Deep Thought: Here Were People
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Deep Thought: Here Were People
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I had a really interesting thought about 4.30 am. It concerned an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that first aired in 1992. It's a good thing I have a strong memory, because of course I haven't seen that episode in decades due to corporate greed and the relentless push to bury the classic scifi stories in an endlessly expanding 'story universe' of trivia and drivel. This one was worth remembering, though: it was called 'The Inner Light'.
The episode starts with one of my favourite Star Trek motifs: the Odd Object on the Vidscreen. Since the bridge is essentially a giant suburban living room, complete with comfy carpeting, it is only fitting that the crew spend most of their time getting their information about the universe outside from a giant screen. I suspect that command chair has a cupholder. Many of their best adventures therefore start with an Odd Object. In the bad old days of the 60s, this object was likely to be a ridiculous Tinker-Toy™ construction that only a diehard fan could take seriously. In 1992, the object was much more sophisticated and can even be purchased as a stylish necklace. Unfortunately, the better-looking probe still does what the old nut-and-a-bolt thingy did: it seeks out the ship's captain – in this case, Picard – and knocks him unconscious with 'some sort of' energy beam.
'Some sort of' is one of my favourite Star Trek phrases. Most fans seem not to mind it, but to me the expression only draws attention to the vast amount of ignorance in Starfleet. They know so little about the universe, yet still they blunder on. Whenever anything new happens to them, something they can't explain away with trekolalia, they slap the 'some sort of' label on it. 'Some sort of' energy field. 'Some sort of' tractor beam. 'Some sort of' life form. One thing is almost always true about these phenomena: if trekolalia won't cover it, the engineer can't fix it and they'll just have to wait until 'some sort of' resolution is reached. Such is the case in 'The Inner Light'. 'Some sort of' light beam has felled Captain Picard, and he's going to lie there on the indoor-outdoor carpeting until the episode is over. We hope Data hasn't emancipated the Roombas and the carpet has been cleaned1.
In the space of the episode, Picard experiences a lifetime as a citizen of a planet called Kataan. As Kamin, an 'iron weaver', he shares the life of a long-dead society. In addition to their memories, the extinct people who launched the probe give Picard other gifts: a flute of ancient manufacture and the skill to play it. Through being touched by 'some kind of' energy, Picard has achieved the secret goal of every archaeologist who was ever born: to rediscover a lost world in its entirety.
That's a particularly fine story. If you care to click you can hear the scriptwriter talk about the idea. Something he said there resonates with what I thought about when I woke up before dawn: telling their story was the only way they had of being remembered. I thought about how hard some have worked to wrestle a knowledge of the past from fragments of pottery and bits of bone. I thought about Irving Finkel and his study of ancient cuneiform and how hard he tries to get inside the minds of people who walked the planet thousands of years before we did.
What does this mean for us? I asked myself at 4.30 in the morning. And I said: what people in the future are going to know about what you've done – the mark, if you will, that you leave on the face of time – isn't going to be what you think it will. Especially not if you regard yourself as VIP in your own time. A mover-and-shaker. A collector of awards and an object of admiration.
Somebody wrote a long time ago: 'The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.'
And some king named Solomon gets credit for it.
Shelley's 'two vast and trunkless legs of stone/Stand in the desert. . . ' is a more common fate for all the pomp of the Earth than we usually like to think of. Ozyman-who? is common – but so is the accidental infamy of Ea-Nasir, the Sumerian purveyor of inferior copper whose dissatisfied client has got them both into the record books for the first customer-service complaint letter in history. Read the clay and weep, Ea-Nasir: your reputation is ruined for all time.
History: a jumble of misunderstood grandfather stories, fake news, and urban legends. Finger in the dyke, anyone? Davy Crockett's bear?
Once my dad and a friend were sitting around reminiscing about their rural childhood education in a one-room school. In those days, it was considered beneficial to memorise poetry, and they still remembered verses such as:
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time. . .
I didn't have the heart to point out that footprints on sand would soon be washed away by the tide or blown away by the wind. I figured that they were deriving inner intellectual sustenance from some sort of spiritual force known only to the Olde American School System.
Given the way things are going, and the general air these days of willingness to sit back and dumbly watch it all happen, it might be well for us to take heed to how we wish our world to be remembered. Perhaps, if we are lucky, the ability to decipher internet pages will persist into the future, or be rediscovered by some genius yet to be born. They might stumble across h2g2 and be able to read it – maybe with the help of a dead-languages specialist. Somebody could even find hard-copies of our novellas and collections of essays/stories/art in print. Stranger things have happened. I think about the random manuscript pages that turn up in odd places, and take heart.
Perhaps there will be enough of our thoughts scattered upon the winds that some traveller will find them. Maybe they'll say to themselves, 'Hey. I detect some kind of energy. There were people here once.'
