Mo and I shook hands, later on, but it spoiled the day.
Good place to pause.They’ve just called us.
Hi again.Well, here I am, Bloody Mary in one hand, pen in the other, using Rushdie’s book to lean on.Got an aisle to one side, empty seat to the other, so I can spread myself out (already taken my shoes off).Bit less crowded than I’d expected at this time of year.Jacksonville here I come. (I guess if it had been Harvard they’d have paid for Clipper Class, but you can’t have everything.)
Right.The coincidences I was talking about.I started reading The Satanic Verses in the departure lounge there, and how does it begin?With two guys falling through the air after being blown up in a jumbo jet.Great.I 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; 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
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 delay while I consulted my notes and tried to dig from my memory what scraps of conversation and ‘atmosphere’ I could, and then fretting over the best way to present the resulting data well, all this has taken rather a long time, and to be honest the sedate mode of my present life has not helped me to be as brisk as I would have liked in the execution of this task.
I am glad to hear that you are only one of many scholars specializing in Earth; I always did think the place well worth studying, and perhaps even learning from.Thankfully, then, you will have all the information that could possibly qualify as background, and I apologize in advance if anything I include doubles on this; but while I have stuck as strictly as memory (machine and human) will allow to what actually happened those hundred and fifteen years ago, I have nevertheless tried to make the presentation of the following events and impressions as general and self-contained as possible, believing this to be the best way of attempting to conform with your request to describe what it really felt like to be there at the time.I trust this combination of fact and sensation does not unduly affect the utility of either when you come to process the result in the course of your studies, but in the event that it does, and also if you have any other questions about Earth at that time which you think I might be able to help answer, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me; I am only too happy to shed what light I can on a place that affected everyone who was there both profoundly and – in the main, I suspect – permanently.
What follows, then, is as much as I and my bank can remember.The conversations I have had to reconstruct, as a rule; I did not then practise full-record, it being a minor piece of the ship’s (frankly tediously) eccentric etiquette not to ‘over-observe’ (its words) life on board.Some dialogue, mostly on-planet, was recorded, however, and I have placed these sections between the following two symbols: .They have undergone a degree of tidying up – removing the usual ‘umms’ and ‘ahs’ and so on – but the original recordings are available to you from my bank without further authorization, should you feel you require them.For the sake of brevity I have reduced all Full Names to one or two parts, and done my best to anglicize them.All the times and dates are Earth-relative/local (Christian calendar).