Old Books 3: The Lathe of Heaven

I remembered how much I loved this book, but on re-reading I realized that I had forgotten how much the main character, George Orr, had imprinted on me as a hero. Especially towards the end, I found myself saying, “Oh, so that's where I got this idea of that kind of Virtue from.”

George Orr is simultaneously a cypher, a man whose psychology tests come back exactly average in every respect, and a man who it turns out possesses enormous strength. At the opening of the book, he appears to be compared to a jellyfish in the ocean of sleep, who upon waking is cast up on the rocks to be torn to bits. At the end, his solidity and centered strength allowed him to save the world from a nightmare created by a power-mad psychiatrist.

Actually, it was the second time that happened; the book is framed by his saving the world. Orr's particular ability—if you can call what your unconscious accomplishes while you sleep an "ability"—is that certain of his dreams retroactively change reality. At the opening, his dreams unmake the nuclear war that had "burned away his eyelids" and pinned him beneath twisted concrete and steel. He tries to get the dreams to stop, tries to stop himself from changing things out of a sense of responsibility. He desperately wants to abdicate.

This sense of abdication, of consciously pushing away from consciously given position and authority, is a running theme in the stories I hold most dear. The Tattoo-Rhumba Man does it, the son of Croesus does it in a play I wrote in high school. It's like The Lion King, except in my versions of the story, the runaway monarch does not return to reclaim the throne.

George Orr also refuses the throne, the mantle of authority that Dr Haber tries to assume in his place and proves unable to maintain. George Orr's power is not to be king, but to be a humble channeler of the power he has, someone through whom Right Order in the world will be restored. It is not submission to his gift that he performs at the end, when he saves the world again, but the simple effort to press a single off button.

At the center of the book is the Taoist idea of strength through inaction, of virtue through inaction. The image of ocean creatures—jellyfish and later sea turtles—held and moved by ocean currents, is a running theme. One of Orr's dreams' creations is Aliens, mysterious creatures who at first appear to be a threat, but then turn out to be benign and kind of Taoist in their love of paradox and seeming self-contradiction. They are a bringing into the flesh of something missing from the nightmarish North America Orr dreams his way out of: the satanic Enemy. Orr's dreams first create the monsters as a diversion from seemingly impossible political divisions on earth, then convert these monsters into friends and neighbors—at the conclusion, one of the aliens is George Orr's benevolent employer.

Here's a moment in chapter 9, where Orr truly comes into himself:

Without premeditation and without timidity Orr said, “Dr Haber, I can't let you use my effective dreams any more.”

“Eh?” Haber said, his mind still on Orr's brain, not on Orr.

“I can't let you use my dreams any more.”

”’Use’ them?”

“Use them.”

“Call it what you like,” Haber said. He had straightened up and towered over Orr, who was still sitting down. He was gray, large, broad, curly bearded, deep-chested, frowning. Your God is a jealous God. “I'm sorry, George, but you’re not in a position to say that.”

Orr's gods were nameless and unenvious, asking neither worship nor obedience.

“Yet I do say it,” he replied mildly.

Haber looked down at him, really looked at him for a moment, and saw him. He seemed to recoil, as a man might who thought to push aside a gauze curtain and found it to be a granite door.

This passage speaks a great deal to me. It oddly pars up with the heroic ideal in Pullman's His Dark Materials, as neither a total abdication, nor a taking back of a kingdom. It's a denial of power as exercised by the conscious self—of “use”—and a restatement of that power as a slower, bedrock kind of stability: a rooted stillness. A conservatism not of habit and form, but of time and presence.

As I say, this speaks a great deal to me.

Conservatism and liberalism

I've been ruminating since the election on what exactly people who call themselves conservatives actually mean by that. It turns out conservatism is a relatively new word, only emerging as a common term in 1819 in the title of French ultra-royalist journal Le Conservateur. It is a term that really only began to make sense in the wake of the French Revolution, with its wholesale destruction of not only an established political order, but much of the national cultural riches that had grown up around that order. Not to mention the Terror.

People had words for “old guard” before 1819; conservatism represents half of a dynamic that's been going on since the dawn of time: some people want to do things the way they have been done habitually, and others want to change those patterns. At root, it's a basic biological function: continuity vs adaption. Both valuable, both valid, together regularly in conflict.

But something happened to the political world of Europe (and the Americas) in what we now call the “revolutionary era.” Revolution itself became a self-conscious cause. Some revolutions were specifically about a change of regime, but for the first time the idea that people ought to revolt and establish new order organically had real on-the-ground success—established governments were founded not on overthrow of a particular tyrant or governing identity group (ethnic, religious, etc), but on the overthrow of a “class” of people. “Conservatism,” I believe, was a reaction to revolutionism as a philosophy."

