Ken's Blog

Josh strode over to the little clock hanging on the wall. “Doesn’t look like much, does it?” he said. “But I’m pretty sure it’s been set to midnight for a long time now.” With a decisive gesture, he reached out to move the minute hand.

“Well?” Jenny said.

“Darned thing’s stuck,” he answered. He glanced over at Mr. Symarian, who merely shrugged. It was clear the teacher was being very careful not to interfere.

“I wonder,” Jenny said. “Maybe it’s just stuck for you.”

“I don’t get it,” Josh said.

“Well, after all, she’s my grandmother, not yours.” Jenny walked over to the clock and gave the second hand a little nudge with one finger. It moved easily.

“Well, I’ll be darned,” Josh said. “You totally called it.”

“Well you know,” Jenny said, feeling quite pleased with herself, “everybody does something. You’re the path finder, and I, it seems, am the path changer.”

“Totally,” Josh said enthusiastically. “I tag ’em and you bag ’em.”

“Yep,” Jenny said, “you see ’em and I tree ’em.”

“I pick ’em and you sic ’em.”

Jenny laughed. “You spot ’em then I got ’em.”

“I name them and you tame them.”

“You smell ’em and I fell ’em.”

“I bring ’em and you sting ’em…”

“Stop! I beg you, for God’s sake, please stop!!”

Josh and Jenny both turned to look at the source of the interruption. “Why Mr. Symarian, you’re shouting,” Jenny said. “Are you ok?”

“Does it look like I’m bloody ok? If you keep this up any longer my head will explode.”

“Sorry,” Jenny said, “we were just, you know, having fun.” Then she had a worrisome thought. “You don’t mean that, um, literally, do you?”

“No Jenny, not literally. I was employing a metaphor.” The teacher managed to get hold of himself. “Well, at least one thing is quite obvious.”

“What’s that,” Josh asked.

Mr. Symarian looked from Josh to Jenny and then back again. “You two are perfect for each other.”

The other day Heather issued the following challenge:

“Write a story using your [It’s in the Blood] theory around this line: `I miss you. Why do you have to be such a nightmare?'”

Herewith is my humble attempt to rise to the occasion.

***

“I miss you. Why do you have to be such a nightmare?”

“Maybe because I’m hungry. You’re the one munching on tasty treats.”

“I’m sorry,” she laughed, “were you talking? Because I’m eating here.”

“Look, I’m sorry about the work thing, but I’m scheduled to get there in a few days. It’s the best I could do. Until then, guess you’re having all the fun.”

OK lover,” Heather put her food down. “The Robinsons can wait. They were ok I suppose, but now they’re just meat.”

His eyes crinkled on the screen as he laughed, in that way that always made her heart melt. “The little ones,” he said, “they’re the crunchiest. You just can’t fake that.”

“I like when we talk about food,” she said, “when we’re apart. It helps — gets us in touch with our animal nature.”

“If we were in the same room,” he smiled, “think of how many more ways we’d have of getting in touch with our animal nature.”

“Yum,” she said, “Something to look forward to. Did you ever wonder,” she asked, licking her fingers, “whether there’s a connection? I mean, you and I have this thing together. You know I love you, but also, it’s, well, it’s hot — I know it’s hot for you too. Do you think that’s why we like the same sort of people?”

“Well,” he said, giving it some thought, “I don’t think we like exactly the same sort of people. Same families, yes, but you like the older ones. I’ve noticed you pick out the parents, and when you’re done there’s nothing left but bone and gristle. So we don’t really have the same tastes.”

Heather idly picked up a thigh bone and started pulling at it with her fingers. “OK, maybe I’m just a romantic. For me it’s about family. You know how important family is to me. I know some couples, they don’t have any tastes in common. Like, she’ll want to eat Italian, and after the hunt he’ll end up munching on some Brits. You and me, we’re not like that.”

“We’re only human,” he smiled.

“You say that like it’s true.” She looked at her hand closely, flexing the fingers. “The science is good, I’ll give you that. The natives can’t tell the difference, which I guess is good. If they figured out someone was picking off their young for snack food, this world wouldn’t be such a popular vacation spot.”

“That’s why we choose these primitive worlds,” he said. “Makes it easier to win their trust.”

“That’s the name of the game, baby,” she said, picking a piece of gristle delicately out of her teeth. “Gotta be nice to the food. I mean, that was the whole point of the Ethical Vacation Act, right? Only eat people who invite you over. Keeps the hunt fair.”

