Pictorial 74

It’s a small world out there, as the cliquishness of 30s/40s pulp writers illustrates. Starting from a WWII picture of Heinlein, de Camp and Asimov at Naval Aviation Experimental Station in Philadelphia, I discovered that Heinlein rented his house to CL Moore and her husband, Henry Kuttner.

Heinlein I know from Stranger in a Strange Land – the space-hippy epic Paul Kantner swore by - and this massive tome might be the Bible of rebellion against an authoritarian future of straight lines and cities (unbroken progress of the sorcery of light Pictorial 67).

I then happened on the post space-opera era of Leigh Brackett, especially The Long Tomorrow. It struck me that there is an optimistic and a pessimistic side to what is almost the same future of technological advance.

Brackett was married to Edmond Hamilton (of Weird Tales) who became a prolific space-opera writer and joined DC (League of Super-Heroes). The big question is if, even within spouses, future fantasy can be either optimistic or pessimistic, what does that imply? (there was actually a comic story in Metal Hurlant  to that effect by Angus Mackie!)
You’re really asking various questions, like:

What is authority?

What is existence?
What is   self, being?
But, there is a more basic question even than those; are you in favor of life or death? Clark Ashton-Smith (again of Weird Tales) could be said to have come down on the side of the latter, in stories punishing egotism in supernatural ways, and even HP Lovecraft labelled him a friend of decay.

So, what I tend to say is the optimistic version of the future doesn’t feature decay (meaning death); the pessimistic one does. Therefore, since decay does exist, the physical reality is much more on the side of pessimism.

That is to say, pessimism that says technological advance is egotism. The Long Tomorrow sets these two views squarely against each other, with “the survivors” being virtually descendants of Amish and other sects that work the earth by means of horses and have no electricity, while Bartorstown is the promised land of forbidden advance.

They were enormous wagons, with canvas tilts and all sorts of things hung to their ribs inside, so they were like dim, odorous caves on wheels.. His mind a blurred jumble of the faraway places of which the traders spoke: the little shipping settlements and fishing hamlets along the Atlantic, the lumber camps of the Appalachians, these endless New Mennonite farmlands of the Midwest, the southern hunters and hill farmers, the great rivers westward with their barges and boats, the plains beyond and the horsemen and ranches and herds of wild cattle, the lofty mountains and the land and sea still farther west.

The book gives a reasonable picture of the slow speaking, Bible fearing men of the seasons, versus the clever “others” of Bartorstown who’s siren call attracts two lads of Huck Finn persuasion (Len and Esau).

The suspicions of the Bible thumpers turn-out to be well-founded. The “slow speaking”, full-bearded men deliver savage beatings to Len and Esau prior to their elopement. In this case the cause of the fear was a nuclear war that destroyed all cities, but can one say that technological advance is a priori suspicious? Preacher Man says

“..they have loosed the sacred fire which lies at the heart of things, and which only I, the Lord Jehovah, should dare to touch.”

Is technological advance actually retrograde because it takes place outside of the physical reality that is born of Earth rhythms that regenerate life? What we call “life” is actually an inferior copy of the real thing which has a manifest destiny of physical decay and revival.

This idea of a copy or an illusion is contained in diverse technology. Not only recording (of images, sounds) but DNA is the machinery for copying lifeforms. This one-sided view (sun – Apollo “sacred fire”) doesn’t include the physical reality that in nature things are balanced, proportionate and irregular (swaying between two things, snakelike).

The serpentine backbone of things is an a priori primitivism of the universe that is what things are – their self, being. What technology does is filter-out all the sublime primitivism of power and meaning, and replace it with copies that are weak.

The underlying reason for this is that Apollo is only appearance (sun); reality is the sublime primitivism of seasons and the cycle of life and death. Dionysus, the god of gaiety and eternal frolicking in pastures green.

It was the strawberry festival, the first big social event of the summer, where people who had perhaps not seen each other since the first snow could get together and talk and pleasantly stuff themselves, sitting in the dappled sunshine under the elms.

A crowd of boys had run out along the road to meet the wagon. They were running beside it now, shouting up to Mr. Hostetter. The girls, and the boys still too little to run, stood along the edges of the square and waved and called out, the girls in their bonnets and their long skirts blowing in the warm wind, the tiny boys exactly like their fathers in homespun and broad brown hats. Then everybody began to move, flowing across the square toward the wagon, which went slower and slower and finally stopped, the six great horses tossing their heads and snorting as though they had done a mighty thing to get that wagon there and were proud of it. (ch six)