The Future People

Below is another story I wrote in 4th grade, this one for a school assignment. I believe it was written sometime in the spring of 1981.

*

The Future People


Monday

I first got into my time machine at noon. I began the controls. I became real dizzy. The Time Machine seemed to fall over. I stopped the control dial.

It read 3 PM. But the Time Machine did go into the future! So I turned the dial again.

The days went by. In 1989 a rocket to Mars went up. In 1992 I saw large blueish-white tanks holding water. A large hurricane was over part of South America. In 1999 a space shuttle went up to give fuel to a space station. Then everything was red.

In the twenty-first century some apes were in a space station, working with people.

My time machine was going at the speed of light. It was 300 feet up and it would land back at my house where I went up.

By 2150 there was a nuclear war in America. It ended and a new city was built in space. It was red. Mutants walked in it. The Washington monument was 1 inch high. The tower of Pisa was on the ground. I stopped the time machine. Seven landing arms touched the ground. They pulled me to the ground and shot out blue globes of water in every direction. The year-reader read 3902. I opened the door and got out. A fireball crashed right beside me and went back up. The desert lasted for miles. Cactus plants were far ahead. I ran to an oasis in the distance.

I saw a man running away from the oasis. He was tall and wore lion fur. I found a beach and walked along it. The statue of liberty was on the shore. It was cracked and half-buried underground. Tall weeds and boulders were surrounding it. In the distance I saw the Empire State Building. It was on the other side of the lake I was walking by. Near it were the Twin Towers. One of them was broken on the top. The rest of the buildings were either gone or broken.

I went back toward the statue. I passed it and then I walked to the time machine. A person was chained up by some red-haired people. There were some black-haired people holding chained people in a large cage.

I saw the time machine. I took off and went backwards in space. A skeleton was on a spaceship and it was getting its organs and skin back. The tower of Pisa went up. The Washington monument rose up. I came in for a landing. Cars were driving backwards. I touched the ground and got out. I think that I would like to be in New York in 3902.

The Sad Saturnian

Here is a little piece of nonsense verse that I composed earlier this year.

*

The Sad Saturnian

I saw a sad Saturnian

On Saturday in the park

His eyes buzzed bright and furry

In the wrinkling, twinkling dark

His squid hands held a juniper branch

Which he swallowed like a Thomistic whale

He murmured forth a yellow bank of turtles

Then told a dismally sweet and languid tale

If he had been a cat from Venus

Or even a caribou from Mars

We might have let him taste the bitter lichens

That fell from certain grim and mountainous stars

As it was, he gurgled, then laughingly eluded us

Warbling along the ridiculous brook

His echoing gray name he never left us

But left us with a sad and Saturnish look

Steven Holland
March 13, 2013
 

The 20th Century Dinosaur

The following is one of my earliest surviving works of fiction. I started writing stories as soon as I knew how to write (c. late 1976), but little if anything remains of my literary creativity from before my 4th grade year, when I composed this tale.

This story has been transcribed faithfully from the original manuscript of December 25, 1980. I have even preserved the mysterious misspelling "refrigetar". I say mysterious because I was an excellent speller, and it seems to me rather surprising that I would have misspelled the word refrigerator at all, let alone so egregiously. I did sometimes purposely alter the spelling of words so as to invent some similar but new concept, and that may be what I had in mind in this case; but, to be quite honest, I have no memory of any such intention, and it may actually have been simply a terrible misspelling. In any case, I am leaving the text as is so as to faithfully preserve what I wrote that Christmas Day when I was 10.

* * *

The 20th Century Dinosaur

One day, a boy found an egg in his back yard. It was as big as his hand. He decided to take it to the dairy.

He took it there the next day. In a week, it was gone. The boy couldn't find it. He looked at the place where he had put it last.

There he found a baby dinosaur.

He ate leaves, grain, and fruit.

Pretty soon, he was as big as a cereal box. He grew every day.

One time, he got as big as an elephant.

The boy put him in a room of the 2-room shed. He put blankets in the room. Winter came pretty soon.

The dinosaur ate up to a refrigetar of food a day.

His dad told him to take him to a national zoo. He told him he could see him every year; but the dinosaur might live 150 or 200 more years.

So he took him to the zoo nearby.

