The other day my dad, who is 93 and losing his mind in dribs and drabs, asked me over the phone if we could FaceTime with his parents. I didn’t lie. I said, well, the technology is advancing quickly but it’s not quite advanced enough to reach them where they are. (True!) Maybe someday?
I mean, why not.
And I thought about what it must be like to be in his head, totally believing that his parents are out there somewhere waiting for our call. Trusting their voices would fill the room (and their faces the screen?) if we only had the right number. I suspect in his mind’s eye they are youngish people still. Maybe this: His mom in her flowered housecoat (faded from so much wash and wear) shuffling around the kitchen waiting for the brisket to cook and boiling the flavor and snap out of string beans in a big pot on the stove. His dad, a physician, coming in the back door looking dapper, as working men at that time always looked (it was the hats), loosening his tie and peeking under the pot lid at the flaccid beans and giving his wife a quick kiss for her efforts, like in some mid-century commercial for Maxwell House or Rolaids.
The phone on the wall, a black rotary Bakelite, is ringing. It’s us! There’s no video, of course, but there is a large receiver to cradle between shoulder and ear and a springy cord that stretches to the sink or stove, for multitasking. (Remember ducking under those cords? And fighting to untangle them so they’d hang right?) My dad called his mother Ma. “Ma? It’s Martin.” I’m not sure what he called his dad, now that I think about it. He was always “my father” when dad talked about him. “My father was an incredible human being. My father was a wonderful physician. My father made house calls and everyone loved him.” His father, my grandfather, died suddenly of a heart attack in his 50s, long before I was born. My dad always teared up when he talked about him. “I wish you kids had met my father,” he’d say. Not “I wish my father had met you kids.” Always the other way around. His father was that special.
Maybe my dad called him Pa, to go with Ma? I need to ask him, ASAP. I hope he remembers.
Anyway, maybe that’s what fills his mental FaceTime: His parents going about their lives, making dinner, anticipating his call, happy to hear his voice. Alive and well with many years in front of them. God, I hope so.
Near where I live in Seattle there is a rail trail called the Burke-Gilman. Everyone around here knows it simply as The Burke. An asphalt conduit that bisects north Seattle from Bothell to the Ballard Locks, The Burke is over twenty miles long, and a classic multiuse recreational urban route. Bicyclists fly over it, people walk along it, there is the occasional rollerblader or rollerskier. Myself, I run.
I enjoy my morning runs on The Burke. I think of them as Nature Trots. I’ve seen all manner of things, in all seasons, in all years. Raccoons, coyotes, moles, enormous rats, shrews, mice, bats. A couple of mountain beavers, even.
Me being me, I focus on birds. The Burke can be pretty lively, being for much of its length a greenbelt of sorts. Lots of chickadees and bushtits and nuthatches and warblers and sparrows and the odd vireo and other small flitty things. During the shoulder seasons I watch for migrants, like hermit thrushes on their way to or from the mountains. I’ve seen dunlins from time to time, a whimbrel. The list could go on and on.
Sometimes I see examples of the fraught territorial overlaps between the human and the non-human. Once I watched a nuthatch try to excavate a nesting cavity out of a metal rainspout, hammering away in vain. And one dark fall morning I was attacked from behind by a barred owl. Feeling the sharp shock of its talons on my scalp, I yelped and flailed until it let go and flew up to a tree. It then proceeded to chase me for another quarter mile, while I alternately sprinted from it or threw myself to the ground when it swept overhead.
Hieronymous Bosch, the Temptation of St. Anthony.Via Wikimedia Commons.
When I was a student studying literature, I kept seeing Christ allegories everywhere. I remember being assigned The Old Man and the Sea, one of many Hemingways I read that semester, and I remember my teacher asking what we thought the book was about. Answers included “death’s inevitability” and “the fallacy of humanity’s power over nature” and other tropes. But it was about Christ. It was undeniably about Christ and Santiago was his avatar. He holds the rope for three days, and it cuts his palms like the stigmata; that much I still remember.
So much of art and literature and cinema offers the same allegory, and some stories and characters are of course more obvious than others. Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is obvious; Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars: the Phantom Menace maybe less so, but watch it again. Ripley in Alien 3, Neo in the Matrix trilogy, Superman in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, every single Mel Gibson character.
But in the past few years, Christ has become less obvious to me. Or, at least, the greatest story ever told is no longer the prevailing motif in the stories I read and watch. There is a different sacrificial lamb, a different tragedy, though I suppose a similar foil. All stories are climate allegories.
I started thinking about this a few years ago, but it has felt ever more present in this summer of hellish fire and heat. The first time a climate allegory became obvious to me was the sparkling 2012 novel The Age of Miracles. It is about a girl going through puberty, as she and her family experience personal crises against the backdrop of planetary calamity. The calamity is a sudden inexplicable slowing of Earth’s rotation, but the connection to climate change was evident.
