How We Write the Future

Posted on December 19, 2015 by Barry Pomeroy

Whenever I think of writing about the future, I always remember those early writers of science fiction beginning in the forties and extending into the seventies, Heinlein and Asimov among them, who thought we’d be smoking in spacesuits, and that women in an technologically advanced society would be making meals in the galley while the men fought wars inspired by the American navy. The future has turned out to be much more difficult to predict, and oddly it is more E. M. Forster’s 1909 “Machine Stops” and Olaf Stapledon’s very modern Last and First Men from 1930 that seem to have come closer to reality.

One of the central problems is trying to define that changes that happen to society by the adoption of a new technology is one that Marshall McLuhan expressed in the fifties about the printing press. At the beginning of the age of printing, what in the western tradition we think of as the invention of the Gutenberg press, no one could have predicted, McLuhan argues, what changes to society such a seemingly insignificant invention would have. Typically when people remember the Gutenberg press they remember the first printed bible, although the press was busy printing the much more lucrative indulgences for the church.

No one could have predicted the reformation, although that proved to be one of the most minor effects of the press. The growth of literacy, democracy with an educated public, scientific communication, and the mass of literature that allowed the growth of thousands of artistic communities, all came about as a direct result of the press. As well, we have changed our idea about truth. The medieval peasant who sat at the priest’s knee and listened raptly to words he could not decipher let alone question is no more. Now people demand proof and point to their own research, which granted for most means spending hours online at night trying to explain one phenomena or another.

If the lowly printing press, which only delivered and packaged the written word, could have such far ranging effects it is no wonder that writers have struggled to write about what might concern their fellows in the near or even far future. The writers who do it best are those that have made an assessment of universal human verities. That Asimov and Heinlein thought women would be content in roles from the fifties, or that men would be content with women at the sidelines as cheerleaders to male accomplishment, shows that those two men put little thought into the trends of their societies, at least in terms of gender. H. G. Wells, with only the suffragette movement to work from, knew that emancipation of all people was an idealized and possible future. Father Amerton, from Wells’ Men Like Gods, who tries to force clothes on the women he thinks of being too scantily clothed in order to hide his own prurient desires, provides evidence of Wells’ rejection of those archaic values. The utopian society of that book is horrified by what the reverend thinks of as cherished ideals, and it becomes obvious the worlds are in collision.

To come back to the example of smoking in a space ship, or even a spacesuit, it seems that some writers of the fifties and sixties had difficulty imagining a society that had gotten past even the most mundane of ridiculous cultural norms. Their cultural future was similar to the wasteland of their social background, in which men had bigger guns, and fought the same wars in the same way. Even if they had traveled and experienced different cultures, you would think that writers with such a limited perspective might have modified their idea of the future.

Of course there are many science fiction writers now, with the perspective offered by Wells as well as the mistakes by others who were equally famous, who can imagine a future which is qualitatively different. William Gibson, Cory Doctorow, and Charles Stross’ cyberpunk novels stand as a testament to that.

This brings us back to E. M. Forster’s “Machine Stops” and Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men. In both of these texts, the authors imagine a society which tinkers with the DNA of humans, even before we knew such a thing was possible. They both also realize the necessity for instantaneous communication. Like Wells’ telephone pole devices in Men Like Gods, Forster gives us facetime and skype with his flat disks which show an approximation of the person you are talking to. The Machine itself sees to the breeding of the populace, and weeds out traits it finds undesirable by a combination of selective breeding and social pressure. In Stapledon’s wide-ranging epic, humanity falls and rises a dozen times, only to come back to the same universal problems. Humanity modifies itself a dozen times in order to improve ourselves, and makes colossal mistakes only to recover.

We may contrast this with Poul Anderson’s “Flight to Forever,” in which men and women play out the same tired stories of battle and conquest, trapped forever in roles that are as repugnant as they are unrealistic. If ever there was a text which would make time travel seem horrifyingly pointless, it is Anderson’s endless repetition. The same guttural concerns are experienced by the first people as the last, and the only way off the wheel is to let it complete its turn.

There is no easy answer to writing about the future. Current trends are as difficult to predict as the internet would have been impossible to foresee in the early 1900s. As writers it behooves us to think beyond what humanity is concerned with now, to look beyond the motes in our eyes, and try to see our way clear of the cultural blinkers we’ve been saddled with. We may take our cues from other cultures, who think of gender and reasoning differently, and always think what around us could disappear at a moment’s notice, such as smoking. I’ve been on airplanes left from the seventies that had ashtrays in the armrests, but even then it was obvious the society was shifting around us. Science fiction writers, above all, should be cognizant of societal and cultural change.

If, Philip K. Dick is right, and like his Electric Ant we are programmed to ignore the fixedness of our perceptions and ideology, then we can always paint over the holes of our ideas, poke new holes in the ticker tape of our reality, and finally step outside that reality altogether, as the ticker tape is cut and we venture onto entirely new ground of a truly unrecognizable future.

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What Meat Means to Argentinians

Posted on December 4, 2015 by Barry Pomeroy

Most of the people I met in Argentina were by times bemused and horrified that I was a vegetarian. It proved to be a challenge and I think, although she was very graceful about it, a bother for the mother of my friend, but for others, I became a cipher and a challenge.

