Precogs
While Stanislaw Lem was the better writer Philip K. Dick,the paranoid
American, was also highly accomplished. When they were to meet at a
conference for science fiction authors Dick was convinced that Lem was a
danger to him (Dick), as he (Lem) had been pre-programmed by Josef Stalin
and the Soviet Comintern.
Nevertheless, and despite Dick's preclivity to sleeping with a gun under
his pillow, as a matter of preparedness, some of his literary endeavours
deserve their fame. Among them is the ditty later filmed with great success
by Stephen Spielberg, the Minority Report (1956/2002). We read:
"*The Minority Report*" is a 1956 science fiction
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fiction> novella
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novella> by American writer Philip K. Dick
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick>, first published in *Fantastic
Universe <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_Universe>*. In a future
society, three mutants foresee all crime before it occurs. Plugged into a
great machine, these "precogs <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precognition>"
allow a division of the police called Precrime to arrest suspects before
they can commit any actual crimes. When the head of Precrime, John
Anderton, is himself predicted to murder a man whom he has never met,
Anderton is convinced a great conspiracy is afoot."
Again, the Wikipedia article goes on to frame Dick's piece in the context
of a moralising universe, where the American knights of free will is pitted
against the forces of darkness, i.e. communism and the Soviet Union.
However, and with reference to Lem's previous ly mentioned disdain of the
(Russian) director Tarkovsky's interpretation of Solaris as a primarly
moral tale it's fair to take exception to the encyclopedia rendering of
Minority Report as primarly concerned with moral issues. Rather, and this
is where Lem and Dick share ground, the quintessentially generic feature in
their work, the scientific *invention*, the technical ditty, the object of
fascination, is what fuels the story, and what generates, ultimately, its
essential meaning. In the case of Minority Report this is the introduction
of the "precogs," this presumably heavily sedated diviners who are able to
predict the future. While the Wiki artice emphasises that in Spielberg it
is the *diss
Yours sincerely,
Torgeir Fjeld
Poland / Norway
https://www.torgeirfjeld.com/
On Mon, 27 Sep 2021, 16:23 Lawrence Helm, <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
In season 3, episode 17 of *Scorpion*, the team is sent to Greenland to
repair the power system in the Granse World Seed Vault. I couldn't find
that entry in Wikipedia, but they did describe the Svalbard Global Seed
Vault in Spitsbergen.
The team arrives at the seed vault and one of the failures spews
hallucinogenic spores affecting three of the team. Each affected team
member experiences whatever it is that he or she fears most. In the case
of Sylvester Doff (played by Ari Stidham) it is chickens. He was bullied
as a child and fears chickens because bullies locked him in a chicken coop
and the agitated chickens jumped about many of them landing on him. He
felt he was being attacked. In this episode the team members not exposed
to the hallucinogenic spores must talk Sylvester (via intercom) and the
other two hallucinating members into overcoming their fears so they can
activate controls opening doors and such like.
I wasn't impressed by the scene because the chickens terrifying Sylvester
are all hens. A rooster, on the other hand, will actually attack a person
as I learned as a child. My mother and sister wouldn't go into the chicken
coop and risk their bare legs. But I wore jeans so it was my duty to
collect the eggs. Each time I entered the coop, the Rhode Island Red
rooster would attack me but he couldn't get his talons or beak through my
jeans. I never developed a fear of chickens, but I did acquire a respect
for Rhode Island Red roosters.
Lawrence
On 9/26/2021 11:00 AM, david ritchie wrote:
Conversation with a chicken is not always and easy or steady-flowing
thing; often we sit in companionable silence, with nothing to report or
examine. After one such period this week I asked whether more sitting had
changed her view of the world. Once the herd would graze and move; now a
single chicken moves from *sitzplatz *to *sitzplatz.*
She responded after a moment’s reflection, “It’s lower.”
“What is?”
“My view of the world. About two inches.”
I explained that I’d been thinking about the relationship between events
as we all experience them and history, that which turns up in our
recounting. The ratio is like an iceberg, most events never reach a level
which makes them worth including in a story.
Mimo disagreed.
“To me it’s all of a piece. This week, for example, there were seven
dawns. The crows returned. No melon seeds on two of the days. And there
was that soft stuff. All of it history.”
“The muffin was history? Stale muffin?”
“Quite nice.”
“Different subject: have you seen snakes?”
“Not recently.”
“Only, I passed one out front, just now, sunning itself by the road.”
“Did you kill it?”
“Left it alone.”
“Back here the cats would kill it. So what kind of events don’t rise to
the level of story?”
“If I told you, they’d be in a story.”
“Not necessarily. You could present them in the form of analysis, with
statistics and a power point.”
“What do you understand by power point?”
“Just a phrase I heard. And if you tell a story to a chicken, does that
really count as telling?”
I nodded. “The week began with a series of unfortunate events. You’ll
have noticed the electrical trucks and the tree down on the wire?”
“Noisy.”
“And then the heavy rain.”
“Nasty.”
“Drain out front was blocked.”
“Probably by snakes.”
“Then another drain blocked, inside.”
“Isn’t that usually where they block? I suppose a horse could block a
drain on the outside.”
“Why do you think drains are blocked by animals?”
“Motives can be very mysterious.”
I let that pass. “And then I avoided emergency surgery.”
“What is that?”
“Something none of us wants. I was drinking a glass of water. Just
before I swallowed, I felt something odd in my mouth. Turned out to be
about a one inch sliver of glass. A bit of the rim had broken off.”
“You lost me.”
“The point is that swallowing glass is bad for gods.”
“We swallow stones.”
“Gods shouldn’t swallow glass slivers.”
“I’ll take your word for it. And then what?”
“I finished a draft of the essay I’m writing and put it in the hands of a
reader.”
“Is that bad?”
“No, it’s good. I’m thinking these essays might be going somewhere.”
“Is that good?”
“Could be.”
“Do they fly or walk?”
“What?”
“Essays. When they go somewhere?”
I thought a change of topic might be appropriate so I explained that the
other god, the one who got married, was off exploring Mediterranean beaches.
“What’s a beach?”
“It’s a piece of land between the land and the sea. You lie on it.”
“Why?”
“Or you can sit.”
“And think?”
“Or not.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do gods sit or lie on a beach?”
“Motives can be very mysterious."
After a quiet start to my Saturday afternoon, I decided that with rain in
the forecast it was moment to harvest our wine grapes. I wish I could
claim prescience, but I planted merlot and cabernet without thinking about
global warming. The pinot has done nothing this year, while those two
vines (one of each) produced about a cooler and a half of fine-looking
specimens.
I was pleased they chose to grow up a Douglas fir tree and so extend the
amount of late-afternoon sun they captured. But the “wine” pleased no
one. Last year there was no harvest; smoke from wildfires ruined the
crop. This year the vines grew into the dogwood tree. Some of the bends
were right angles, so the harvest was hard and sweaty and even involved
crashing on concrete. Western, macho grape harvesting. Bound to produce a
better kind of wine. I’m going to experiment with leaving stems in the
fermenting liquid, which is said to increase tannins, possibly in a good
way.
Tannic wines should be laid to rest for a while. The additional benefit
of this method is that I can postpone discovering that I have made yet
another undrinkable bottle.
Arsenal won. Slaughtered Spurs. Mimo was delighted. No idea why.
Motives…
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
