The War Is Over (full version)

Silent soldiers on a silver screen
Framed in fantasies and dragged in dream
Unpaid actors of the mystery
The mad director knows that freedom will not make you free
And what's this got to do with me

I declare the war is over
It's over, it's over
All the children play with Gatling guns 
Tattooed mothers with their tattooed sons 
The strong will wonder if they're surely strong 
It doesn't matter lately whether we are right or wrong 
But surely we've gone on too long

I declare the war is over
It's over, it's over

Cardboard cowboys in a new frontier 
Drowning Indians in vats of beer 
The troops are leaving on the Trojan train 
The sun is in their eyes but I am hiding from the rain
 Now one of us must be insane

I declare the war is over
It's over, it's over

Drums are drizzling on a grain of sand
Fading rhythms of a fading land
Prove your courage in the proud parade
Trust your leaders where mistakes are almost never made
And they're afraid that I'm afraid

I'm afraid the war is over
It's over, it's over

But at least we're working, building tanks and planes 
And a race is coming so we can't complain 
The master of the march has lost his mind 
Perhaps, some other war, this fabled farce would all be fine 
But now we're running out of time 

I declare the war is over
It's over, it's over

Angry artists painting angry signs
Use their vision just to blind the blind
Poisoned players of a grizzly game
One is guilty and the other gets the point to blame
Pardon me if I refrain

I declare the war is over
It's over, it's over

So do your duty, boys, and join with pride
Serve your country in her suicide
Find a flag so you can wave goodbye
But just before the end even treason might be worth a try
This country is too young to die

I declare the war is over
It's over, it's over

One-legged veterans will greet the dawn
And they're whistling marches as they mow the lawn
And the gargoyles only sit and grieve
The gypsy fortune teller told me that we'd been deceived
You only are what you believe

I believe the war is over
It's over, it's over

Phil Ochs 

And the world disappeared as though shot with a warm whisky gun
As proudly we played and frolicked in desperate fun
The cold night was laughing and waiting outside of the room
So here's where I'll stand and drink with the damned
And take it out of my youth.

Phil Ochs

 

"It Seems There Are No More Songs"

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.   

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.   

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.   

Till then I see what’s really always there:   

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,   

Making all thought impossible but how   

And where and when I shall myself die.   

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse   

—The good not done, the love not given, time   

Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because   

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;   

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,   

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,   

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,   

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,   

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill   

That slows each impulse down to indecision.   

Most things may never happen: this one will,   

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without   

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave   

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.   

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,   

Have always known, know that we can’t escape,   

Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring   

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Philip Larkin

"Aubade" 

Collected Poems. 

The Right Mindset for Our Times?

I was at that time a stupidist, and probably still am. Stupidism is the theory that people are stupid in the measure of their most powerful agency. They’re stupid precisely when we need them not to be stupid. Much as I didn’t want to be a stupidist—it’s dispiriting, for starters—I recognized that it improved my grasp on things. Whereas I used to listen with great respect to what the Treasury Secretary or the C.E.O. of a booming conglomerate or even your regular talking head had to say, now I presumed that they were full of it. It was revelatory. The world makes a lot more sense when you accept that it’s run by dingbats. And once you’ve recognized the nature of stupidity—that it expresses a relation between a person and that person’s situation; that it describes the gap between what ought to be understood and done and what is, in fact, understood and done—you begin to recognize the magnitude of the problem. Stupidity isn’t inevitable or constant, of course, but in the long run it almost always prevails. Alan Greenspan? Stupid, ultimately. Barack Obama? Not as smart as he needed to be, at the end of the day. Joe Schmo? Amazingly stupid.