Most people were merely aghast and held up slices of sticky beef on skewers from their asado asadoto test my resolve, but a few people at a social occasion became concerned about my health. They told me, in no uncertain terms, that a human cannot live without meat. Setting aside the many millions of people worldwide who do just that, I asked them how long they thought a vegetarian would survive without that most important of foods. They told me that such a person might last two years at the most.

The social occasion was an impromptu house party at a friend of a friend’s, so it didn’t behoove me socially to enter another room let alone cause a conflict, but my incredulity certainly was evident. It was amazing to me that these perhaps otherwise intelligent people had a test case immediately before them that proved their assertion wrong and still persisted in their premise.

I’d been a similar situation in Mar de Plata so I wasn’t entirely unprepared. My friend was reading a Spanish translation of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s NestOne Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest 2 when his aunt happened by and mentioned that McMurphy, the protagonist, had been sent into the asylum to test conditions. I typically missed much of the ebb and flow of rapid Spanish around me so my friend had to ask me if that were indeed true. I stared at him dumfounded. He’d seen the film some thirty times and was nearly halfway through the book. How could he not know that his aunt’s gross misreading of the text was terribly, inarguably wrong?

Luckily, among the assertions of my imminent death due to meat withdrawal, considering I’d been a vegetarian for more than twenty years, we caught the interest of my friend’s father, who was a doctor. In fact, he was a nutritionist. Instead of inquiring about the specifics of my diet, or my use of supplements, he cut right to the heart of the matter. “How many years have you been vegetarian?” he asked me.

“Over twenty,” I answered.

“He looks healthy to me,” he told the table of smoking and drinking teens and went back to his wine.

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Writing is a Poor Person’s Art

Posted on November 30, 2015 by Barry Pomeroy

Writing is the poor person’s art, just like soccer is the poor person’s sport. All you need to play soccer is a will, for a ball can be made out of torn nylon stockings, my friends from Chile tell me, or a leather case wrapped around fabric in Africa or, as theyRattan_sepak_tawraw_ball do in Thailand, a flexible plaited bamboo ball they call a takraw. Balls can be made out of local materials, and then all that is required is willing children and a relatively flat surface.

Likewise of the arts, writing requires little. We all remember the Marquis de Sade smearing feces in Quills in 2000, but few of us are that desperate. At most we would need paper or a paper substitute and a pen, or a pencil, or something sharp that leaves a trace on the surface. When we think of the requirements of the other arts, the canvas and the paint and the stone for sculpting, we realize how lucky a writer is. I read a story in a Reader’s Digest many years ago about an artistic boy who is compelled to draw. His father saves him packing paper when he very occasionally visits the shops, but most of the time, because he is living in the forest, he resorts to charcoal tipped sticks from the fire and birch bark. As you might expect, because it is Reader’s Digest, he becomes a famous painter in the end. The story constantly reminded us that paper was a luxury but such was the level of his commitment that he would draw on anything.

The writer is equally driven, but given the flat ground of the soccer pitch, and the bundle of rags of the ball that is a pen and paper, nearly anyone has access to their art. They may be equally driven to write as the boy was to draw and paint, but they can engage with their craft on the bus while commuting, on the beach while vacationing, and while at work when the boss is looking the other way. Although that leads many unfortunates to presume that ease of access equals ability, and has led to millions of blogs—like this one you are reading right now—it also indicates that no matter who you are, or your background, or how few people are reading, you are free to bend the words to your will. You need heed none of the worries of the other arts as you cheaply engage in your craft and, if you need the interaction of a community, there are millions like you happily posting opinion and conjecture online.

Given those minimal constraints, I wonder sometimes why more people don’t write. I’m not especially driven to it, although I am drawn to stories like a ghoul to a grave, but it is entertaining enough on its own, that even without an audience I’m surprised that others don’t take up the pursuit. When I think about those I know, however, those whose stories tumble from them when we have a quiet moment together and yet never touch pen to paper, I think I realize what the problem is.

Run off our feet as we are, frantic to purchase the elusive vacuum cleaner part of our desires, we make multiple trips from one side of the town to another, but rarely pause to reflect. The words upon the page are the direct result of slowing down, of forcing the human attention to linger for a moment on something that might seem mundane to our neighbours. Then, once we’ve stilled the rush, we have the chance to convey what we saw, what we felt, and with our charcoal and ochre and the lascauxIMG_1096smcave wall before us, we draw the magnificent bisons of our dreams so people ten thousand years from now may enjoy what we felt.

Writing is the still pool of the rushing stream, that reflects the trees and yet is translucent enough to allow a view of the wary crayfish and the alert trout. The rapids may seem pleasant enough on the face of them, but with upon scrutiny we can tell the stream moves gaily over rocks only for itself. Greedily, it keeps what it learns to itself, and neither allows us to see the depths or reflects the sky. Writing is the communicative urge, while pinballing from one part of our busy errand-filled life to another, we merely are moving meat.

