I haven't made up my mind yet, but I'll think of something

 

Here's a story from the old, weird America that once was, where there were isolated rural enclaves where the old ways still lingered, where a 16-year-old girl was of marriageable age, where teenage girls were not bobby-soxers in pedal-pushers and saddle shoes swooning over Guy Mitchell songs but broom-wielding barefoot witches whom you had better not upset or, brother, look out! 

I've wondered why the belief that adolescent girls have mischievous powers, cause poltergeist activity and that sort of thing, has been common for such a long time.  Adolescent boys are not ascribed such powers.  Because the conviction that, as it is usually described, an angry or unhappy pubescent girl can cause havoc, make things and animals fly through the air, break crockery, even teleport herself, persists, it would seem like there must be something to it.  

I don't know.  When I was a teen, I had my share of anger and unhappiness, but I could never cause things to shatter or fly through the air.  I certainly could not teleport myself.  

Darn it.

"You with your kindness and your handsome face and your city manners," Abbie said. "How could you do it? You made me fall in love with you. It wasn't hard, was it? All you had to do was hold a little hill girl's hand in the moonlight an' kiss her once, an' she was ready to jump in bed with you. But you didn't want anything as natural as that. All the time you was laughing and scheming. Poor little hill girl!"

 Wherever You May Be, first broadcast on June 26, 1956, by NBC radio as an episode of the series X Minus One. It was based on a novella by James A. Gunn published in the May, 1953, edition of Galaxy Science Fiction magazine.

 An episode of the 1989 Soviet science fiction TV series This Fantastic World, "Psychodynamics of Witchcraft," was based on this story.

James Gunn was also an example of the old America, his grandfather appearing in Ripley's Believe It or Not because he could name every county of every state in the union. A high-ranking mason, Gunn studied Japanese to learn the secrets of the Orient. As a result, when he was drafted in World War II he was sent to the Pacific to interrogate Japanese prisoners and learn their secrets.  After the war, he became a professor of English at the University of Kansas, teaching science fiction.  He wrote The Listeners, which Carl Sagan called, "one of the very best fictional portrayals of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence ever written."

Gunn's novella was adopted for radio by Ernest Kinoy.  Kinoy fought in World War II with the 106th Infantry Division. During the Battle of the Bulge, his regiment was surrounded by the Germans and forced to surrender. The Americans were interned at Stalag IX until they were transferred to the concentration camp at Berga, the slogan of which was Vernichtung durch Arbeit -- extermination through labor. One day the commandant of the the stalag lined all the regiment up and ordered those who were Jewish to step forward.  The senior NCO replied that they were all Jewish. So they were sent to Berga where Kinoy and his fellow soldiers dug tunnels and space for an ammunition plant 150 feet underground under conditions so harrowing that 47 men died.  When the US Army neared the camp, the prisoners were force-marched to another camp.  Thirty-six died along the way. Kinoy survived all this, graduated from Columbia University and became a script writer for NBC during the Golden Age of Television, writing for Studio One and Playhouse 90 as well as such television series as The Defenders, Dr. Kildare and Route 66, in addition to writing for radio. He, too, is an example of the America that was.

Patsy O'Shea, the actress who plays Abigail Jenkins, was also part of the America that was and lived to see what it has become. Born at the height of the Depression in 1931, she became a wildly popular child star beginning at the age of three, appearing in hundreds of radio plays. She became a regular on the soap operas Guiding Light and As the World Turns, among others. A 1942 article described her as “Orson Welles in miniature,” adding, “She is so much in demand that if you tune in on any daytime radio serial and hear a little girl’s voice the chances are that it’s Miss O’Shea.”  She switched to television when it came along, continuing her roles in the soap operas as well as appearing in such early TV series as Boston Blackie, The Line-Up and City Detective. She died alone in a nursing home in 2020 at the height of the Covid lock-down madness, her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and 90-year-old husband of almost 70 years forbidden to visit her.

Ants and the Borg

See that line across the road just about in the middle of the photo to the left?  That's an ant trail.  It was there when I was a little girl visiting my grandparents.  It was there when my mother was a little girl and my grandmother told me it was there when she was a little girl and her mother told her it was there when she was a little girl.  So that ant trail has been in the same spot for more than a century and a quarter, and very probably a lot longer than that. 

 How much longer? Who can say, but probably a lot longer than that road has existed, centuries maybe, maybe thousands of years.  Maybe it was there before the Indians came.  If I learned that it had been there since the glaciers retreated 11,000 years ago, I wouldn't be surprised. And if, somehow, I was to learn that that ant trail would still be there when the glaciers come grinding down from the north again, as by and by they surely will, whether that's a hundred years from now or 10,000, I wouldn't be surprised, either. What is time to an ant colony anyway? We humans are like mayflies compared to colonial creatures, whether ants and termites or coral polyps.

Then there are plants.  Some years ago I came across a study of the flora of the Mojave Desert.  It mentioned that the author had found a creosote bush that was 12,000 years old.  The plant grows by spreading out in an ever-widening circle.  Underground the roots spread from the central, original plant, the above-surface parts of which may die, but beneath the surface, it lives on, essentially indefinitely.  Even a fire, which may burn off the above-ground parts of it, won't kill it because the root structure is untouched.  It can, of course, be killed.  In this case, the bush was bulldozed into oblivion to make way for a housing development.  Alive since the beginning of the Holocene, a grassland ape destroyed it to create another one of its ever-proliferating nest heaps.

Do plants think, are they sentient?  Define sentience. Is there only one type?  Is your definition valid for any life form other than hominids? How do you know?  