The Flier
Joseph O'Neill
The New Yorker
November 11, 2019

At the Ruins of Yankee Stadium

It is that week in April when all the lions start to shine,
café tables poised for selfies, windows squeegeed
and fenceposts freshly painted around Tompkins Square,
former haven of junkies and disgraceful pigeons
today chock-full of French bulldogs and ornamental tulips
superimposed atop the old, familiar, unevictable dirt.
Lying on the couch, I am drifting with the conversation
of bees, a guttural buzz undergirding the sound
from a rusty string of wind chimes hung and forgotten
in the overgrown beech tree marooned out back,
limbs shaggy with neon-green flame-tongue leaflets
forking through a blanket of white blossoms,
long-neglected evidence of spring at its most deluxe,
pure exuberant fruitfulness run amok.
Rigorous investigation has identified two dialects
buzzing through the plunder-fall, hovering black bumblebees
and overworked honeybees neck-deep in nectar-bliss,
as the city to us, blundering against its oversaturated anthers
until the pollen coats our skin, as if sugar-dusted,
as if rolled in honey and flour to bake a cake
for the queen, yes, she is with us, it is spring and this
is her coronation, blossoming pear and crab-apple
and cherry trees, too many pinks to properly absorb,
every inch of every branch lusting after beauty.
To this riot of stimuli, this vernal bombardment
of the senses, I have capitulated without a fight.
But not the beech tree. It never falters. It is stalwart
and grounded and garlanded, a site-specific creation,
seed to rootling to this companionable giant,
tolerant and benign, how many times have I reflected
upon their superiority to our species, the trees of earth?
Reflection, self-reflection—my job is to polish the mirror,
to amplify the echoes. Even now I am hard at work,
researching the ineffable. I loafe and invite my soul,
for Walt Whitman is ever my companion in New York,
thronged carcass of a city in which one is never alone
and yet never un-nagged-at by loneliness, a hunger
as much for the otherness of others as for the much-sung self,
for something somewhere on the verge of realization,
for what lies around the corner, five or six blocks uptown,
hiding out in the Bronx or across the river in Jersey.
Somewhere on the streets of the city right now somebody
is meeting the love of their life for the very first time,
somebody is drinking schnapps from a paper sack
discussing Monty Python with a man impersonating a priest,
someone is waiting for the bus to South Carolina
to visit her sister in hospice, someone is teleconferencing
with the office back in Hartford, Antwerp, Osaka,
someone is dust-sweeping, throat-clearing, cart-wheeling,
knife-grinding, day-trading, paying dues, dropping a dime,
giving the hairy eyeball, pissing against a wall,
someone is snoozing, sniffling, cavorting, nibbling,
roistering, chiding, snuggling, confiding,
pub-crawling, speed-dating, pump-shining, ivy-trimming,
tap-dancing, curb-kicking, rat-catching, tale-telling,
getting lost, getting high, getting busted, breaking up,
breaking down, breaking loose, losing faith,
going broke, going green, feeling blue, seeing red,
someone is davening, busking, hobnobbing, grandstanding,
playing the ponies, feeding the pigeons, gull-watching,
wolf-whistling, badgering the witness, pulling down the grill
and locking up shop, writing a letter home in Pashto or
Xhosa, learning to play the xylophone, waiting for an Uber X,
conspiring, patrolling, transcending, bedevilling,
testifying, bloviating, absolving, kibbitzing,
kowtowing, pinky-swearing, tarring and shingling,
breaking and entering, delivering and carting away,
enwreathing lampposts with yellow ribbons,
reading Apollinaire on a bench littered with fallen petals,
waiting for an ambulance to pass before crossing First Avenue
toward home. No wonder they fear it so intensely,
the purists and isolationists in Kansas, the ideologues
in Kandahar, it is a relentless negotiation with multiplicity,
a constant engagement with the shape-shifting mob,
diversely luminous as sunlight reflecting off mirrored glass
in puzzle pieces of apostolic light. Certainly this is not
the Eternal City but it is certainly Imperial, certainly
tyrannical, democratic, demagogic, dynastic, anarchic,
hypertrophic, hyperreal. An empire of rags and photons.
An empire encoded in the bricks from which it was built,
each a stamped emblem of its labor-intensive materiality,
hundreds of millions barged down the Hudson each year
from the clay pits of Haverstraw and Kingston
after the Great Fire of 1835, a hinterland of dependencies,
quarries and factories and arterial truck farms
delivering serum to that muscular heart, a toiling collective
of Irish sandhogs and Iroquois beam walkers and Ivoirian
umbrella venders collecting kindling for the bonfire
that has lured, like moths, the entire world to its blaze.
As with my tree, the hubbub of bees its exaltation.
Apis, maker of honey, Bombus, the humble bumbler,
and the tree a common American beech.
It rules the yard, overawing a straggling ailanthus
hard against the wall of the Con Ed substation.
Along the fence some scraggly boxwood shrubs,
a table collapsed into rusted segments, two piles of bricks—
what’s their story?—who made them, carted them,
set them as a patio, and who undid that work to create these
mundane, rain-eroded monuments to human neglect?
Why does nobody tend this little garden?
Undisciplined ivy scales the building in thick ropes
and coils of porcelain berry vine, whose fruit will ripen
to obscene brilliance come autumn, those strange berries,
turquoise, violet, azure . . . Ah, I’ve lost my train
of thought. Berries. The city. People, bricks, the past.
Bees in a flowering beech tree. Symbiosis. Streams and webs
and permutations, viruses replicating, mutating, evolving.
Books in a library, bricks in a wall, people in a city.
A man selling old golf clubs on the corner of Ludlow Street.
A woman on the F train carefully rubbing ointment
up and down her red, swollen arms. Acorns—
tossing them into the Hudson River from a bench as I did
when I was Peter Stuyvesant, when I was Walt Whitman,
when we were of the Lenape and Broadway our hunting trail.
Then the deer vanished, the docks decayed, the towers fell.
The African graveyard was buried beneath concrete
as the memory of slavery has been obscured by dogma
and denial. The city speaks a hundred languages,
it straddles three rivers, it holds forty islands hostage,
it is an archipelago of memory, essential and insubstantial
and evasive as the progeny of steam grates at dawn,
a gathering of apparitions. The Irish have vanished
from Washington Heights but I still see myself eating
a cold pot-roast sandwich, watching “McHale’s Navy”
on black-and-white TV in my grandmother’s old apartment.
I remember the parties we used to throw on Jane Street,
shots of tequila and De La Soul on the tape deck, everyone
dancing, everyone young and vibrant and vivacious—
decades later we discovered a forgotten videotape
and our sons, watching with bemused alarm, blurted out,
Mom, you were so beautiful! She was. We all were,
everyone except the city. The city was a wreck and then
it was a renovation project and now it is a playground of privilege
and soon it will be something else, liquid as a dream.
Empires come and go, ours will fade in turn, even the city
will retreat, step by step, as the Atlantic rises against it.
But water is not the end. Bricks are made of clay and sand
and when they disintegrate, when they return to silt,
new bricks will be made by hands as competent as ours.
People will live in half-flooded tenements, people will live
on houseboats moored to bank pillars along Wall Street.
It’s all going under, the entire Eastern Seaboard.
The capital will move to Kansas City but nobody will mourn
for Washington. Someone will invent virtual gasoline. Someone
will write a poem called “At the Ruins of Yankee Stadium”
which will be set to a popular tune by a media impresario
and people in Ohio will sing it during the seventh-inning stretch
remembering, or imagining, the glory of what was.
Time is with us viscerally, idiomatically, time inhabits us
like a glass bowl filled with tap water at the kitchen sink,
and some little pink stones, and a sunken plastic castle
with a child’s face etched in a slate-gray window.
Fish swim past, solemn as ghosts, and the child smiles sadly,
wondering, perhaps, how bees will pollinate underwater.
He seems a little melancholy. He must miss his old home,
a skin-honeyed hive of multifarious humankind,
a metropolis of stately filth doused in overrich perfume.
The castle door swings open and the boy emerges
like an astronaut stepping warily onto the moon.
When he sees us, through the warping lens of the bowl,
watching him with desperate, misfocussed passion, we are
as cartoonishly gargantuan as the past, and he as spectral
as the future, raising one small hand to wave goodbye.

