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imomus* I stood on the most northerly beach in the British Isles. It lies just north of a holiday resort equipped with machine gun turrets, formerly an RAF base used for the interception of Soviet submarine communications. It's somewhat bleak, there at the top tip of Unst. The sea rattles in, and a dog barks.
* Norway, Shetland, Faroes, Iceland, Greenland; a sort of Viking's Causeway, a series of stepping stones from Northern Europe to North America.
* The tourism here is dominated by "biddies" -- ladies in their 60s and 70s, typically from northern English cathedral and university towns (Durham), terribly interested in local crafts and history. They wear brightly-coloured rain cagouls and Nikes and like to ask the tour guide intelligent questions. They occupy all the rooms in the B&Bs.
* Much of what I've been seeing here is reconstructions. Of a crofter's cottage, of a Bronze Age village, of "trowie" dells, of a Viking longship. Jumping from the present to the past -- and finding the past, for all its poverty, superstition and chilliness, more beautiful than the present -- you can't help asking yourself something like this:
In how many, out of, say, a thousand parallel worlds in which the people of the past are offered a choice between their lifestyle and ours, do they choose their own?
In other words, how much of what you consider beauty -- the muted colours of the croft's workspaces under its thatched roof, the pancreatic forms of the paleolithic brochs and roundhouses -- would be junked in a flash by these "virtuous poor" in exchange for, say, your mum's Citroen with its longboat-shaped digital speedometer display?
* My mother tells me that when we emigrated from Britain to Canada in 1973 it really felt like going to a more advanced culture. But after two years with Canadian wages (three times what my dad had been earning in Britain) and central heating, and a truly free and universal education system, we made the decision to return to Scotland. So perhaps the Bronze Age people I bring with me to the Citroen turn back at the last minute, shake their heads, proclaim that the future is not the place for them, and return to their mossy warrens, their dark brochs, their thatched drystone foundations.
* Norway, Shetland, Faroes, Iceland, Greenland; a sort of Viking's Causeway, a series of stepping stones from Northern Europe to North America.
* The tourism here is dominated by "biddies" -- ladies in their 60s and 70s, typically from northern English cathedral and university towns (Durham), terribly interested in local crafts and history. They wear brightly-coloured rain cagouls and Nikes and like to ask the tour guide intelligent questions. They occupy all the rooms in the B&Bs.
* Much of what I've been seeing here is reconstructions. Of a crofter's cottage, of a Bronze Age village, of "trowie" dells, of a Viking longship. Jumping from the present to the past -- and finding the past, for all its poverty, superstition and chilliness, more beautiful than the present -- you can't help asking yourself something like this:
In how many, out of, say, a thousand parallel worlds in which the people of the past are offered a choice between their lifestyle and ours, do they choose their own?
In other words, how much of what you consider beauty -- the muted colours of the croft's workspaces under its thatched roof, the pancreatic forms of the paleolithic brochs and roundhouses -- would be junked in a flash by these "virtuous poor" in exchange for, say, your mum's Citroen with its longboat-shaped digital speedometer display?
* My mother tells me that when we emigrated from Britain to Canada in 1973 it really felt like going to a more advanced culture. But after two years with Canadian wages (three times what my dad had been earning in Britain) and central heating, and a truly free and universal education system, we made the decision to return to Scotland. So perhaps the Bronze Age people I bring with me to the Citroen turn back at the last minute, shake their heads, proclaim that the future is not the place for them, and return to their mossy warrens, their dark brochs, their thatched drystone foundations.
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Date: 2008-06-13 07:00 am (UTC)How about a half hour from a rooftop in the Ninth Ward?
Does the offer come with a guarantee that participants get the upper tier of modernity and none of the consequence further down?
Maybe you could attempt to throughly educate them before they chose. Illustrate the things they take for granted so completely they'll need to be led toward the names for them, things we've let slip away now.
It will be large task, making the differences between those old harsh ways and our well-upholstered bullet train to wherever it is we're going clear to people whose immediate worries will be vividly assuaged by what they see, if what they see is mostly just progress.
Graph the absence of songbirds in strength to people who've never known spring without them.
You could edit the glimpses for contrast, say with the hammered coasts of the south-asian tsunami and cyclone bounced off jumbo prawns on ice on a laden banquet table bounced off the coastal mangrove swamps going down to some brightly-colored amphibious tractors clearing the way for aquaculture pens.
We have much more access to a far wider variety of cheeses than any Bronze-age folk ever did. That's a sure win point.
End of the day, though, this isn't the future, that wasn't the past. Both are moments passed through to some other. Progress has been stamped into us as inevitable and linear, but it's come to seem pretty local, and precariously temporary.
Thatching foundations seems an odd practice but building on what's solid, putting what lasts above immediate gratification, looks right all through. Pecht or world citizen we'll agree on that.