Soul of the Future: Secret Progress Report II

 

More than three years ago now I reported on my plan to post a Soul of the Future series (over at Captain Future’s Dreaming Up Daily) as a way to complete this writing project, which had already gone on for some 20 years and counting.

 I recently posted the last chapter in this series.  It’s been a long road, but this experiment was successful in that I completed a “draft” that could stand as a whole.  The question now is what if anything to do next on this project.

 As I noted in the earlier report, this project goes back to when I was living in Pittsburgh in the mid-1990s.  It started with my observation that there were plenty of scenarios about an apocalyptic future, especially in popular culture forms (movies, TV.)  But I could think of only one scenario of a better future, and that was Star Trek—which happened at that time to be the most popular story about the future just about everywhere in the world.  Star Trek: The Next Generation was still making new episodes, though it was probably coming to an end. 

 The other scenario for a better and much different future was, in a strange way, the Ghost Dance.  Native American ideas were in the air in 1992 because it was the 500^th anniversary of Columbus “discovering America.”  I’d done an article on American Indians in Pittsburgh, and started becoming familiar with contemporary Native literature.  Two scholars at the University of Pittsburgh had a public forum where one of them read the chapter of Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Almanac of the Dead, in which there were a few sentences about the Ghost Dance coming true—the West emptying out of people, the buffalo returning, etc.  That idea caught my imagination as a larger metaphor. 

 I did a piece for the Smithsonian Magazine on two contemporary Native artists in Canada, and a few other pieces, while reading a lot of American Indian writing. I saw a way of being in the world that added spiritual dimension to contemporary ecology and related concerns.

 So for awhile the working title of my project was “Star Trek/Ghost Dance.”  I’d been interested in the future through popular science fiction in my boyhood, and as a subject through articles I’d researched on the futures studies and related movements of the 1970s. And I’d written on Star Trek before, seen it all and knew it well.  So I had a good grasp of that end of it.

 In the fall of 1996, I moved with my partner Margaret to far northern California.  I worked for awhile for a Native grassroots organization called the Seventh Generation Fund, and I wrote the script for a video on forest issues.  All of that was contributing, but the idea was still growing.

 One of the major perks of being the partner of a tenure track professor was access to the university library, and the ability to take out lots of books.  I don’t recall why I focused in on H.G. Wells for this project, but the library had a couple of shelves of books by and about him, and as I worked through these, Wells became a bigger part of this project. His focus on the future, his apocalyptic and utopian writings, and as a forerunner of many ideas physically realized in Star Trek, all became relevant.

 For awhile the parallels between Wells and Star Trek's Gene Roddenberry fascinated me, to the extent that I tried to write a double biography.  But both of them led to other science fiction writers and movies, relevant to my project.

 Wells led into other areas as well.  He was a student of T.H. Huxley, Darwin’s friend and defender, and Darwinian evolution was central to his approach to the future, especially in his first novel, The Time Machine. So I read more deeply into contemporary thought on evolution and Darwin.  At this point I was also reviewing books for the San Francisco Chronicle and the North Coast Journal, and so I got access to new books on the subject.

 At the same time as all this started in Pittsburgh, I began reading the American Jungian psychologist James Hillman.  In Arcata I added Jung himself, beginning with the library’s shelves, and ending up with a few shelves of my own, thanks mostly to used bookstores.   

One day I was musing about combining these two obsessions of Wells and Jung, and mused about writing a play in which they meet, only to find that they had known each other.  This led me to writing a play about a conversation they could have had in the U.S., which also involved the Ghost Dance.  But I also realized that a number of Jungian concepts were useful in my futures project.

 That’s partly because, by this time, I’d broadened the idea to “soul of the future.” (Jung pointed out that a translation of "psyche" is "soul.") I read Hillman and other contemporaries on soul, when that was a hot subject in the 1990s and early 2000s.  The subject of soul involved the subject of imagination, and the emphasis on scenario or story in futures studies also involved reading in these areas.

