.
Yes, I have written about the series, and Burke previously. It really is excellent – and you should either add the thing to your NetFlix queue, buy it outright, or at the very least avail yourself of the chance to see it online.
Thanks, Brian!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Connections, DARPA, Expert systems, General Musings, James Burke, Music, Predictions, Science, Society, Survival, tech, Writing stuff, YouTube
I’ve mentioned previously the work of science historian James Burke. This past weekend I finished watching the last couple of episodes of his ground-breaking series Connections. Overall, you would probably enjoy watching the series, and will find a lot of chuckles over what was “high tech” in 1978 versus the reality of what we have today. But the closing bit was just stunning – it was a prediction of the need for and use of the Internet before DARPA had even begun to let the cat out of the bag. Here’s the last ten minutes:
In particular the bit that starts out at about 5:00 is the culmination of his entire thesis about change – that understanding how things change is the key to understanding everything. At about 6:45 is this remarkable passage (transcribed myself, since I couldn’t readily find it online – how’s that for irony?):
Scientific knowledge is hard to take, because it removes the reassuring crutches of opinion and ideology. And the reason why so many people may be thinking about throwing away those crutches is because thanks to science and technology, they have begun to know that they don’t know so much, and if they are to have more say in what happens in their lives, more freedom to develop their abilities to the full, they have to be helped towards that knowledge they know exists and that they don’t possess.
And by ‘helped towards that knowledge’, I don’t mean give everybody a computer and say “help yourself.” Where would you even start? No, I mean, trying to find ways to translate the knowledge, to teach us to ask the right questions. See, we’re on the edge of a revolution in communications technology that is going to make that more possible than ever before. Or, if that’s not done, to cause an explosion of knowledge that will leave those of us who don’t have access to it as powerless as if we were deaf, dumb, and blind.
Digital divide, anyone? Anyway, I find it just fascinating that Burke was so dead-on in his prediction of the Internet, even if he didn’t have the term for it, and yet even he failed to understand how phenomenally all-encompassing it would be. Whereas he thought that it would be impossible to just give people access to the information and say “go to it”, that is exactly what we’ve got – and self-organization of information and resources like Wikis make that information understandable, not just accessible.
When, as often happens, I feel somewhat pessimistic, that our greed or violent tendencies will outstrip our maturing as a culture/species, it is helpful to come across something like this. And I think that is why I read SF, and have written Communion of Dreams: because there, with all the ugliness and human folly, there is nonetheless room for hope. Look at what we’ve done in just the last thirty years – what more can we accomplish in the next forty, if we don’t destroy ourselves?
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Connections, Daily Kos, Feedback, General Musings, Promotion, Publishing, Society, Writing stuff
Just thought I’d take a moment and do a little meta stuff this morning.
First off, over 6,250 have now downloaded the novel. The pace has slowed somewhat in the last couple of months, with just 5 or 10 people a day downloading it. Still, I find that encouraging, given how little effort I have put into trying to promote the book. If you know someone who enjoys SF, send ’em a link to it – a cheap and quick Christmas gift, if you want to just send them the .pdf of the the book. I figure eventually this will help me get the book published, so the more downloads, the better.
A little more surprising to me is how popular this blog has become. Typically, I get between 50 and 70 hits a day now, and the total is over 10,500 views, and that doesn’t include people who get an RSS feed. (If you do read this by RSS, either drop me a note or leave a comment, would you? I would like to have some sense of how many people do, and the WordPress software doesn’t let you know that.) I don’t get a lot of comments, which surprises me a bit, given how my posts (and cross-postings) elsewhere tend to generate discussion. But that’s OK, as there has been a slow but steady rise in readership and linkage from other sites. Sure, it’s nothing like UTI or Daily Kos, but still, I’m pleased that my random wonderings do regularly draw readers.
And yes, I do a lot of random wondering about things. Just a glance to the left will show you that – there are 239 categories. And this will make post number 241. For a blog which started out with the ostensible goal of discussing my novel, it has turned into something else almost entirely. But that’s OK – as I told a friend via email this morning, this allows me to keep my intellectual and writing skills somewhat sharpened during this time when my attention span is compromised by the demands of care-giving. If you figure my average post runs something like 500 words, I’ve written another full-length novel here – but given my current lack of ability to really concentrate and plan, a novel would be out of the question presently. This helps keep those other writing skills fresh, and that’s about the best I can hope for.
So, thanks for coming by. And Merry Christmas to you and yours.
Jim Downey
Following back a link to this blog, I came across a great source of space-related links that I thought I’d share: The North Dakota Space Grant Consortium links page. Someone has spent a hell of a lot of time to compile this – and it’s likely going to take me even longer to explore all these sites thoroughly. But I thought I’d share.Jim Downey
Filed under: Connections, Fermi's Paradox, General Musings, James Burke, Predictions, Saturn, Science Fiction, Space, tech, Titan, Writing stuff
In my previous post, I commented that the universe had just changed with the discovery of 581 c. A friend who saw this responded that no, the uninverse didn’t change – our perception of it did.
Well, yes, and that was exactly what I meant. I was referring to the wonderful series The Day the Universe Changed by science historian James Burke. If you are unfamiliar with it, by all means track down the series and enjoy. It is primarily about Kuhn’s concept of paradigm shift, leavened with a nice helping of applied philosophy. If you’ve seen any of the Connections series that Burke has done, you’ve probably got an idea how he would approach this issue.
The idea that our perception of the universe fundamentally determines our actions is one that I use explicitly in Communion of Dreams. [Spoiler alert.] In the book, the entirety of the scientific community believes that ours is the only civilization still active in at least our little corner of the universe. That belief is challenged by the discovery of an alien artifact on Titan, the moon of Saturn. From then on the story line spins out exploring the very nature of perception and knowledge in the very midst of a paradigm shift – all tightly controlled (at least at first) within the small community of people involved. At each stage of revelation, the characters have to confront and integrate new knowledge, and how they cope with that radical shift is at the very heart of the story that I tell.
This is why after posting my brief “welcome” last night, I kicked back and had a wee dram of my favorite scotch. Because whether or not most people realize it, this event was a turning point in our history. Yes, we all expected that sooner or later such a planet would be found – but now it has happened, and the universe around us is now viewed differently. Sure, the universe itself hasn’t changed – but how we understand it has undergone a shift. Just a small one, but an important one nonetheless.
And just think what will happen when we discover life elsewhere. Particularly intelligent, technological life. And after you start to understand the impact that will have, sit back and once again consider what it is my characters in Communion are going through.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 