August 2009 Archives

"The concept of a 'speaker for the dead' arose from my experiences with death and funerals. I have written of this at greater length elsewhere; suffice it to say that I grew dissatisfied with the way that we use our funerals to revise the life of the dead, to give the dead a story so different from their, actual life that, in effect, we kill them all over again. No, that is too strong. Let me just say that we erase them, we edit them, we make them into a person much easier to live with than the person who actually lived." -Orson Scott Card

Normal people get a couple of lines at a few cents per word in the local paper, but with the papers dying, we probably don't even get that anymore. A death certificate stamped by the county, an entry in a ledger somewhere, musty whether electronic or not, and the only mark of your passing is a funeral attended sparsely by a few old friends waiting their turn and family who will be sad this day, but less with each tomorrow. We cut through the world like blades, and when we've left the flesh, the flesh heals over. Most of us don't even leave a mark. The great ones though, whether they're particularly keen or just have the luck to strike a vulnerable spot, they leave scars that never quite heal.

We like to think that the good ones slice to heal, to excise the tumors and gain access to the deeper ails of the body. The bad ones, we believe, are just twisting the knife. The secret is that there are no bad ones. Even the worst of men who try to change the world, think that they are helping it, think that the blood and scars are worth it to fix something, even if they're the only ones to see it. They are all defined by the same mad chutzpah that insists that they are different, that they have the right to cut deeper and deeper. It's only an insane man who believes that he is so special that he has the right to change the world. But without that madness, there would never be any change at all.

Ted Kennedy outlived his brothers by more than four decades, but never quite strode out of their shadows, so long because they were cast at dawn. He was a Kennedy, that name uttered with reverence by half and spite by the rest. It's become a word like "liberal," used interchangeably as a point of pride and a slur depending on the speaker. Ted Kennedy would probably never have been a senator without the aura of his brothers and the piles of money old Joe Kennedy made during Prohibition. But then, most of us probably wouldn't have TVs, cars and computers if we hadn't had the good luck to be born American, heirs of a national fortune built on a stolen continent. We're a nation of bandits and cowboys, the Kennedys but a distillation of the common stock, not better or worse, just concentrated potency.

The drunk who crashed his car into a river, saved himself, left a girl behind, waited until morning to call the police. A coward.

The statesman who eulogized his brother, reigned in the Senate for forty years, fought for progress. Lion of the Senate.

Which is real, which counts? The immortal sides take up their inevitable positions, dictated not by the man but their pre-designated roles. He was a great statesman, flawed yes, but great no matter what Fox News tells you. He was a horrible liberal, a statesman yes, but a horrible liberal no matter what MSNBC tells you. The problem with eulogies is in the eulogizer not the eulogized.

There is no great scale that balances our rights and wrongs. We are both damned and saintly all at once. Sin and virtue are like oil and water, they don't mix together into some shade of gray, they exist side by side, dark and light. And when that pallid mixture of our deeds is poured swirling down the drain, only the warped mirror of memory remains to tell those who remain what shade we once were.

There's an art to the obituaries of the notable, an attempt to fade the newly deceased into the sepia tint of old photos overnight. We rip our heads around at an impossible angle to try to snag a glimpse of what this will look like in twenty years time, when the weight of history has descended and cast judgment on the dead. Obituaries are the cover notes of biographies yet to be written.

"I rejected that idea. I thought that a more appropriate funeral would be to say honestly, what that person was and what that person did. But to me, 'honesty' doesn't simply mean saying all the unpleasant things instead of saying only the nice ones. It doesn't even consist of averaging them out. No, to understand who a person really was, what his or her life really meant, the speaker for the dead would have to explain their self-story--what they meant to do, what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in. That's the story that we never know, the story that we never can know--and yet, at the time of death, it's the only story truly worth telling." -Orson Scott Card

We like to think that we're immortal, that even if our bones turn to dust, something of us will live on. It's the demiurge, the spark of divinity that burns in each soul, the consuming desire to create. In Christian mythology, God stamped Adam's soul with that gift, but withheld it from the angels. Lucifer rebelled at that final indignity. The ember of creation drives our every impulse, whether to build a house, a career, a business, an empire, a theory, or a story. Even the least ambitious of us strive for eternity by creating children. There's a simple underlying faith to civilization, independent of any religion or agnosticism. Humanity is eternal, and therefore that which we create echoes in eternity.