In 2180, a boy was at the zoo, looking at the dinosaur. His grandfather told him, "my great-grandfather said that when he was real little his grandfather told him this was his dinosaur."

Fantasy v. Realism: An Opinion

The following is an essay I wrote in May 2009. This is the first time I have published it.


*


Fantasy and realism, it would seem, are two of the most fundamental modes of art, the one expressing the inner vision of imagination and the other representing the observable world around us. We might assume that each mode has a history stretching back into the dim human past, and that any given work of narrative or visual art humankind has ever produced can be placed somewhere on the spectrum between the most accurate, sober realism and the wildest flights of fancy.

However, in one sense, both fantasy and realism are recent inventions, at least as we tend to conceive of them today. The modern narrative genre of “fantasy” has only existed for two centuries at the outside, and the same might be said of the narrative genre of “realism”. Prior to the nineteenth century, and particularly before the advent of the realist novel in the middle of that century, no strong or significant distinction seems to have been made between the “fantastic” and the “realistic” in literature. Take classic epics like the Odyssey, for instance, or Beowulf. Both stories are rife with monsters and take the form of heroic, romantic adventures (two qualities which a modern “realistic” temperament tends to associate with the unreal escapism of popular fiction or blockbuster movies), yet both works are deemed to be of the greatest literary quality and cultural importance. The reason for this assessment, it seems clear, is that both the Odyssey and Beowulf deal with larger human concerns and are written in well-wrought and elevated poetic language. In other words, the tales of Odysseus and Beowulf are not mere escapist potboilers, but rather are works of both great style and rich substance. These epics, and many others like them, are serious, profound works of human expression, expressed in beautiful and sublime ways.

As one who has maintained a lifelong love of science fiction and other fantastical narrative genres, I am the first to criticize the uncritical dismissal of fantasy by those high-minded audiences who view it all as pulp trash or childish make-believe. But at the same time I readily acknowledge that much of contemporary genre fiction falls well short of achieving the quality of classic literature. Of course, most authors writing genre fantasy and science fiction are not even attempting to produce works that could proudly take their place on the shelf beside those of Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare. They are, more often than not, simply creating stories to entertain their readers, and in this respect many of them greatly succeed.

So while I can see that the vast majority of published fantastic fiction does not aspire to the level of “high” literature and is therefore of minimal interest to many literary connoisseurs, I also believe that novels or films within these genres receive unnecessarily short shrift from those who deem anything fantastical as insubstantial, irrelevant, or--get this--unrealistic.

Is this bias against the fantastic only a case of unfounded generalization, a form of artistic “profiling” or blindly prejudiced stereotyping? Probably. (“It's because I'm sci-fi, isn't it?”) For every fantasy novel that the hardheaded realist can point to as an example of unserious, untruthful pabulum, I can throw back two or three outwardly “realistic” novels that answer to the charge. The issue isn't whether a story is outwardly fantastic or realistic, as this is only skin deep. What counts is what's on the inside, that is, the inherent substance and style of the work. The high esteem given by critics to such enduring classics as A Midsummer Night's Dream and Frankenstein, as well as the aforementioned epics, demonstrates that consistent surface realism is not a requisite for the production of great literature. Somehow, Shakespeare and Shelley got away with putting fairies and monsters in their High Art.

The realist novel, which is to say the self-consciously “realistic” novel, came into vogue in the Victorian era and reflected a certain soberly scientific outlook of its time. The Enlightenment had already cleared the air of fairies and, with its high-beam rationality, demonstrated to its own satisfaction that the night was free of ghosts and monsters. Notwithstanding the Romantics' spirited (shall we say) defense of all things marvelous and strange, the clear-eyed, clear-headed views of the Age of Reason gained a foothold in the realm of storytelling. Now we were to have edifying tales about real people in the real world… no more letting our imaginations get carried away. A story, to be really good, must be not about adventures and wonders, but about real estate deals and marital strife. In other words, literature, to be truly serious, must be about things as they really are.