A writer colleague recently asked, in a large group, for suggestions of books that are climate allegories, whether obvious or not. Her main example was Barbara Kingsolver’s lovely Flight Behavior, a beautiful climate change story that has stuck with me over the years. My colleague was hoping to avoid speculative fiction or science fiction/fantasy, but was open to any ideas. The suggestions rolled in, again some obvious and some less so: Remarkably Bright Creatures, by Shelby Van Pelt; Migrations, by Charlotte McConaghy; The Overstory, by Richard Powers; and Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton, were among my favorite recommendations. I said the Fifth Season trilogy, by N.K. Jemisin — yes, it is science fiction/fantasy, but some of the best writing I’ve read in recent years, and to my mind definitely climate fiction.
I started thinking about whether these books were intended as climate allegories, or whether the moment in which they were written is just so suffused with that reality, the climate connection was more organic. I don’t know. But I like thinking about it.
TV and movies are the same way. Everything is a climate story now. My favorite show lately was Silo, based on some of my absolute favorite speculative fiction books, the Wool series by Hugh Howey. I was one of the lucky people who found Wool on Kindle, back when it was new and fresh technology, and waited desperately for Howey to upload his next installments. The books read as climate or nuclear fiction, but they felt somehow fun to me then, not so suffused with dread. The TV adaptation, starring Rebecca Ferguson (never enough, never, never; also Lady Jessica), feels different. It was more darkly like a story about climate apocalypse. I won’t spoil it — you should really just read the Wool Omnibus — but suffice to say that it has the same feeling, dread mixed with longing and nostalgia and solastalgia, that is shared by movies like Children of Men, Blade Runner: 2049, and Interstellar.
I thought about the Old Man and the Sea when we watched Avatar: The Way of Water with my 8-year-old. (OK, fine, Jake Sully’s “They killed their mother” is not exactly allegorical, but Avatar is still a climate movie.) The space whales movie tries to be a lot of things, but I kept coming back to ocean acidification and the 101 degree temperatures in the south Atlantic this summer. Is that what James Cameron wanted me to think about? The deep-sea submersible diver and HMFIC hitting me over the head with mournful whale families? It’s true that some of the greatest stories getting told are, in fact, trying to talk about climate, sometimes to give the productions greater meaning, sometimes to give voice to the feeling of living and creating right now. My friend explored this in depth in a feature in The Atlantic, which you should read.
Or maybe it’s also true that I am seeing these metaphors because my mind is primed to see them. I live in narratives, so of course I look for meaning behind them, and right now the most meaningful thing I can imagine is what we have done to this planet. Books are all about climate, movies and TV shows are all about climate, because my mind is all about climate. It is the main theme I obsess over, the future I try to imagine on behalf of my kids; climate fiction is the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.
If, as someone once said, the aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inner significance, then I suppose it’s ok that I am seeing climate stories everywhere. It may be as the artists intended. It may be the meaning that I, the consumer of art, am bringing to the experience. The story gets told either way.
Sorry, Santiago. I still think you are a version of Christ. But I do wonder, if Hemingway were writing now, whether The Old Man and the Sea would be about rising seas instead.
Even at a thousand words, this picture would be way undervalued. But there it was, waiting to be taken (the picture, that is, not the object). So I took, during a visit to Florence, and I wrote, in 2014, and I redux, here, because some images you just can’t get out of your head. The middle finger of Galileo’s right hand is a satisfying sight. Not because the resemblance to an obscene gesture is unmistakable (though that’s pretty amusing). And not because such a gesture might suggest that in the end a scientist who suffered persecution for the sin of being correct had gotten the last word—well, two words (though that would be amusing, too). And not even because the relic once belonged to the body of the real live Galileo Galilei (awesome). No, what pleased me most during my first personal encounter with the finger a few months ago was something more historically potent: its setting. Continue reading →
I had never seen or heard of cypress knees before last year, when I visited Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati. It’s a beautiful place to walk around. The landscape is idyllic. Grass, grass, trees, trees, pond, swans, mausoleum, leaves, tombstone, tre—what the hell are those?
This post ran in 2017 and the last time I looked, the Four Corners is still a Roadrunner cartoon landscape. Here, I explain, at least in part, why.
Flying through Monument Valley on the Arizona/Utah border recently, I was crammed into an old and slow Cessna 147 taildragger. Light filtered through the smoke of distant wildfires. It felt like looking through antique glass at a country of stone giants. We’d arrived at the last blink of this particular landscape, buttes shipwrecked alone in the desert, thin memories of mesas and canyons blown out by erosion.
When I posted the above photo on social media, one of the LWON writers commented that the landmarks look like volcanic necks, which are the hardened insides of volcanoes left when the rest of the land has eroded away. When I said no, this is straight sandstone erosion and not a cluster of exposed volcanic guts, she said prove it. Continue reading →
It’s an interesting time to go back and look at the old artificial intelligence work. This summer I’ve been reading Marvin Minsky’s The Society of Mind (1985), the kind of systematic monograph people don’t seem to publish anymore. The computer-like schemas Minsky draws out for how the mind must work belong to cognitive psychology, a school of thought that was sidelined with the rise of neuroscience. It breaks down the work of the mind into basic functions—until they are so basic that none of them, alone, constitutes thinking.
