WHAT WILL BE IS
The wind was strong. An orange fell from the tree. Was it simply good luck that I wasn't under it? With its skin split, releasing sharp fragrance, I thought about the life of an orange. It will spend its last days on our kitchen table, in the fruit bowl.
The odds, I'll say, are comparable to success in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. On the SETI website you'll find Frank Drake's equation for the number of civilizations possibly transmitting in our galaxy. He thinks there might be 10,000. Carl Sagan thinks maybe a million or more. And SETI is about “...an effort to detect evidence of technological civilizations that may exist elsewhere in the universe...” Intelligence is technology?
Since before it acquired its current moniker, Silicon Valley has been my home. It was once called The Valley of Heart's Delight. At the heart of the transition, in a garage in Palo Alto, Hewlett and Packard made their first audio oscillator. Intelligence is indeed required. When they went into business making test equipment, I preferred theirs over any other brand.
That was then.
Technology has become a battleground of wits. Hackers, cybercrooks, bank fraudsters, getting the TV remote to work, passwords. Without it where would Mutually Assured Destruction be? Or Artificial Intelligence, with the singularity on pace to supersede us? Facial recognition technology scans intersections in China, looking for jaywalkers who will be issued demerits in the national data base.
It took awhile, the orange just sitting there in the bowl, before it occurred that it wasn't rhyming with anything. And what are the inhabitants of other civilizations but aliens? They might not be friendly, a profitable theme for movie makers and publishers. Rest assured, aliens will obviously be more intelligent. But so far nothing. Puzzling.
So the Game of Let's Suppose is refereed by dwarves. It bears upon the Game of What We Got, which we'll get to.
I hadn't been in the Air Force for long before impulsively buying an Olivetti portable typewriter. And what for? I had no idea. But I was free. Having escaped our “family,” finally out on my own ~ (In high school only music mattered, and playing clarinet in the marching band, and sax in the dance band, and drums in Tom Clark's band for all occasions, and books had been an annoyance.) ~ suddenly I began buying books at the BX.
And then typing letters to my sister ~ fromJapan! About a colony of ants that lived beneath the asphalt walk to the microwave shack, and kites, a huge moth that splayed itself over the paned window door, maybe for the glow of vacuum tubes in there at night. Military life was pretty good in the mid-fifties. Tokyo was an education in everything I had missed out on at Montezuma School for Boys. But after realizing I wasn't very military, I took an early out. Three crates of books and the Olivetti followed me back.
As I re-integrated into civilian life, becoming an electronic technician in the bay area war machine, writing went dormant. Planning an upgrade, I enrolled at San Jose City College. It was going to be OK, until an instructor in trig-algebra, prior to calculus, so prefigured the coming wasteland that I changed my major to English. This confluence of events, some way similar to that meeting of Hewlett and Packard, eventually led to becoming a technical writer. But that's a tune in a different key.
English was laughably easy, and more my style. The quality of my instructors was more humane, not strained. Doing English for the academic crowd was – just make it sound like all those books I had read. It's a form of music, really. Screw rules (but play as though they matter.) Studying English is as sensible as taking a course in walking, yet one thing did come out of it. During an excursion into Modern Fiction, into what seemed my Heart of Darkness, was a sign on the river bank with this remarkable phrase: like an orange nailed to his brow . . .
So now there's a fragrant rose by the fruit bowl. Because I made juice out of the orange.
For playing either Game, a fundament is science. I'll compare this to method acting. We have the scientific method, which relies upon reason (so often identified with logic), observations, hypotheses, testing and independent verification. The procedure is useful, accurate, reliable, repeatable, and it has cleared away centuries of nonsense. I agree.
Am I alone in wondering if there are trees, mountains and rivers for civilizations on other planets? Let's Suppose there are. And amongst the galaxies maybe a few with intelligent beings who appreciate the whole of it? Maybe they are mum because they don't want to hear from us (a wild supposition for method actors).
Science is scripted in the maths, as Brits would say, and these are not comfortable with infinities, suppositions that would outstrip all reasonable calculations. The framework, running on orbital rails that are somewhat adjustable to include an influence of mass, is called the arrow of time, or the irreversible march of entropy. In this conception, what cannot be defined and measured is held not to exist. Except at subatomic scales where quantum events are disturbingly (and even if no one uses the word) magic.
So What We Got is a world of left over deterministic justifications where technology is intelligence, survival of the most belligerent spells MAD, and the droll roll of humor is called reasonable.
My game supposes a different foundation. Time is not “real” at all, though the planets orbit like clockwork and water does not flow uphill. Entropy can unhappen. Lecture the second law of thermodynamics at will and I will be interested for a few minutes, and reply that there is more to all of this than meets the eye, ear, nose, etc. Instruments that interface with our senses might be arranged to record some fleeting traces that will need statistical analysis to halfway satisfy scientific minds. Special pleading, this is not. We do all have conscious minds capable of more than words can encompass, more than science comprehends.
Actually, I don't know if writing is my thing. So now hear this:
ancient pond oops . . .
frog jumps in thermogeddon!
ploop! error 005
This turnaround is a fugue, with time the silent counterpoint. Ah, it's like the orange, with crows and butterflies laughing overhead!
Smile. The rogue wave cometh.
An experience that laughs at any definition is like the musician dancing a fugue, playing all voices at once, cymbals under a waterfall. Scientists are welcome, listen up. Great discoveries have relied upon an impossible act of imagination, visualize – the square root of negative one. Whatever you say, it soars beyond the irrational, into some realm of the absurd. Being-time is forty elbows! What happens now isn't necessarily today . . .
ancient pond . . .