“Tradition” is a word that gets bandied about a lot if conservative circles. In America, “traditional family values” is a code phrase for family structures and social mores grounded in the nuclear, church-going family. “Traditional marriage” is used to denote a life-long commitment between a man and a woman, producing offspring biologically, sanctified in a religious institution (see my article about this usage here).

But “traditional” is also a word used a lot in the folk music and dance community. It connotes being part of a style or form that's been passed down from person to person. But folk music as a field was also heavily influenced by leftist political activism: union organizers adapted hymns into union songs, desegregation activism was founded in part on singing songs like “We Shall Overcome,” and the entire counterculture of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s included heavy doses of the electrified rediscovery of folk music. It still does.

The thing is, traditions can be revolutionary. As the Wikipedia article on conservatism points out, “In the United States, conservatism is rooted in the American Revolution and its commitment to conserve the rights and liberties of Englishmen. Most European conservative writers do not accept American conservatism as genuine; they consider it to be a variety of liberalism.” So also we see the Chinese Communist Party engaged in a struggle between “reformers” and the revolutionary “old guard.”

Really, any revolution that sustains itself long enough to become the new established order carries this possibility. How else could we have a “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?” And so we have a fundamentally confused idea: “conservatives” fighting for policies developed in the 1980s interested in dismantling “liberal” institutions assembled in the 1930s and 1940s.

Conservatism doesn’t really make sense as a working philosophy in and of itself. Conservatism means maintaining institutions generally, but without being attached to some specific identity or institution, it could just as easily mean the old guard in Beijing as the Dalai Lama's retinue in Dharamsala; ultra-Orthodox Jewish settlers or Salafist Saudis; singers from the Sacred Harp or singers from Wobbly songbooks.

So: conservative… what? What is being preserved? And the thing is, we almost all want something preserved, collected, retained, remembered… we don't by and large want to completely forget. Even the monsters of cultural memory erasure—Taliban who destroyed Buddhist monuments, Pol Pot's educide, the iconoclasms that have swept the Christian world for centuries—have their own ideal past they wish to purify and make clear. They are conservative even as they destroy.

I betray my biases. I was raised a self-confessed liberal. I was raised to sneer at Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell and Barry Goldwater. And here’s the thing: there is no such thing as purity of conservatism or liberalism. We all want some things to remain, and some to change. The American Republican party was formed by the joining of the business-conservative Whigs with the “Radical Republicans” who rallied around slavery abolition. Revolution and plutocracy wrapped up in one package. We liberals who rail against the “former Party of Lincoln” forget this. Lincoln stood for abolition (eventually) but also for railroad baronies. Nixon was for overthrowing Allende in Chile and for forming the EPA.

I sing old songs and new songs that sound like old songs, after listening to new rock music on the radio. I sit in silent worship in a 350-year-old practice, while wrestling with my own very modern non-theism. I live in a 122-year-old house, typing in a blog entry over wi-fi.

Conservatism for conservatism's sake makes no sense, just as liberalism for liberalism's sake ends up as a grand mushiness. We as humans need traditions and institutions and patterns to make sense, and we need to be able to edit those patterns as the world they describe changes. And for any given tradition, we need conservatives working in the “old style” at the same time as liberal avante gardists push the envelope. This is true in the arts, and it’s true in public life.

I need to give up my own broad liberalism for something more nuanced. And I hope some of my conservative friends will consider doing the same.

Great Work of Time

Who hasn't run into old Shelley's "Ozymandias" in an English Lit class, the ruined claim of eternity disintegrating back into sand. We think we are free of the pride of our permanence—the mortality of ourselves and our endeavors gets drilled into us over and over: hubris and vanity and the problem of seeking immortality (cf. Voldemort).

I just finished rereading John Crowley's Great Work of Time, a compact, melancholy and thorough dismantling of the idea of an eternal empire. It's a time travel story in baldest terms—one where the attempt to make the British Empire truly eternal, the protector of world peace and preventer of the horrors of the twentieth century, turns out to make the world go horribly wrong: the future fills with monsters and angels, a strange and unnatural stasis that in the end is imagined as a silent forest underwater, forever still and unchanging. The angels and the wise magi that the messing with time produces, do not want to have been created. They long for death.

We mapmakers make some claim of permanence—more modest than eternity, but what I take away from Crowley's book is the false seductiveness of the idea that what lasts beyond our lives lasts forever. We don't know what happens after "The End," and so we imagine a universe that never ends, an empire on which the sun never sets. An immortal soul. Streets that are somehow permanent. But someday the streets in my neighborhood will become meaningless. It might be a very very long time (in doing research this week I realized I will likely live to see the basic streeet pattern of Harvard Square celebrate its 500th anniversary), but there is no such thing as "forever", only "over the horizon." I don't think there is anything, anyway.

