.
Did I mention that Heliopoli was a circular city?
Did I mention that it is ringed and trisected by the monorail?
Did I mention that the pedways create a symbol that can only be seen from above?
Yes — yes, I did.
Good.
Just wanted to make sure.
“These founders were not perfect people; they were not gods. They were human beings. But we mustn’t just see them as human beings because they were imperfect; they were also human beings because they could achieve great things. They could have dreams of what they hoped to achieve.”
– David McCullough, in a documentary included in the DVD release of HBO’s John Adams
Photo © ACF
It is rumored that the excavation of the city of Heliopoli will cease operations on Oct. 4, 2009, exactly two years after its start. Though I can’t confirm this, it is true that nearly all the major structures have been unearthed and described, excepting the Lightworks, the Slideway Shopping Mall and the Museum of Futoria. There are plenty of details to explore, however, so it is hard to say whether this record will merely change slightly at that time, or become its own archeological artifact (and we have wandered from our course occasionally anyway). Certainly there is a great amount of cataloging to be done given the amount of mood rings, Uncandles, Fidgets, fiber-optic lamps, and bean-bag chairs that have been found, not to mention the necessity to pay tribute to the color lime green.
At any rate, more major structures might be uncovered as the excavators redouble their efforts, or merely stumble upon them. Take the Balloon Ferry, for instance.
As mentioned before, Heliopoli is a circular city that never lacked in transportation. It is ringed and trisected by the monorail and honeycombed underground by the Metro. It sports slideways and pedways, and its citizens make use of the ubiquitous uniped single-wheel transport. So why would the city need a Balloon Ferry?
At opposite ends of the city lie platforms that are now known to be stations for hot-air balloons. These were at first thought to be unfinished monorail stations until excavator Theronomous Moon wandered past the city into the desert and found sprays of color just under the sandy surface. These proved to be buried portions of hot-air balloon fabric. The rest fell into place.
As a transportation system, hot-air balloons would be quite efficient; as an aesthetic experience, unparalleled. One floats above the city; there is no wind, since one is traveling with it. This aerial view can make one appreciate the city’s design like never before. The city’s own citizens can then apprehend its circularity, its aesthetic aplomb, its radial symmetry, its shining wonder; and there is evidence that the pedways surrounding the Central Plaza create a certain pattern, a symbol, that can only be ascertained from above. Besides, to travel from one end of the city to the other could not be achieved faster than by hot-air balloon.
But no. The theory doesn’t work.
The gondolas that have been found attached to the balloons can hold at most two people. This is hardly an efficient transportation system, or cost-effective for any other purpose — if the purpose was to carry people.
So now we know, and know that there can be other reasons for the city’s need for a Balloon Ferry than just what lies at the surface:
The balloons of Heliopoli were not for looking down from but for looking up at.
There would be at least two or three balloons aloft at any given time. Carrying only one or two attendants, they decorated the air with a looking up, a striving to.
At any hour of the day, a good portion of the citizens of Heliopoli were shading their eyes and gazing into a rainbow sky.
The excavators and the chief archivist love good design, so when it seemed a change was needed they chose this Vigilence theme for Heliopoli’s new look. Small tweaks might lie ahead. Comments (such as, “If there’s no lime green, it just ain’t Heliopoli”) are welcome.
I have been duly chastised by the excavators for neglecting an element of Heliopoli that if not included in the city’s description would be like trying to make seawater without salt, or to deny a firmament its shining stars.
There is no proper classification for this thing. It is not just a color or a cloth or a pattern, and its interpretation has changed over time. I am further hampered by not being able to find a photo I have permission to use as an example, and any samples in the city itself have so degraded with time that they are useless, so I have used different, though appropriate, images instead. This thing is locked in its own time anyway — its proper time — so its image is always brighter in memory than anything even a digital photo can reveal.
You might have been introduced to tie-dying in someone’s backyard, with buckets of dye and rubber bands and white T-shirts. The method has to be taught, can’t be learned from a book, like making tallow candles or blowing glass. Tie the rubber bands around the T-shirt, tighten it up, thus and so. There were some who knew how to make certain patterns, methodical, while others just waited to see; but when the rubber bands were taken off the shirt after being dipped in this dye and that, it was always a surprise; you never really knew what you were getting, and that was part of the fun –
a sunburst, always — or a star –
Then in the 1980s we got the manufactured kind, made in a factory, always the same stupid spiral, they all looked the same — which was never the point — and it became a fashion, a self-conscious referent, a wry wink to the past gabbled by New York types through their rectangular, black-framed glasses, snarkily summarizing culture — we are only observers — and stuffing all into a box labeled “Retro.”
That was never the point. And now it can never again be what it once was. We are all too self-conscious for that. It will never again be sunshine backyards amid grass clippings — the smell of cut grass — or “arts ‘n’ crafts” or rainbow colors hanging on a clothesline to dry. It will never again be a surprise sunburst. It will never again be a surprise. It is premade now, hanging in a store.
Wryness is death to surprise. Cynicism destroys optimism.
Snark kills voice.
