Our human hopes sailing
In humankind’s ark
The improvement of the individual was pursued in such sessions as body-mind-posture, conducted at first by Ben Borrow, a disciple of the energetic Belle Rivers. Borrow was a little undersized man, full of energy, as easily roused to anger as to raucous laughter. He drove and inspired his attendees to believe, as he did, that the secret of a good life lurked in how one stood, sat and walked in the light gravity.
Perhaps because the bleak surroundings led our thoughts that way, our Art of Imagination colloquium was always successful. Swift and Laputa, those two satellites, first dreamed of by an Irish dean, that chased regularly above our heads, were used to connect the reality of our lives with the greater reality of which we were a transitory part.
A way of knowing ourselves was to relate our lived experience with the flow of language, thought and concepts surrounding us, by which the mundane could be reimagined. ‘Know thyself was an exortation requiring, above all, imagination. In this department, the Willa-Vera Composite, one so whippetlike, the other so much like a doughnut, proved invaluable.
Hard work along these lines produced some extraordinary artistries, not least the four-panel continuous loop video abstract entitled ‘Dawning Diagram’ which, with its mystery and majesty, affected all who watched it. Human things writhed into shape from the molecular, rose, ran, flowered in bursts of what could have been sun, could have been rain, might have been basalt, died, bathed in reproductive dawns. In another quarter of the screen an old Tiresias read in a vellum-bound volume, tirelessly turning the same page.
Everything happened simultaneously, in an instant of time.
The aim of the Art of Imagination colloquium was to revive in adults that innocent imagination lost with childhood (although children also enjoyed the programme and gave much to it).
‘I know the Sun isn’t necessarily square. I just like it better that way.’ This remark by an eight-year-old, as comment on his strange painting, Me and My Universe, was later embodied in a large multimedia canvas hung at the entrance of the Art of Imagination Department (previously Immigration).
There were those who attended this colloquium who were initially unable to seize on the fact that they were alive and on Mars. So obnubilated were their imaginations they could not grasp the wonder of reality. They needed a metaphorical sense to be restored to them. In many cases, it was restored.
Then they rejoiced and congratulated themselves that they were Upstairs.
To our regret, the scientists in the main kept to their own quarters, a short distance from the domes. It was not that they were aloof. They claimed to be too busy with research.
I accompanied Tom to the station when he went to talk privately with Dreiser Hawkwood. A woman who announced herself as Dreiser’s personal assistant asked us to wait in a small anteroom. We could hear Dreiser growling in his office. Tom was impatient until we were admitted to his presence by this same assistant.
Dreiser Hawkwood was a darkly semi-handsome man, with the look of one who has bitten deep into the apple of the Tree of Knowledge. Indeed, I thought, noticing that his teeth protruded slightly under his moustache, he might have snagged them on its core. He was much preoccupied with the fact that the paper substitute was running out.
‘Predictions are for amusement only,’ he said. ‘When computers came into general use, there was a prediction that paper would be a thing of the past. Far from it. High-tech weaponry systems, for instance, require plenty of documentation. US Navy cruisers used to go to sea loaded with twenty-eight tonnes of manuals. Enough to sink a battleship!’
He jerked his head towards the overloaded bookshelves behind him, from which manuals threatened to spill.
Tom asked him what he was working on.
‘Poulsen and I are trying to rejig the programme that controls all our internal weather. It’s wasteful of energy and we could use the computer power for better things.’
He continued with a technical exposition of how the current programme might be revised, which I did not follow. The two men talked for some while. The scientists were still expecting to find a HIGMO.