 

 

Campbell McGrath

The New Yorker, April 27, 2020

Conditions of White Privilege

"After frustration with men who would not recognize male privilege, I decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some of the daily effects of white privilege in my life. It is crude work, at this stage, but I will give here a list of special circumstances and conditions I experience that I did not earn but that I have been made to feel are mine by birth, by citizenship, and by virtue of being a conscientious law-abiding "normal" person of goodwill. I have chosen those conditions that I think in my case attach somewhat more to skin-color privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographical location, though these other privileging factors are intricately intertwined. As far as I can see, my Afro-American co-workers, friends, and acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent contact in this particular time, place, and line of work cannot count on most of these conditions.

1. I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.
2. I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.
3. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.
4. I can be reasonably sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.
5. I can go shopping alone most of the time, fairly well assured that I will not be followed or harassed by store detectives.
6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely and positively represented.
7. When I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization," I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.
8. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.
9. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.
10. I can be fairly sure of having my voice heard in a group in which I am the only member of my race.
11. I can be casual about whether or not to listen to another woman's voice in a group in which she is the only member of her race.
12. I can go into a book shop and count on finding the writing of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods that fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find someone who can deal with my hair.
13. Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance that I am financially reliable.
14. I could arrange to protect our young children most of the time from people who might not like them.
15. I did not have to educate our children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection.
16. I can be pretty sure that my children's teachers and employers will tolerate them if they fit school and workplace norms; my chief worries about them do not concern others' attitudes toward their race.
17. I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my color.
18. I can swear, or dress in secondhand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.
19. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.
20. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
21. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
22. I can remain oblivious to the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world's majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.
23. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.
24. I can be reasonably sure that if I ask to talk to "the person in charge," I will be facing a person of my race.
25. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven't been singled out because of my race.
26. I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children's magazines featuring people of my race.
27. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out of place, outnumbered, un­heard, held at a distance, or feared.
28. I can be pretty sure that an argument with a colleague of another race is more likely to jeopardize her chances for advancement than to jeopardize mine.
29. I can be fairly sure that if I argue for the promotion of a person of another race, or a program centering on race, this is not likely to cost me heavily within my present setting, even if my colleagues disagree with me.
30. If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn't a racial issue at hand, my race will lend me more credibility for either position than a person of color will have.
31. I can choose to ignore developments in minority writing and minority activist programs, or disparage them, or learn from them, but in any case, I can find ways to be more or less protected from negative consequences of any of these choices.
32. My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives and powers of people of other races.
33. I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing, or body odor will be taken as a reflection on my race.
34. I can worry about racism without being seen as self-interested or self-seeking.
35. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race.
36. If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it has racial overtones.
37. I can be pretty sure of finding people who would be willing to talk with me and advise me about my next steps, professionally.
38. I can think over many options, social, political, imaginative, or professional, without asking whether a person of my race would be accepted or allowed to do what I want to do.
39. I can be late to a meeting without having the lateness reflect on my race.
40. I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.
41. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.
42. I can arrange my activities so that I will never have to experience feelings of rejection owing to my race.
43. If I have low credibility as a leader, I can be sure that my race is not the problem.
44. I can easily find academic courses and institutions that give attention only to people of my race.
45. I can expect figurative language and imagery in all of the arts to testify to experiences of my race.
46. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color and have them more or less match my skin."

from "White Privilege and Male Privilege" and "Some Notes for Facilitators" by Dr. Peggy McIntosh, The National SEED Project. 

Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

"After a moment, he opened his mouth, then closed it.  He turned back to look at the water, and for a long time neither said anything.  Earlier in their marriage, they'd had fights that made Olive feel sick the way she felt now.  But after a certain point in a marriage you stopped having a certain kind of fight, Olive thought, because when the years behind you were more than the years in front of you, things were different.  She felt the sun's warmth on her arms, although down here under the hill by the water, the air held the hint of nippiness."

A Different Road
Elizabeth Stout
The Best American Mystery Stories 2008
George Pelecanos, editor
Houghton Mifflin Company
2008

The View From Abroad

Madeline: It always leaps out at me...

Frances: What does?

Madeline: When you read in the paper: "American lives have been lost..."

Frances: Oh yes.

Madeline: Their politicians always put on that tone of special shock.  "The situation endangers American lives."  As if American lives were automatically different from any other kind, in a different category, a different category of life...

Frances: But isn't that what they believe?

Madeline: That's how they are.  Because they're richer than everyone else, so they have to insist that their dramas are more significant. (Madeline shakes her head.) And my God, all that behavior in restaurants...

Frances: What behavior?

Madeline: Even here, even on the island, you hear them in restaurants...

Frances: Who?

Madeline: Americans.

Frances: Oh.

Madeline: "Does this chicken have skin on it?" What's all that about?

