Thursday, June 10, 2010
Sunday, June 6, 2010
yyz, yyc, yyj; melancholy elephants
En route back home from a lightning trip to Toronto, I read bits of several books, but finished first Spider Robinson's Melancholy Elephants, short (primarily) speculative fiction. I can't promote the title short story enough, but I'm not entirely sure why. There's something about the resolution, perhaps, both of the scene and its players, determination in the face of silent desperation, of probable failure leading to sociocultural death, that appeals to me. It insists earnestly that small victories are essential. That changing huge sweeping behaviours happens not once, but continually, gradually. And that, try as you might (and likely should, since people tend not to learn best second-hand), you can't do much of anything entirely alone. (Here, I would like to offer my condolences to Spider and his family for the passing of his beautiful wife, Jeanne, inspiration for The Stardance Project, and offer this gem rather than my own clumsy, awkward words.)
The second story in the anthology, "Antinomy," claims for its title "the word for the sharpest tragedy a human can feel" (45), aligning urgent contradictions with dramatic suffering and remarking on the strangeness of the word's disuse. It seems, though, to modify the anthology's title, describing the melancholy of the elephants—people of the future, caught by the efficacy of their own record-keeping and resource-devouring in an eminently unsustainable downward spiral of literal and figurative consumption.
"No Renewal," originally published even earlier than the collection's 1984 release (ominous?), is rife with tubercular spasms. I read this one in the Calgary airport, sipping on a gin and tonic as I waited for my transfer, and its fixation on "lasts" was troubling. Conforming to Fredric Jameson's description of the role of SF, the story projects itself into a consequential future where the protagonist owns "for all he knows, the last small farm in Nova Scotia" (126). This farm is conceptually isolated, "bordered on three side by vast mined-out clay pits, gaping concentric cavities whose insides were scraped out and eaten long ago, their husk thrown away to rot." In place of the neighbouring farms of his childhood, Douglas has for neighbours the oddly mixed metaphor of "an apartment hive, packed with antlike swarms of people." The story idolizes rural pastorality, yearning for the "sawmill, rushing streams, hundreds of thousands of trees, and acre after acre of pasture and hay and rich farmland" of yore that perished in the fiction when "the petrochemical industry died of thirst" (126–27). Though Robinson often tackles heavy themes, he rarely leaves the reader in despair, preferring generally to somehow turn his stories hopeful. But the hope in this particular excerpt is a bleak one, and the "birthday present" cantankerous aged Douglas can expect is reminiscent in its blessing of young Smeagol's ill-gotten gift; his expiration date's shadow looms ominously with the end of even artificially subsistence agriculture and, particularly in juxtaposition with the next story, "In The Olden Days," cultural heritages.
The interplay of antinomy and the "Melancholy Elephants" fixation on infinity is the key to uniting the stories, I think: "I think it comes down to a kind of innate failure of mathematical intuition, common to most humans. We tend to confuse any sufficiently high number with infinity" (12), and act accordingly:
So now what? 25 years later, we're still fixated on the infinite, even though we're running out of all sorts of things, including the hydrogen mined for the kids' balloons at Victoria's World Partnership Walk (and, according to one earnest ten-year-old, the turtles who will eat said balloons if released by his younger brother). While some of the individual stories in this collection refute Robinson's tendency toward hope, the tales fit, one way or another, into an arching narrative of extinctions, of creativity, of ways and forms of life, and to the hopefulness of enlightened sharing. His characters mature through the textual bildungsroman to marital, sexual maturity. By honing and focusing his earlier characters, many of whom have to forced from their self-absorption by the epiphanies in their mini-narratives, to the eminently adult "High Infidelity" and finally the phoenix of "Rubber Soul" as a cultural maturing and rebirth. It is important to the growth of the elephants that they strive for dynamism; even the progressive tendency of the bildungsroman is challenged by the non-sequiturs, stories like "The Chronic Offender" that resist a simplicity of development and the framing narratives of "Melancholy Elephants" and "Antinomy" with their profound anxieties. Extinctions, the stories earnestly confide, are complicated—and unbelievably important.