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An Authorial Dream of Wealth and Success

Posted on November 21, 2015 by Barry Pomeroy

Perhaps because my latest book, Not Quite Dark: A Post-Apocalyptic Adoption Story is doing well in terms of sales, I had a strange dream about being a popular writer the other night. I dreamed that Obama had unwittingly endorsed my book because he’d recommended it to a friend. The resulting media firestorm soon had my book flying off the virtual shelves. Soon that was followed by the sales of my other books, and suddenly I was hugely popular and had to worry about keeping my fans happy, deflecting the haters, and dealing with media reactions and demands as well as keeping the writing machine going.

When I woke up, I paused, in that glorious moment when you wake early but don’t have to get out of bed immediately, and thought about what that success would look like. I thought about the five or so books I am currently working on and how I would have to step up production to keep the shark tank fed. I also contemplated what my working life would look like. Instead of fitting my writing in when I have time, I would be able to devote some hours of my day to finishing old projects and starting new ones. I would teach next term, even if I were quite wealthy, largely because I have signed the contracts and because I have students who are depending on me to be there. Also, I would need a while to get ready for the idea of being an author only instead of the jack of all trades I have been most of my life.

The most profound change that would happen to my life would be where I would live and how large my place would be. I have discussed with my friends the reason that I might soon have a two bedroom apartment, but if I were suddenly wealthy, I might splurge and live in a nicer area, although the two bedroom quality would likely stay the same. I wonder if my sudden success would speed parts of my new plan, or slow them.

I rose that morning, anticipating that my book sales were likely stable and modest, and I wasn’t disappointed. The new novel is doing well, but in some ways it is a relief to work on the books I want to write instead of worrying about a huge audience. I only have to keep myself happy and not millions of fans. Thus I can write stories set during various apocalypses, write a journal about visiting Thailand, a road novel about a man searching for meaning after his mother dies, and a novel about fifteen colonists on Mars. I can do this and not have to worry about either public approbation or attack.

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Killing Kids in Books and Film

Posted on November 8, 2015 by Barry Pomeroy

Perhaps because I teach courses about apocalyptic literature, and I’m an avid fan of end of the world stories, I have read and watched enough of the genre that I’ve noted a significant, if not disturbing trend. This is a genre that necessarily involves some mayhem, so a few deaths can be permitted, but increasingly murderous rampages are becoming a shortcut to audience titillation even as they act as a cheap plot device. Certainly we can admit that Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men might not have been as childrenvideo-game interesting if the main characters weren’t constantly being chased and shot at, but was that really the import of the film? Ostensibly, the film was about protecting the woman’s unborn child, and if we admit the truth, her egg potential, but much more of the screen time was devoted to her danger than her safety.

A lot of this death, killing thousands of zombies in the Resident Evil franchise ResidentEvil-Filmeven though dozens of murders could just as easily have answered the plot, is used to heighten old flight-or-fight instincts in a human who has long since gone to ground in the safety of the couch. Playing with the heroes’ survival, and teasing the audience with their own expectations by alternately terrifying and satiating them has become so extreme and heavy-handed that the viewers may begin to doubt that the narrative is worth their attention. Both killing and the special effects in these films become blunt instruments that bludgeon to entertain, rather than probe to evoke.

Intricate and highly doubtful plot elements conspire to kill the people we care about—or, I would argue, increasingly care less about—in an effort to artificially boost viewer or reader interest. Caught by these portrayals, we forget to ask if the hero should survive at all. The super soldier hero who has killed umpteen zombies or terrorists—or, in my time, communists—has necessarily become identical to the enemy they were saving us from.

Also, if we can get past the spurting arteries, we begin to wonder what peaceful world the hero is trying to preserve. Typically, they spend their screen time occupied with saving their love interest, but few ask if they have become the maniacal killer in order to protect from their equally murderous twin. Instead, as viewers, we cheer the survivors and forget how they have achieved their victory and forget to ask if it was worthwhile. We forget that there is no point in becoming a mass killer to protect society if you are defending society from mass killers. Then you merely turn into the enemy you despise and fear. Increasingly, we have become focused on the killing and lost track of the values our heroes are killing to protect.

I am more interested in what we are trying to preserve than I am the mechanism we use to preserve it. If we are protecting the one we love, then what is that relationship about, and how can plot elements—zombies or whatever—help to further the laudable goal of investigating that relationship?

The Walking Dead is a series that excites millions of viewers. My friend told me how riveting the show was, wd little girlbut when I took her advice and watched the opening sequence, I saw the hero Rick Grimes, played by Andrew Lincoln, shoot a little girl in the head. Instead of being intrigued by the storyline, I began to wonder what the producers were hoping to tap into. Were they so cynical about their audience that they thought that killing a child would engage viewer interest? I couldn’t help but wonder why it was necessary to kill the girl.

For me, that moment effectively defined my reaction to the series. Perhaps it had many redeeming features beyond that opening sequence, but the blatant and heavy-handed manipulation of the viewer, without any redeeming plot purpose that I could discern, smacked to me of prurient sensationalism writ large across the screen in a little girl’s blood. Perhaps they are right, and we’ve become jaded as an audience, but such images of carnage seem to be performed for the mere shock value, as one show after another tries to one-up their peers.

