Ten thousand years - the life span I hope for the clock - is about as long as the history of human technology. We have fragments of pots that old. Geologically, it's a blink of an eye. When you start thinking about building something that lasts that long, the real problem is not decay and corrosion, or even the power source. The real problem is people. If something becomes unimportant to people, it gets scrapped for parts; if it becomes important, it turns into a symbol and must eventually be destroyed. The only way to survive over the long run is to be made of materials large and worthless, like Stonehenge and the Pyramids, or to become lost. The Dead Sea Scrolls managed to survive by remaining lost for a couple millennia. Now that they've been located and preserved in a museum, they're probably doomed. I give them two centuries - tops.
The fate of really old things leads me to think that the clock should be copied and hidden. The idea of hiding the clock to preserve it has a natural corollary, but it takes Teller, the professional magician, to suggest it without shame: "The important thing is to make a very convincing documentary about building the clock and hiding it. Don't actually build one. That would spoil the myth if it was ever found." In a way, Teller is right.
Which reminded me of what my friend Greg said to me this summer at the Pig Roast, when Eddie and I confessed to not having actually Cannondonged to get there (SF to Boston in a straight, dizzying shot):
Don't ever let the truth get in the way of a good story.
(And actually, it was Errol Morris who told this to Greg.) But anyway, what does this say about what we do? The documentary of a fake clock's fake construction standing somehow in perfect stead for the real thing. One car, two people, three thousand miles, and who's to say, if we don't, that it didn't happen? And if we don't tell those people in Vermont, they leave that weekend telling their friends that two guys ran a car three thousand miles across the country in one glorious run. And what, weeks from then, in all those tertiary people's minds, could ever differentiate it from truth?
What I mean to say, is, suspension of disbelief or no, what we write in fiction never really happens and yet no one reads it that way, and yet, on some level, readers take it for gospel, for truth. It speaks to them; they carry it with them, and believe in it, and care.
So why not put fiction, and our capacity to create it, in more parts of our lives?
3 comments:
these are bigger ideas than i am prepared to tackle on a monday night, but i'm interested, and know youpeople is checking every fourteen minutes for comments.
what are you really asking us here, though? to lie more? to lie more in order to tell better stories when we're sitting around the dinner table? i imagine, with all the yarn-spinners in the room (uh, blog),that we're already well versed in the art of embellishment. in fact, I’m not imagining, I *know* we're well versed in the art of embellishment, since i've witnessed events, and then heard them retold around those aforementioned dinner tables with enough hyperbole to make someone who uses a lot of hyperbole jealous. See, I couldn’t think of anyone there. I warned you about Monday nights.
About lost things surviving only because they were lost, YES, did anyone read about those Neolithic noodles? Some archeologist in Lajian (I think) in China found noodles from the Neolithic period (thereby more or less proving that it was the Chinese, not the Italians, who invented noodles, but that's another story). Said noodles (made out of millet) had been preserved in an overturned bowl because a volcano had erupted and sealed the overturned bowl with ash. For 4,000 years. But as soon as the archeologists turned the bowl right side up and the noodles came into contact with air, they (the noodles, not the archeologists) began to disintegrate. The archeologists barely had time to take a picture.
Isn't that a lovely (yes, lovely) emblem of how things only survive when they're lost?
Also, Neolithic Noodles would be a great name for a rock band, if any of you ever decide to start one.
Ahh, and what did that "picture" look like? I mean, how hard would it be to doctor a picture like that, or no doctoring at all--just put something in there yourself that looks like petrified noodles (or whatever adjective would work best here), then take it away, say it disintegrated.
"Teacher, my homework disintegrated. I completed the assignment months ago, actually, which is why it had the chance to decompose...."
I'm probably kidding about this, though--archeologists are such nice sorts--but I bring it, and my post, up to illustrate two things about 'creative writing' (and here I'm getting to bizness's question):
a) given that fiction and poetry are meaningful and worthy, but lies (in the case of fiction, and possibly to probably lies in the case of poetry), why does our version of storytelling (as opposed, say, to the recapitulation of an archeological dig) get a free pass? and,
b) might not the consideration of this matter intrigue us to do things with our fiction and poetry that would further blur this distinction between truth and what is not, at the time of documentation, truth?
Post a Comment