Why think about living life backward into time to witness the hideous carnage left by the politics of certainty.
Chicanery is the lifeblood of politics. It’s the same blood that has flowed through humans since prehistoric differences of opinion formed borders, barriers and fences: sow the seeds of war. Good fences make…
We arrive at understanding through our collective memories found in myth. Mythology is eternally familiar, exposing our baser minds but letting us look at the stars. Unless you’re the one starving in a garret with no skyward window.
Myth is about asking inscrutable questions, the inexplicable is never really inexplicable. Everything is woven along an uninterrupted thread leading from the present-time into unalterable history. Infinite paths may mold the future, but only one path leads to the past. The inscrutable is always scrutable, tension: the certainty of the unexpected.
2016 is another strange leap year in American politics.
I remember 14 presidential elections from leap years 1956 to 2016. Whether mundane or jaw-dropping, they are 20-20 glimpses, but you won’t know that until after the die is long cast.
Fifty years ago I learned about having a wizard for a tutor.
A touchstone work is one you return to throughout your life for the simple reason that its ring is ever true, it illuminates your contrived and contorted life rather than darkening it.
Merlyn had a skill that made him a profoundly wise teacher: the ability to live life from the future into the past. When you live life backward in time you meet the people who live lives forward into the future: you and I. People look to the past for better choices, being raised in different families in different schools.
Were that Franklin Roosevelt had died from his polio in childhood. Reconnect the dots: fractals snap that way, but if you proceed from the future-as-history into the past-as-future?
Alternate histories in science fiction are fractals of life, roads not taken in a panorama of maybes. Setting out one way, becoming derailed or re-railed. Hindsight might be gift or torture.
Let me live my life backward. Let me celebrate my first birthday one year in the past. It would take me from 1947 to 1946. I would become an adult in 1926, the present moment would be in the year 1879.
And the best thing for being sad?
“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then–to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn–pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics–why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.”
(Merlyn, advising the young King Arthur in T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, Berkeley Medallion Edition, July, 1966, page 183.)
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