Appealing Ideas #1 - an occasional series.
Every now and then I come across an idea which really pleases me. I don't feel the desire to have thought of it myself (well, maybe sometimes), or even to rush out and rip it off; I just like to roll it around in my brain like an intellectual Mint Imperial, letting it zing! across my mental cavities. Sometimes I come across some really novel idea which means I have to read a book several times, then read another few books just to cross-check, then a couple of books with opposite ideas just in case. Ideas like that are rare (so anyone who's read "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" might like to check again) and to be savoured; who says there's nothing new under the sun?
Excellent though the above-mentioned book is, my favoutrite idea recently comes from somewhere completely different, from some books by Robert Rankin in fact. In case you have the misfortune not to have read Rankin, the idea is this; inside the earth is a big clockwork motor which not only keeps us rolling around the sun in the approved planetary manner, but, when we approach Armageddon of one sort or another, gets set back by The Controller (Ooooh!) to a point just before that of no return, with the precipitating factor edited out. No-one remembers, the world just rolls on. So we are, all of us, always, living in the End Times. The point just before Armageddon.
Of course, the idea of a big clockwork motor inside the earth is clearly preposterous, as Rankin himself (through a character) points out. He doesn't go into details but they're fairly obvious surely. We'd long-ago have run out of oil, for instance, because The Controller would have been tapping it from underneath to keep the wheels spinning; imagine clockwork big enough to drive a planet; lots of lubricant, right? Also, someone sometime in human history would have discovered it (the Greeks, probably, they were pretty good at that kind of thing) and forever after guards would have to be posted over every manhole and storm-drain to stop disaffected loonies dropping spanners down them. Spelunking would never have evolved as a sport, thus robbing us of many rib-tickling jokes ("See Kevin over there? From Accounting? He's a spelunker, he is!") and the occasional opportunity to get rid of rich but dull husbands ("He loved spelunking, Chief Superintendent - it's how he would have wanted it. And who could have known that the spare batteries had been taken out and used for the remote control?"), incidentally saving a great deal of money on coffins.
No, it's a nice idea, it really is - try rolling it about a bit yourself, ramify, man! - but it's not true - sadly, perhaps. We might never have discovered warfare, for instance, because who could afford standing armies when there were holes in the earth to be vigilantly guarded day and night? Unemployment would never have existed; "If you can't find yourself a hole in the ground, go dig one!" Hole-watching (no doubt dignified in every language with some such title as Guardian of the Netherworld) would have been quickly assmilated into every human society, and would of course have become riddled with heirarchy, corruption and nepotism. There's an obvious and enormous social gulf between, say, Standing Guard at the Buckingham Palace Stop-Cock and sitting in a roadmender's tent in the rain by a rabbit-hole on Orkney. If they have rabbits in Orkney, I'm afraid I don't know that for sure. It's a metaphor, stop being so picky.
If the discovery had been made by, say, the Chaldeans (also very good at stuff like this, but a millennium or so earlier than the Greeks) it would have become an integral and ritualised part of human society, right from the start. Astronomers today proudly trace the history of their science back to the observations of the ancients; it isn't magic any more, but there's no denying the aura clings. "I'm an Astronomer" has so much more of a ring to it than "I'm a Dinner Lady", although few (parents, at least) would deny that the dinner-lady is probably more socially useful. Apologies to the Atronomical Fraternity, but getting pre-schoolers to eat cabbage is a lot more challenging than calculating redshift. But I digress. There would have to be a name for hole-watching, of course, something suitably Greek or Latin (give me a moment, I'm freewheeling here), and probably a High and Noble Order of. In the Middle Ages the good holes (Paris, the Vatican, Hull) would all have been snapped up and become hereditary, and of course a whole social order of Holewatchers-by-Proxy would have developed; nobody would really expect Lorenzo de Medici (a total Banker, if you're not familiar with the name) to sit next to the main drain in Florence all day, for example.
Burial customs would be completely different; they wouldn't involve burials, for starters. I wonder, if humans had never buried their remains, if there'd be a noticeable difference in soil composition here in Europe, say. Think of all the billions of us who've generously donated our physical selves (often long before we've actually finished with them) to the earth's fertile bosom; would it be noticeably less fertile if we collectively hadn't, do you think? If cremation had always been the norm, what would Europe be like now? Don't just rush off to the next blog with an exasperated expression, when you think about it it's quite boggling. An intelligent person (or a statistician) could probably work this out with a bit of effort; take the most accurate assessment currently available of how many people who've lived and died in Europe since we wandered north from Africa, assign the average bod a carbon content, nitrogen content, H2O content etc., then work out how much of all that is lost in heat or light energy when the bod is cremated. After all, we acquire all our constituent elements from the environment around us; what if, as a species, we'd just not put them back?
