Consideration of Works Past: A Mirror for Observers

(Picture from here.)

I've been wanting to reread this for a while now for a number of reasons. It is a small novel-- the great movements and changes that SF is so famous for are either absent or merely backdrop for the transition of the characters.

I like books like this-- for that matter, I write books like this. I like a great space opera as much as the next SF reader but there's a soft spot in my heart (or head) for little books.

The other book I was considering was The Revolving Boy by Gertrude Friedberg but I decided on this one. It has a plague in it.

Edgar Pangborn, like Clifford Simak, is a writer that has fallen out of the limelight. Both are good writers of their time but their time has largely passed. It is interesting how what I considered canon when I was younger in fiction and in film has changed. Heinlein and Asimov remain but I think, like Pangborn and Simak, the change is generational. New readers don't tend to read them unless it's part of a class or a book club.

A Mirror for Observers tells the story of Elmis, an expatriate Martian-- who name themselves Salvayans-- who has lived for hundreds of years. His species came to Earth over thirty thousand years ago and live among humans. Some guide human beings. Some vilify them. Some leave them alone. Elmis is an Observer: a Martian whose task it is to live within humanity and report. Observers are hopeful of humanity's future.

Elmis is pursuing a boy named Angelo Pontevecchio, a precocious child of tremendous potential. Also pursuing Angelo is Namir, an Abdicator-- those Martians who want to find human beings a lost cause and want to destroy them.

Angelo is the intended target of influence of both Martians. (I was reminded of the Giacinto Gimignani painting at left.) Elmis meets Angelo when Angelo is twelve.

Pangborn writes love stories. Not romantic stories but love is often the primary motivation between people in his works. This was true of West of the Sun. Like WOTS, Mirror is about love and the lack of it. Again, I must emphasize, neither novel is romantic at all.

The book is in two parts. The first part, where Angelo is a child, consists of the tug of war between Elmis and Namir. This ends when Angelo flees them both. Later, Elmis rediscovers him.

One would expect the love Elmis has for Angelo would be the center of the story. And there is a good deal of it. Elmis loves people and Angelo in particular. He was married for decades but his wife is dead.

However, the real affection here is between Elmis and another child prodigy, the musician Sharon. Pangborn was an artist and musician. It's not surprising, then, that Angelo is a gifted painter and Sharon a gifted pianist.

This relationship is the heart of the novel. Elmis has some affection for Angelo but he deeply loves Sharon. And she has great love for him-- though, of course, her romantic fixation is for Angelo and his for her.

When I read this book-- when I remembered this book over the years it was this relationship between truth and falsity, the continuing philosophical discussion between the characters and the mirror-- a Cretan masterpiece referred to in the book-- that reveals the truth of the person. Not in a crass way-- that person is a Martian. This is a human. But the underlying self. Pangborn stays inside Elmis throughout the book so when revelations come to the characters, he can only see what they do and say and is denied their internal revelations. There are several scenes where such a revelation occurs and Elmis cannot know what it is because the character does not reveal it.

In rereading this book, I found I wanted Pangborn to be a better writer. He chose a set of mirrors himself in which to write the book. Elmis is writing letters back to his friend Drozma about what has already occurred. I am no fan of epistolary novels. I find them tedious. They lack immediacy.

It is worse in this novel. Elmis is already removed from the changes in his character just by being the point of view character. He's further removed by not being human. And, finally, he is removed further in the writing of these letters.

The first section feels too long. Pangborn skips the intervening years where Elmis is searching for Angelo-- a first rate opportunity to see how Elmis ticks. The second section-- where the plague happens-- feels actually too short, though both sections are more or less the same. We never find out what Angelo is capable of or if he will realize anything at all-- which doesn't bother me. The book stops before  Angelo can show that.

Mechanical issues aside, Pangborn is not afraid to show love in his work and he's not terribly sentimental about it. That part I liked.

The plague is well executed, though contrived. It comes with a sort of leaden inevitability.

I don't remember when I read Mirror but it was probably before I graduated high school. The book cannot mean the same to me now as it did then. But while it did reach as far as I remembered, I did enjoy the love.

Which brings us to our own plague. This is one of those situations where if we sit still and do nothing, the reaper might pass us by. Even more, we might enable it to pass others by as well.

This is not a narrow temporary thing. It is a marathon, not a sprint. And when we reach the other side, if we are honest,  how we dealt with this will remain with us. Will we handle it with kindness and patience? Will we blame people with whom we did not agree?

Will we act with love?

State of the Farm: Spring, 2020

(Picture from here.)

With the advent of COVID-19, the state of the farm is intimately connected to the state of the country. So, we'll start with that.

This is the beginning of week 2 staying at home. Draper Labs (my employer) told us to work from home starting last Monday.

Because of my wife, Wendy, we were prepared. Wendy has been tracking the virus since middle January. We've been apocalyptishopping ever since. We have about three months of staples.