I think that’s why Cormac McCarthy’s The Road never resonated with me. I sympathized with the father tryingthe-road to find a haven for his son, but I didn’t buy that as soon as danger threatened everyone would become an inarticulate cannibal. The cannibals seem shoehorned into the narrative so the reader could feel the thrill of imminent death around every corner, and every few minutes we become aware of the horror when yet another cannibal runs out of the trees.

Jack McDevitt’s Eternity Road kills a few people on a relatively harrowing journey, but that is not the main concern of the plot. Instead, it is used to ensure that the characters 200px-Eternity_road_novel_cover1rethink the purpose of their quest so that we as readers are reminded that civilization and scientific thought are inherently worthwhile projects. Also, the deaths provide a reason for the characters to express sentiments that have slowly developed over the journey—and thus become a driver for character development. McDevitt’s narrative doesn’t stop in its tracks, and forget all other purposes, in order to wallow in lurid and unforgettable images of death.

Perhaps the best example of a book that remains realistic, within the bounds of its invented world, and yet does not dwell on the sensationalistic, is Dale Pendell’s The Great Bay: ChroniclesGBay-halfcover of the Collapse. Pendell’s is one of the few texts that takes on a boundless cataclysm in the form of plague, climatic collapse, environmental toxins, bandit armies, and homegrown murder, but he doesn’t let those narrative elements take over his story. Ultimately, his tale is one of human inventiveness and the wish for community, as people band together for comfort and mutual assistance. A few invaders enter Pendell’s world, cannibals during times of starvation and malicious individuals in search of victims, but Pendell makes it clear—by the brief narrative time devoted to those moments—that his main story is elsewhere.

I wonder how much our own ideas about people and end of the world scenarios define the stories we write and want to read. In the end, the stories I tell have as much to do with my own views of humanity as anything else. I don’t think we slough off civilization quite so readily. I think William Golding’s Lord of the Flieslord of the flies tells more about our fears of groupthink than our natural tendencies. While some people might be drawn to bad actions by circumstances or personal predilections, most will try to protect the weak, pull together to make life better for all, and remain honest despite the lack of police.

My collections of short stories, Working after the Collapse and Surviving the Apocalypse both take strife and societal collapse as their departure point, but I am much more interested in human resilience and the rebuilding of community than I am the crunch of bone as someone feasts on brains. I don’t think I’m alone in this. My two story collections have never inspired the same initial interest as my novel Not Quite Dark: A Post-Apocalyptic Adoption Story. I wonder if it’s because the focus of that book is more on the survivors and less on the survival.

For me, the use of murder and rape as cheap sensationalism, where it is entirely unnecessary to the plot, is as much a cardinal sin as placing a science fiction story in space that could be told in a barn. Terrible things happen, and in an apocalyptic world, they might happen more often, but is that the tale we want to tell? For my own part, I am more interested in the nuts and bolts of survival, as well as the interpersonal story of those struggling, than I am the mass killing that seems to be required in most apocalyptic scenarios. I think in dwelling on those more salacious details, we lose track of the best offerings of post-apocalyptic stories: the chance to reaffirm our faith in human resourcefulness and altruism even while the world crumbles.

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Proof of Alien Life, or at Least of Human Silliness

Posted on October 25, 2015 by Barry Pomeroy

There has been a lot of excitement lately, in scientific circles at least, about the star that experiences periodic and unexplainable dimming. Conjecture about the causes of the phenomena range as widely as the people who are doing the dreaming but none are quite as tantalizing as the thought that out in the universe, a seemingly limitless expanse that must harbour life beyond our own beautiful planet, we seem to have detected evidence of an alien civilization.

Although it may make Fermi rapidly spin in his grave, one of science fiction’s most beloved notions is that an advanced civilization is attempting to capture more of its sun’s energy by building either a Dyson sphere, or in this case of periodic dimming, Matryoshka layers of solar panels orbiting the sun and diverting its huge power to the civilization that built them. Only that could explain the periodic dimming of more than twenty percent of the sun’s output, say those more eager for this to be true.

Others, more cautiously, suggest that a huge field of comets, torn apart by the distant red dwarf in the binary system, would have the same effect. These suggestions are lost under the welter or youtube video commentary and blog comments, however, as the excitement of the day rules over reason, and those cautious voices which bade us to bank the fires of enthusiasm with the cold reality of evidence are increasingly talking to each other.

The great mass of humanity wants the aliens to exist. We want an ancient and wise society, viewing its solar system with a speculative eye, to make the space factories that such an enterprise would demand, and then use what otherwise would be wasted.

Others are not so eager for this to be true. A friend of mine told me that aliens do not exist. She knows this to be the case because God sent Jesus to save humanity, and if aliens existed, so goes the supposition, then there are multiple Jesuses, which there cannot by according to he sent his only son, or he had Jesus doing multiple house calls. That greatly diminishes our specialness and his sacrifice, however. Even that American psycho, Ken Ham, thinks if aliens exist they can’t be saved because the missed out on the doubled incest of Adam’s bloodline. Perhaps God didn’t bother with them and wants to torture them in a special corner of hell, presumably one that suits their atmosphere and temperament. If they are turned on by fire, for instance, then they might have to be endure a cold environment, while if they were from a planet covered with roiling clouds, and you still wanted them to suffer eternally, you might organize a corner of hell where the sun would always be blazing. You would never let the desert folk into that section, presumably, and while they wrung out their clouds in the cloud forests, God would be devising ways the rain forest people could desiccate for eternity.