*
 

Things as they really are... One item that is surprisingly rare in discussions of fantasy literature is the question of how we know, or who says, what is “realistic” and therefore what is “fantastic”. This, of course, is a metaphysical question. If fairy stories are labeled as fantasy, it is because we assume that fairies are not in fact real. But this real-unreal distinction strikes me as a far too simplistic, and misleading, way to distinguish between fantasy and realism. It is not enough, and not really to the point, to say that fantasy stories are deliberately fanciful and that realistic stories are conscientiously devoted to depicting life as it really is. Or rather, the very terms “fantasy” and “realism” are inadequate in conveying the important distinctions between these two modes of narrative art.

The fantasy-realism dichotomy implies that we live in a thoroughly materialistic universe, and that any story dealing with the supernatural is “fantastic”, which basically means unreal. While this may seem unproblematic to a committed materialist, it is hardly satisfying to anyone who believes in at least the possibility of a supernatural dimension to reality. For that matter, calling any story that posits the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations or creatures “fantastic” suggests that even stories grounded in scientifically plausible physical and biological principles may fall short of realism if they dare to imagine possibilities currently unknown to us.

Of course, it is useful to distinguish between the known and the unknown, between storytelling based on experience and that based on imagination, even if the imagined thing is perfectly possible. This is at least a more accurate, and less controversial, way to distinguish the realistic and the fantastic than to take the terms too literally. But it is still not enough, for there is no firm line between the literature of experience and the literature of imagination. Indeed, any story you care to name is based on both imagination and experience. This is of course true of all art, which combines, to varying degrees, what we have experienced of the world with what we can imagine about it.

So if it is not the real and the unreal that constitute the most significant distinction between realistic and fantastic art, and if it is not even the known and the unknown, then what is it? I would venture that the relevant difference is that between the mimetic and the symbolic. Of course, both of these traits exist to varying degrees in any work of art, as do reality and fantasy. My claim is simply that an examination of any given work's place on the mimesis-symbolism spectrum is more useful in understanding its nature than is merely considering it as either realistic or fantastic in the most literal sense.

The mimetic and the symbolic are two complementary modes of art-making that emphasize different ways of interpreting reality. The mimetic seeks to imitate what it sees, in order to see it more fully. The symbolic, on the other hand, seeks to represent the inward perceptions of the mind, whether these be the most rarefied philosophical abstractions or highly concrete visions filled with sensuous detail. Any given work of art can be said to function in both of these modes simultaneously, though it may emphasize one mode over the other.

I believe it is more useful and less misleading to think of “fantastic” narratives as symbolic ones, rather than as unrealistic ones. To say they are unrealistic is to do them, and audiences, a disservice, because it implies that such stories tell us nothing about reality, perhaps even that they tell us lies about reality. But ostensibly “realistic” narratives are just as capable of falsifying reality as are the most fantastic tales. So it is not a question of truthfulness. It is only a question of interpreting truth by way of literalism or metaphor, science or myth, history or poetry.

It is a curious malady of the modern mind that it gives such esteem to prosaic literalism and has such little regard for poetic symbolism. Even much of contemporary religion emphasizes the literality of sacred writings while ignoring the rich metaphor that is the only vehicle for expressing profound spiritual truths. Myths are true in a way that science is not, and poetry can give us knowledge that factual history can never provide. Our civilization currently prizes the factual, literal, small truths of scientific and historical discourse at the same time it disregards the larger, deeper truths that have been traditionally embodied in our religions and our art. These larger, deeper truths can only be approached through imagination and intuition, not by way of verifiable scientific observations or statistics-laden reports. Information does not equal knowledge, let alone wisdom.

Modern fantastic narratives are perhaps the last refuge, in our blindingly literal society, of the mythopoeic faculties that were wielded to such tremendous and enduring effect by the poets of old. It is true that the vast majority of fantastic narratives being produced today, whether in the medium of prose or film, might be considered subliterary, trivial, and ephemeral; but the same is true of the vast majority of realistic narratives. In evaluating the profundity, the relevance, and the beauty of any given story, we might do well to look past its superficial resemblance to the world we know and to consider what it tells us about that world.

A Distant Night in May

 

 

 

it was a distant night in May

the sweet scent of orange blossoms

may have filled the warm and twinkling air

—though i cannot recall for certain

 

for i glimpse this luminous, longing vision

not by way of sightless sight

but through the yearning inward eyes

of my deepest dreaming soul

 

it is you i see there—

you, in that intimate, dimly lit chamber

the same room where you, so dearly, slept

and gave your secret thoughts to the night

 

i was with you upon that far off eve

our souls like brittle peeking blossoms

that trembled in the glittering dusk

 

—a song, a star, a dream.

