Jeff Jones, Idyl with redwood
Jeffrey (Catherine) Jones' series reminds me somewhat of the South with the great redwood. Their physical strength seems to mirror the psychic investigations of the eponymous heroine.
While Idyl - and "I'm Age" - are white females, one suspects they might equally be dusky or black with no significant changes in the dilemmas posed.
I say this as I intend to take by the horns the charge that my comparison of the American South to a rustic Idyl is tantamount to a support of historical slavery.
This is a tedious argument. Tina Turner, born Anna Mae Bullock of a Tennessee broken home and in a long-term fractious relationship with Ike, said,
'You adjust to what was given, and that is what was given at the time."
My attitude is that was the given economic situation at the time of the Confederacy. I don't support it, but neither do I support a future situation where everyone is created the same.
GENETIC ENGINEERING (PS)
To say that something is an Idyl is simply a statement of rustic fact going well outside the political requirements of equality. People have bought-into the modern acceptance of sameness.
Poly, in one of the two political-statement songs on Generation Indigo (2009) does so herself.
Since the assumption is so current, it's worth going into the confusion of meaning (epistemology) at length. Where epistemology is confused, one can be sure the natural power (ontology) is also lost in the mist.
First of all, differences in nature contain sameness. Idyl's curves are mirrored by the curves of the redwood's roots deep in the mangrove.
Genetic engineering inhabits a world where there is assumed to be no physical substance, only information.
Information becomes predominant, when in fact information is tied to a world of sameness (straight-lines, algorithms, AI). In this world where there is no difference of substance, there can also be no sameness in terms of the metamorphosis of line (see prev.)
It's a basic linguistic trap, couched in scientific jargon. Where things are the same in terms of information, there is at the same time a distance created in terms of the physical substance of the metamorphosis of line.
This distance can be seen in the obsessive tidiness of modern societies. The metamorphosis of line is seen in decadence and decay. It is for sure seen in mangrove swamps.
When I say Idyl I mean the sense of closeness in nature that an apolitical social structure can give. It's not an illusion, it exists, but with the arrival of politics things have to change. I'm not denying that.
I'm simply saying that the sameness of difference is visible and tangible in the rustic fields of the metamorphosis of line.
The modern scene is confused because it cannot see that sameness and difference spring from the same root. You cannot have just one.
The same goes for life and death, or the sensual and the holy. Mishima in The Decay of the Angel has this quote.
What must it be like, to wear such a beautiful covering? To see people fall down before it. When admiration passed the gentle and docile and became lunatic worship, it would become torment for the possessor. In the delirium and the torment were true holiness. What Honda had missed had been the dark, narrow path through the flesh to holiness. To travel it was the privilege of the few. (page 215)