You see my friend’s dilemma. I don’t think she thinks it would overly strain her God to deal with meting out rewards and especially punishments, but the idea that God is letting the aliens go without the possibility of salvation and torment is untenable to her, although she forgets that’s exactly what the Christian God did to the many millions of humans who were born before Jesus. I think she believes that if nothing else it trivializes our own special relationship with God when we find out that we are not the only special ones, just like a discussion about God in reference to the scientific possibility of an alien civilization trivializes the importance of this astronomical event.

Silliness aside, we finally have telescopes good enough to begin to see some detail of our universe. Many scientists say that we are on the cusp of discovering alien civilisations, although they caution us that light traveling some hundreds of light years might indicate the civilization we perceive as hearty might be long extinct in real time.

Whether we have seen proof finally that we are not alone in the universe, or merely that we are overly excited by the possibilities, we are finally looking outward. Giving the question of God’s concern with aliens the disinterest it so richly deserves, humanity is beginning to expand our senses enough to look into the universe around us, and with radio and light telescopes trained on KIC 8462852, may we are hoping to see something wondrous and strange rather than just relying on evil myths and dirty church stories.

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Generalizations about Politics

Posted on October 10, 2015 by Barry Pomeroy

Typically, we are told to avoid generalizations. I even caution my students against this most facile of errors. When we examine this directive closely, however, we can see that while we commonly generalize about other animals we are scolded when generalizing about ourselves. All monkeys bite, dogs are friendly, and flies are disgusting. When we say that all long-haired men are hippies, all bald people are skinheads, all suited people are jerks, and all angry drivers are young, we are suddenly scolded and reminded not to generalize.

I would like to generalize a bit. At first, a disclaimer. I have only paid the minimum of attention to the various political parties of Canada and the United States. I have work I am preoccupied with, and that and other concerns prevent me from taking on the amorphous and polarizing topic of left versus right and doing any more than commenting on partially understood trends. Therefore, you need to research my claims—although hopefully for you that means going beyond a quick google search—in order to ascertain what I have said is something you can agree with, or that it might be true. If you are a conservative voter, however, jump instead to the comment section and unleash some partially digested flatulence.

Like many, I find broad trends that indicate a person’s politics. The people who support conservative policies, which are largely aimed at enriching the wealthy at the expense of the poor, the environment, sound fiscal policy, the elderly, and reason, tend to be wealthy themselves. This makes sense, for they have the most to gain from a government which promotes corporate welfare even while it cuts money to social supports.

At first, this doesn’t seem to explain the many living in penury who crow about how the best government is one which tears money from their hands even as it gives it to the moneyed classes. In fact, they are merely the deluded, poorer cousin of the rich. They fawn over wealth and power because they hope that one day they also will become wealthy. “Some day my prince will come,” they sing to themselves when they are alone in their cramped apartment. They share the rich person’s faith and delight in money and deep suspicion of morality and responsibility, and so, hoping that some of the wealth will fall to them, they eagerly leap onto the tattered bandwagon of avarice.

What both of these groups share, and this is passing strange, although when examined perhaps not unexpected, is ignorance. They have a special type of ignorance, however. They are more than just rabid posters on websites whose vitriol combines naturally with tortured grammar; they also have an antipathy to information that runs counter to their views. Like a religious fanatic, they already know the truth, and any attempt to dissuade them using evidence at first confuses, and then angers them.

Overall, the conservative or republican position is clear enough. It is a position that puts money above all else. If the wars are money spinners for the arms dealers who have hijacked your economy since they sold to both sides in the second European war, then they recommend war. If the corporations will lose money from a war, they declaim it and push avidly for peace. Like the swaying crowd in Orwell’s 1984, their opinions are of the most basic sort, easily modified and endlessly plastic.

Traditionally, this has had a particular and perhaps contradictory result. Economically, a country run by the conservatives, who have spent their time in office gutting social programs and enriching their friends, is left bankrupt. Conservatives funnel money away from social programs, ostensibly to save money and pay off debts, but at the end of their tenure the economy is in ruins and people are even more desperate and poverty stricken although the income gap widens considerably and those at the top of the pointless wealth pyramid lick their fat chops in anticipation.

The more liberal or democratic voter is not exactly a polar opposite. Like the conservative, they have gained from a system that reduces others to penury, but unlike their rigid cousins, they hold other values to be important. The more leftist voter is concerned that the statistics and studies are correct: that oppressing the poor, neglecting children and addicts, mistreating the elderly, and abusing those who look or act different than ourselves, will somehow come back to bite us. They note that divisive societies have always crumbled from within and they point to widespread abuses in a system that they vote to revitalize.

The liberals are allowed to take over because the conservatives have bankrupted the system. The conservatives know that the country needs to get back on its feet, but they don’t want their friends blaming them for withdrawing the gravy train, so they let the country be rebuilt by the naïve liberals and then set it up for plunder once again even while they proclaim fiscal responsibility as their fundamental ethic.