“I love when you talk ethics,” he smiled. “Gotta go though, this call’s costing us a fortune. See you in a few days.”

“Hurry, I miss you,” she said, “Remember, next Thursday we’re having the Goldfarbs for dinner.”

“OK, let’s take inventory,” Josh said. “There are some things we know for sure, or at least for pretty sure. We know the riddle exists, and we know — from that storybook — that the solution probably has something to do with turning the darkness outside into light.”

“Yes,” Jenny added, “and we’re also pretty sure that we’ll find the clue we need somewhere here in this room.”

“Right.” Josh was looking around the room carefully. “It’s a pretty boring room, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Jenny said. “But Mr. Symarian said — before he stopped talking — that we were staring the answer right in the face.”

“Wait, say that again.” Josh said.

“I just said that he told us we were staring the answer in the face.” Jenny frowned. “I know, it seemed weird to me too. Rooms don’t have faces, only people have faces. And there are no pictures here.”

“People,” said Josh with a smile, “are not the only things with faces, are they?”

Jenny looked at him, feeling a bit lost. Then all at once she got it.

They both shouted the answer at the same time. “The clock!”

There are some decisions that seem obvious once they occur to you.

And rarely has there been such an obvious way for me to be patriotic and support my country.

I am going to make a substantial financial contribution to the building of the new Community Center at Park51 in downtown Manhattan.

“Are we on the right track, Mr. Symarian?” Josh asked.

“I’m sorry,” said the teacher. “But I really cannot comment. I’m afraid that any advice from me at this point would simply negate your fine efforts.”

“Well,” Josh replied with a grin, “at least now we know that our efforts are fine.”

“Perhaps I have said too much already.” Mr. Symarian said. “These things must be handled delicately, or you hurt the spell.”

“Margaret Hamilton!” Jenny said.

“Pardon me?” the teacher said, “Why did you just say ‘Margaret Hamilton’?”

“She played the Wicked Witch of the West in ‘The Wizard of Oz’. You were quoting her.” Jenny explained. “You mean to tell me, after all your talk about the ‘classics’, that you don’t know who Margaret Hamilton was?”

“I am afraid my knowledge of Hamiltons runs more to Edith than to Margaret.”

“I would’ve bet ten bucks you were going to say Alexander,” Josh said.

“Sorry to disappoint,” the teacher sniffed. “In any case, I cannot see how this is relevant to our current situation. I believe that it would be best for me to remain silent until you have solved the riddle.”

“He didn’t get that one either,” Jenny said to Josh, grinning. “Maybe we really are better off doing this on our own.”

When you look past the hearts and flowers, the sappy songs and silly greeting cards, dating is actually a deadly serious business. It’s the process of Darwinian selection itself at work — the one sphere of our lives in which we are most clearly operating not merely for the sake of our own individual now, but as an agent of future generations yet unborn.

The reason a novel by Jane Austen can be so gripping is that readers understand that the game afoot is far more serious than it appears. Behind the witty drawing room banter and well wrought bon mots lies a fight to the death — not necessarily of the self, but certainly of the bloodline.

When we are in the grip of romantic passion we are operating partway outside of the sphere of rational thought, for we are treading into the land of the uncontrollable id. Perhaps that is why there is such euphemism around romance and sexual passion. Society instinctively understands that it is not dealing with anything as malleable as individual difference, consumer preference, or interest groups, but rather with the unforgiving, inexorable, and often savage drive of DNA to survive. And so we build innocuous walls around the process — romantic comedies, dinners by candlelight, midnight walks along the beach.

But it is no accident that the genre of teenage romance has become entangled with the genre of bloodthirsty vampires who hunt and kill and feast by night. Young people everywhere flock to these tales because they understand the subtext.

You could say it’s in the blood.

“The problem,” Jenny said, “is that the room is empty. Well, almost empty anyway. It’s just got the stuff every room has.”

“Yes, there’s a bed,” Josh said, “and of course the door, and a window and a clock over there on the wall.” He went over to the window. “Strange though, you can’t see anything when you look outside. It’s all just black.”

Jenny came over and stood next to him. “Yes, like it’s always night.”

“What did you say?” Josh said.