 

*

 

the bedroom’s soft light still glows

like a gentle gossamer moon

somewhere in the universal dark

 

a star yet wandering the ancient heavens

silently seeking its vernal home

appearing lost amid the fixèd stars

 

yet following a fated, elliptic orbit

toward its sighing cosmic destiny

in an elegant but invisible constellation

 

—i see it, that sweet lost silver star

not by futile telescopic lens

but in my dark and dreaming heart

 

it is still aloft, adrift somewhere

in the high and sparkling vault

a secret soft-lit chamber

hidden in the beating heart

of the deep vast sea of night

 

that star still calls to me

across the years of time

and across the unlit empty spaces

that separate me from thee

and mine from thine

 

that tender place, that lovely

incandescent room

surrounded by the universal dark

where we, almost

touched

 

—a song, a star, a dream.

 

*

 

i see us still, that night

alone, us two, in springtime

on a silent and a singing dusk

 

your eyes there, lustrous

still gaze curiously into mine

your forearm, tender

still rests untouched upon your lap

 

that room, that moment

drifting still among the stars

searching for its longed-for home

 

the home, waiting, where

white curtains rustle softly

in the warm evening breeze

 

where lies a cool quiet bed

waiting to receive our weight

and a gentle glowing lamp

waiting to be made dark

 

it is, perhaps, a distant night in May

the sweet scent of orange blossoms

may fill the lush and verdant twilight air

 

this may be only known

when i, no longer lost among the stars

arrive upon my bright and silver home

and there discover

you

 

—my song, my star, my dream.

 

*

 

 

 

Steven Holland

October 17, 2013

 

Of The Future

the future is not made up of silver space cones
or computers gurgling their sickly data sets--

the future is instead made
of unexpected roses

of breathless lovers' feet
stealing away into the voluptuous dark

of songs given and songs received
of dawns never dreamed

and happinesses unforeseen

the future is made of soft children's hands
touching, new worlds birthing

the sweetness of secret words exchanged
in the silences of night

no, the future is not made of plastic and of steel--
nor of utopias, microwaves, or jets--

the future is instead made
   of gloriously appearing myths
   of wondrously fateful flowers
   of strange and sighing stars
   of fields beyond the world you've known

the future is no more a dream
the future is here--is now



Steven Holland
October 16, 2013

Song of Night

 

I sing to you, fairest heart

 

your face among the stars--

you, like dark Selene

 

grace me with your silvery love--

and my love, too, is like the moonglow

 

that tender kisses the yearning flowers

 

of your deep and dreaming night

our love, lustrous, luminous, and lush

 

rests upon this fragrant desert bed

 

soft and breathing warm

for this, my love, is all we have--

 

this fleeting florid moment

and all the golden past

 

and every future clime--

all my love for thee, my glory--

 

for thou, and thou alone, art mine

*


Steven Holland
October 1, 2013

The Birds of Heaven

I gaze upon thee—

my tenderest, my sweet—

my eyes alight with heaven’s fire

my heart hot with one desire—

the radiant heights

the searchless depths

the dark-hidden chambers

the soft and secret flowers

of thy soul to know

we are cast upon the burning shore

of a lush and fragrant paradise

its peaks beyond our aching reach—

the waters, salty, churning

lap and lash the longing sands

and break upon the bitter rocks

with a constant rushing beat—

we thirst and taste

we taste and thirst—

our faces and fingers aflame

at the sudden sight and testing touch—

I gaze upon thee—

my tenderest, my sweet—

bare before my eager eyes—

as you belong to the universe

so I belong to you

and you to me—

my lovely trembling blossom—

all that is in you

is all I yearn to see

above our heads the nova bursts

catch its falling embers if we may—

our ardor lifts and lights us

to spheres of bliss above

where our souls shall soar and sing

like the birds of heaven

like all the stars of love

Steven Holland

September 13, 2013

Astronomy

We sought the stars—

The stars sought us—

Though mortal, we dared aspire

To knowledge of the heavens

Not for us the lesser earths

The diurnal complacent dream

No—for us the finer, rarer lights

Of love’s utmost constellations

We ascend the untrod galactic peaks

To gaze on the flowered earth below

We scale the heights of dawn Olympus

Nearer ecstatic gods than sullen men

We make our bed above the dreaming world

In one of heaven’s hidden chambers

We lie on clouds of starry bliss

The dim earth far below, forgot—

We reign together, my radiant

Beaming down upon the moon—

By what art or magic

Did we attain this sparkling height?