The liberals theoretically manage their tenure according to values they have espoused, although the careful eye notes they spend much of their time catering to the swing voter. If unpopular policies have been put in place by their rivals, they promise to dismantle them, although no taxes are ever rescinded and no invasive and quasi-fascist laws are overturned. The liberals divert money from corporations to social programs, try to ensure the country functions in accordance to international law, outlaw abuses in the system and at least pay lip service to stamping out racism. While this is going on the conservatives cry foul. They claim the liberals are destroying the economy even as the liberals struggle under the huge debt conservative spending has always left them. Corporate sponsors and lobby groups begin to simultaneously pressure the incumbents and fund their opposition, hoping to undermine a system which might actually feed the people and revitalize the economy.

While their country teeters between penury and health, a decent standard of living and the fascist state, the dismayed voter looks in vain for a third option. Throttled by the need to protect the society from conservative plundering and liberal sycophancy, the voter finally votes for what had been the far left. The far left, smelling the possibility of brinkmanship like the middle classes can smell the poor, move their party line to the right, and then right again, forcing the other parties to crowd ahead of them just to distinguish themselves. Finally, three parties crowd the right of the curve, each focused on garnering as much of the vote as possible, even while behind the curtain they bow to their corporate masters.

Right and left, and far left, are loose ideologies as much as anything, and although we cannot blame the voter for confusing images of representation with the reality of real governance, we are a long way from José “Pepe” Mujica. Still, we stumble to the polls, scratch our x on a paper that is likely disregarded even as it falls into the box, and hope that this time our candidates will keep their promises. If the past is any indication, however, we have no intention of holding them to what they said in the heady days of campaigning any more than we have of dispensing with them entirely. Like many before us, we will buy the snake oil with the vain hope that this time it will be different, even while tar sands executives rub their sticky hands on the endless cycle of our future. We still never ask whether any of these politicians are truly necessary for the running of a country they show so little interest in running.

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My Consistency Meter

Posted on September 20, 2015 by Barry Pomeroy

As long as I can remember, I have always been concerned about consistency. Perhaps it had to do with the mixed messages of my childhood, as tossed from one place to another I had endearments muttered to me that were out of keeping with the reality of my existence. In any event, that blessing or curse has stood by me through the years, frustrating my students who try to plagiarize on their papers and confounding those who, even though they know of my particular foible, still wish for me to relish the cotton candy ball they have spun from lies.

When describing my talent, or disability to others I compare it to a Rolodex, those now-archaic address books which were meant to collect business cards and numbers and make them easy to access. In my case, that’s my memory. When anyone tells me something, quite involuntarily, my minds sifts through the thousand other similar statements they’ve made looking for consistency. I don’t do this to be a jerk. It happens on an instinctual level. Obviously, this would have been a useful survival skill to an insecure child, but for some reason—and perhaps that requires another essay—it still persists. I can hear the fluttering of the cards as the memory is sought after and then the halt of the wheel when it is found. I don’t search for accuracy, or similarity of statement, I search, rather involuntarily, for contradiction.

Unfortunately, I occasionally find what I am looking for. I understand that most of what we say to others is confounded by our own misremembering of the incident, and some of it is deliberately if unconsciously massaged to either promote our view of ourselves or to hide something from another that it would be meaningless to show, but we also knowingly and consciously lie. We know from witness studies that our interpretation of events is suspect, and we know enough to give others the benefit of the doubt when their oft-told tale begins to morph before us. We are also aware that others possess the same fragile ego as ourselves and therefore feel a need to change details in order to appear as something that they—and for them this is tragic—are not.

For instance, my friend liked to tell the story of how he lost his driver’s licence. He had accumulated so many unpaid parking tickets that they finally took away his licence and he received a registered letter to that effect. He signed for the letter using a fake name, cleverly enough, and at the time told me what the letter said. Later, when he was pulled over by local police and fined for driving without a licence, he fought the ticket in court by claiming that he never received the letter. I think we can understand why he would lie about that in court. He was merely saving himself from a fine. It is much more difficult to understand the lying when he would subsequently, and frequently, tell the story, however. For in his need to appear completely and utterly in the right, he would change what happened. His new version made him unaware that he had ever received the letter and therefore was not at fault when the local cop became excited about his licenceless driving, but he strangely kept the use of a fake name when signing for the letter. He wanted the genius of his false signing to be attributed to him, but he was so obsessed with appearing like a person who wouldn’t break the law that he transformed the story of civil disobedience into one that had no internal consistency. Since I’d been present for the event, and even drove him to the courthouse in case they took away his license and he couldn’t drive home, I noticed when he changed the story. But even without inside information, the story is obviously inconsistent. He is asking his listeners to believe that he signed a false name on the letter, thus retaining his cleverness at outwitting the system, but didn’t read it. In the after dinner atmosphere of storytelling, amongst his friends who are quite willing to hero-work their own stories, this rarely becomes a problem, but for anyone who is concerned about trust in relationships, this glaring inconsistency stands out.