“It’s a story my mom used to read me out of an old story book, when I was little. About a town where it was always night. I’d forgotten all about it until I saw this weird window. The book was written all in rhyme. I only remember one part clearly:

In the town of endless night, the darkness ran so deep
That even all the dogs and cats and clocks fell fast asleep
Everywhere was darkness, and every house the same
Sleeping people dreaming of a dawn that never came

“That’s so sad,” Josh said. “I’ll bet your grandmother read that same book to your mother when she was little — I think we can use that.”

“Yes,” Jenny nodded, “I think I was supposed to remember that.”

“But that still doesn’t tell us what we’re supposed to do.”

“Oh I think it does,” Jenny said, “I think we need to make the dawn happen.”

I was having a conversation with my mom the other day about history. We realized that we had similar views on a peculiar property of historical writing: That if you pick up a history book that was written, say, fifty years ago, it literally may not be possible for you to truly understand what you are reading. And as you go further back in time, history books become ever more insidiously incomprehensible.

For example, at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 it was determined that a slave in the United States should be counted as three-fifths of a citizen. To modern eyes, counting a slave at all might seem like a precursor to emancipation. But in fact it was something else entirely: The slave-holding states pushed this formula so they could have greater representatives in congress. Slaves were property, and therefore a measure of each state’s acknowledged contribution to the nation’s wealth.

A historian writing two centuries ago would see this issue merely as one of economics, so a history book from, say, 1800 would reflect that world view. Whereas a historian writing now would have a hard time working entirely from the mindset of “slaves are only property, not people”. History is not the only thing that changes — historians change along with it.

This kind of thing happens in all spheres of society. For example, “Babes in Arms” was a popular Hollywood film (based on a 1937 state musical) that saw itself as completely inoffensive when it was released in 1939. This teenage Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland singing and dancing romp was that era’s equivalent to, say, today’s “High School Musical. Yet if you look at this trailer, and skip forward to 2:24, you see a series of sequences that would shock the pants off of modern audiences, and might get the movie banned outright in various states.

Yet it is clear that the folks making this movie had no intention of offending anyone. It is history itself that has changed, so much so that the way people in 1939 saw themselves and their own era is something we can now only imagine, not directly experience. If you were to pick up a book about the history of cinema written in 1940, the author probably wouldn’t even mention “Babes in Arms” other than to note that Mickey Rooney, only 19 when the film was released, was the most popular movie star of the day.

One could posit a field of study about the way that history itself changes. I’m not sure what to call such a post-modern science of the ever changing mindset of historians, a sort of history of history. Perhaps it could simply be called History².

“OK, I get it, we need to figure out what the riddle is before we can solve it.” Jenny said. “But how do we figure out that the riddle is?”

“Mr. Symarian, can you help us out here?” Josh said.

“I’m terribly sorry,” the teacher said, “but I cannot help you with this part of your journey.”

“No disrespect Mr. Symarian, but that’s kind of lame,” Jenny said. “I mean, we came all this way.”

“Yeah,” Josh added. “To get this far I had to find us a path through the freakin’ fourth dimension. And now you won’t even help with a stupid riddle?”

“It is not that I will not, but that I cannot. The riddle is a pathway. Your grandmother Amelia was young when she created it, and as the creation of a young mind, the pathway can be traversed only by young minds. Were I to attempt to provide any assistance, the way forward would disappear forever.

“Well ok then,” Josh said, taking a deep breath. “Jenny, I think we need to look around the room for clues.”

Last week at a conference I was listening to an intense diatribe by an artist who was positing that the availability of instant on-demand interactive media — the web, Google, Twitter, Wikipedia, and all that — would be the death knell for good old fashioned book reading.

During the question and answer session that followed, a man in the audience started out a rather long question with the quote: “Language is an old-growth forest of the mind.” I was struck by the wit of this quote, so while he was formulating his question I typed that phrase into Google and found out that it was by the anthropologist Wade Davis (whom I had never heard of). That led me to the Wikipedia page about Wade Davis, from which I learned that Davis had written an influential and controversial book in 1985 called “The Serpent and the Rainbow”. I then went to Amazon.com and put the book in my shopping cart. By the time the guy had finished his question, I was already queued up to read this book.

I did all this reflexively, without pausing to think about the process, but afterward it occurred to me that my experience was a direct refutation of the central point of the talk. I don’t read less because of these internet-enabled connections. I read more. There is an intriguing interaction between my reading time — something I do in solitude when at leisure — and my real-time acquisition of knowledge about new topics to explore, something that would not have been possible before the age of the internet.

The title of this post is from another quote by Wade Davis, one I find particularly inspiring and oddly relevant: “The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you; they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.”