Frances: You tell me.

Madeline: This incredible fear.  This terror. What's the waiter meant to say?

Frances: I don't know.

Madeline: "No, this chicken never had a skin. This chicken shivered skinless in its coop at night, just pure flesh and feathers, terrified it might one day give an American a calorie."

Frances: Well, quite.

Madeline: I mean, somebody tell me: are the two connected? How are they connected? At once the most powerful people on earth and now it appears the most fearful...

Frances: Perhaps that's why.

Madeline: The most risk-averse.  (Madeline is emphatic, summing up.)  Life with all the life taken out of it. 

Frances: Perhaps they just feel they have more to lose.

     Madeline looks at her, unforgiving.

Madeline: Well, they don't.

Frances: Of course not.

Madeline: They'll die like we die.

Frances: Well, yes.  (Frances frowns slightly.)  I mean, not quite.

Madeline: Oh, maybe with a few more drips attached...

Frances: That's what I meant...

Madeline: Yes, with a few more monitors, perhaps.  Jumping up in their beds like rubber dolls when the electrodes are applied. A couple more weeks of gibbering half-consciousness.  Parked for a while in some chemical waiting room.  Yes, they'll get that.  Electronically bestowed.  Death delayed but not denied.  But finally, no. They'll lose what we lose.  (Madeline nods bitterly.)  Take it from me. 

The Breath of Life
David Hale
Faber & Faber Limited
2002

Freeman’s Top Five Tips for Studying the American Revolution

1. Avoid the dreaded Revolutionary War fact bubble. 

2. Think about the meaning of words.

3. Remember that Founders were people. 

4. We’re not just talking about Founders. 

5. Remember contingency.  

Joanne Freeman
History 116
Yale University Open Courses
Spring 2010

The Fire Next Time

Darkness

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,

And men forgot their passions in the dread

Of this their desolation; and all hearts

Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:

And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones,

The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,

The habitations of all things which dwell,

Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum'd,

And men were gather'd round their blazing homes

To look once more into each other's face;

Happy were those who dwelt within the eye

Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:

A fearful hope was all the world contain'd;

Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour

They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks

Extinguish'd with a crash—and all was black.

The brows of men by the despairing light

Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits

The flashes fell upon them; some lay down

And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest

Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil'd;

And others hurried to and fro, and fed

Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up

With mad disquietude on the dull sky,

The pall of a past world; and then again

With curses cast them down upon the dust,

And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the wild birds shriek'd

And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,

And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes

Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd

And twin'd themselves among the multitude,

Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food.

And War, which for a moment was no more,

Did glut himself again: a meal was bought

With blood, and each sate sullenly apart

Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;

All earth was but one thought—and that was death

Immediate and inglorious; and the pang

Of famine fed upon all entrails—men

Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;

The meagre by the meagre were devour'd,

Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one,

And he was faithful to a corse, and kept

The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay,

Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead

Lur'd their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,

But with a piteous and perpetual moan,

And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand

Which answer'd not with a caress—he died.

The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two

Of an enormous city did survive,

And they were enemies: they met beside

The dying embers of an altar-place

Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things

For an unholy usage; they rak'd up,

And shivering scrap'd with their cold skeleton hands

The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath

Blew for a little life, and made a flame

Which was a mockery; then they lifted up

Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld

Each other's aspects—saw, and shriek'd, and died—

Even of their mutual hideousness they died,

Unknowing who he was upon whose brow

Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,

The populous and the powerful was a lump,

Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—

A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.

The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,

And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths;

Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,

And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp'd

They slept on the abyss without a surge—

The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,

The moon, their mistress, had expir'd before;

The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air,

And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need

Of aid from them—She was the Universe. 

Lord Byron (George Gordon)

"Bellringer"

I am as true to that bell as to my God.
   —Henry Martin (July 4, 1826-October 5, 1915)

I was given a name, it came out of a book—
I don’t know which. I’ve been told the Great Man
could recite every title in order on its shelf.
Well, I was born, and that’s a good thing,
although I arrived on the day of his passing,
a day on which our country fell into mourning.
This I heard over and over, from professors
to farmers, even duel-scarred students;
sometimes, in grand company, remarked upon
in third person—a pretty way of saying
more than two men in a room means the third
can be ignored, as I was when they spoke
of my birth and Mr. Jefferson’s death
in one breath, voices dusted with wonderment,
faint sunlight quivering on a hidden breeze.
I listen in on the lectures whenever I can,
holding still until I disappear beyond third person—
and what I hear sounds right enough;
it eases my mind. I know my appearance
frightens some of the boys—the high cheeks
and freckles and not-quite-Negro eyes
flaring gray as storm-washed skies
back home; it shames them to be reminded.
So much for book learning! I nod
as if to say, Uncle Henry at your service,
then continue on my way through darkness
to start the day. This is my place:
stone rookery perched above
the citadels of knowledge,
alone with the bats and my bell,
keeping time. Up here, molten glory
brims until my head’s rinsed clear.
I am no longer a dreadful coincidence
nor debt crossed off in a dead man’s ledger;
I am not summoned, dismissed—
I am the clock’s keeper. I ring in their ears.
And every hour, down in that
shining, blistered republic,
someone will pause to whisper
Henry!—and for a moment
my name flies free.