At MIT’s AI lab in the 1960s, Minsky’s team created a robot hand married to a camera and computer. They worked out some of the first solutions to make robots responsive to their changing environments, enough to build a tower out of blocks. These same challenges come up to this day, most recently for Amazon’s picking and packing robots. In Ocado’s 3D printed grocery-packing robots, the capabilities include picking up each piece of produce in just the right way using reinforcement learning.
But it’s the descriptions of generative AI that make the book so striking for this reader at the dawn of Chat GPT. He calls it the “puzzle principle”: “We can program a computer to solve any problem by trial and error, without knowing how to solve it in advance, provided only that we have a way to recognize when the problem is solved,” he writes.
If your task is to create a bridge, say, you can have two programs. One generates every possible arrangement of boards and nails, and the second one determines whether the resulting structure spans the stream. What’s interesting here is that Minsky feels he is describing something ridiculously infeasible. “In practice, it can take too long for even the most powerful computer to test enough possible solutions,” he says. But of course, “the most powerful computer” today is an entirely different beast, and the systems he painstakingly set down are now having their moment of feasibility.
How easy might it have been for him to focus on the impracticality—from the vantage point of a world of Amiga and Atari computers—and dismiss his hypothetical solutions before they even reached the page. Thank goodness he didn’t.
This brought to mind Herodotus, the first historian, who made a similarly courageous decision to disclose the improbable, at the risk of ridicule. Unlike Homer, who set his stories 400 years earlier than the time of writing, Herodotus limited himself to recording the accounts of ‘sons of sons’, so that his histories would describe events within living memory. Even so, some of his research uncovered oral narratives he considered outlandish.
Still, he wrote them down. Take with a grain of salt the claim of the Phoenicians that they sailed all the way around Africa, he scoffs. Those bullshitters say they sailed so far that the sun started falling on the opposite side of their boats! As skeptical as he was, Herodotus took down every word and ultimately let the future judge for itself.
Of course, we now know that this fantastical detail, the heavenly bodies rearranging themselves, is proof that it really happened. The Phoenicians must have crossed the equator, of which Herodotus knew nothing.
We all do our work with little understanding of the future world that may ultimately consume it. That’s why it’s important to still our inner editor when she objects on the grounds of feasibility. When Kepler wrote to Galileo about their respective astronomy projects, he showed extraordinary imagination, envisioning a world in which the infeasible would inevitably become feasible. “Let us create vessels and sails adjusted to the heavenly ether, and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes,” he writes in the year 1610. “In the meantime, we shall prepare, for the brave sky travelers, maps of the celestial bodies. I shall do it for the moon, and you, Galileo, for Jupiter.”
Image: Phoenician ship Carved on the face of a sarcophagus. 2nd century AD. Author: NMB (CC license)
So I finally read Craig’s bookStone Desert, and I’m glad I did. It’s a republication of an earlier essay collection alongside his original journals – sketches, scribbles and notes he made in his twenties while hiking and paddling through desert canyons in Utah, along the Green and Colorado rivers.
For me, the book was a reminder of how zesty life can be when I remember to shut down my computer and leave the damn house without my phone, and with a notebook and pen. Sometimes (especially in summer) I forget what it’s like to be hungry for knowlege — to gnaw on a question before I Google it, letting my own thoughts develop and whetting my appetite before lunging for the answer.
Craig says he finds his 20-something self embarrassing, but his voracious curiosity was a perfect antidote to the summer ennui I’ve been flirting with lately. For one thing, he reminds me that it is in fact possible to write when it’s hot out, and for that I (grudgingly) thank him.
The book also reminds me what human writers can do that AI can’t — move our uniquely gifted, limited, vulnerable bodies through the world, use language to make sense of what we find out there and share it with each other. It’s hard to imagine an AI stashing canoes in the desert and writing about it (though I’d definitely read a sci-fi novel about that). But even if it could, it wouldn’t walk, paddle, or wonder like Craig.
Here’s our conversation:
Craig,Stone Desert is full of references to canoes you’ve stashed in remote river canyons. When and why did you start stashing canoes? Was this something you did as a kid?
I was doing that as a kid with my mom, she and I would do these things. The plans were not quite as elaborate, but there was always some kind of adventure where she’d come up with a crazy plan and we’d go do it, you know, something in the backcountry. I enjoyed that so much that I stepped it up to a new level.
Two of the people that I traveled with quite a bit were running a river outfit out of Moab. So they would jet boat down the Colorado River to the confluence with the Green River and pick people up. We knew these routes and we said, why don’t we just start dropping canoes at the bottom of the route – go hide them up in the boulders and then pick them up again, in the spring. We’ll hike down through a crack in a cliff and when we get to the river, there will be a canoe waiting for us. And in that way, we can kind of sew the whole landscape together.
Confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers, Google Earth
So wait – you drive out into the desert, and then hike down the canyon and then get in the canoe?
That’s one way to go. We’d get dropped off somewhere and just start these walks. Within a couple of years we were doing 30-day trips out there. We’d have food stashed at the canoes. For the next month, we’d be gone and we wouldn’t see anybody, wouldn’t cross a trail, wouldn’t see another human footprint for 30 days.