Did you think we were stupid? Yes, we knew it was about psychedelia and where that came from — you were never taught how to tie-dye from a non-hippie, were you? — but it didn’t matter. We ignored that part. It was just cool. And fun.
For its sunburst and its infinite colors; for its encapsulation of creative and otherwise freedoms; for its obeisance, we see now, to chaos theory’s fractals and never-repeating iterations; for its dark genuflection to drug culture we can ignore; for its bright bursting optimism –
for its representation of an unself-conscious act now turned to stone –
the official something of Heliopoli is –
the tie-dye T-shirt.
“The delight which SF writers show when encountering one another personally, at conventions or on panels or during lectures, indicates some common element shared by them, novices and old pros alike. There always emerges a psychological rapport, even if the ideas and politics in their respective works clash head-on; it is as if absolutely opposite themes in their published work — which might be expected to create a personal barrier when the writers meet face to face — this barrier is never there, and a feeling when a group of SF writers gather is always one of a family rejoined, lost friends refound or new friends made — friends among whom there is a fundamental basis of outlook or at least of personality structure. …
“On meeting a new SF writer who has just gotten into print, we never feel crowded or insecure; we feel strangely happy, and tell him so and encourage him: We welcome him. And I think this is because we know that the very fact that he has chosen to write SF rather than other types of fiction — or other careers in general — tells us something about him already. …
” ‘I know where your head is,’ is what I think when I meet a man or woman who has just published his first SF piece.”
– Philip K. Dick, from his essay “Who Is an SF Writer?” (1974), as reprinted in the The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings
Twenty years ago I met a man through my work who said he had decided not to worry about anything anymore. This was a conscious decision on his part. He had decided. It was a decision. Simple as that.
I was young. I found him a bit odd. He carried a large satchel all the time.
“But what about — ?” I asked.
He shrugged. He decided not to worry about anything anymore. Simple. As that.
“But what about — ?” I persisted. “But what about — ?”
Shrugs. I even ran into him at a mall. He still carried that large satchel. No, I’m not going to say he carried his worries in the satchel; it was just part of what made him a little off, a little unbelievable.
I think about him once in a while, even after all these years. I think about the choice he had made and … yeah. Yeah, I see it now.
I still can’t do it myself, and I still think he was a little nuts — but he had made the right decision.
… in the road.
The chief archivist remains stupendously and utterly convinced that computers do not save us time, only shift it.
(And perhaps his next computer won’t be one that requires a three-hour-long update download, the installation of which comes with confusing instructions, and there’s more updates to come. Perhaps when the antivirus software alerts him that a particular file is trying to access the Internet, it could tell him from which program it comes, so he could determine friend or foe and not freak. Perhaps when a program is installing and asks him if he wants A or B, there could be one — just one — little explanation of the consequences of choosing A or B, since neither A nor B is defined in any clear way. Perhaps he could learn whether the instruction “Close all open programs” means his Internet connection as well, which he figures it does, since it’s, um, an open program, though when he does this the other programs don’t seem to like it much. Perhaps someone somewhere could write clear step-by-step instructions for … anything. And all of this after the above sentence was written and prepared as a blog post. Sheesh.)
Whenever someone mentions Twitter or Facebook to the excavators of Heliopoli, they think of two things, mired as they are in decades-old aesthetics. One is the shampoo commercial with the refrain “And they told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on ….”
The other is the movie Logan’s Run, in which Logan is browsing one evening through images of people in a kind of transporter, looking for companionship. He chooses one woman and she materializes in his room. She’s not interested in what he has in mind, it turns out, and so he asks, “Why did you put yourself in the circuit?”
“I was sad,” she says. “I put myself in the circuit. It was a mistake.”
The chief archivist, for his part, thinks of the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. How long can one resist the siren song when everybody else is doing it? How can you not join the communal mind? It doesn’t hurt. Just lie down next to this pod. It will be over in a minute. The wail of your modem matches the haunting sound coming out of Donald Sutherland’s mouth.
He also seeks to come up with a diagram in his mind of, say, Twitter’s interconnectivity. It is not just lateral, of course, but also vertical … but more than that. Truly the world wide web, but a three-dimensional web … no, four, because it includes time. Is this your tesseract, Ms. L’Engle?
And just when he thought of proposing that Twitter and Facebook would kill blogging, WordPress releases a widget to place one’s Twitter feed in one’s sidebar, proving they’re on top of things. He approves. He just might do it his ownself. It’s cool. (Right on. Far out.) Twitter seems an excellent way to connect to a blog, superior to a feed reader. And yet.
So where does this leave Heliopoli? The city contains a number of crude videophones with tiny black-and-white screens, but not many of them, owing, it seems, to the expense. Most phones are the regular kind, the old-fashioned kind; and though the devices themselves were designed in the most streamlined way, adopting the wedge shape of a TR7 (hee hee), they are still just phones, just phones.
The connection is one-to-one over a copper wire. It takes place only in the present tense. How droll.
And yet. The overarching question seems not to be “What are you doing?” but rather “Why did you put yourself in the circuit?”, after all.