A lie to a stranger has, of course, less implications for our non-relationship with them. We will likely never see them again and the burden of our falsehood is on us, for each one of those lies erodes slightly what we are, even to ourselves. If I pretend to limp as I get on the bus in order to secure reserved seating, for instance, the many able-bodied people around me are neither discomforted nor aware of my duplicity. When someone steps aboard the bus who requires the reserve seating more than my assumed injury, I can merely limp aside and to the accolades of the crowd take my ill-gotten position as the hero who gave up his deserved seat. This would take a toll on me, of course, for those presentations of self sink deep into the person and become who we are. For instance, even when I leave the bus, limping away to catch the light, I am aware of what I have done, and that I have rather pointlessly lied about who I am in order to gain an undeserved benefit. I’m sure my friend who lied about his registered letter knew what he was doing and although had made the calculation that the crowd’s attention was worth it, he felt slightly worse about himself. I think we are right in believing that only a true psychopath would feel nothing about constantly lying to make themselves appear as something they are not.

We may compare this to other types of lies. Some people lie in order that their sacrifice not be known and make the recipient of their generosity feel uncomfortable. We may think of those who lie about not having a disability so that they don’t clutter the reserved seating with what they think of as a minor issue. We recognise these types of lies as surrounding us all the time. We can easily imagine the mother who says she’s not hungry so that the child may eat more, the friend who takes the floor so that you may sleep better, and the parent who praises their child’s stick-figure drawings.

Other lies, such as when a child pretends to live at another address in order avoid bullies at school or the prying of the creepy church lady, are also different in kind. We understand the child’s need to protect themselves and immediately excuse the falsehood. When I was hitchhiking as a young teenager I often lied about my name, employing a consistent pseudonym in order to protect myself, although I was unsure of how that exact technique would work.

The lies of those we love, and say they love us, are much more difficult to deal with. We find it impossible to excuse anything more profound than the patently false answer to “Does this dress make me look fat?” or “What do you think others really think of me?” We hold those we love to a higher standard but that is not because we think they are less liable to lie, but rather because our fragile ego is in their unsteady hands. We feel so much more riding on their lie, as if their falsehood could turn our world upside down and shake it so hard that we’d come tumbling out, tears streaming and our world view in shambles.

When someone we love lies to us, it profoundly crumbles the foundation of the relationship. We suddenly question everything they might have said, sorting through their statements like a child looking for rings by sifting the sand on the beach, and by times we find instead the odd turd left by a dog and hastily covered by the person on the other end of the leash.

My consistency Rolodex is particularly pernicious when it comes to my close relationships, and since trust has historically been so important to me, I tend to observe my friendships through that thick, slightly cloudy, fire-resistant glass. Strangely, when someone I care about tells me something I often accept it at face value, since one of the conditions of my relationships is trust. But, when their reporting of the facts becomes fickle, or another part of the Rolodex calls for my attention because they have made a statement that contradicts the facts on file, my ancient skills come into play. I spin rapidly through the files, and some more astute part of my unconscious selects the appropriate utterance so that it may be held up to conscious scrutiny.

Once my conscious mind has pondered both statements, my first reaction is to gather information. Often this erupts as pointed questions about the past. The person who has lied—for people don’t tend to be that great at keeping track of their falsehoods—ponders what exactly I am asking. Once I have the information, I often consult the perpetrator. I believe that everyone should have a chance to defend themselves and it may be that I have grabbed the wrong end of the stick. If my end still remains sticky with deceit after talking to them, then I have learned something about the one I love. I know all people manipulate the easily malleable truth occasionally, but as we know, certain verities should not be tinkered with. Once that line is crossed, it is much more difficult to maintain a relationship.

I know that this all sounds like vague-booking, but for the purposes of this exercise I am more interested in the mental process rather than the particular incident that inspired the finger twitching over the keyboard. I don’t think I’m alone. Most people consider what they are told in the same way, and try to be as honest as a fallible human might in most situations. But, as we find in the Rolodex when someone bends the truth beyond its natural flexibility, they have usually done it before and the walls of their house are so twisted that they no longer meet at the corners. Such a house can become unliveable, and like many, I have always been sensitive to drafts.

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My Various Projects

Posted on September 14, 2015 by Barry Pomeroy

The various projects I have done in the past fall into two broad categories. Some of them were individual exercises that depended on my endurance, intelligence, and the natural strictures of materials and the physical world. Others, and in some ways these were more difficult, relied on the opinions of others just as much as my own labour and wit. Now that I am embarking on another project of the second type, I have started to reflect on how much power others have over our lives.

Many of my early projects were limited by the materials I had available, as well as my own penury. I had lots of time, and seemingly enough inventiveness, that carving from stone, building a blast furnace for my metallurgical experiments, construction of the cabins of my youth, and travel in my region were possible. I pulled rocks from the creek before I learned that many thrown away sports trophies have marble bases, and when I visited the west coast I found marble in the mountain streams. Therefore, I could carve to my heart’s content with none to gainsay me. After I’d seen what fire could do to lead, and then aluminum and brass, I built a few structures that partially melted the metals I could find readily available. I was in a rural area so no one prevented me from burning wood and hydrocarbons. In fact, most of the time no one was even aware of what I was doing.

