The Last Days of Fall

At 1 pm, flecks of snow began to drift down from the sky above Mt. Greylock – uncertain and flaky at first, then a steady drizzle. Such leaves as were still present on the trees collected the snow, grew heavy and their branches bent double under the weight. The color of autumn began to fade from the ground; ephemeral fires before the long whiteness.  On the summit, kind caretakers closed down the doors of Bascom lodge for the winter and took the treacherous paved road down the mountain. One pianist and one flautist made their way down the western slope to the town of Lanesborough. At the same time, two novice backpackers took the northern route on the Appalachian trail before bearing west, keeping their eyes peeled for weathered white and blue paint on a few tree trunks that signalled the vanishing trail. Soon, the afternoon grew dim, thunder punctuated the steadily humming snowfall, and tracks of man, woman, bear and coyote disappeared. In an hour or so, no evidence would remain that a half-dozen people took different paths down the slopes of Mt. Greylock on the afternoon of the great Noreaster. Earlier than most years, Winter claimed the Berkshires for its own.

[10/30/2011]

The polyglot novel

The trouble with the phrase magic realism, is that when people use it, they tend to hear the magic and not hear the realism, whereas in fact one of the things about going to the world of García Márquez is that you discover he is telling the truth. He is not exaggerating; he is understating. And that’s really what I thought about India. You can’t tell the truth about India; it’s too weird; nobody would believe it. So, these books which people call fantasies are actually mild understatements of the truth.. [Salman Rushdie]

My last few weeks have been spent in the vicious unyielding grip of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children – Sweet irony and  bitter romance, horror and history, fountains of blood and stains of mercurochrome all mixed together in this tour de force of magical realism. I am reading slowly now, not wanting the story to end, and not wanting to forego one of the magical aspects of consuming this novel:  the impression that it is written simultaneously in English, Urdu, Marathi, Hindi, Sanskrit and host of other languages that I cannot guess. This is a story about my country and culture, and I sense an incommunicable pleasure in swimming through it; a conspiratorial feeling of being in on the writer’s mischief. Because of this, the plot – intricate as it is – throws unpredictable flashes in all directions and lodges itself more vividly in my head.

For I smile to myself repeatedly during this book. My smiles, some of them happy giggles, others pursed and wry, and still others sad and unexpressed, have to do with knowing suddenly that the strange “fool from somewhere” is actually “pagla kahin ka”, and “dung-lotus” refers to a goddess who grew out of Vishnu’s navel in a colorful Indian myth. “Really truly?”  puts me in mind of a letter in my closet, full of pain and love; And “hot chana hot” takes me back to smoke-filled gas-lamped evenings on Indian railway platforms with the hiss of steam engines and their sore throat whistles. I have become aware of only a few of Rushdie’s turns of phrase. Being unschooled in Sanskrit and Urdu, and having stayed away from the day-to-day collision and collusion of Indian languages and subcultures for more than a decade, I may have missed some of the landmines embedded in his dense prose. (I note joylessly, that if the novel’s many-tongued expertise extends to choice gutter language, then my familiarity with Hindi and Marathi swear words and their oddly musical English translations has remained  unsettlingly fine.).

Quite by chance, I came across a 1989 interview of a young Christopher Hitchens – hale and hearty and no less articulate – talking about The Satanic Verses, and the fatwah that drove Rushdie into exile. I recommend the entire interview for a sense of that politically charged time, where the Ayatollah’s power was seemingly in its last throes, and as if to say that he wasn’t finished, the religious despot saw fit to let loose a messianic bounty hunt for the infidel writer’s head. But, in the context of my current reading experience, the following extract was surprisingly a propos:

…Rushdie is a genius with language, … but there is a difficulty which if you are starting the book today, you should bear in mind. He’s got an absolutely magnificent ear, and his ear is brilliant at catching the nuances and the turn of people who speak in Indian or Pakistani subcontinental English. He is fantastically good at this, makes almost poetry out of the prose … Unfortunately, that is not very well understood here [The United States] as it is in England, there aren’t that many people from the subcontinent in America…

This makes me wonder about some of the translations that I have read. How far and how deeply have I understood them, beyond the structure suggested by their plot, and beyond their English approximation? How much of the music, playfulness, taboo, triumph and defeat from the original language has seeped – or been assiduously woven by a perspicacious translator – into the English version. It is true, especially of the great novels, that their themes are universal and on that account they profoundly affect readers of all stripes, but I cannot help but wonder what I may have lost because of my ignorance of the local. I think of the perceived contrast between the books of García Márquez which I loved immediately and devoured as if in a feverish trance versus Gunter Grass’s Tin Drum which – after the unforgettable beginning of Joseph Koljaiczek’s refuge under a four-skirted Kashubian peasant girl – I could admire but not come to love. How much does it have to do with my – however minimal – familiarity with Spanish as opposed to my complete ignorance of German language and culture? Perhaps this is another post on another day. Or perhaps, a second reading of The Tin Drum is in store.

Whither goest thou America … ?

Neal and I and Louanne talking of the value of life as we sped along, in such thoughts as “Whither goest thou America in thy shiny car at night?” and in the mere fact that we were together under such rainy circumstances talking heart to heart. Seldom had I been so glad of life.

