-
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mean not that I'm a nervous flier or anything, but this is not what one wishes
to read before boarding a plane, correct? So that's one. Plus those other two
instances; of travel, a conversation/argument started by a book (by two
books), reason against faith both times, somehow seem to belong together with
this journey; bus, train, plane, a travelling trinity of functioning
technology to compare and contrast with the paranoid psychoses of religious
belief.
What do you do with these people? (Never mind what they might do to us, if
they ever get the whip hand; what chance would I have to teach 'Reason and
Compassion in
Twentieth-Century Poetry' in Tehran?) Reason shapes the future, but
superstition infects the present.
And coincidence convinces the credulous. Two things happen at the same time,
or one after another, and we assume there must be a link; well, we sacrificed
a virgin last year, and there was a good harvest. Of course the ceremony to
raise the sun works - it comes up every morning doesn't it? I say my prayers
each night and the world hasn't ended yet ...
Dung beetle thinking. Life is too complicated for there not to be continual
coincidences, and we just have to come to terms with the fact that they merely
happen and aren't ordained, that some things occur for no real reason
whatsoever, and that this is not a
punishment and that is not a reward. Good grief; the most copper-bottomed,
platinum-card proof of divine intervention, of some holy master-plan, would be
if there were no coincidences at all! That really would look suspicious.
I don't know. Maybe I'm the one who's wrong. I don't mean that either the
Christians or the Muslims actually have the truth, that either the geriatric
gibberings of Rome or the hysterical spurtings out of Qom contain anything
remotely resembling the real bottom line about Where We Come From or What It's
All About, but that both might represent the way humanity truly wants to be;
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perhaps they are its truest images. Maybe reason is the aberration (thought
perishes).
A little girl - long curly blonde hair, enormous blue eyes, with one of those
unspillable plastic cups held chubbily in both hands - has just appeared in
the aisle beside me, expression very serious. She's gazing at me with that
disinterested intensity only little kids seem to be capable of. Gone again.
Absolutely gorgeous. But how do I know her parents aren't Christian
fundamentalists and she won't grow up sincerely believing Darwin was an agent
of the devil and evolution a dangerous nonsense?
I guess I don't. (Hey! I used 'guess' instead of 'suppose'! I'm thinking like
an American already!) I guess I don't, and it wouldn't matter if I did. Let
the crazies burn rock albums and hunt the Ark on Ararat;
let them look stupid while we look to the future. We just have to hope there
are always more of us than there are of them, or at least that we are more
influential, better placed. Whatever.
Whatever indeed. I smell food. My semi-circular canals tell me - I think -
that we are starting to level out, reaching our cruising altitude. Dark
outside the windows. Last coincidence:
I never did specify in the poem, but the wee daft town - dismal, rain-soaked -
in 'Jack'
was called Lockerbie (about the only time you might have seen or heard the
name was when we were driving up to Scotland - it's just off the A74, not far
over the border). And -
according to this handy route map in my very own complimentary Pan Am
in-flight mag -
we'll fly right over it. I suspect old Jack kicked the bucket years ago, to go
to whatever award he imagined might be his, but if he isn't dead, and he does
look out of his window tonight (and he finally cleaned his glasses), I wonder
if he
(Piece PP/n.k.no. 29271, recovered grid ref. NY 241770, at 1435 on 24/12/88.
A4 Refill
Pad, part, torn.)
The State of the Art
CONTENTS
1. Excuses And Accusations
2. Stranger Here Myself
2.1: Well I Was In The Neighbourhood
2.2: A Ship With A View
2.3: Unwitting Accomplice
3. Helpless In The Face Of Your Beauty
3.1: Synchronize Your Dogmas
3.2: Just Another Victim Of The Ambient Morality
3.2: Arrested Development
4. Heresiarch
4.1: Minority Report
4.2: Happy Idiot Talk
4.3: Ablation
4.4: God Told Me To Do It
4.5: Credibility Problem
5. You Would If You Really Loved Me
5.1: Sacrificial Victim
5.2: Not Wanted On Voyage
6. Undesirable Alien
6.1: You'll Thank Me Later
6.2: The Precise Nature Of The Catastrophe
6.3: Halation Effect
6.4: Dramatic Exit, , Thank You And Goodnight
Or
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7. Perfidy, Or
, A Few Words From 'The Drone'
1: Excuses And Accusations
Parharengyisa
Rasd-Codurersa
Listach
Diziet
Ja'andeesih
Embless
Petrain
Sma dam Kotosklo da'Marenhide
(location as name)
(c/o SC)
2.288-93
Dear Mr Petrain
I do hope you will accept my apologies for keeping you waiting so long.
Included herewith
- at last! - is the information you asked me for all that time ago. My
personal well-being, after which you so kindly enquired, is all I could hope
for. As you will probably have been told, and doubtless observed from my
location (or rather lack of it) above, I am no longer in
Contact ordinaire, and my position in Special Circumstances is such that I
occasionally have to leave my present address for considerable periods of
time, often with only a few hours notice during which to attend personally to
any outstanding business. Apart from these sporadic jaunts, my life is one of
lazy luxury on a sophisticated stage three-four
(uncontacted) where I enjoy all the benefits of an interestingly, if not
exotically, foreign planet sufficiently developed to possess a reasonably
civilized demeanour without suffering overmuch the global sameness which so
often accompanies such progress.
A pleasant life, then, and when I am called away it usually feels more like a
holiday than an unwelcome interruption.
In fact, the only grit in the eye is a rather self-important Offensive-model
drone whose exaggerated concern for my physical safety, if not my peace of
mind, frequently becomes more exasperating than it is comforting (my theory is
that SC finds drones whose robust pugnacity has led them to some
overly-violent act in the past and then tells these pathological devices to
guard their human Special Circumstancer successfully, or be componented. But
that is by the bye).
Anyway, what with the remoteness of my habitation and the fact I've been
off-planet for the past hundred days or so (with drone, of course), and the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] - zanotowane.pl
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