Roe, Row, Rho

I suppose we all have a number of books on a shelf somewhere (or even packed, hidden away, in boxes in attics) that were bought or gifted and kept with the intention that one day they would be read. Perhaps some of these are books that did not quite fit the category of un-put-downable. I am certainly one of those who is more than capable of setting everything on hold to read to the back page without stopping. In extreme situations I have been known to unplug the phone. I am not an especially fast reader; I like to savour a book, fiction especially, and am prone to breaking off actual reading for short daydreamy asides the better to adsorb a particularly chewy philosophical nugget. Unpacking, therefore, has uncovered some interesting items: Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead for example.

I bought both Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged at the same time from Amazon a few years ago after coming into contact with someone who repeatedly made reference to objectivism and to his own adherence to the same philosophy. I am not and never have been much of a philosopher ... at least not in the academic sense. My education lamentably was all in science subjects, as if the study of human thought and society is not the grandfather of all science! Sheesh. Anyway I got Rand's two major works and for no particular reason I opened first Atlas Shrugged and began reading that. Sadly it proved what I suspected: that an objectivist hero might prove a little too impervious to the warmth of a Constant Reader's earnest desire to engender some affection. Maybe that was the point ...? In any event I put the book down and as days rolled into weeks it gathered dust, first on the bedside table, then on the stand beside the bathtub — because I used to adore to read in the bath — until eventually I gathered it up with a load of other 'stuff' that was doing nothing for the feng shui of my various domestic tantiens and lost it in the back of some dark cupboard.

I lost the plot, so to speak, because I couldn't find a single protagonist in there with whom I could identify other than in some vaguely risible sense: for example by likening the characters to the playing pieces in a game of Monopoly ™ and thereby finding they have as much personality as the little alloy shoes and hats and cars. It was sad to use the modern vernacular with a punnish nod to the adjective's principle definition.

I refound The Fountainhead a few weeks ago (I still haven't found Atlas, maybe he shrugged too hard and lost his ball ...) and after it had been moved from here to there and back again, gaining an unsightly coffee mug ring in the process, I finally deigned to open it last week and to commence reading. I cannot say that I find it hard to set down. It is too challenging for me to maintain a long sessions with my eyes in focus and brain in gear. For one thing the woman's literary style is a little too 'artsy' for my simple taste. And, although the protagonist is rather obvious in his selfish devotion to his ambition, at least I can empathaise with his idealistic opposition to the establishment that is holding him back.

None of which explains why I passed much of the last seven or days in a fugue of amorphously colourless despondency. The foregoing perhaps might go some way to explaining that I am a somewhat lazy reader. I read firstly to be entertained and only secondarily do I expect to be informed. Most times I suspect the information, but entertainment is perfectly real, absolutely tangible. If you fall asleep before the fat lady starts to warble then you should get a refund!

It is perhaps no surprise then that my favorite literary entertainments come from the giants of science-fiction with side-orders of other stuffs like Steinbeck, King and P.D. James. Such stuff is light and easily digestible reading. Its only purpose is to be highly entertaining and only infrequently does it disappoint by running against the grain of its own genre-specific raison d'être. However sci-fi is more unusual in that it much more often carries a weightier philosophical conundrum as a plot-sustaining strut. One of my long term fascinations in this field is that of the idea of non human intelligence.

I have no belief whatsoever that humans have ever been in contact with extra-terrestrial aliens and little faith we ever will. The idea is too silly even if the notion of extra-terrestrial life isn't. Ask any biologist how many species of plants and animals in their locality are threatened by 'alien' species imported by humans from another continent and the answer will be too many! How much worse would the situation be if the Things from Alpha Cenaturi decided to pop over and say hello? Even if they didn't care about what might happen to our planet they wouldn't want to muck up their own unique ecology with a load of accidental imports. Or maybe I just want to believe that aliens would be more ecologically advanced. Wells made the first effort to expound this idea in War of The Worlds but he overlooked the possility of importation of infection. Whatever. As far as non-human intelligence is concerned it is much more likely that we will make it ourselves.

Over the years of the twentieth century sci-fi struggled, more or less in vain, to keep pace with science. Various writers made varying yarns out of in vitro fertilisation and gestation and some even debated the legitamacy of the humanity of such people. Imagine!

A good argument can always be had on a religious forum by asking the question: "could a robot have a soul?" These questions have been asked over and over and are not even the perquisite of sci-fi. I'm literary hack but I bet that even the Pinocchio story is not even the first example of this time-worn argument with no definitve answer.

Meanwhile it happened that I was channel-hopping on my TV a week or so ago looking for something light and I chanced on an episode of Star Trek Voyager, a programme I normally shun because that franchise lost its freshness long before Rodenberry's heirs noticed. There wasn't much else on at the time so I stuck with it. By coincidence the plot referred to a previous incident in a prior episode that I had also seen and remembered (what are the odds of that? Out of a hundred or hundreds of episodes I doubt I have seen more than 5 or 6 all the way through.) They had been to a place where some of the crew had been duplicated by a weird quicksilver substance and now they realised that they, and the whole ship, were all duplicates and that they were therefore not the real versions of themselves. As if that wasn't bad enough, they were also decaying back into a silvery goop so they decided to race back to their home planet. Unfortunately they blew up before they got there, their final attempt to leave a record of their existence failed in the last moment and those still alive just before the end died with the shatteringly distressing knowledge that everything they knew about could never even know they had ever existed.

It's just a 15 minute, coffee time fiction in the middle of your weekly magazine. Nothing to lose sleep over and yet it does actually pose the same great question. If I think then I must be. Period. If we take that indefinable element that distinguishes a live human being from a beetle, or a cat, or a computer and call it a soul for want of a better and more meaningful word (mainly because ego is too easily misunderstood and too anthropomorphisable: Little Mad has more ego than an army of Samurai!) then it is not just possible, but undeniable, to argue that souls must be capable of spontaneous self generation. I stipulate that because to ascribe the allocation of souls to God is merely to pass the blame or else just to fudge the question.

A beginning a middle and and ending is what I desire. You cannot have a chicken without an egg; nor the egg without the chicken. Rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty are the benchmarks of sanity in a universe so cock-a-mamie that if I'd had it designed to order I would want my money back. So I'll just carry on waiting for armageddon to come in my pleasant little dream world.