 Running parallel in time was the growing crisis of climate disruption.  I’d been reading and writing about it since 1990.  I wrote about it incessantly online, in book reviews and essays in the SF Chronicle and elsewhere.  So I was well informed on the nature and extent of this crisis that threatened civilization and the planet’s life as we know it.

In Pittsburgh I had acquainted myself with the work of pioneer ecologist--and human ecologist-- Paul Shepard, whose first book I'd known since college.  He had taught at my college until the year I arrived, but we had a mutual friend, and we exchanged letters before his untimely death.  When I got to Arcata his widow Florence Shepard contacted me about writing something for a special issue of an environmental magazine about Paul, and after that, at Flo Shepard's request and with her participation, I wrote and gathered material and created a Paul Shepard website.  His work was a profound influence, including on the futures project.

 I’d begun drafts for this future project in the late 90s, and continued through the decade of 2000 and into the next decade.  I created separate files for drafts of each year.  Some of those files are fat, and some are thin.  I started each draft with enthusiasm but wound up exhausted and discouraged.  There was too much stuff.  I had lots of problems with scale.  Chapters that were exhausting to write were also exhausting to read. They didn’t lead anywhere.

 I was writing a lot of other stuff, of course.  Some elements of this project got into essays I wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle, for example.  And I did a New York Times article on Star Trek.  Then I found myself writing about local plays and (for the university departments), press releases about university plays and music events, that wound up in local papers which pretty shamelessly printed press releases verbatim.  There were weeks when I was writing most of the performing arts articles that appeared in the 4 local papers (three weeklies and the weekly arts section of the daily, or briefly, the dailies.)  There wasn’t a lot of time to pursue other projects—and I had more than this one.  

But I managed to read a lot that helped shape the futures project, including books by W.I. Thompson, Lynn Margulis, Kim Stanley Robinson and Ursula Le Guin.

 Since my “retirement” and the collapse of the freelance market, I’ve concentrated on my own work, including these projects.  My last progress report was about my realization that “serializing” this futures project as blog essays might center it.  Perhaps from habit, I found it easier to write in this form than in facing all the white space on the digital page. I’d found something like a voice (a blue voice?) and that’s essential.

 Getting past individual topics led to finding themes to unify the series, which alone is a good guide to another draft.

 But by the time I completed the series in 2021, something else had happened—not so much to me as to the future.  The future had contracted. Largely because not nearly enough had been done to address the climate crisis, it was now all but certain that it was going to dominate the future, as it already had begun to dominate the present, along with the parallel eco-crisis expressed in mass extinction.  It had become highly probable that humanity no longer could make choices that would ensure a smooth path to a better future And the deteriorating political consensus especially in the US made the outlook especially bleak.  There is probably going to be an apocalyptic period to some meaningful degree.  And suddenly all my words seemed beside the point.

 Yet in my last posts I found reasons why centering on the future was still important, was in fact crucial.  This project was always meant to be a book, and while the chances of my book being at all influential seem to have diminished, it still might be worthwhile.

  I would still need to work up the faith that it might, and though I was fairly pleased with what I had written in the past three years on this subject, I didn’t ever get much positive comment.  It was seldom the feature of my blog that anyone mentioned.  If I wasn’t connecting, what is the point?

 When I was completing the last posts, realizing I’d left so much out from my original plan, I considered that at best these posts constituted a decent first draft.  But that was their purpose.  A complete first draft is what I never had.  And now I do.

 Still, by the time I finished, I thought I was really finished with it, that this would be the end of this project. Especially after the massive silence that greeted the end of it.  And it may well be.

 On the other hand…Over the years, especially before the Internet was the chief repository of information, I compiled file cabinet drawers full of files. Recently I began looking to get rid of those files, but in leafing through them, I’ve found things that could enhance the material I have as organized in my blog posts.  So I may make digital notes from those files before they end up in the recycling bin.  And that in turn could lead to a second draft. 

 So maybe the project isn’t over.  Maybe there’s a book called Soul of the Future with my name on it, sometime, in the future…