Maps only act as a way of contrasting relatively transient with relatively permanent phenomena: the states shapes remain the same as votes move from bloe to red and back again. Streets remain the same as taxi routes wiggle back and forth across them. Continents retain their rough outlines as glaciers push forward and retreat.

We need ground to stand on—a stage as I've said before, here—in order to make our performances and arguments. People who have attempted to eliminate that stage in the name of acknowledgining our impermanence have unleashed a peculiar kind of madness we see in some kinds of modern art and philosophy. Eliminate permanence, and there's no "there" there, as Ms Stein said. Perhaps the answer is to sadly acknowledge that our stage, our permanence, is itself impermanent, and find a platform that fits our lives, and the terms of permanence we can find— the land that stays more-or-less the same between glaciations, the nation that for a while retains the same basic shape, the family and friendship we have for the span we are lucky enough to have it.

Happy New Year, all. Here's to what permanence we can muster in the coming year, and what good we can perform upon that permanence.

The International Date Line

My son asked a random back-of-the-car question the other day, about whether there was a place where the day changed too, not just the time. There is, of course, and it's the International Date Line, more-or-less located at 180° longitude, opposite the globe from the Greenwich meridian. (the picture attached is from Wikipedia)

What I found interesting about the question, though, was how the idea of such a line requires a leap of how we think about time. For most of us, time is local: our makers are sunrise, noon, sunset, midnight. Like the Archimedean, Earth-centered model of the universe, and like earth-navel cosmologies, it makes "us and ours" the center of all things, both in space and time.

20 years ago, I took a course at Carleton College from the late Mike Casper, "Revolutions in Physics," that was mocked by some as "Physics for Poets." Which isn't really fair, although I can see the case that it really was as much a history of science course as anything. The course was divided into three sections: the Archimedean, earth-centered universe, the Newtonian universe, and the Einsteinian universe. The goal of each was to immerse the students in what historically were comprehensive worldviews. And it worked. It was fascinating how useful the oldest model, the one we've mocked as "wrong" since grade school, really is.

It's of course incorrect that the sun goes around the earth, but there's a lot to learn about seasons and the sun's movement in the sky if you think that way. And I became aware that I simply had not paid that much attention to how the sun moves in the sky over the years. For example, that it is always due east or west at 6 o'clock (either one) local time. Or that the angle of the sun's path is constant in the same location, but that the constant-angled path moves up and down vertically with the seasons in relation to the horizon. I dunno, maybe everyone else got that from day one, but it was new to this college student and it was cool, and it depended on thinking locally.

The Copernican/Newtonian model of the universe that shifts this around. Suddenly, we're on a planet, and really there is only one day, and it keeps rotating around the globe—or rather, the globe keeps turning and the day is the glow from the star at the center of our solar system. Instead of the sun as a clock that keeps our time, we are fixed points on a moving sphere, which keeps its time in turning us and everything else in the world.

And it's in this world that International Date Lines become necessary.

Interestingly, it wasn't scientists who first proposed such a line. It was an 11th-century Jewish scholar, who was concerned that all the Jews in the diaspora should observe the same Sabbath, and so proposed a system which kept the same day-observance for all of Asia, and made a break somewhere in the Pacific. The "Circumnavigator's Paradox" was in fact a real paradox, discussed in the late middle ages (see the excellent History of the International Date Line for much of the source material in this post): Apparently it surfaced when Magellan arrived at the Spanish outpost in the Philippines, having come from the east by way of Cape Horn, and disgareed with the Spanish officers there, who had come from the west, via the Cape of Good Hope. Their dates, of course, were off by one.

In a world where one set of grandparents is an hour earlier and another is an hour later, and where we can fly to Europe where it's six hours later, it's commonplace to think about time zones. But it was not always so. It was not until railroads needed to keep precise time in their east-west journeys that the need for standard time became apparent. Before the railroads, punctuality was enforced within local communities. A parishioner coming to church on time, or a worker arriving at the mill, or any citizen keeping any of the other appointment-keeping arrangements we make, either had to judge by the sun, or by the bells of the church tower, or later by the local-time clock or sundial, how close they were going to cut it. And travel, by foot or horse, essentially re-set the clock.

By instituting standard time, we essentially said, railroad time is more important than where the sun stands in our sky.

And much the same thing, on a global level, happens with the International Date Line: we are forced to recognize that this is a round, whole planet, which moves in one time, simultaneously. And for better or worse, this means we depend less on what we see—here and now over our heads—to regulate our lives by.