The Lizard Thing, part 2

in which we meet the Whispers

Question 7

In an old piece here, I said that history is fractal.

No matter how much we zoom in or zoom out, it remains complex.

That’s very much the vibe of a Booker-winning text by Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan. I say text because it’s not a novel, more an odd mix of memoir and fiction, reminding me of Kurt Vonnegut in a way. Flanagan ends multiple chapters with the phrase, “That’s life,” which echoes Slaughterhouse Five’s "So it goes.”

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my family’s financial entanglements from a faux Norse point of view. In that metaphor my dad would be a dragon,¹ curled around a golden hoard. I like Flanagan’s simile a lot better.

“Money,” my father would say, “is like shit. Pile it up and it stinks. Spread it around and you can grow things.”

I am a permaculturist², after all, not a Viking.

Flanagan goes on to talk about the aboriginally informed convict-descended Creole culture he grew up in on the island of Tasmania, contrasting it with the elite settler culture of younger sons of the English landholders, who were all about the money they could extract from ‘their’ land, ‘their’ sheep, and ‘their’ convict slave labor.

My parents were frugal not simply because they had to be careful, but because they saw little reason for making life about money. The notion of any relationship being what is now termed transactional, the idea of monetising aspects of your very life, would have seemed to them like some sort of emotional sickness or mental illness.

My parents were also frugal, and Christian, and therefore against wealth in theory but very devoted to accumulating it in actual practice, as a hedge against the kind of poverty they experienced as children of the Depression in rural Kentucky, most of which did not have electricity until well after World War II. As a child in the 1970s I often unfairly considered myself a slave to cows and tobacco and greed and anxiety.

The other narrative thread running through Flanagan’s book follows HG Wells, who conceived the atomic bomb in a mediocre novel called The World Set Free, which inspired any number of the Manhattan Project scientists, but especially Leo Szilard³, the Hungarian-born physicist who first came up with the idea of a nuclear chain reaction, and whose fears of a German bomb program convinced FDR to invest massive amounts of American time and treasure in beating them to it.

Fiction may be only fancy yet reality is often no more than the enthusiastic answer we give to our dreams and nightmares.

Which I why I agree with Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek fame and more recently the solarpunk crowd that we need positive futures to balance out the fearmongering.

• What Is Solarpunk? A Guide to the Environmental Art Movement

• Solarpunk Is Not About Pretty Aesthetics. It’s About the End of Capitalism

Pyrite is not that, at least not yet. Pyrite is me making dumb jokes and playing with ideas.

“Hey, my ‘saucer people’ were friendly!  I tried to steer them away from nuclear weapons!  Universal brotherhood!  Free love with aliens, the whole deal!”

Enjoy.

The Lizard Thing, part 2

Oh, Gary, my head, I thought, as I stumbled out of the alchemist’s the next afternoon with a packet of pain-relief powders.  Don’t ever drink with that hummingbird ever again.  A hummingbird with needle-sharp teeth.  She had bitten me good-bye and scurried up the side of a building, then leaped away to glide off into the sunrise on her four little wings, as fresh as the morning dew. 

Quetzal looks much cooler than this, with her feathers iridescent like a peacock’s, but you get the gist. Microraptor, by Conty. Wikimedia Commons.

I gingerly touched the scab she had left on the right side of my neck.  Hickies are supposed to be bruises.

“Long night?” someone breathed into that ear.

“Gaaah!” I shrieked, and leaped about four feet to the left, banging my shoulder into a wall.

“Sssshhhhhh,” went the voice, barely audible.  “Calm down, party boy.”  It was one of the invisible guards of Chimeria.  If you think someone shouting and waving a gun at you is scary (which it is, no argument), try facing off against someone you can’t even locate.  “You’ll reopen your wounds.”

Officially, they’re the Watch, or Witnesses, but no one calls them that. “What do you want, Whisper?”⁴