The cabins I built as a child were like the raft and artificial island I made in local pond. I could locate castoff wood and straighten a few nails to make nearly any structure I wished. I was only limited by my own lack of knowledge, such as the cabin I built when I was eight or so that had no roof because I didn’t know how to build one. Likewise, I tried to hollow a rotten white spruce that had dropped in a storm and made good progress towards the outrigger canoe I wanted, although I didn’t know that south sea islanders sit on top of their canoes and put their feet inside. I abandoned my canoe because it wasn’t wide enough for me to sit inside like the canoes I was used to. I really wanted a canoe at that time, but couldn’t even foresee a time when I would be able to afford one. Later cabins were better formed, and one of them, my sister’s favourite, was the two story fence rail structure I built when I was eleven. Local kids, and strangely, even some adults broke into it and took some of my belongings, but I’d proved the building of it was possible.

When I wanted to travel, the only vehicle I could afford was at first a bicycle and then a motorcycle. I couldn’t go very far at first, but many summers I would bicycle all night and only return at dawn. When I had a motorcycle I traveled as far as Ottawa before the bike threw the timing chain and I couldn’t afford to fix it.

As these examples indicate, the main limitations on my projects were financial and material. As well, at this time I was dependent on others for a place to live, and my stability was directly connected to the idle whims of others. Oddly, however, when I began to assume more control over my own life, such as when I went to university, my projects started to be subject to the opinions of others.

Whether I received a degree was partially dependent on my own hard work, as well as overcoming my lack of socialization, but the main ingredient was the opinion of my professors. I needed to be found worthy by the professors who act as gatekeepers in most universities. One professor told me I didn’t belong in university, that I wasn’t university material, and others, employing the same tactic as teachers and social workers, tried to assure me of my ill fit. Regardless of their statements, for me, university was also an opportunity to reinvent myself, and I set about that willingly. I worked reasonably hard at my classes, much harder at my socialization, and soon similar minded professors knew I didn’t belong but found it much harder to identify my exact problems.

During my Masters that disconnect between their expectations and my abilities was profound, but when I went west for my PhD I was able to make some headway on my merit. These were both projects which meant I was subject to the opinions of others, however, and couldn’t just force my way through by dint of hard work. I had to keep the committee happy with me even more than I had to perform well on my courses and the dissertation. My future hung on the unsteady thread of the regard of others, and that is never a comfortable position for anyone.

After a few degrees, I turned my mind to writing and for a long time that just meant that part of my bookshelf was written by me. Few people knew or cared that I wrote anything, although many of my friends were supportive. That solitary enterprise was dependent on an old borrowed typewriter, then a borrowed computer, then a cheap laptop, until I could write as much as I wished and no one could prevent me. I’d found the stone and wood of my next project, and the only limitation was my need to make a living and conduct a social life.

When I decided to build a wooden sailing boat, I was limited financially, as always, intellectually, since I had never even sailed let alone built a boat, and when the time came to build, I was limited by the four walls of my sister’s two bay garage. I made up for my deficiencies by reading fifty boatbuilding manuals, saved money so I could build a cheap boat if I cut some corners, and trucked five hundred dollars’ worth of lumber from a local mill. I learned as I went, and the project was delightfully free of the input of others. It was only limited by my own weaknesses and the physical constraints of the world. I built in the garage, and my eager nephews began to stop by on the way home from school to see the progress of the day. I ignored the derision of my sister’s neighbours who knew little enough but felt qualified to tell me I would fail, and soon I had a boat whose sails bellied with the winds of the Strait of Georgia.

On the water other boat people were unanimously positive, and I was merely limited by what the wind and sea could throw at me. I survived unintentional groundings, high tides, rip currents and near misses from other boats. I only came close to problems with others when the coast guard showed too much interest in me and when I told the Gibson’s Landing harbour master he should use please when asking someone for a favour. I could avoid those people at sea however, and soon I built a dingy and went further and further away from others.

When I bought my land and spent my summers building a cabin out of largely used building materials rescued from dumpsters I was again cast on my own resources. I required little from society, and if anyone caused me heartache I merely drove into the woods. The cabin itself was merely the product of hard work, and since I was limited by access to materials, I designed it around what I could scavenge. No one came to tell me I was wrong, that the boat would never float, that people like me couldn’t do graduate degrees, and although a few told me that my cabin would not be a comfortable place to live, most were positive about what I was working on.

With my latest project I am more subject to the whims and opinions of others than ever. As if I were a foster kid again, standing at the unwelcoming door of a new home, I can merely try for an acceptance I am unlikely to receive. I wish for the simpler days when my hard work, or in the case of the boat and the cabin, extremely hard labour, would pay off with a result. Instead, I am facing a committee like when I worked on my PhD, and I’m subject to the goodwill of others. Like a refugee at Canada’s borders, I can only look earnest, answer politely and subserviently, and hope the doors might open enough that I might have permission to begin my last big project.

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Preparing to Leave

Posted on August 24, 2015 by Barry Pomeroy

Late this week I make my last round trip into town. Then, I have to prep the land for the winter. It is a relatively easy task now, since I’ve set up shutters for the windows and a framework for the solar panels. There are still little tasks to do, but soon I’ll be far away. No visitors at all this year. I think that’s the first time that’s happened.

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