[Jack Kerouac's notes for On the Road; New York Public Library; July 2011.]

Will they know we were once here?

All that night long, the boy slept and the man waked, gazing forward steadily into the dark. There were no stars. – Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore.

In San Francisco on Labor Day Weekend, the folks at the California Academy of Sciences screened a special live show called “Tour of the Universe”. Here, a narrator took the audience from Earth into Outer Space, beyond our solar system, beyond the limits of our galaxy and galactic cluster, to the edge of the observable universe. As eager observers of many a starry night, P and I watched the digital projections with interest. When we filed out of Morrison planetarium, P, whose curiosity is not easily contained, wondered aloud what the narrator had meant by the concept of the Earth’s Radiosphere and why any intelligent life outside the Radiosphere has no chance of knowing about us.

Between the two of us, the explanation that we developed at the time was as follows: the Radiosphere is an imaginary sphere whose center is the same as the center of the earth, and whose radius equals the distance traveled by the first radio signals emitted by human beings in the 1930s. If you remember the opening sequence of the movie Contact, the camera is taking to the far reaches of outer space, where we here radio signals documenting several historical events of the last century, becoming older as the camera zooms further out from the Earth. In order for another intelligent civilization in the Universe to know about our existence, they must necessarily have to intercept the transmissions that human beings have inadvertently sent out into space – all manner of radio signals, soaring arias, documentaries, bad reality TV programs, tragedies and comedies, nuclear explosions, the 11 minutes of athletic activity embedded inside three hours of advertising static that constitutes a game of American football. This necessarily means that the listening civilization has to be within the imaginary Radiosphere. Or, in other words, if there is intelligent life on an exoplanet that lies outside the Earth’s Radiosphere, then it would be impossible for them to know of our existence.

P’s question was that, since the Radiosphere will grow outwards at the rate of 1 light year per year in all directions, would an intelligent civilization currently outside the Radiosphere eventually hear about us? And not thinking carefully enough, I said, “Yes, eventually”. However, as is often the case, her questions are harder and deeper than they initially seem; I was wrong. Since we live in an expanding universe, the correct answer is “Not necessarily”. This has bizarre implications, if we allow our minds to wander a little. First, let us see why the Radiosphere cannot grow fast enough for its surface to reach any given exoplanet: To be specific, let this exoplanet belong to a star in a different galaxy from ours, one that is far far away as in Star Wars lore. Given that we live in an expanding universe – as opposed to a stationary or a contracting universe – every galaxy is moving away from every galaxy owing to the expansion of space time. Furthermore, if the physicists are right, then the farther two bodies are, the faster they are receding from each other. Thus, our chosen exoplanet is moving away from us faster and faster. Much to my surprise, physics does not put the usual constraints on the speed of this expansion, i.e., the expansion of spacetime can take place faster than the speed of light! I don’t know why exactly this is true, and I must find this out from an advanced physics textbook or from a physicist. The Radiosphere is, of course, growing at the speed of light. Now, if our exoplanet was far enough to being with, and was moving away fast enough, then it is possible that the expanding Radiosphere may never grow fast enough to swallow it.

Unless I am mistaken, the implications of this thought experiment – academic though they may be – are both somber and fascinating: Assuming that some intelligent species does not kill itself off in a nuclear holocaust, survives the interplanetary billiards of meteor and comet collisions, weathers volcanic eruptions and similar catastrophes, evolves, migrates to other distant worlds to escape the inevitable expansion and death of their parent star, they will eventually be alone in a practically limitless sea of empty space. Owing to the expansion of space time, every other star and every other planet has receded far away out of reach, so far away that even light cannot catch up, and therefore any communication with any outside world is impossible. The odds of any earthbound species surviving many billion or more years into the future are exceedingly slim, but if it does, what a strange life awaits it? For, other than the parent star system which gives it life during the day, and a possible dim moon or two, the night sky will be utterly dark – No visible stars, no constellations, no galaxies, no nebulae. Without these keepers of cultural lore, these signposts for voyagers, these pointers in a coordinate system, what would a species’ culture be like? Their stories? Their myths? Their gods? Their science? Their place in the universe? Where will they put their heroes and villains, if not in imagined patterns in the skies?

[I wonder though, won't a universe in that incredible state of dissipation, where everything is so far away from everything else, be utterly, mind-numbingly cold; too cold to support any kind of life as we know it? But let us set that interruption out of our minds for a few more moments of irrational speculation ]. Now, what if there was no evolutionary continuity between our time and the time of this hypothetical species that we have dreamed up? What if they evolve long after every currently thriving species and currently thriving archival technology has long been extinguished? How could they ever know that there once was a time when billions of celestial pinpoints made awesome patterns in the sky? Could their Einsteins and Newtons ever know that they were once part of a galactic conglomeration of stars, planets and interstellar gas and dust? Could their Sagans and their Asimovs figure that, many eons before them, star-stuff had come to life and contemplated the cosmos? In the absence of celestial signposts, will they again return to thinking, as the pre-Copernicans did, that their planetary home is the center of the universe?!

Addenda:

More information on the Radiosphere from the Hayden Planetarium.

Frogs in the well

Lawrence Krauss offers a dose of perspective, and takes a swing at our ludicrous obsession with our own pitiful smallness

Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements – the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life – weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.