If that myth fell, would civilization fall with it? It may have happened before.

The biosphere, the area in which life lives, ranges from about 8400 meters below sea level to 5400 above, a thickness of only eight and a half miles. If the Earth was a pool ball, the biosphere would be thinner than the pool ball's coating of paint. The dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid only six miles long. That's a dust mite pinging into our metaphorical pool ball. We can take some element of pride in our insignificance, like raging fans of a team that hasn't won in a decade but still keeps showing up to play with full stands.

But we haven't even begun to appreciate that we are not just small in size but in time. Our entire civilization has erupted from clever bald apes into space travelers in twenty thousand years or so, depending on where you draw the precise line between animal and civilization. Life has existed on Earth for around 3.6 billion years. If the history of life on Earth were projected into a 24 hour day, the entire history of our civilization would have taken place in the last half second. Half a second. Every tragedy and triumph, the rise and fall of every empire, a foot note at the end of our planet's day. If we annihilated ourselves in an orgy of atomic fire, how long would it take for us to be replaced? Even if we scoured every bit of life from land, even the cockroaches, it would be but a few seconds to the planet before some enterprising microbes flourished into clever beasts who built their own nuclear rockets. We comfort ourselves in some twisted way, imagine that those inevitable successors will wonder at our ruins, page through our decaying libraries, puzzle out some lesson from our self destruction. We imagine that we will live on as some ghost of a memory.

But the instruments and relics of technical society disintegrate at a far faster rate than geologic time. Toss a circuit board onto your lawn and watch it disintegrate day by day. In the twenty odd years since Chernobyl caused the evacuation of the nearby city of Pripyat, nature has reclaimed the city despite the fallout. Soccer fields have become forests, libraries mere mulch for soil, winds and rain gradually pound even the concrete into dust. In another hundred years there will be little left but misshapen lumps of residual concrete and rusted iron. In a thousand? If we destroy ourselves, no one will wonder at our monuments, for they will have been dust for a thousand generations, subsumed into the soil and bedrock. No one will ever know we existed, save for a fossilized skeleton or two indistinguishable from those left by Cro-Magnon man.

There could have been dozens, perhaps hundreds of technical societies predating us, leaving nothing behind to mark their passage. How did they disappear? The usual suspects, none of which would be detectable at a geologic distance. Even a nuclear war would be swallowed in a few million years by the planet. The fossil record reveals unimaginable mass extinctions at intervals of a few tens of millions of years. There is no evidence of prior technical civilizations, but we wouldn't expect to find any at a remove of eons.

Whether we are only the latest in a line of technical civilizations, or whether we are the first such to arise on this planet, certain conclusions become apparent with the realization of the sheer scale of time and space. First, we are only the latest living to haunt a vast and unmarked graveyard. Second, we must learn to think on a larger scale, if we are to survive and truly make our mark on eternity.

"The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program." -Larry Niven

Ah, well so here we are, a day late and a post short it seems. I had grand plans for the 26th <i>Burning Violin</i>. It's the sixth month mark, which means we're getting serious, no chance of breaking up now by text message. Of course the giant fancy post took far far longer than anticipated, and is still in an amorphous state of unfinishedness. I'll try to get it done next week, a belated big deal, but as a way of pleading for forgiveness, here's a sweet love story with a happy ending.

Helix

What you don't understand is that I had to leave, I had no choice, damn it! Oh my friends were understanding, and my family too, but they didn't, couldn't comprehend what really had happened. I loved her, yes, with every part of my soul. But what made her death so terrible was not that she slipped away from me day by day as she faded more into cancerous delirium, but that she became more and more present in my mind. My God, she did not die!

From the first day I met her I felt a connection, a sort of transcendent, soul-gripping deja-vu that hinted of a past that was so ancient and eternal that neither of us could seize its true meaning. I know, you say that it was youthful infatuation, the fast dying flame of high school love. You are wrong. I felt, no, I knew that we had been linked eons before, that our souls had never orbited far apart. Indeed they may have been one, only now torn into separate bodies by some perverse deity.

I could sense what she thought, what she was doing, if she was but a room away, or across town. On some other plane of existence, some unearthly power had welded our souls together. I thought it a blessing then. But now? Ha! Now I rather think it was a trick of the devil, earthly damnation for some unimaginable crime. For it did not end!