Rita Dove
The New Yorker
March 18, 2019

"Along the East River and in the Bronx Young Men Were Singing"

I heard them and I still hear them
above the threatening shrieks of police sirens
above the honking horns of morning traffic,
above the home-crowd cheers of Yankee Stadium
above the school bells and laughter
lighting up the afternoon
above the clamoring trudge of the 1 train
and the 2 and 4, 5, 6, the B and the D
above the ice-cream trucks’ warm jingle
above the stampede of children
playing in the street,
above the rush of a popped fire hydrant
above the racket of eviction notices
above the whisper of moss and mold moving in
above the High Bridge and the 145th Street Bridge
above mothers calling those children
to come in for dinner, to come in
before it gets dark, to get your ass inside
above them calling a child who may never come home
above the creaking plunge of nightfall
and darkness settling in the deepest corners
above the Goodyear blimp circling the Stadium
above the seagulls circling the coastal trash
along the East River and in the Bronx
young men are singing and I hear them,
eastbound into eternity even
as morning destars the sky.

Ariel Francisco
The New Yorker
March 18, 2019

Something happenin' here, what it is ain't exactly clear...

"Aside from their unpredictability and their susceptibility to fear, hunger and disease, flesh-and-blood soldiers think and move on an unceasingly irrelevant timescale.  From the days of Nebuchadnezzar to those of Saddam Hussein, despite myriad technological improvements, war was waged on an organic timetable. Discussions lasted for hours, battles took days, and wars dragged on for years.  Cyber-wars, however, may last just a few minutes.  When a lieutenant on shift at cyber-command notices something odd is going on, she picks up the phone to call her superior, who immediately alerts the White House.  Alas, by the time the president reaches for the red handset, the war has already been lost. Within seconds a sufficiently sophisticated cyber strike might shut down the US power grid, wreck US flight control centres, cause numerous industrial accidents in nuclear plants and chemical installations, disrupt the police, army and intelligence communication networks -- and wipe out financial records so that trillions of dollars simply vanish without a trace and nobody knows who owns what.  The only thing curbing public hysteria is that, with the Internet, television and radio down, people will not be aware of the full magnitude of the disaster."

Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari

We'll meet again/don't know where/don't know when...

"How rational is it to risk the future of humankind on the assumption that future scientists will make some unknown planetary discoveries?  Most of the presidents, ministers, and CEOs who run the world are very rational people. Why are they willing to take such a gamble?  Maybe because they don't think they are gambling on their own personal future. Even if bad comes to worse and science cannot hold off the deluge, engineers could still build a high tech Noah's Ark for the upper caste, while leaving billions of others to drown.  The belief in this high-tech Ark is currently one of the biggest threats to the future of humankind and of the entire ecosystem.  People who believe in the hi-tech Ark should not be put in charge of the global ecology, for the same reason that people who believe in a heavenly afterlife should not be given nuclear weapons."

Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari

Dorothy: How can you talk, if you haven't got a brain? The Scarecrow: I don't know. But, some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don't they?

"According to the Turning Test, in order to determine whether a computer has a mind, you should communicate simultaneously with a computer and with a real person, without knowing which is which.  You can ask whatever questions you want, you can play games, argue, and even flirt with them.  Take as much time as you like.  Then you need to decide which is the computer and which is the human.  If you cannot make up your mind, or if you make a mistake, the computer has passed the Turing Test, and we should treat it as if it really has a mind.  However, that won't really be a proof, of course. Acknowledging the existence of other minds is merely a social and legal convention.


The Turing Test was invented in 1950 by the British mathematician Alan Turing, one of the fathers of the computer age.  Turing was also a gay man in a period when homosexuality was illegal in Britain.  In 1952 he was convicted of committing homosexual acts and forced to undergo chemical castration.  Two years later he committed suicide.  The Turing Test is simply a replication of a mundane test every gay man had to undergo in 1950s Britain: can you pass for a straight man?  Turing knew from personal experience that it didn't matter who you were really -- it mattered only what others thought about you.  According to Turing, in the future computers would be just like gay men in the 1950s.  It won't matter whether computers will actually be conscious or not.  It will only matter what people think about it."

Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari

“All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them.” Neil Gaiman, American Gods

"...for thousands of years humans used God to explain numerous natural phenomenon.  What causes lightning to strike?  God.  What makes the rain fall?  God. How did life on earth begin?  God did it.  Over the last few centuries scientists have not discovered any empirical evidence for God's existence, while they did find much more detailed explanations for lightning strikes, rain and  the origins of life.  Consequently, with the exception of a few sub-fields of philosophy, no article in any peer-review scientific journal takes God's existence seriously.  Historians don't argue that the Allies won the Second World War because God was on their side; economists don't blame God for the 1929 economic crisis; and geologists don't invoke His will to explain tectonic plate movements."

Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari

The Anthropocene

"How many wolves live today in Germany, the land of the Grimm brothers, Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf?  Less than a hundred.  (And even these are mostly Polish wolves that stole over the border in recent years.)  In contrast, Germany is home to 5 million domesticated dogs. Altogether about 200,000 wild wolves still roam over the earth, but there are more than 400 million domesticated dogs.  The world contains 40,000 lions compared with 600 million house cats; 900,000 African buffalo versus 1.5 million domesticated cows; 50 million penguins and 20 billion chickens.  Since 1970, despite growing ecological awareness, wildlife populations have halved (not that they were prospering in 1970).  In 1980 there were 2 billion wild birds in Europe.  In 2009 only 1.6 billion were left.  In the same year, Europeans raised 1.9 billion chickens for meat and eggs.  At present, more than 90 percent of the large animals of the world (i.e., those weighing more than a few kilograms) are either humans or domesticated animals."

Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari

Good doggie

"In my view, you cannot have a serious discussion about the nature and future of humankind without beginning with our fellow animals.  Homo sapiens does its best to forget the fact, but it is an animal.  And it is doubly important to remember our origins at a time when we seek to turn ourselves into gods.  No investigation of our divine future can ignore our own animal past, or our relations with other animals -- because the relationship between humans and animals is the best model we have for future relations between superhumans and humans.  You want to know how super-intelligent cyborgs might treat ordinary flesh-and-blood humans?  Better start by investigating how humans treat their less intelligent animal cousins."

Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari

"Movements seeking to change the world often begin by rewriting history, thereby enabling people to reimagine the future.  Whether you want workers to go on a general strike, women to take possession of their bodies, or oppressed minorities to demand political rights  -- the first step is to retell their history.  The new history will explain that 'our present situation is neither natural or eternal.  Things were different once.  Only a string of chance events created the unjust world we know today.  If we act wisely, we can change that world, and create a much better one.'  This is why Marxists recount the history of capitalism; why feminists study the formation of patriarchal societies; and why African Americans commemorate the horrors of the slave trade.  They aim to to perpetuate the past, but rather to be liberated from it."

Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari

The past isn't dead...

"If history doesn't follow any stable rules, and if we cannot predict its future course, why study it?  It often seems that the chief aim of science is to predict the future -- meteorologists are expected to forecast whether tomorrow will bring rain or sunshine; economists should know whether devaluing the currency will avert or precipitate an economic crisis; good doctors foresee whether chemotherapy or radiation therapy will be more successful in curing lung cancer.  Similarly, historians are asked to examine the actions of our ancestors so that we can repeat their wise decisions and avoid their mistakes.  But it almost never works like that because the present is just too different from the past.  It is a waste of time to study Hannibal's tactics in the Second Punic Wars so as to copy them in the Third World War. What worked well in cavalry battles will not necessarily be of much benefit to cyber warfare. 

Science is not just about predicting the future, though. Scholars in all fields often seek to broaden our horizons, thereby opening before us new and unknown futures.  This is especially true of history.  Though historians occasionally try their hand at prophecy (without notable success), the study of history aims above all to make us aware of possibilities we don't normally consider.  Historians study the past not in order to repeat it; but in order to be liberated from it. 

...

Studying history aims to loosen the grip of the past.  It enables us to turn our head this way and that, and to begin to notice possibilities that our ancestors could not imagine, or didn't want us to imagine.  By observing the accidental chain of events that led us here, we realise how our very thoughts and dreams took shape -- and we can begin to think and dream differently.  Studying history will not tell us what to chose, but it at least gives us more options."

Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tommorow
Yuval Noah Harari

Earthseed: The Books of the Living

Octavia Butler's Lost Parables

"The bad news is waiting for us on the first page of the first chapter of Octavia E. Butler’s 1998 science fiction novel Parable of the Talents. “I have read,” writes one of the book’s four narrators, “that the period of upheaval that journalists have begun to refer to as ‘the Apocalypse’ or more commonly, more bitterly, ‘the Pox’ lasted from 2015 through 2030 — a decade and a half of chaos.” And before you buckle in to at least enjoy what’s left of 2014, take note: “This is untrue. The Pox has been a much longer torment. It began well before 2015, perhaps even before the turn of the millennium. It has not ended.” For those who would call the Pox bad luck —“accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crisis” — our historian has even more bad news: “It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises.”

The good news — such as it is — was waiting for us on page one of 1993’s Parable of the Sower, and presented in the short poems that populate the two published Parables books: Earthseed. Earthseed is a new religion founded by a young black woman, Lauren Olamina, who is living in the failing California of the 2020s. The religion is organized around a central proposition: the inevitability of change, and the consequent need to be adaptable and flexible in response to change.

God is Power—

Infinite,

Irresistible,

Inexorable,

And yet, God is Pliable—

Trickster,

Teacher,

Chaos,

Clay.

God exists to be shaped.

God is Change.

The Parables series — Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents — was Butler’s least fantastic series of novels, her attempt to write in the mode critics sometimes call “mundane SF” to denote those science fiction stories that remain in accordance with the laws of physics as we understand them. Gone are the superpowered telepaths that populate her Patternist series; gone is the time travel from Kindred and the aliens from the Xenogenesis trilogy. The sole science fictional conceit in the Parables books is the presence of a psychosomatic malady called “hyperempathy” that is caused by contact with a toxic prescription drug in the womb, which causes its sufferers to falsely experience the sight of another’s pain as their own. The rest is prophecy, not fantasy — Butler’s earnest attempt to imagine the failing world of the twenty-first century, as we are all about to experience it, from that long-ago position of the happy 1990s. “Sometime ago I read some place that Robert A. Heinlein had these three categories of science-fiction stories: the what-if category; the if-only category; and the if-this-goes-on category,” Butler told an audience at MIT in 1998. “And I liked the idea. So this is definitely an if-this-goes-on story. And if it’s true, if it’s anywhere near true, we’re all in trouble.”

In personal journals Butler admits Olamina is an idealized self, her “best self” — and the poetry that drives the Earthseed religion actually mirrors the style of the daily affirmations, self-help sloganeering, and even self-hypnosis techniques Butler used to keep herself focused and on-task. (The Huntington Library contains countless examples of this seemingly daily ritual of writing down things she wants to come true, some dating back as far as Butler’s teens.) The ultimate expression of “shaping God,” the culmination of human historical achievement Olamina calls “the Destiny,” likewise seems to parallel Butler’s deep-rooted psychological investment in science fictional speculation, which dates back to her childhood: “The destiny of Earthseed,” Olamina prophesies, “is to take root among the stars.”