How about fungi? I once listened to a very -- very --  smart guy proposing and defending convincingly the hypothesis that all fungi on the planet are really just one globe-spanning life form that has been continuously alive since the first fungi evolved.  What about the oceans separating continents, and continents moving around via plate tectonics? What about islands far out in the ocean? Wouldn't that have broken apart the Ur fungi?  He had an answer to that, but I forget what it was.  

Fungi and vascular plants interact intimately with each other.  Fungi act as a communications pathway between trees, conveying information about their health, telling a tree that it is time to die -- yes! that's true -- among many other things including, no doubt, things we, as animals, could never understand, or even be aware of.

Are fungi sentient?  How about the combined creature that is a forest/fungi symbiote?    

And what about Gaia, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis' updating of Vladimir Vernadsky's concept of the biosphere as the interconnected biomass of the earth through time and distance that maintains itself through feedback loops. Is it sentient?  What experiment could we devise to prove or disprove it? What if we are just a part of Gaia's "brain," rather like our brain is made up of various parts that separately are nothing but combined are us? Or maybe we are like one of the cells in our body that, alone, is nothing but combined with millions of other cells is us and we continue to be us even as the individual cells die and others replace them, rather like bees in a hive.  The hive continues on year after year though the various bee units come into being, function for a while, then perish, each bee, aware of its impending death, leaving the hive to die alone so as not to pollute the hive with its decaying corpse.  How does the bee know it's going to die?  Or does it?  Perhaps it just begins to feel tired and so, on one of its excursions, stops to rest on a flower petal and goes to sleep, forever.  Will we ever understand these things?  Or just imagine that we do?

I recall reading, maybe in The Soul of the White Ant by Eugene Marais, speculation about social insects having a group mind, rather like that of the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I watched that with my dad when I was a kid and remember him saying, "Borg, Borg, okay Borg.  But where's Warner, that's what I want to know.  What did Borg do with Warner?"  I had no idea what he was talking about but my brothers laughed.

I digress.  Where was I?  Hmm.  I forget.

 “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.”
―Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

 
I would take a splendid sapling in my hands, pull it back, let it fly, as it did with a will, into position again—its uprightness. One day I stopped in the exercise, the thought striking me: This is great amusement to me; I wonder if not as great to the sapling? Maybe we interchange—maybe the trees are more aware of it all than I ever thought.
Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me? I think they hang there winter and summer on those trees and always drop fruit as I pass.  

In the revealings of such light, such exceptional hour, such mood, one does not wonder at the old story fables, (indeed, why fables?) of people falling into love-sickness with trees, seiz’d ecstatic with the mystic realism of the resistless silent strength in them.

I had a sort of dream-trance the other day, in which I saw my favorite trees step out and promenade up, down, and around, very curiously—with a whisper from one, leaning down as it pass’d me, murmuring out of its myriad leaves, “We do all this on the present occasion, exceptionally, just for you.”

I fling out my fancies toward them,
Surely there is something more in each of the trees, some living soul,
In my soul I plainly heard the wood-spirit join the refrain,
As some old tree thrill’d with its soul:
Know I bear the soul befitting me,
I too have consciousness, identity,
And all the rocks and mountains have, and all the earth.

~ from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass

I thought about you today

I was thinking about this old guy I knew when I was in college, just some guy I met while sitting on a park bench. We got to talking and became friends, although, as has been not unknown to happen, he believed my cordiality implied romantic interest, which it did not. That put the kibosh on our friendship.  The fact that he was three times my age did not suggest to  him that...well, you know. I liked him, but not that way. And it had never occurred to me that he would like me that way.

Oh, really?

Anyway, for some reason after heaven knows how long not thinking about him suddenly I did, remembering that he had spent decades writing a book, a novel based around the character of his girlfriend, who had died during the summer of love, 1967, the year he quit high school and joined the hippies in Haight-Ashbury.

He couldn't get over her death, and what I came to realize was that he was keeping her alive in his novel. That's why he worked on writing it every day of his life, writing, re-writing, editing, "polishing"  it, as he said. I wondered why he didn't submit it to a literary agent, who would advise him on shaping it for publication.  He said he had and that the agent said it was a very promising first novel but that, at 700 pages, it was too long for a publisher to accept as a first novel by an unknown.  He suggested cutting it down to 300 pages.  That my friend would not do. After that he didn't bother with agents or publishers. He just kept writing and re-writing, reliving the magical year  of 1967, the pinnacle of his life, when he was in love as only a teenager can be. 

Some time after I had lost contact with him, while browsing Amazon I ran across an author by his name and I wondered if it could be the same person and checked out his author's page and, yes, it was him and he had finally published his book, self-published it. 

Well, today I tried to find his book on Amazon.  I decided I should read it, wanted to read it.  But I could not find it.  I'd forgotten the title, and, honestly, even his name.  I had to think hard to recall it.  His first name, of course, I remembered, but not his last name.  Finally it came to me and I searched Amazon for him.  I found authors with the same name, but not him. I didn't understand that. I thought an Amazon listing was forever.  

I tried to find e-mails from him, but I only found some that didn't mention the title of his book.  Maybe we only talked about it. But I did find his obituary. It was in an e-mail from a someone I didn't know that I had never opened, presumably a friend of his who sent the obituary to those who had known him. Probably at the time I didn't want to be reminded of him, the end of our friendship still fresh in my mind, so I ignored it, the heading not mentioning the content, merely "About ---."

Died after a long illness.  Cancer, I suppose.  I wonder if, when he knew his life was over, he decided to publish his novel, letting "her" go to live on in the life he gave her in his mind so that she would live in the minds of others who might read his novel.

I don't know.  But I would like to think so. Rest in peace, Robbie, and long may your Lily live.