Playing Around the Edges of Ideas: Writing and Sci-Fi, inter alia

From the mid-1930s the Shell Oil Co published a series of Country Guides written by authors and poets with an interest in topography. They were aimed at promoting the touring car on the open road, at encouraging motorists to explore the countryside and historic towns. Car ownership, of course, had begun in the years before WW1; the car was ready to take middle and upper class people from all backgrounds to many places and it did. Car ownership became available to a much wider public as the decades advanced in the 20th century. Citizen motorists took people to places they had never gone before on national motorway networks constructed from the 1950s to the 1970s and beyond. -Ron Price with thanks to C. Aitchison, N. MacLeod and S. Shaw, Leisure and Tourism Landscapes: Social and Cultural Geographies, Routledge, London, 2000, pp. 45-46.

An essential restlessness,
a lack of anchorage
novelty, change, adventure,
experience--this sixties generation
on the sci-fi stage of history,
that was I, me and mine.
Then came the writing it down,
creating some of the first images
of sci-fi for this sixties generation,
strong links between pioneering and
the poetic, artistic, reciprocal relations.

Pioneering appropriating the literary
to give shape, form, direction, meaning,
an enhancing excitement, the harsh and
not-so-harsh reality of a cultural aspiration,
a quasi-religious ethos. One poet for information,
another for sentiment, as this predilection
for literary pioneering, a literary way of seeing
has defined this pioneering journey into the literary,
giving it a particular potency in the collective imagination,
finally taking off in that fin de siecle and the new millennium.

Ron Price
1 November 2002

I feel compelled to bring in Mozart, arguably the greatest musical genius of history, as one of the world’s greatest travellers in the world, a traveller in the world of melody. On the surface, Mozart and his life seem irrelevant to the theme of sci-fi. But on closer scrutiny he needs to have a place in this story, this sci-fi mecca which recognizes an historical heritage and a future, one far removed from the entertainment tourism of Las Vegas, its narrative and its analysis. Mozart brings to the discussion here a particular promise and a hope that is part of human destiny and the mysterious dispensations of Providence Itself.

Travelling without hope, without promise, is not uncommon, even for poets. Many poets and writers are, in fact, seriously pessimistic as they journey on, travelling in their respective milieux.
SOME COMPARISONS

Mozart's description of what happens to him as he composes has some similarities to the process of writing poetry(although not sci-fi, yet!) as I experience it and to the process of travelling. "Once I have my theme another melody comes,"1 Mozart begins. And so it is, for me, with writing poetry. I get the germ of an idea, some starting point, a strong note or theme. Then, another idea comes along linking itself to the first one in a similar way to the linkage of that melody Mozart mentions to his theme. By now there is emerging "the needs of the composition as a whole" both for me and for Mozart. For both of us, too, the whole work is produced by "melodic fragments," by "expanding it," by "conceiving it more and more clearly." Mozart finishes his work in his head and so often this is precisely what we do when we travel, before we travel. Travelling, in fact, takes place because we finish the story in our head. This is often the stimulus for buying the ticket. The composition comes to him in its entirety in his head.

In writing poetry, I finish my work on paper and I have no idea of the ending until the end. I travel on an unknown journey. The poem below is an example, drawing heavily on the contents of a book by Chloe Chard.2 -Ron Price with thanks to the 1ABC Radio National, The Science Show, 10.1.98; and 2Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography 1600-1830, Manchester UP, NY, 1999.

Even the most uninteresting,
trivial and repetitive,
when seen at a distance
with a lively fancy
and a determination,
with purpose and system
to make the most of life,
can find a mysterious charm,
an entertaining commentary
in the hands of a good writer
and someone who knows how
to travel, to journey, the earth.

But this is not the work of a tourist
and its trivial, pointless diversion,
its innocent gratification,
its pleasureable indolence,
its gratifying excitements,
its gastronomic indulgences,1
its relief from responsibility,
and its identity: escape.
I have never been a tourist.2

Always there was the work,
the object worthy of life,
of commentary:
always the profusion
of the incomparable,
so much intensification,
excess, the delights,
the dangers, the restlessness,
a reaching out beyond
the mundane, the observable.

The danger of hyperboles,
accepting, as I know I must,
jarring encounters,
the destabilizing,
troubling elements
that can't be kept at bay,
when calm benevolence
can't be maintained
and the necessary distraction.
Travel has always been difficult.3

1 Except, perhaps, on my two 'honeymoons' for several days in August 1967 and December 1975; and travelling to and settling in to some new places of residence and employment.
2 Tourism in the modern sense began, according to Chard, about 1880.
3 Any history of travel up to the middle of the 19th century tells a story of the difficulties involved in the process.

Ron Price
27 June 2002

How can one talk about travel without bringing in Star-Trek, mirabile dictu? There has been a whole world of science fiction travel since at least the 1930s and 1940s to say nothing of the sci-fi on TV since the fifties. Anyone under 75 has experienced this new world of imaginative travel. Star-Trek is a program that takes us where no man has gone before in the world of the imagination.

And, then, there is the ever-present travel amidst the products of our consumer society, as alluded to above. These are products and places where billions of us travel now, even the Thoreau’s among us.

COCA-COLA AND CHIP INTERFACE

Increasingly, the interaction of three levels of law and custom, of cultural interpretation and convention, are producing an enormous complexity. Our attempts to get resolution between global consumerist, commodity culture and local, indigenous, often tourist-driven culture, is sometimes, fortuitously, successful but more often impossible; and the labyrinth imposes excessive demands on the institutions and the individuals attempting to resolve the problems. -Ron Price with thanks to The Science Show, ABC Radio, 12:40-1:30 pm, Saturday, 25 January 1997.

