!Notes on most science fiction films

We must accept that things will not always be as they are. Suddenly or gradually, what we are will pass away, and new forms take our place. Much will remain: the physical shape of the human organism, and all that it conveys. Laughter, love, the various hungers. But the social exoskeletons, which for all their externality are as much a part of us as our genes, will crumble into artifacts, unarticulable and powerless. For the powers of everything we possess, from guns to cities, lies not in their physical forms, which rust and drown, but in what they say. Justice still stands on the courthouse steps of a city lost to anarchy, but as nothing more than a blind woman trying to defend what she holds in one hand with a sharp stick held in the other.

It is a common trope for the dying order to be confronted by what will replace it, the new man against the armies and machinations of the old, but it will not happen that way. Rome perished centuries before the barbarians came, when all that made a dumpy city on the banks of a river Rome had been distorted into a mindless and self-defeating expansionism. But history may find a certain irony in allowing the high priests of a culture founded on a peculiar and obsessive thirst for knowledge a glimpse of what will be so utterly, utterly unlike them.

It is a scene repeated every year in university departments the world round, a retreat to some remote place. Not to contemplate nature, or even to experiment on it, but a largely social gathering in which vanishingly small bits of knowledge are argued and dissected, all against a background of awkward dancing, copious drinking, and a fair number of rendezvous both awkward and drunken. Some sort of disaster, caused by people very much like them, strikes, stranding them in the mountains with their colleagues, disinterested lovers, and a rapidly dwindling supply of alcohol.

FIRST SCIENTIST, POETICALLY INCLINED: While walking (what else can you do now?) I saw a man striding alone on a high meadow. The grass was green and the sun and the wind were in his hair, and I saw from the way he walked, turning his head, that he knew the names of all that he beheld. No tree could show a leaf, no bird could call, without appearing in his mind, named, whole, and gloriously alive, bathed in the light of his love for it. He seemed not to see me, though, and he had the look of a man going to meet the most beautiful woman in the world, a divine and ecstatic lover.

OTHER SCIENTISTS: The notion of your impending death is destroying your judgement. You are too much attached to your body. If you admitted, as we do, that death is not all that different from life, you would face it sanely, drinking what is left of the wine and rutting with the undergraduates.

FIRST SCIENTIST: He spoke loudly. Not to himself, but to the whole world:

  I hear the voices of the deep in my blood;
  My bones ring like the hoofbeats of ranging beasts
  They are mine, I move them!
  Which of your kisses shall I taste
  My lips hot with breath and full of my life?
  I will possess your inmost form
  and breathe the scent of your fecundity.

OTHER SCIENTISTS: Now we know you have lost your senses, though perhaps it matters less now that we have all lost our funding. But if such a creature existed, he would be madder than you. How can anyone claim to possess the forms of nature? It is we who possess them; they are in our genomic databases, in our ecological maps. We have plumbed the depths and harrowed the heights. We have digitized the rat, the mouse, and the fruit fly. We possess their very substance, immortal and incorruptible.

And perhaps, for the sake of something far deeper than history or science, we will permit the Naked Man to see a Female Scientist who in her eyes has something that Nature (it is capitalized for him, of course) does not in all its richness possess, nor (and she has known this all her life) do any of the other scientists. He sees her gasp with joy at the sight of a swallow, or perhaps he sees her saddened by something he does not understand. After watching her, now to himself and quietly:

It always seems that after I have seen you there is nothing for me but to suffer. This though I know there is no way in which I could possess you, no way that could prevent me from suffering, from passion. From desiring with all I do possess to be closer and closer to you.

What I would give to be free of you! All of it, every drop! I would unload the precious cargo of my soul until I was nothing but a thin shell, an empty reed in the wind. I know places to hide where no strand of your hair would catch on me. I could, if I had any strength at all! I cannot stir my arms to rise, and if I could, my legs would run to you. They will, soon enough, and all this complaint is the feeble nonsense uttered by a man who berates the gods because he does not know what he is. The complaint of wood that it burns, as if it did not contain in its very nature a thousand fires as hot as the sun.

So that is what I am! I knew everything, but I didn’t know myself. I am the madrone, the pitch-tree, the sarcobatus: I become pure light at your touch.

(cdm |Incipit)