Viva Vaudeville

Oh, passerby, take a moment, will you?  Stay, stay – I’ll give you a show, something to think about, a little glimpse at what might have been.  I’d call it magic, but we don’t believe in that any more, do we?  No, no, this is about something else, about the ingenuity of man.  We have remade the world.  We have subverted it.

Why don’t you come see?

Come, cast your eyes on Antiquity!  Here is a bauble for Hero, the long-rumoured aeolipile!  See how it spins!  It is a heart to pump the wind; why, it is done through steam of course!  A breath of air, a smear of water, and the wind moves the metal!  A marvellous trinket, you’ll agree, but listen here – it was the first steam engine no less, and on the back of its descendants rest the foundations of our modern world.

Our trains, of course, are thrown forwards on piston-legs of steel and steam.  Our clocks calculate the circumference of each second on brass weights, fused copper drawn from the deepest wells of the earth.  Difference engines are enabling our engineers and mechanics to build ever more complex contraptions, and our dirigibles have taken to the sky; my friend, surely you can see that we are in a new age.

The old one was governed by the rural chains of feudalism – well, we are over with that now.  Now we are making the world into images of ourselves, and we are welding the water and the fire together to do it.  We are making engines of steam to rebel against the natural laws of the world and the limits of man.  We are refusing to obey, we are rising like steam; yes, yes, don’t you see?

We are steam punks.

poq!

Poqku Number 3

Watching silver screens

Action, comedy, romance,

Taking me away.

Things…My, How They Pass

Divine Gyanendra takes his shining crown

and puts it down,

betrayed by the stars and the signs.

The Lunatic Fringe

“A Lunatic:  one whom the moon inhabits.” - Ambrose Pierce

There has always been a sense in which the madman is the visionary, who sees the moon beyond the clouds.  The mad see things we do not – for that we brand them either insane or genius – and this is what makes them dangerous, for

“The nose of the mob is its imagination.  By this, at any time, it can be led.” – Edgar Allen Poe

And led it has been, to the maw of Auschwitz and the killing fields near Phnom Penh.  When the lunatic and the mob are combined, anything might happen.

Surely by now, we have learned to distrust grand narratives.

Still, poq ponders the relation between the Cloud, the mob and the mad.  The Cloud has opened the ears of the many to the voices of the few.  Words are no longer vetted;  they find your heart directly, like a drug on drip-feed.  In this way a new type of beast has emerged:  a hyper-ventilating, panic-driven, super-sensational echo chamber, where opinions are minted in minutes and forgotten faster.

In the Cloud, the smallest of pins hits the floor like thunder.  A moment later and a million voices will make a mob, noisy voices – maybe not angels – dancing on the head of the pin.  A moment after that, and the whole circus will move on, learning – and earning - little.

In Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card, a genius child realizes the potential for power hidden in the anonymous voice, and uses the Cloud to shape the global discourse to his advantage, writing stories and crafting comments as a virtuoso conductor would direct an orchestra.  He carefully creates an atmosphere of fear in which only he can provide the solutions to the world’s ills.  Eventually, the child ascends the ladder of his own making and steals the ears of the world’s leaders, and from there he (somewhat fancifully) steals their thrones too and becomes world leader.  Beware the visionary who comes bearing narratives, because the guardians are all gone now.

Mobs are as mad as the Moon, and where the mad go they follow. In a Cloudy age, we should fear those who shape the shapeless Cloud: they are the most dangerous of all.

(Matt Drudge, we are watching you.)

Old King Coal

You want to know about Old King Coal?  Most don’t come asking about him around here anymore.  They’re all heated up at the thought of Slick Oil, or cat-cool Hip Hydrogen.  But Old King Coal, well, he’s been around the block a few times.  He lived in a different age, you know?

He lives in the apartment below, alone now – ever since Sammy Steam died – and what a noise he makes!  Tromping around with that great big bag of charcoal and belchin’ and fartin’ black smoke like a dragon.  Even in my grandfather’s day he was never any better – cantankerous and arrogant, a true and loyal friend, and a with look that lights up real quick at the wrong sort of word.

Watch it if you go down there to meet him, son.  Old King Coal’s not crazy, but he’ll bear a grudge for five thousand years.  Spark a fight with him and he’ll smoulder for a long, long time.  He’ll nurse his feuds, he forgets nothing: he slow-burns.

I tell you what, though, he’s still worth talking to.  He’s seen it all, and he’s still the King.  Take it from me, son, Old King Coal’s yet got a few tricks up his sleeve.  Convince him to change his ways, well, and you’ll be on your way with a whistle and done a world of good for us all.  He’s nothing fancy, but he’s a good man, that old King o’ Coal.

Ode to a Fossil

Little one, pale-cast,

You were, once,

In the Cambrian

When the waves crashed on

Stones still unsmoothed by time’s hands,

Now you are

Poetry still breathing, but

Inside the stone.

I saw you, once,

Your last wake was a

Trill of tents perched above your grave.

Word of the Day

Oubliette:

A peculiar type of French dungeon, accessible only through a hatch in the floor, and a little like an attic with chains.  Hardly as efficient as Bentham’s Panopticon, but the advantage is that it’s impossible to escape without help from below, which means that the ruler can just ‘file and forget’ you.

Internet access, alas, is probably not included.

So goes Ape, so goes Man

poq has heard many attacks on the theory of evolution:  some fair, some far, some simply bizarre.

One persistent offender is the specimen known as ‘your ancestor was an ape’ – just like a school boy insult, the intent of the criticism is to imply that anybody who believes in evolution has particularly smelly parents.

poq will be to the point.  Apes are not your ancestors.  They are your distant cousins.

Get it?  You share a common ancestor with apes, but they are not your ancestors.

The End of Arctic

“Never on land or by sea will you find,

the marvelous road to the feast of the Hyperborea.” – Pindar (a Roman)

Well, it was not for lack of trying that we failed.  The fabled land of Hyperborea – North, North of the North Wind – was always rumoured to guard feasts for the hungry, and so it was no suprise when we discovered that gold ran in a lucky streak from California to the Cascades, and even further north to the Yukon, where compasses shivered and the light froze blue-green in the sky.  Prospectors and no-hopers, we came in floods to the half-lit lands, looking for fur, whale-bone, timber, amber and gold, always gold.

We came by water too, but by the score our ships foundered on the spires of ice, always failing to find the Northwestern Passage.

Pindar was right – no matter how frantic our search, we were left stymied and unsatisfied.  In time, we took what we could of the North’s gold to gild our cities, and we turned our avararice elsewhere, and

In time the North was forgotten.

And yet, “while history doesn’t repeat itself, it does rhyme.” – Mark Twain

There was more than one treasure lying beneath the permafrost.  There is more than one colour of gold.

We are echoes of our ancestors:  just like they did, we search for Hyperborea.  The Artic markets are heating up again – and this time, the ice is melting.

We are switching myths.  Soon the polar bears will be mere legends, like dinosaurs and dodos, but the Northwestern Passage will be real, and once more we shall feast in the lands of Hyperborea.

ANWR is ready for drilling, and poq mourns

the passing myth of the North.