Not by silver chariot

Nor on Pegasus wings—

We saw the stars

In each other’s eyes

Steven Holland
September 21, 2013

There Go The Gods

I. Twilight

My dreams are black and without faith

For I heard from the bird of mourning

There is no such thing as love

And the madman emerged from the burning wood

And cried out with a crazy shout

That all the gods are dead

*            *                        *                                    *

A cloud has gathered and overwhelmed

This once golden, glistening land

The roses withered, the sparrows silent

The oranges spoiling on the trees

A depthless shadow fell across the earth

Arrived from a distant summer

Telling of glories that never were

And worlds that shall never be

The cities lie half-abandoned

The other half drowned in woe

The music turned to senseless noise

The lights now colorless and strange

The call came on the video tube:

Four o’clock—

Time for biscuits, tea, and Ragnarök

Did you hear what the piper said?

The floodgates have been opened

And all the gods are dead

*

            *

                        *

                                    *

                                                *

                        Of all the words that were ever heard

We could not think of one

            More somber and more desolate

Than the word that spelled the end

The sky fevered with a fearsome glow

                        In sulfurous fury shining

            The leaves swirled in the sordid air

If we did not know it then we know it now:

            Everything is lost

Here come the Empty Ones

Their eyes never seeing

Here come the Hopeless Ones

Ahead the light is fleeing

Burn, burn, springtime yearning

Bright summer you shall never see

Fall, fall, black sky burning

Bleak winter comes for thee

In this burning Ragnarök

Categories fall, classifications fail

And the universe goes dark

What if the gods won’t save us?

They are falling, fallen, laid to rest

What if the music cannot be heard

Above the dismal din?

Listen to what the madman says—

You blind, deaf, dumb heathen swarms

His words flew serenely above your head—

Your verdant wood is burning

And all the gods are dead

* *    *  * * *  *    * *

We sat for tea, and talked of time

As though it still existed

We spoke of space as if it yet

Surrounded us above

“Men should fear the gods,” we said,

“Or face the abysmal waters.”
“But who can see the sky,” said we,

“And still believe in light?”

Did you hear the mournful cosmonaut

As he sailed the silent stars above?

“My instruments do not detect—

Proving what we did long suspect—

There is no such thing as love.”

Is this, then, why the tumult and collapse?

Why the fiery flaming fall?

The props that held the world all up

Have buckled beneath the emptiness

All the channels have gone silent

And all the stations black

And to escape the void’s cold approach

We turned to hopeless futile dreams

But the heavens will not save us now

Because we will not see them

And still we will not hear the voices

Of the high and ringing stars

All we see is the nothingness

The end of all the stories

The books are ravished by our blindness

We have lost our fear of gods

*            *            *            *            *            *            *

We looked at where the poet stood

As tears burned his forlorn cheeks

He gazed at us with bleary grimness

And proclaimed his newfound faith:

“Of course I believe in dreams,” he said,

“Only yesterday I saw many of them

Vanish before my eyes.”

We asked him to sing a song to us

To offer us a leaf of hope

But he said all the trees had fallen

Consumed by raging sorrow

“They told you Helen of Troy was just a myth

Invented by mad sad bad poets

Little did they know

“I saw her once in long lost dreams

The face that enflamed the furious fires

And that made the broken stars collapse

And despair to earth in woe

“And I was visited by the darkling angel

Who led me to the mountain peak

And showed me a dazzling dream

“I beheld a vision of wondrous love

Of love’s bright beauty and bliss

And the angel said, ‘This, Poet, is not for thee—

Instead thy liver is the eagle’s meat

Thy torment is this blessèd dream

This happy heaven thou shalt never reach

Though it once lay within your grasp.

It is all there, Poet, that thou might see—

The homeland thou shalt never enter—

Stand and look and weep—

The Promised Land not meant for thee.’