Whatever model we have of social organization for the planet, a model that is eventually adopted to take us into the future for perhaps a thousand years, must have some essential and necessary interface with the three levels of society around the globe. -Ron Price with appreciation to Douglas martin, "The Baha’i Model for World Fellowship," World Order, 1976, pp. 6-20.

It has become a central issue
in anthropology and management science:
the interaction of three levels
of social organization: local,
national and international.

Some integration of all these levels
is crucial, as our society becomes
more and more global and at the same time
enjoys a recrudescence of local culture,
a local culture that appeals to tourism,
to some native tradition
and all that a local region stands for.
And with this, at least in our time,
Coca-Cola, hamburgers and chips travel
to the furthest corners of the planet.

Ron Price
25 January 1997

Any discussion of travel must, as I say above, bring in the consumer society. So let me say a few more things about travel, the consumer society and the two societies in which I have lived my life: Canada and Australia.

THIS NEW HOME

The ultimate offering of the consumer society is tourism, travelling and the exotic excitement of the unknown. Many, although clearly not most, now have what used to be the priviledge of the few. They can experience a range of glamorous fantasies. Their travel is seen as an adventure, a dream, a pioneer experience, an exploration. The tourist, this modern traveller, becomes a man of distinction, a lord or a lady, an aesthete, a traveller in search of knowledge and the beautiful. Travelling, tourism, is a great art, an escape, consumption, not revelation. It is a rich cake at the end of the meal of modern life. -John Carroll, Sceptical Sociology, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1980, pp. 144-149.

MY TRIBUTARY

Each artist thus keeps in his heart of hearts a single stream which, so long as he is alive, feeds what he is and what he says. When that stream runs dry, you see his work gradually shrivel up and start to crack. Sci-fi writing is not yet dry.-Albert Camus, Selected Essays and Notebooks, editor, Philip Thody, Penguin, London, 1970, p.18.

There’s been a stream, scented,
I’ve been drinking from it
since before I came of age.
Its waters have been sweet and deep,
with periodic wastelands
when the bed runs dry
and the blackest and dustiest soil
fills my soul with fear,
disorder and dessication.

A new, a fresh, tributary of this stream
is running in these late middle years.
Inspiration is running with a force
that I barely understand,
nor can I withstand
its roving eye and hand
making an interwoven carpet,
traveling silently like a meteor
through a dark, remote, isolated
universe and noone sees.

Will this tributary shrivel
after I have expressed my life
and all it means
at a deeper, more intense,
more clear-sighted level
than anything I could ever
have achieved in this daily round?
I think not; for it is a tributary
of a great and thundering river
whose waters will flow on forever
into the sweet streams of eternity:

As long as I have the will
that wills this eternal flow,
some mood will strike me here below.

Ron Price
12 January 1996

This last poem alludes to a type of travelling which I am now enjoying as I head for sixty-five this year. It contains more than any passenger ship, aircraft, pleasure destination could possibly give. Still, like the traveller, I have my down times, my down side. All is not on the pleasure-craft of life. My cruise ship is slowly coming to its harbour, sometimes "festive in the face of death," as the poet Roger White once write, sometimes tired and worn, sometimes ill and depressed. For my type of travelling is no picnic. This is no Disneyland of antiquities and religious sites that one can soon encompass in one's camera sights. The heart's frail craft has welcomed some of this journey, has coasted unperturbed, has braced itself to deflect the dips and swings which threaten to capsize it in unforeseen eddies or fling it uncontrolled to perilous brinks. In its bleaker more depressing moments one thinks, as White puts it again: "I would not have chosen this, any of it, the wringing of the spirit, the remorse." This journey is not for the timid, the overwrought, the vainly pious, the pusillanimous of spirit, the bloodless prig. This ardent voyage "on the unvariable storm-lashed brig" with its unreasonable rain to bring the living twig is "not for those wary and in despair of love."

THE OUTER SUBURBS

We might be told to ignore our dreams
and discount the rainbow.
A cold, winking star, nameless and infinitely remote,
might be given us as sole comfort,
or a dull black stone.
-Roger White, “Question”, Occasions of Grace, George Ronald, 1992, p.61.

The answer is not that it is difficult
not that there are hazards abounding,
but that an empty, bland, yawning gulf
drifts which some call liberation,
others retirement and still others
nothingness.

The great gap between an old authority
and a creative substitute,
how to make use of a new freedom
and its bright-coloured patches and
its grey-black patterns in symbiosis:
a cavernous abyss, tall precipice
yawns before us as we sleep,
as we try to find the canvass
on which to paint the picture--
from drift to mastery--
with our lives.

Patterns of feeling and meaning
can only fill some of the infinitely cold spaces
from here to eternity and its distant stars,
nameless planets and the miles and miles
between us along roads that I keep travelling
and will never do again.

Perhaps this emptiness is for the heart
where inner mysteries unfold
and love and hate must not take root.
Perhaps it is in these cold and barren places
that truth unwinds and error is defined.
Perhaps here it is that the lamp of search,
earnest striving, devotion, rapture and ecstacy,
find its home, its niche, its spacious dwellings,
in these cold, clinical and distant planes
where the City of God finds its outer suburbs;
where the heart begins its slow,
infinitely slow journey
to the brighter lights of some downtown
and its intense, its brightest lights-upon-lights,
where there is a satisfaction that at last
fattens and appeases the hunger;
where the fragrant trees and flowers,
the familiar friends and sublime embers
warm me by the fire;
where You lay waiting with love,
more than I have known.

Ron Price
10 September 1995

I wrote this last poem eight years ago. As I read it now, I do not understand it all, but it tastes of the journey that is ahead of me down the long river of time. It tastes of eternity where we all travel in whatever form it takes.

Ron Price
12 August 2003