As she approached her death in that sterile hospital, I began to feel her even more clearly, as if I no longer sensed the brushing of her soul past mine with whispering tendrils of thought, but physically felt it pressing into my head. For those last few days the intimacy grew closer, until it was omnipresent, watching me and sharing my thoughts with a closeness that we only fleetingly experienced during life. And when she died! Oh hell of hells! She was there, everywhere. I could feel her behind me, standing next to me. Even at her own funeral.

Soon I felt her talking to me, hearing her inside my head day and night. I thought I was surely mad, lost in some disease that had snapped every part of my mind. But it wasn't her voice that I feared, it was what it said. Beckoning, calling out my name, she wanted me to join her on the other side. I had sworn to love her until death did us part, and I had. It was she who was to blame. I couldn't stand it after some time, her calling me at every moment, speaking my name; I suppose souls have no need of sleep. Worse though was that I began to slip away as her soul became closer. Our minds began to mesh - oh I couldn't bear it! At whatever level our souls had been bound, they remained so as her body rotted in the ground.

I had to leave it all, she was drawing me away and I was losing myself. The friends, the family, they don't know. They think I ran to escape her memory. No, I ran to escape her presence. Soon her presence dimmed, as I moved from city to city. It seemed I might have found some relief at last. But heaven, or hell, twisted another knife in my gut and the sheer emptiness ate at me. It was all or nothing by fated decree. The balance life gave our souls is forever lost, replaced by either frightful fusion or utter desolation.

But I fear now. Yes, I am horribly afraid, because the visions, the closeness has begun to return. Once again she has found me, though I fled across the Atlantic in desperation. And now I see her once more, striding down the Champs-Elysees toward me, merciful God, she has come for me and I have no where else to run. I don't know why I am writing these words to you, my friend, but I feel someone should know the truth, whatever happens next. Fate has won. I will go find what awaits me in her embrace.

Next week marks the six month mark of writing Burning Violin, so I'm working on something a bit bigger than normal, you know, to make it special and such. So this week I'm being both lazy and shameless by posting one of my favorite scenes out of Katorga (my novel, available from Amazon in both paperback and for the Kindle). This scene captures a lot of the heart of the novel at once: it's brutal, terrifying, and yet darkly funny at the same time. There are few things more awkward than an author writing his own blurbs, so buy the book (or ten, don't be shy), and write your own awestruck blurbs for me to quote so that I don't sound like such a pompous twat typing about how awesome I am. Even though I am. Please enjoy...

A metal door was held open for Doug into a tiny room, no more than ten by ten, hardly the size of a decent bathroom.  A metal table with three chairs sat in the center of the room, and a broad mirror Doug recognized from old police shows covered one wall.  The room was otherwise bare concrete except for a drain at the center of the room right underneath the table.  The leader pointed to the single chair on the opposite side of the table from the other two.

"Please take a seat there, Dr. Bradley, someone will be right with you," the man said and then leaned close to talk in a low voice.  "These are desperate times, Doug, please do your best for the Republic."

Doug drew himself up straight and spoke as firmly as he could.  "I will do whatever I can, sir.  I'm a good party man, myself."

The man nodded and his lips touched on an enigmatic smile for a moment and then he left the room in a hurry, closing the door behind him with a loud click.  Doug walked slowly to the chair and sat down.  He looked idly over at the mirror and felt suddenly claustrophobic, the walls pulling in closer every moment.  Doug shivered and stared at those other two seats.  Some interminable amount of time later, it was impossible to sense time accurately surrounded by concrete and glaringly unnatural fluorescent lights, Doug nodded off, face lowering to the slick metal of the interrogation table.

..........

"Wake up you ignorant piece of shit fuck donkey," a voice screamed in Doug's ear.  A finger roughly ran up the side of his chin, covered in drool.  "You're slavering all over my goddamned table you drooling goat fucking cock monger."

Doug jerked up in the chair, almost falling over backwards before a hand caught him by his hair and steadied him.  He couldn't see, the fluorescents were so bright they were blinding him, burning his retinas.  Doug shouted out, and got a slap across his face for the trouble, cheek left stinging by a latex-gloved hand.

"What?  Who?  What?"  Doug exclaimed.  He blinked against the lights and began to see shapes.  Men in the two seats across from him, another towering over him, holding his head up.

"Three fucking stupid questions that only a slut slit licking terrorist taint sucking whore of a traitor would even think to ask!"  Another slap across his face.  "I've fucked sheep to death that made me less sick than you!"