This sound like a lot but it's actually not all that much more than we usually have. When we moved into the house back in 1993 we were at the tail end of the electrical lines. We lost power when the wind changed direction. That first winter there was so much snow that roofs collapsed all over Massachusetts and interior floods so frequent that the resulting claims for damaged walls and floors weren't even investigated. Adjusters said, "Go ahead. We'll cover it."

That winter, when the roof blockages sent streams of water across the walls inside, we looked at our new house and developed a mantra: "There is nothing wrong with our house."

We developed a sort of apocalyptic mindset. Every essential piece of equipment had to be doubled-- with a 150 foot drive way and a foot of snow a week, the snow blower became essential equipment. We had two: one we bought, one we inherited from my father-in-law. We had a generator. We had two cars. We had enough food that we could hunker down for a couple of weeks if the weather forced us to.

So, hunkering down these days isn't that much of a stretch.

But I find it depressing, just the same.

The main problem for me is finding that my main stay of human contact is work. Wendy and I get along very well but our son is out of the house and it's now just us. That's a great burden for any couple.

We've been managing it, so far, through technology. Skype, webex, duo and the like. So far it's been adequate. I'm unsure how it's going to handle the long haul. Our Incompetent-in-Chief disbanded the pandemic response team early in his administration and didn't seem to understand what he was being told until it could no longer be ignored. Because of his administration we're in a bad situation.

It's possible someone else would have done no better. But so what? He's the one in charge and he dropped the ball. No, he deliberately tossed the ball off the field, declared he didn't need it, that the ball was a lie and then was forced to trot off the field and dig through the weeds until he could find it. He still hasn't yet been able to bring the ball back on field.

But even he had to finally state that this can go as far as July. I think he's wrong again, there. I think we're going to be dealing with this until we get a vaccine.

So. Back to the farm, I suppose.

Last year we had a poor crop of Concord grapes. I think the grapes had grown two clustered and could no longer get good sunlight and air circulation. The grapes had no obvious fungus but looked withered. So this spring I cut them back hard. I have pictures of them but the upload isn't working quite right. So, I'll leave that for a future post.

The Ruth Stout method I talked about before-- laying down a layer of straw and planting potatoes under it-- was so successful we're expanding it significantly. We increasing from two 4x8 beds to about three times that much. The idea is that we want to be as calorie independent as possible. (See COVID-19 above.)

Corn is already sprouting in the greenhouse so that will go in by the end of May. We're going to aggressively try the Three Sisters method: corn, beans and squash. We've practiced this before with significant success. We're using Glass Gem corn-- it looked so cool I had to try it. It's a seed corn so we'll have corn meal. It can also act as popcorn.

Lots of beans this year. We already have had success with tomatoes. We're going to try intercropping the tomatoes with carrots-- an idea we got from a video from MIGardener.

We've been essentially practicing to get the most calories and nutrition from the garden for some time. This year is no longer practice. The goal is to have a substantial portion of our diet to come from the garden over the winter.

In addition, we've had good luck from our peaches, grapes Cornelian cherries and persimmons over the years. Peaches go into the freezer. The CCs, grapes and persimmons go into wine.

This last week we bottled the Marechal-Foch and a Concord/persimmon combination. The M/F did not taste great. It didn't go bad. It just wasn't very good. So we bottled it with the name, Unpromising. The C/P combination, by contrast, is very promising. We've transferred some additional persimmon wine from primary fermentation to the glass rack stage, where it will remain for some months.

One of the persimmon wines we cooked up with an amylase-- we were of the opinion that the persimmon had a lot of starch in it by the way we were able to make persimmon bread out of it. Amylase breaks the starch into sugar and makes it more available to fermentation. The result was dubious. The remaining specific gravity was 1.005 (1.0 == water) so there was something left in the proto-wine that had not fermented. Was it unfermentable sugars? No clue.

There was also a great deal of material left over from the process. This was not left over yeast. It tasted persimmon-ey. So we tried some in bread and it seemed to taste okay. We froze it and maybe will use it in bread making. Sort of like chestnut flouer.

Regardless, we want to make better use of the fruit material. Wine is good and all but it's not a source of nutrition. We're considering the problem.

As I said, we have about three months of supplies in house. But we're expecting our first harvests in May. The spring peas are in and other cold crops are being prepared for planting.

The big fear we have is another cold, wet May and June like we had last year. We're probably going to put out some crops under row covers to see if that helps. It's possible that eventually we'll have to follow some of the solar gardening principles (See here.)  and put everything under semi-permanent covers. At least until July. But we won't have that ready this year.

That's it for now.

Be safe out there. Maintain social distance. Don't be stupid. This bug is nasty to people with comorbidities such as age, obesity, smoking or diabetes. It turns out over 35% of the population has one or more of these so if we're not personally vulnerable someone right next to us is.

The whole idea is to keep within the capacity of the health care system so people don't die from lack of care rather than the disease itself.