I feel bad for any chimpanzee who hasn’t read The Sheltering Sky, or any dolphin who doesn’t desire this dolphin’s art, that one’s scope, the friends possessed of another.
The research into the symbolic capacity of animals is tantalizing but tentative. Nonetheless, it’s widely believed that the long-angle tools of symbolic reasoning are absent in animals– even tool-handy chimps, chit-disciplined capuchin monkeys, and puzzle-keen crows– just as they appear absent in very young human children. No representational if-thens. No madeleine reveries. Grief but no memorials.
Same for our ancestors: our biological next-door neighbors Homo habilis or neanderthalis, human enough in limb but before the onset of what scholars call “behavioral modernity” (abstract thought, recorded in signs of barter, burial, figurative art). Our dignified family, 50,000 years ago, who couldn’t yet think!
But save some pity for what we, too (us, readers, with WWI out of living memory, gray or gone before the next visit of Halley’s comet), won’t know we won’t know. Culture once swore we lived in a world of humors and horrors, half-gods and spirit quests. Now did you hear that between things there’s a sort of quantum foam?
I’m not a skeptic of science, its genuine grand jumps. Quantum foam isn’t black bile. Sad and exciting, though, to think what our descendants– superwomen? iPads? pulses of light?–, or hypothetical friendly alien guests, will know we don’t have. The way I feel for a chimp, not far with her termite-stick from a stick-in-sand self-portrait. Or, closer, the way I feel for the intimate human foolishness in the Canterbury Tales, an England without vaccines or Einstein or printing presses where people double-cross and tell fart jokes and pray.
What will your grandkids take for granted? In one of my favorite science fiction novels, Samuel Delany’s colossal mashup far-future Grail novel, Nova, this exchange is tucked in between space battles: Katin, a novelist (practitioner of the then-stone-dead art) who practices the very up-to-date art of the Tarot, and a young Earth-born Gypsy, Mouse, who doubts the cards’ power. First, Mouse, remembering his adoptive mother:
“That’s what she told me, that the cards belonged to the gypsies first, and that the gypsies knew: they’re just fake. And never to believe them.”
Katin smiled. “A very romantic notion. I cotton to it myself: the idea that all those symbols, filtered down through five thousand years of mythology, are basically meaningless and have no bearing on man’s mind and actions, strikes a little bell of nihilism ringing. Unfortunately I know too much about those symbols to go along with it.”
In this future, Tarot is as serious as a weather forecast, as borne out as the commutative property. Mouse, the young gypsy, winds up stealing the Sun when it’s dealt. For luck.
Bigger, farther, and sadder than all of Delany is Cordwainer Smith. (This is why my girlfriend likes him.)
Smith’s future, not done at his death in 1966, was 20,000 years out, really-felt years, pushed to an impenetrable remove. His stories (like “Scanners Live in Vain,” “Drunkboat,” “Golden the Ship Was– Oh! Oh! Oh!,” “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” “The Burning of the Brain,” “The Lady Who Sailed the Soul”) had a very 1950s pulp gusto. Yet the authority of his myth (he spoke Chinese and was fluent in its folklore) and the blurriness of its memory remains. Our era is forgotten by his Instrumentality, Lord Jestocost, Paul and Virginia and Charley-Is-My-Darling and the Underpeople off in the Downdeep Downdeep. Likewise, his world awes me but never quite parses, its givens and fears never set for sure.
What conclusion do I take from this kind of speculating? A Tao-by-shrug, a lying down in a peace past understanding would just bug our forward-thinkers, Hermann Minkowski, Freeman Dyson or Roger Penrose, who want to postulate, falsify, establish, prove, and explore.
“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” That’s Isaac Newton. Next to Don DeLillo’s little boy, going to bed with the horrid fancy of being able to destroy a plane with simple thought: “a power and control that rose damnably from the curse of unbelonging.”
What if our grandkids take for granted physicist Roger Penrose’s head-busting assertions on human consciousness (he tells you why no computer will ever be a genius, or even properly think) (and this guy’s a scholar, dig)?
Or Michael Brown’s Presence Project, a pro-bono revelation you have to swear not to share without passing the whole book on?
Or Magritte’s “genius”? Which, Magritte (Parmenides with a brush) said he saw silhouetted in all things around us, gathering only traces to return with, and then only with utmost labor. Like the first Bronze Ager pushing the first wheel uphill.