Saturday, April 14, 2018

Present: A Quotation.6

Once Later

It is not until later
that you have to be young

it is one of those things
you meant to do later

but by then there is
someone else living there

with the shades rolled down
how could you have been young there

at that time
with all that was expected

then what happened to
the expectations

there is no sign of them there
a shadow passes across the window shad

what do they know in there
whoever they are

W.S. Merwin
published in New York Review of Books
May 7,2015

Friday, April 13, 2018

Today

It feels like today could be the day.

It's Friday the 13th--what could possibly go wrong?


Wednesday, April 11, 2018

The Unknown Zone

Has there ever been a film or a novel or story that portrayed an insane or deranged President of the United States?  There must have been, but it seems notable to me that I can't think of one.

Apart from dramatizing some moments late in Nixon's last days, there hasn't been a portrayal based on history.  But even in imaginative fiction, when many shocking things around the presidency have been portrayed, the President himself is usually a steady and sane character.

In the early 1960s, there were several provocative books and movies portraying insanity in Washington.  Seven Days in May (1962) dramatized the unthinkable possibility of a military coup in the US, in which a self-righteous and perhaps insane General comes very close to taking over the country.

 It was a taut suspense drama, with the main character based partly on a couple of real Generals, Edwin Walker and Curtis LeMay--LeMay was the Air Force Chief of Staff.  But the President himself is not insane--he's the victim of the plot.

President Kennedy read the novel and was said to believe such a coup could happen.  There were tensions with LeMay, especially around the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he and other generals were pushing for thermonuclear war.

By the time the movie came out in 1964, Kennedy had been assassinated, and the topic was even more sensitive.  If memory serves, Burt Lancaster played the character of the General as borderline insane.

Fail-Safe, another White House nuclear war crisis suspense drama, came out in those same years--the book in 1962, the movie in 1964. It, too had an unthinkable premise--a US bomber gets the order to bomb Moscow by mistake, and after efforts to recall it and even shoot it down, the President is left with the option of trading the destruction of Moscow by hydrogen bomb with the self-inflicted destruction of New York City, in order to avert a total thermonuclear exchange.

The situation, a product of the Mutually Assured Destruction policy (MAD), was an insane result of an insane policy held by both the US and the USSR for the decades of the Cold War.  Some of the characters--including a White House advisor--proceed so rationally on their abstract premises that they come to insane conclusions about what to do, which again involves unleashing thermonuclear war.  The insanity of it all (including the dependence on supposedly fail-safe technology that started it all by failing) is the point of the book and the movie.  But the President, played by Henry Fonda, is not crazy.

After the book but before the movie came out, was the 1964 movie everybody remembers: Dr. Strangelove.  The premise was basically the same as Fail-Safe but the movie was not: it was the definition of a black comedy.

 Nearly every character in it is despicable and in some sense insane (including George C. Scott's portrayal of an Air Force General also based on Curtis LeMay), except for two: a minor British officer and the President of the United States.  (Though the situation is so insane, even Peter Seller's President occasionally sounds crazy.  "You can't fight in here!  This is the war room!")

There may be other stories I'm forgetting, but in every movie I can think of, in which the President of the US is a character, that person may be many bad things, but not insane.

There is probably good reason.  Even though imaginative fiction has few boundaries, it does have rules.  The fictional premise has to be portrayed in a convincing way, and the situation has to be believable.

 It's difficult to know how to play a crazy President.  (I don't think Anthony Hopkins actually played Nixon as crazy in Oliver Stone's Nixon, but I may not be remembering that movie accurately.)

But in terms of the premise, the idea of a President suddenly showing signs of mental illness or instability shouldn't be outside the realm of the believable.  The drama would be how the other people in the White House and Congress realize it, and prevent it from becoming a catastrophe for the country and the world.

We don't know the extent, but at least a few Presidents (Wilson and Reagan come to mind) may have not been in full possession of their faculties towards the end of their presidencies, but others kept the system working.  So it would be believable that a mentally unstable President could be contained and if necessary, removed.

But the real reason, I believe, that we haven't seen a story about a crazy President is that it is too scary to even contemplate.  Not even in fiction.

But now we have one in fact.  We have a President who is not only psychologically unstable, with little control over his impulses and his temper, who seems to live in a world of delusions, prejudices and profound ignorance.  But he is increasingly surrounded, not by stable, thoughtful and knowledgeable people who can put the interests of country above political and personal consideration, but by mediocre sycophants.  Plus at least one who may be nearly as crazy as he is.

This would be the new National Security Advisor who is a combination of those far right Generals and super-rational MAD theorists of the 60s, and a hot-tempered psycho with impulse issues like his boss.  This is a dangerous situation beyond our collective imagination--even, it seems, in fiction.  (Though not all of us failed to imagine it.)

We are in uncharted territory, the unknown zone, and every day that brings some dramatic development--FBI, Syria most recently--brings up this awful thought from the depths of denial.  And in the short term we're pretty helpless.

But at least we can recognize the extraordinary moment this is.  And hope we get through it.

Sunday, April 08, 2018

The Time Machine.8: Who Makes the Future

“...there is a sense of courage to live for the future because we need no longer be helpless pawns of circumstance but may confidently embark on a course of action to influence the future for good by fostering the best possible development of society and ultimately of the human race." 
 Roslynn D. Haynes

The Traveller sits in the sunshine of his last day in this future, grieving for the human race. His afternoon musings end with a nap. He awakens as evening approaches, and calmly walks towards the building where he is sure the time machine is hidden. With a few remaining matches in his pocket, he carries his crowbar to pry open the bronze door.

