Dead Water
A couple of things have brought about this post and its title.
The first was some disobliging comments made by Christopher Priest about the shortlist for the Clarke Award 2012. Now it so happens that I agree with the general tenor of Mr Priest’s comments. Having read back through his blog I find him to be consistent in his tone and manner as a critic and, indeed, the Clarke Awards nominees seem have got off lightly compared with some of his previous subjects.
But that is not why I have adopted the title. Mr Priest also suggested some novels which were, in his view, more deserving of shortlisting than the actual nominees. I generally ignore awards and shortlists and follow my own nose when it comes to selecting novels to read and writers to “follow” but in this case I decided to splash some cash and read a selection of the novels in question (I already owned two – Charles Stross’ Rule 34 and Ian R Macleod’s Wake Up and Dream). One of those I bought, not on the shortlist but, according to Mr Priest, deserving of being there was Simon Ings’ Dead Water.
I enjoyed Dead Water very much. It reminded me a little of Pynchon but it had a strong voice of its own and a compelling central metaphor which, eventually, gets me to my point. Dead Water is used in two or three ways in the novel but the deep meaning describes the boundary layers between waters of different temperature, salinity and density. Propellers straddling the boundary generate no forward motion. The layers do not mix but generate their own currents along the boundary – spontaneous motion along myriad points of contact and transition.
The second was some activity on Facebook. I am part of a (private) group there where we post links to music based around announced themes and the current exercise was to link to five pieces of music which have significance for us and state something about why. The pieces I chose were
- Kathryn Tickell: Rothbury Hills
- Dory Previn: Mythical Kings and Iguanas
- Jake Thackray: The Hair of the Widow of Bridlington
- Davy Graham: Moanin’
- Jimi Hendrix: Drivin’ South
When I gave my reasons – which I’m not going to elaborate much here – the common link is that in some sense they all refer to some moment of transition in my life; to some moment when I was swimming in Dead Water, paddling like crazy at a boundary.
And so, rather like my frequent musings on self-reinvention (eg this one) I am back in familiar territory. But now I have a metaphor for it that I can appropriate!
Citizen G'Kar
It isn’t the first time I have pondered “moments of transition” either. On a couple of forums my Avatar is or was the image of Ambassador/Citizen G’Kar from Babylon 5. G’Kar undergoes a substantial epiphany in the course of the series which was very well played out allowing for the standard tropes of TV Space Opera. In particular he opined that “The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition to be born in moments of revelation”. Allowing for the melodrama of cod-philosophy, the only thing on which I would depart from G’Kar is that moments of transition and revelation can occur in joy as well as pain.
Where am I going with this?
Self reinvention, moments of transition, are a core part of how I understand my existence. I do not profess any particular faith or ‘religious’ belief at all. I do not associate universal consequence to moments of transcendence and I have no belief in an afterlife. That makes the time I have all the more precious.
There are those who have argued that someone in my position should be swept by the currents of Dead Water into a despairing nihilism. I make no apologies for seeking to journey in the opposite direction (nor for retaining an abiding interest in religion, mysticism and spirituality which swim in the same currents)
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