I Believe in the Future

by chandlej2

 

Full Text:

I believe in the future. Not the future as a distant place disconnected from the present, but the future as a product and producer of the present. As Sara Connor learns in The Terminator, the future is always already here. Though its invasion into our present can be unsettling, it can also inspire change For, if there is no imagination of a present that could be otherwise there is no passion to create something new. The future is that potential present that can be otherwise. Without the future there is no past, no present. Thus, contrary to Big Brother’s famous mantra in 1984, I believe that they who control the future control the present, and they who control the present, control the past. And anyone who can dare to imagine can control the future.

The future’s inspiration on artistic creativity and innovation is probably most evident in science fiction. Sometimes referred to as literature of the future, science fiction not only imagines the future in order to speculate on what it will look like, with its fancy techno gadgets and all. No, science fiction also imagines the future to better understand the present. When I read science fiction, then, I am doing the work of a historian, but in reverse. Just as a historian reads the past for a more critical understanding of the present, so do I read the future to critique aspects of the present that may be too difficult to see from up close. Further, science fiction dares me to imagine the world as it can be, not as it is. That is what draws me, for instance, to the artists loosely associated with afrofuturism, who have adopted elements of science fiction to render and re-imagine the African Diaspora—from Parliament Funkadelic and Sun Ra to Basquiat, from Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler to Deltron 3030.

However, I believe that the future is not only experienced in art. I believe it is what the ecophilosopher Timothy Morton calls a “hyperobject”—an object that is too large for human minds to grasp in its totality but that humans experience in glimpses and fragments. I think of, for instance, how climate change offers me glimpses of ecological futures that influence how I design, imagine, and interact with my present. Not only are many of my fellow humans already experiencing effects of this future now, like cataclysmic weather events, changing weather patterns, and climate migration. But many of them are also re-designing their world to account for this future that they expect but don’t entirely understand. From the development of self-sufficient buildings and electric cars to green spaces and alternative energy sources, the future of climate change looms over present human civilization and innovation. I believe that the future is already here, daring me to imagine.

Finally, I believe that the future needs to be available to everyone, for everyone can dare to imagine. There is nothing more debilitating and demoralizing than being robbed of one’s future. There is no worse feeling than feeling as if there is no future. Thus, in everything I do—as a writer, as a teacher, as a husband, son, brother, and fellow human—I try to offer a little future.

I believe in the future.

 

Works Cited:

Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World,

Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2013.

Orwell, George. 1984, New York: Harcourt, 1949.

The Terminator. Directed by James Cameron, MGM, 1984.

Preface: Writing as a Blasted Heath

by chandlej2

In H.P. Lovecraft’s short story, “The Colour Out of Space,” his narrator describes a place once visited by a strange alien presence from space as a “blasted heath.” Here, he tells us, the terror of this place “is not because of anything that can be seen or handled, but because of something that is imagined.” Later, when recounting the experience of the only family who had lived in this blasted heath at the time of the alien visitation, he tells us, “Something was creeping and creeping and waiting to be seen and heard.” For Lovecraft, then, the blasted heath is an uncanny, haunted place. To go there is to feel a presence that can’t be understood. It is a place where you are not alone even when you’re by yourself.

Three centuries before Lovecraft’s story, a “blasted heath” is where Shakespeare’s Macbeth encounters the three witches. After hearing them prophesy his rise to the throne, Macbeth demands, “Say from whence / You owe this strange intelligence, or why / Upon this blasted heath you stop our way / With such prophetic greeting” (Mac 1.3.76-79). Here, the blasted heath is a battlefield, a site of physical and psychological trauma. Like Lovecraft’s blasted heath, the terror of Macbeth’s also lies in what is imagined. For here, in this space, the mind is infected with an idea, an idea that breeds and grows and consumes.

Less than a century after Shakespeare, Milton conjures the image of a blasted heath to describe the army of fallen angels spread out before Satan as he prepares to deliver his first major speech: “As when heaven’s fire / Hath scathed the forest oaks or mountain pines, / With singèd top their stately growth though bare / Stands on the blasted heath” (PL 1.612-615). This image of a burnt forest, smoke still drifting off of charred trees, is infused with both despair and grandiosity, defeat and power, death and rebirth. Milton’s blasted heath, then, is a place where old allegiances and purposes have been stripped away and new ones are to be formed. It is an apocalyptic space, where the earthly intersects with the divine.

A blasted heath, then, is not strictly a post-apocalyptic wasteland or a ruined environment. Instead, it is a site of magic and madness, a space in which the supernatural invades the natural, a place where everything we thought we knew about reality is suddenly and irretrievably lost. In a blasted heath, the empirical, the teleological, is transformed into the purely, incoherently ontological. A blasted heath is not simply about loss, though. It is also where new life, new expanses, new ways of knowing, new identities are able to form. Out of the rubble of abandoned assumptions about the world emerge transformative thoughts and products.

In this sense, the blasted heath is also a metaphor for the writing process, where confrontations between prior knowledge and the unknown produce new ways of seeing and understanding the world. Though I used to understand the writing process as a procession toward an objective goal, I have come to understand it as something far more persistent and recursive than that: a means to a means, rather than a means to an end. Like the chapter in Winnie the Pooh, “In Which Christopher Robin Leads an Expotition (sic) to the North Pole,” I have learned to think of the writer’s destination as something to be discovered rather than something to be arrived at. You don’t need to know where you’re going before you start, but you do need to be willing to leave where you’re at. This willingness to embark on journeys into the uncanny is the seed of perpetual transformation. And the more comfortable you become with the discomfort of not knowing, the less terrifying the writing space can become.