He is surprised to find the door open and his time machine visible inside. He drops his crowbar and enters confidently, realizing it is likely to be a trap. Sure enough the bronze door closes and he is in darkness. But he has his matches, and the Morlocks, their eyes remade for darkness, will scatter with the bright light and fire.

Except that these matches won’t light without the edge of the box to strike them on, something he hadn’t noticed before. It is the last in the series of his obvious absent-minded blunders, which began when he failed to equip himself for his time journey in the first place.

The Morlocks attack him but he manages to attach the crucial levers he carried, and he engages the machine. Fighting off Morlocks, he isn’t quite in control of the machine and it careens into the future.

Once again he goes forward, at first accidentally and then several more times deliberately for short visits leading up to the awesomely quiet, gruesomely garish last gasps of the world, shortly before entropy's final triumph. He encounters several life forms, including giant crabs, and a small creature the size of a human head crawling out of a still sea. He is witnessing the last moments of the living planet Earth.

The timing of the world’s end and its general nature are in accord with the science of the times, though later surmises differ. Nevertheless, the eloquence of Wells’ writing remains. This vision greatly impressed readers of the time. It may well be, as Ursula LeGuin wrote, that with this book and this passage in particular, the end of the world first becomes a subject of fiction.

Yet this desolate moment is ennobled for us because the Traveller is there. Once again—and in a sense for the last time—human witnessing transforms what seems to be the cold mechanisms of the universe into something soulful, through the human medium of story.

The Traveller's brief visits to the long distant death of life in a final exhaustion, is more than a coda to the longer tale. It seems to follow from the horrific stasis of the Eloi/Morloch period. Ironically, this is the first story about change through evolutionary time, yet it dwells on a society in which there is no longer even an obvious potential for change.

Humanity has divided against itself, and its houses of culture cannot stand. Without a synthesis that is synonymous with soul, entropy had no countering principle, no gathering of energy and organization. Poetically more than literally, this scene reinforces the sense of doom unwinding from the failure of humanity.

The Traveller returns home, and tells his story. No one believes him. The next day the narrator (whose name, we have just indirectly learned, is Hillyer) sees the Traveller disappear on his time machine.

Disappearance leaves us with a mystery of where the Traveller is, what happened to him, whether he might come back, and of "what happens next"—the momentum of the endless story as well as the mythical promise of the return.

We now see why there was a narrator other than the Traveller in the first place: to confirm the sight of him disappearing on his machine, to tell us that he has vanished for three years, and to leave us with a message of hope in a pretty bleak story.

Readers might find hope for our future in the Traveller's ethical behavior, in his openness to the value of beauty, and in the message—the prophesy-- he brought back as a cautionary tale.

But within the story the hope expressed is by the narrator as he reflects on the Traveller's story and his disappearance. He acknowledges that the Traveller "thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end."

Though this is not Hillyer's view he still concludes, "If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so."

To do that requires not denial but stretching the human capability for complex thinking and feeling and acting to meet the challenges of a complex world.

Hillyer’s statement suggests an often quoted observation by the 20th century American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald: "…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

This statement is in turn often seen as an extension of John Keats’ definition of ‘Negative Capability,’ or the ability to remain in a state of uncertainty and doubt. Fitzgerald did admire Keats, but he also admired Wells. (There’s even a long discussion of Wells towards the end of Fitzgerald’s college novel, This Side of Paradise.)  He likely read The Time Machine and Hillyer's statement.

Further suggestion of that comes in Fitzgerald's rarely quote next sentence. He went on to give an example—a very apt example in the light of Hillyer’s observation at the end of The Time Machine.  Fitzgerald’s full statement is this:

"…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."

To the ultimate narrator of The Time Machine, the future is still blank, still full of possibilities, as it is for us. This may well be another reason the story is told by Hillyer: he has not experienced the future that the Traveller saw, but only heard an account of it. So for him the future is still what hasn’t happened yet.

If we take the full Fitzgerald statement as an interpretation of Hillyer's, is it what Wells meant? There is some evidence that it is.

A little more than a decade after this book’s publication, Wells walked the White House grounds with President Theodore Roosevelt. He recounted the conversation in his autobiography of the 1930s.

 Roosevelt brought up the vision of the future Wells created in The Time Machine. “’Suppose, after all,’ he said slowly, ‘that should prove to be right, and it all ends in your butterflies and morlocks. That doesn’t matter now. The effort’s real. It’s worth going on with. It’s worth it. It’s worth it, even so...’”

In an earlier paragraph, Wells had already summed up Teddy Roosevelt’s attitude towards “a pessimistic interpretation of the future,” by using—without quotation marks—Hillyer’s words: “Only he chose to live as if this were not so.”

Many years later, on the eve of World War II, Wells affirmed his own similar belief regarding the human future.  "I think the odds are against man," he wrote, "but it is still worth fighting against them."

We should also recall that this future depicted in The Time Machine is not a specific prediction. It’s a story. It depicts one possible way the future could evolve from the present. The way to avoid that future is to change the cause—the stark and growing division of rich and poor-- in the present.

A few years after The Time Machine was published, Wells told an interviewer that he never intended its future to be seen as inevitable and a reason for despair.

“The great thing I had in my mind, as the book developed, was this—the responsibility of men to mankind. Unless humanity hangs together, unless all strive for the species as a whole, we shall end in disaster.”

To live as though it were not so is to help form a future in which humanity survives as a whole: body, mind, spirit and soul. Because hope for the future is a condition of the present. As is the effort to save the future.

To be continued... For prior posts in this series, click on the "Soul of the Future" label below.