The two published Earthseed books trace the tribulations of Olamina’s early life and her efforts to find some safe space for her nascent utopian community in the desperate and increasingly fascistic America of the coming decades. But the last chapter of Talents skips ahead to the end of the story: jumping forward six decades, the epilogue sees a very aged Olamina, now world-famous, witnessing the launch of the first Earthseed ship carrying interstellar colonists off the planet as she’d dreamed. Only the name of the spaceship gives us pause: against Olamina’s wishes the ship has been named the Christopher Columbus, suggesting that perhaps the Earthseeders aren’t escaping the nightmare of history at all, but bringing it with them instead.

And there Butler left it. The long-promised third book, Parable of the Trickster, never arrived.

Last December I had the improbable privilege to be the very first scholar to open the boxes at the Huntington that contain what Butler had written of Trickster before her death.What I found were dozens upon dozens of false starts for the novel, some petering out after twenty or thirty pages, others after just two or three; this cycle of narrative failure is recorded over hundreds of pages of discarded drafts. Frustrated by writer’s block, frustrated by blood pressure medication that she felt inhibited her creativity and vitality, and frustrated by the sense that she had no story for Trickster, only a “situation,” Butler started and stopped the novel over and over again from 1989 until her death, never getting far from the beginning.

Nearly all of the texts focus on a character named Imara — who has been named the Guardian of Lauren Olamina’s ashes, who is often said to be her distant relative, and who is plainly imagined as the St. Paul to Olamina’s Christ (her story sometimes begins as a journalist who has gone undercover with the Earthseed “cult” to expose Olamina as a fraud, and winds up getting roped in). Imara awakens from cryonic suspension on an alien world where she and most of her fellow Earthseed colonists are saddened to discover they wish they’d never left Earth in the first place. The world — called “Bow” — is gray and dank, and utterly miserable; it takes its name from the only splash of color the planet has to offer, its rare, naturally occurring rainbows. They have no way to return to Earth, or to even to contact it; all they have is what little they’ve brought with them, which for most (but not all) of them is a strong belief in the wisdom of the teachings of Earthseed. Some are terrified; many are bored; nearly all are deeply unhappy. Her personal notes frame this in biological terms. From her notes to herself: “Think of our homesickness as a phantom-limb pain — a somehow neurologically incomplete amputation. Think of problems with the new world as graft-versus-host disease — a mutual attempt at rejection.”

From here the possible plots begin to multiply beyond all reason. In some of the texts, the colonists are in total denial about the fact that they are all slowly going blind; in others the blindness is sudden, striking randomly and irreversibly; in others they all begin to go insane, or suffer seizures, or mad rages, or fall into long comas; in still others they begin to hurt and kill each other for no other reason than the basic inevitable frailty of human nature (the same, alas, on any world). In one of the versions of the novel the colonists develop a telepathic capacity that soon turns nightmarish when they are unable to resist it or shut it off; in one twist on this idea it’s only the women who are so empowered, with the men organizing a secret conspiracy to figure out how they might regain control.

There’s a version where the blindness and the telepathy are linked; Imara becomes able to see out of others’ eyes as she loses the ability to see out of her own. In some Imara finds she needs to solve a murder, the first murder on the new world; in still others Imara herself is murdered, but discovers that on this strange alien world she is somehow able to haunt another colonists’ body as a ghost, replicating Doro’s power from the Patternist books and thereby linking even the Parables to the speculative universe she first developed as a teenager. Sometimes Imara is an Earthseed skeptic; other times she is a true believer; sometimes she is, like Olamina, a hyperempath; still other times the cure for “sharing” has been discovered in the form of an easy, noninvasive pill. Sometimes Bow is inhabited by small animals, other times by dinosaur-like giant sauropods, and still other times by just moss and lichens; sometimes the colonists seem to encounter intelligent aliens who might be real, but might just be tokens of their escalating collective madness; and on and on and on.

One version of the blindness narrative is abandoned with no small grumbling after José Saramago wins the Nobel Prize for Blindness in 1998; another is put aside after she determines it’s just too similar to Kim Stanley Robinson’s famous Red Mars; still another is abandoned shortly after Butler frustratedly, self-loathingly declares Imara to have “a personality more like mine” against Olamina’s “super me — the me I wish I was.” Sometimes Earthseed seems more like a self-help philosophy; sometimes it becomes a genuinely mystical, transcendent religion; sometimes we see it begin to shift from the first toward the second; sometimes it suffers schisms, heresies, and purges. Sometimes Imara is a former cop; sometimes she is a trained psychologist; sometimes she’s a doctor; sometimes she’s that undercover journalist; still other times she was the victim of a horrific series of rapes as a child, saved by one of Olamina’s orphanages when no other entity or institution would bother. When Butler begins writing the book, Newt Gingrich is named as the model for the central antagonist; in the versions from the 2000s, it’s George W. Bush; sometimes in between it’s other science fiction writers with whom Butler didn’t especially get along.

As Butler describes her long-term plan in an interview: “I’m not interested in confronting them with natives. I’ve done that elsewhere. What I’m going to confront them with is just a nasty world. It’s not violent, just nasty and dull and awful, and what they’re going to have to deal with is themselves. There’s no going home. Nobody will follow within their lifetimes. …. The real problem is dealing with themselves, surviving their promised land.”