“The angel beheld my tortured gaze

His eyes burned with a black and awful light

He showed me the very face of Beauty

Then slew me with a song.”

* *  ***  * *

The winds moaned across the city

The buildings ruined and decrepit

A hollow howling storm approached

Bearing a deluge of endless grief

I walked a neighborless neighborhood

And saw a scrap scurry across the street

I watched as it grabbed hold my failing feet

And upon it read the letters:

RENOUNCE DESPAIR

—I knew not what it meant

For all words had failed me

All philosophies rendered useless

History never happened

And science never knew

The heavens had been emptied

All the stars turned black

Then with a long deafening roar

The sky tumbled to the earth

And with a dim and dismal crash

The entire universe collapsed

All we were left with was this

Black, bleak, bitter knowledge:

There is no such thing as love

And all the gods are dead

I returned to my apartment

Well past time for tea

But that did not matter

Happiness was not meant for me

I sipped but did not savor

No flavor could I taste

The light had been lost

The world gone to waste

II. Dawn

A child played in the street

Apparently unaware of the tragic news

That the world was no more

I had endured an endless night

Without rest or dreams

The sky lay dark upon the earth

I had no drink of water

I heard a sweet and splendid voice

From the vanished street below

It was the blessèd child singing:

We’ve had tea and teacakes

We’ll have them all again

We’ve had love and roses

We’ll have them all again

The stars still shine above

Where you cannot see them

The dawn is for you, my friend

The dawn is for you

I listened but could make no sense

Of this strange and childish verse

It did not agree with sight or reason

I hovered in my chambers like a ghost

Not at home but only occupying space

Space that remained, despite my presence,

Empty, horribly cold

*

The rumble late awoke me—

There was thunder on the earth

The horizon glowed with pallid light

The hint of a waking morrow

I reached out to the reachless vault

Of the lost and lightless heavens

I gazed upon the sky with depthless ache

Searching for a star

Then I heard it, faint at first

A song of distant light

Sounding beyond the universe

A music not heard since the youth of the world

Do the gods even now speak—

Their voices thundering across the sky?

*                        *            *            *            *                        *

The voices rose low and somber

Across the sullen desolation

We could hear them singing:

Arcturus ,,,,,,, have you lost

            The uncanny way to paradise

We see the unseen endless light

We hear the unknown musics yet

The ancient darlings .... have .... not abandoned you

            It is only Time

,,, the vernal bird of unseen light ,,,

* *** * even now abides * *** *

our names are written among the stars

trembling, trembling,                                                                        Unseen Light!

Our song rises to the highest height!

All dreams are not lost

                        ,,,,,,, our song for the unknown glories ,,,,,,,

Trembling toward the unseen light!

*******have you heard the realms of bliss

All dreams are not lost

                        ,,,,,,, our light among the million stars ,,,,,,,

Glorious! Glorious!

All the darling ones here rejoice

                                    ....we know dreams are true

A light—not seen but seen—

Uttered weird majestic words

Speaking in a soundless tongue:

“O mortal, know this:

You may not look long on impossible things

And live.

“You listened to the Angel of Despair

He told you warped and woolly truths

Which amount to lurid lies.

“The child who sings knows more

About the birth of the dreaming stars

And the fate of bitter teardrops.

“Wake, mortal, and you shall see

The dawn is not afar—

The stars begin to sing.”

*            *                        *                                    *

We lit upon a field

Of soft and dewy clover

A child played in the sparkling grass

And the child I saw was me

The angel said, “His dreams now belong to you

His life is yours to keep

Do not make him tremble

Do not make him weep.”

The sun rays played upon his face

His eyes reflected light

The dawn had come to greet him

To him the gods had given

The magic gifts of life

I beheld the child, pure and warm

With life and light and love

I only wished to be him

To face with faith and hold with hope

All the golden mornings

And all the tragic tomorrows

Of his course upon the earth

Around him roses bloomed

And sparrows sang

And oranges sweetly ripened

The sun rose and showed his face

As he looked upon the sky

And the angel said:

“Renounce despair, sweet child,

Renounce despair—

It was not meant for thee.”

For Elizabeth Partington

Steven Holland

August 28, 2013