That's what I like about ideas like this. A good one will spark off a whole chain reaction of associated ideas, ricocheting off in directions the originator (Robert Rankin, in this case) probably never considered. Or at least didn't think were funny enough to put in a book if he did. A really decent idea can keep me happy for a week; I'm a great fan of daydreaming, for instance - as, I suspect, are many insomniacs. It stimulates me to read other books, either by the same author or (in the case of ideas political and philosophical) opponents of the author. I don't really mind if the idea's a joke like the one above, or a serious new take on consciousness like the one I found in Dog in the Night-Time; if it inspires creative thinking, or research, in fact any expansion of the mind at all, then it's worth it.
Another, more real train of thought which came from Robert Rankin's clockwork earth was the idea that we're all, permanently, living just on the brink of global destruction. This is slightly scarier, because we are. I'm not going to bang on about Global Warming or nuclear terrorism here (plenty of time for that), but it's a fact that, since the 50's, the "First World" as a society has been living out it's own particular End Time. What make this different from the End Times of, say, 999 A.D., is that we aren't (or at least I'm not, the Seventh Day Adventists may be) living in fear of a wrathful God putting an end to His creation. We're living in the very real fear of man-made destruction; we know it can happen, we've seen it on TV. I was born in 1966 so I don't remember the "height" of the Cold War, when people were encouraged to build nuclear fallout shelters and the 4-minute-warning sirens were regularly tested; I can only speculate as to what it must have been like growing up in such a fear-dominated society, only decades after the most destructive war the world had yet seen. Hiroshima and Nagasaki must have been a bucket of icewater over the collective psyche of the Western world, already staggering from the reality of conventional war; Dresden to the power of ten in seconds, could anyone really imagine that?
So, a good idea, can really lead you anywhere, if you let it. Personally, I'm a great "evangeliser" of ideas; if I read something that hits the right chord, and that's so far anything from Philip K. Dick to Baudelaire, I get on a mission and threaten, bribe or cajole my friends and relatives to read it as well. "But you don't understand, I've got no-one to talk to about it!" I would wail to my ex-partner as I spent hours online urging people to read whatever I was into at that particular moment. Ex-partner, who reads a couple of books a year (in fairness, he does have a life), really didn't understand; for me, ideas are for sharing and discussing, batting backwards and forwards over a bottle of wine, disseminating as widely as possible. Which is more or less what I'm doing here, I suppose. And why I love the Net so much; once an idea is out there, it persists, and with a bit of effort I can find it.
Excellent though the above-mentioned book is, my favoutrite idea recently comes from somewhere completely different, from some books by Robert Rankin in fact. In case you have the misfortune not to have read Rankin, the idea is this; inside the earth is a big clockwork motor which not only keeps us rolling around the sun in the approved planetary manner, but, when we approach Armageddon of one sort or another, gets set back by The Controller (Ooooh!) to a point just before that of no return, with the precipitating factor edited out. No-one remembers, the world just rolls on. So we are, all of us, always, living in the End Times. The point just before Armageddon.
Of course, the idea of a big clockwork motor inside the earth is clearly preposterous, as Rankin himself (through a character) points out. He doesn't go into details but they're fairly obvious surely. We'd long-ago have run out of oil, for instance, because The Controller would have been tapping it from underneath to keep the wheels spinning; imagine clockwork big enough to drive a planet; lots of lubricant, right? Also, someone sometime in human history would have discovered it (the Greeks, probably, they were pretty good at that kind of thing) and forever after guards would have to be posted over every manhole and storm-drain to stop disaffected loonies dropping spanners down them. Spelunking would never have evolved as a sport, thus robbing us of many rib-tickling jokes ("See Kevin over there? From Accounting? He's a spelunker, he is!") and the occasional opportunity to get rid of rich but dull husbands ("He loved spelunking, Chief Superintendent - it's how he would have wanted it. And who could have known that the spare batteries had been taken out and used for the remote control?"), incidentally saving a great deal of money on coffins.
No, it's a nice idea, it really is - try rolling it about a bit yourself, ramify, man! - but it's not true - sadly, perhaps. We might never have discovered warfare, for instance, because who could afford standing armies when there were holes in the earth to be vigilantly guarded day and night? Unemployment would never have existed; "If you can't find yourself a hole in the ground, go dig one!" Hole-watching (no doubt dignified in every language with some such title as Guardian of the Netherworld) would have been quickly assmilated into every human society, and would of course have become riddled with heirarchy, corruption and nepotism. There's an obvious and enormous social gulf between, say, Standing Guard at the Buckingham Palace Stop-Cock and sitting in a roadmender's tent in the rain by a rabbit-hole on Orkney. If they have rabbits in Orkney, I'm afraid I don't know that for sure. It's a metaphor, stop being so picky.