"Now, now, Robert, why don't you go take a breather now that our friend has woken up," one of the men across the table said.  The voice sounded so kind that Doug almost whimpered.  The instinct made him feel ill, reminding him of dogs he had put down.

Robert shoved Doug so hard that he tumbled out of the chair and it landed on top of his head.  Doug cowered for a moment, expecting a kick or another tirade, but Robert only paused to spit in his face before exiting the room.  Doug lay there for a moment before standing on shaking legs, wiping the spittle from his face with the end of his silk tie as his stomach roiled in protest.  He picked up the chair with hands that hadn't shaken so badly since his wedding day and looked around for his bag, desperately needing a valium.  His bag was on the other side of the table, behind the two men.  Doug refused to ask for it, and sat down in his chair.  He took a deep breath and composed himself.

"There must have been a terrible mistake," he said.  "That man I came here with told me that the Republic needed me.  I came as quickly as I could and am at the government's service."

The two men exchanged a look.  They both wore the gray and red uniforms of the world police.  Doug thought that the three bars on each of their breasts meant that they were captains, but all he knew about such things were from television and movies, all of which were spinning nightmare scenarios before his eyes from memory.

"I am Lieutenant Thomas, and this is Lieutenant Allen," the man on the right said.  The man on the left said nothing, but stared at Doug through squinting eyes and lit a cigarette.  "I assure you that there has been no mistake.  We are quite aware of your activities and all we want to do is help you as best we can.  But make no mistake, we know absolutely everything, we just need to hear it from you."

"What are you talking about?"  Doug asked.  "I came here to help."

"And you can help," Thomas said gently.  "You can help by telling us the names and addresses of all of your co-conspirators."  He leaned forward and placed his hand on Doug's.  "It is essential to the security of the state that we know exactly what the plan is, in your own words.  We have to stop your friends before it is too late."

Doug opened and closed his mouth repeatedly.  "But I haven't done anything!"

Thomas sighed and rubbed his eyes with both hands.  Allen blew a long cloud of smoke at Doug.  "Was your wife in on it?"

Doug blinked.  "No, of course not."

"Then you admit you were?"  Allen asked.

"Were what?"  Doug asked.

"In on it."  Allen said.

"On what?"

"It."

"No."

Allen paused for a moment.  "What it weren't you in on?"

"It?"

"It."

"What?"

"Exactly."  Allen said and blew out another long cloud of smoke.  "How can you know your wife was not part of it, if you don't know what it is?"

"She wasn't in on anything!"  Doug said.

"So you must have inside information on the plan, if you do know for a fact that she was not involved.  And even if she is not involved, your involvement makes her an accessory and thus involved just as much as if she were involved."  Allen said, he leaned back and blew out another cloud of smoke, tapping the ashes off his cigarette onto the concrete floor with a look of satisfaction like a mathematician having finished a twenty page long geometric proof.

Thomas leaned forward again.  "Look Doug, I know you're protecting her.  Hell, if our positions were reversed, I'd try to protect my wife too, but you can't drag her down with you.  You have a chance to make things right here.  Take responsibility, turn in the guys in charge, I know you were just going along with it out of friendship, you weren't really a terrorist, right?  I mean, if you don't confess and tell us what we already know, then we're going to have to assume that Caroline was involved, and have Robert go bring her in and interrogate her.  And I don't think anyone wants that except for Robert."

"But I didn't do anything!"  Doug shouted.

Thomas shook his head.  "Come on man, it's over.  But don't drag Caroline down with you.  And little Alice, I mean if you're lucky she'd get put into foster care, but really with two parents classified as anti-social, there's not much of a chance of her not getting sent off-world to work off some of your debt."

"Quit saying their names!"  Doug yelled.  "You have no right, you don't even know them!"  He sobbed.

"Shhh, I know, I'm sorry."  Thomas said, and patted Doug's hand again.  "Just tell us what happened."

"You were part of a group plotting to smuggle a dirty nuke into the Los Angeles spaceport, weren't you?"  Allen asked.  He opened a folder and threw dozens of pictures of Doug talking to various people, passing them by on the street, looking at various public buildings.  "We've had you under surveillance for quite some time and have tracked down most of your associates, but we need your help to convict them."

Allen folded his hands in front of him.  "So should we talk about it, or should we have Robert go get your wife and daughter and get answers out of them?"