Today's focus on extinctions inadvertently but quite conveniently segues with the topics of my next posts, Terry Glavin's Waiting for the Macaws and other stories from the age of extinctions and Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Reading these three texts concurrently, especially coming out of Don Gayton, certainly informed my reception of each. Now, how to reconcile these looming extinctions with drinking imported gin suspended in an airport, waiting for my next flight?
Stay tuned.
The second story in the anthology, "Antinomy," claims for its title "the word for the sharpest tragedy a human can feel" (45), aligning urgent contradictions with dramatic suffering and remarking on the strangeness of the word's disuse. It seems, though, to modify the anthology's title, describing the melancholy of the elephants—people of the future, caught by the efficacy of their own record-keeping and resource-devouring in an eminently unsustainable downward spiral of literal and figurative consumption.
"No Renewal," originally published even earlier than the collection's 1984 release (ominous?), is rife with tubercular spasms. I read this one in the Calgary airport, sipping on a gin and tonic as I waited for my transfer, and its fixation on "lasts" was troubling. Conforming to Fredric Jameson's description of the role of SF, the story projects itself into a consequential future where the protagonist owns "for all he knows, the last small farm in Nova Scotia" (126). This farm is conceptually isolated, "bordered on three side by vast mined-out clay pits, gaping concentric cavities whose insides were scraped out and eaten long ago, their husk thrown away to rot." In place of the neighbouring farms of his childhood, Douglas has for neighbours the oddly mixed metaphor of "an apartment hive, packed with antlike swarms of people." The story idolizes rural pastorality, yearning for the "sawmill, rushing streams, hundreds of thousands of trees, and acre after acre of pasture and hay and rich farmland" of yore that perished in the fiction when "the petrochemical industry died of thirst" (126–27). Though Robinson often tackles heavy themes, he rarely leaves the reader in despair, preferring generally to somehow turn his stories hopeful. But the hope in this particular excerpt is a bleak one, and the "birthday present" cantankerous aged Douglas can expect is reminiscent in its blessing of young Smeagol's ill-gotten gift; his expiration date's shadow looms ominously with the end of even artificially subsistence agriculture and, particularly in juxtaposition with the next story, "In The Olden Days," cultural heritages.
The interplay of antinomy and the "Melancholy Elephants" fixation on infinity is the key to uniting the stories, I think: "I think it comes down to a kind of innate failure of mathematical intuition, common to most humans. We tend to confuse any sufficiently high number with infinity" (12), and act accordingly:
Well, it takes a lot less than [ten to the eighty-fifth, "the current best-guess for the number of atoms in the universe"] to equal "infinity" in most minds. For millions of years we looked at the ocean and said, "That is infinite. It will accept our garbage and waste forever." We looked at the sky and said, "That is infinite: it will hold an infinite amount of smoke." We like the idea of infinity. A problem with infinity in it is easily solved. How long can you pollute a planet infinitely large? Easy: forever. Stop thinking. (12)
So now what? 25 years later, we're still fixated on the infinite, even though we're running out of all sorts of things, including the hydrogen mined for the kids' balloons at Victoria's World Partnership Walk (and, according to one earnest ten-year-old, the turtles who will eat said balloons if released by his younger brother). While some of the individual stories in this collection refute Robinson's tendency toward hope, the tales fit, one way or another, into an arching narrative of extinctions, of creativity, of ways and forms of life, and to the hopefulness of enlightened sharing. His characters mature through the textual bildungsroman to marital, sexual maturity. By honing and focusing his earlier characters, many of whom have to forced from their self-absorption by the epiphanies in their mini-narratives, to the eminently adult "High Infidelity" and finally the phoenix of "Rubber Soul" as a cultural maturing and rebirth. It is important to the growth of the elephants that they strive for dynamism; even the progressive tendency of the bildungsroman is challenged by the non-sequiturs, stories like "The Chronic Offender" that resist a simplicity of development and the framing narratives of "Melancholy Elephants" and "Antinomy" with their profound anxieties. Extinctions, the stories earnestly confide, are complicated—and unbelievably important.
Today's focus on extinctions inadvertently but quite conveniently segues with the topics of my next posts, Terry Glavin's Waiting for the Macaws and other stories from the age of extinctions and Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Reading these three texts concurrently, especially coming out of Don Gayton, certainly informed my reception of each. Now, how to reconcile these looming extinctions with drinking imported gin suspended in an airport, waiting for my next flight?
Stay tuned.
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