If the discovery had been made by, say, the Chaldeans (also very good at stuff like this, but a millennium or so earlier than the Greeks) it would have become an integral and ritualised part of human society, right from the start. Astronomers today proudly trace the history of their science back to the observations of the ancients; it isn't magic any more, but there's no denying the aura clings. "I'm an Astronomer" has so much more of a ring to it than "I'm a Dinner Lady", although few (parents, at least) would deny that the dinner-lady is probably more socially useful. Apologies to the Atronomical Fraternity, but getting pre-schoolers to eat cabbage is a lot more challenging than calculating redshift. But I digress. There would have to be a name for hole-watching, of course, something suitably Greek or Latin (give me a moment, I'm freewheeling here), and probably a High and Noble Order of. In the Middle Ages the good holes (Paris, the Vatican, Hull) would all have been snapped up and become hereditary, and of course a whole social order of Holewatchers-by-Proxy would have developed; nobody would really expect Lorenzo de Medici (a total Banker, if you're not familiar with the name) to sit next to the main drain in Florence all day, for example.
Burial customs would be completely different; they wouldn't involve burials, for starters. I wonder, if humans had never buried their remains, if there'd be a noticeable difference in soil composition here in Europe, say. Think of all the billions of us who've generously donated our physical selves (often long before we've actually finished with them) to the earth's fertile bosom; would it be noticeably less fertile if we collectively hadn't, do you think? If cremation had always been the norm, what would Europe be like now? Don't just rush off to the next blog with an exasperated expression, when you think about it it's quite boggling. An intelligent person (or a statistician) could probably work this out with a bit of effort; take the most accurate assessment currently available of how many people who've lived and died in Europe since we wandered north from Africa, assign the average bod a carbon content, nitrogen content, H2O content etc., then work out how much of all that is lost in heat or light energy when the bod is cremated. After all, we acquire all our constituent elements from the environment around us; what if, as a species, we'd just not put them back?
That's what I like about ideas like this. A good one will spark off a whole chain reaction of associated ideas, ricocheting off in directions the originator (Robert Rankin, in this case) probably never considered. Or at least didn't think were funny enough to put in a book if he did. A really decent idea can keep me happy for a week; I'm a great fan of daydreaming, for instance - as, I suspect, are many insomniacs. It stimulates me to read other books, either by the same author or (in the case of ideas political and philosophical) opponents of the author. I don't really mind if the idea's a joke like the one above, or a serious new take on consciousness like the one I found in Dog in the Night-Time; if it inspires creative thinking, or research, in fact any expansion of the mind at all, then it's worth it.
Another, more real train of thought which came from Robert Rankin's clockwork earth was the idea that we're all, permanently, living just on the brink of global destruction. This is slightly scarier, because we are. I'm not going to bang on about Global Warming or nuclear terrorism here (plenty of time for that), but it's a fact that, since the 50's, the "First World" as a society has been living out it's own particular End Time. What make this different from the End Times of, say, 999 A.D., is that we aren't (or at least I'm not, the Seventh Day Adventists may be) living in fear of a wrathful God putting an end to His creation. We're living in the very real fear of man-made destruction; we know it can happen, we've seen it on TV. I was born in 1966 so I don't remember the "height" of the Cold War, when people were encouraged to build nuclear fallout shelters and the 4-minute-warning sirens were regularly tested; I can only speculate as to what it must have been like growing up in such a fear-dominated society, only decades after the most destructive war the world had yet seen. Hiroshima and Nagasaki must have been a bucket of icewater over the collective psyche of the Western world, already staggering from the reality of conventional war; Dresden to the power of ten in seconds, could anyone really imagine that?
So, a good idea, can really lead you anywhere, if you let it. Personally, I'm a great "evangeliser" of ideas; if I read something that hits the right chord, and that's so far anything from Philip K. Dick to Baudelaire, I get on a mission and threaten, bribe or cajole my friends and relatives to read it as well. "But you don't understand, I've got no-one to talk to about it!" I would wail to my ex-partner as I spent hours online urging people to read whatever I was into at that particular moment. Ex-partner, who reads a couple of books a year (in fairness, he does have a life), really didn't understand; for me, ideas are for sharing and discussing, batting backwards and forwards over a bottle of wine, disseminating as widely as possible. Which is more or less what I'm doing here, I suppose. And why I love the Net so much; once an idea is out there, it persists, and with a bit of effort I can find it.
posted by holojojo at 2:08 AM
1 Comments:
Just seeing if this works
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