What Butler had ultimately hoped to do was write four Parables sequels: Parable of the Trickster, Parable of the Teacher, Parable of Chaos, and Parable of Clay. The titles suggest a shift from a Christian idiom (Sower, Talents, and Trickster all reference Biblical parables) to an Earthseed one (Teacher, Chaos, and Clay seem likely to be parables drawn from Olamina’s life, not Christ’s). In some of her imaginings it seems as though each of these stories might have taken place on four different Earthseed colonies, showing the diversity of thought Earthseed makes possible — but more commonly she imagines them taking place across the generations on the single world of Bow, as each generation confronts its own new crisis and Earthseed evolves to meet the needs of extrasolar humanity in each new historical moment. When the hallucinations are dealt with — not defeated or cured, she was clear, but adapted to — her notes indicate the colony would have struggled with dictatorship, and then with catastrophic ecological scarcity, and finally with the strangeness of children who were genuinely novel, genuinely new, genuinely post-Earth if not quite posthuman: the children of Bow, for whom the “screaming colors” of Earth might have seemed the real horror.

So of course we discover that achieving Earthseed’s Destiny, despite Lauren Olamina’s dreams, hasn’t solved the problem of the human at all, only extended our confrontation with the very difficult problems that drove its development in the first place — only removed them to some other world where they can take some other form. The Destiny was essentially a hyperbolic delaying tactic, a strategy of avoidance; even achieved, it’s worthless in its own terms. The fundamental problem is still how to make a better world with such bad building blocks as human beings.

As her published novels demonstrate, Octavia Butler was no utopian; in fact she rejected utopian thinking in the strongest possible terms. She believed human beings were biological organisms with sharp instincts for self-preservation that had been honed by evolution over innumerable millennia; she believed evolution had made us clever but mean, creative but selfish and short-sighted. In the Xenogenesis books the aliens who visit the planet determine we are fundamentally broken as a species, brilliant enough to invent nuclear bombs and hierarchal enough, crazy enough, stupid enough to actually use them. In the first Parable book, the young Olamina seems like an exception to this unhappy general diagnosis, even perhaps something like a saint—but her daughter is the main narrator of Talents, and her daughter finds her to be selfish, destructive, and extremely dangerous, a zealot willing to sacrifice anything and anyone for the Destiny. In the archives we actually see this revisionist attitude borne out from an objective, third-person perspective; lost stories and cut scenes set during Olamina’s missing decades reveal her as a steely and callous power-broker when she needs to be, even ordering a local politician’s assassination for daring to defy her. (One version even has Olamina slave-collaring people who try to leave her Earthseed villages: “Boy,” she said, “the dogs eat what’s left of people who try to break into our Communities. We burn what’s left of people who try to break out.”) For anyone who has read the published versions of the novels, this is absolutely startling; Butler’s personal reflections on Olamina reveal her as a much, much darker character than the one we get to know in the books, a character Butler never really trusted and only grew to like despite herself over time. Readers of the Parables books typically call the character “Lauren,” with a soft fondness—but in Butler’s personal notes she is always “Olamina.”

What the all-important dream of the Destiny offered Olamina, offered Butler — offers us — was a chance not to abolish human nature but to perhaps temporarily suspend it; the extrasolar colonies are the chance to start over in circumstances whose radical hardship would offer a chance to build new practices of solidarity and collective life rather than indulge the selfish impulses the bad habits of capitalism and the bad instructions in our DNA have ingrained in us. “If we survive,” Butler once told Larry McAfferty, “we have a whole solar system to grow up in. And we can use the stresses of learning to travel in space and live elsewhere—stresses that will harness our energies until we’ve had time to mature.” In her own notes for Trickster, she echoes this sense of constrained hope, which is to say a hope that is made possible by constraints, our boundless human creativity channeled by necessity into productive and useful ends because otherwise we’ll all die. “We can’t afford to go someplace else and make the mistakes we make here, here in the nest,” she writes. “We can’t afford to assume that another living world with its own biota and its own eons of existence will be able to tolerate our nonsense… taking, and putting back nothing — or putting back poisonous waste.”

Her cynicism led to Butler to think humans as a species won’t behave more decently towards each other and towards our environment unless and until we have literally no other choice — and maybe not even then. But her optimism led her to believe that when push finally comes to shove we are actually capable of it, and might actually do it. Getting off the planet, achieving the Destiny, was to be the start of the hard work, not the end of it — the unfinished Parables sequels would have been Butler’s chance to imagine that we might find some way to be better human beings out there than our bad history has ever allowed us to be here.
The epigram she chose for Trickster captures this tension between optimism and pessimism, and the possibility of actually breaking through this psychic impasse into something new, quite wonderfully:

There’s nothing new

under the sun,

but there are new suns.

Bow was a place where history wasn’t the unhappy curse we were condemned to, a place where the tug-of-war between collective survival and collective insanity might play itself out in another way. On Bow, they can choose: either live together, work together, struggle together, and pray together, or else hoard food alone, scheme alone, lose their minds alone, breakdown and die and murder each other alone. And the tragedy is she was never able, in her short life, to think through the hopeful part. Not “if this goes on,” but “if only”: if only she’d been able to complete that vision of better humanity — not perfect, not even perfectible, just better. If only she’d been able to finish the book."

"There's Nothing New/Under the Sun,/But There New Suns": 
Recovering Octavia E. Butler's Lost Parables
Gary Canavan
Los Angeles Review of Books
June 9, 2014

From Earthseed: The Books of the Living

Choose your Leaders
          with wisdom and forethought.

To be led by a coward
          is to be controlled
          by all that the coward fears.

To be led by a fool
          is to be led 
          by the opportunists 
          who control the fool.

To be led by a thief
          is to offer up
          you most precious treasures
          to be stolen.

To be led by a liar
          is to ask 
          to be told lies.

To be led by a tyrant
          is to sell yourself
          and those you love
          into slavery. 


Parable of the Talents
Octavia E. Butler
(c) 1998