The Future Perfect
Entry by: MirisB
20th February 2022
In the beginning there was a Word, they say, and light, and a garden, and a tree, and potential energy.
Arnold Hills
Feeling defeated as he watched the swallows fly south and disappear across the horizon of chimneys and into the fog, Arnold Hills began to reconsider it all. I thought I had some control. I thought I could change things. I thought my ideas were good. All these things he thought, not serially, but simultaneously. After years of oblivious engagement it had at once become clear to him that it was all predestined. His perceived accomplishments would soon be forgotten, irrelevant. The steel of his newest ship, now painted and polished, would soon turn to rust. The workmen, now strong, would become weak and die. The oil, like the coal and the trees before it, would be exhausted. He could suddenly see all these things as clearly as he could envisage the swarm of birds crossing the open water channel. And with this realisation, the weight he had carried for so long began to disappear. Defeat became resignation and to an extent, contentment. As he thought of the birds flying over Africa, he felt himself becoming smaller and wondered if he might just vanish. The mountains felt and absorbed this new mood, which was not merely confined to the mind of Mr. Hills, and observed that it seemed to be a generational phenomenon. Never sleeping, and with conversations transpiring over years and decades rather than seconds and minutes, the mountains always had a deeper wisdom and with a broader sense of time. ‘It seems that the humans are awakening’.
Girl
‘I’m vegetarian’ the Girl said, praying to the Giants of Albion. ‘But if I desperately needed energy, I would take it. I would try to take it from the sun, leaf-like, or the air, chameleon-like (said Hamlet), or the wind like a great foreboding turbine. But failing those things - and I imagine they would fail at this point in time - I would take it from a rabbit, or a squirrel, or a chicken.
‘What do you say, Giants? Will you scatter food at my feet if I do hunger and fail? If we work with you, this could come to pass. If we work against you, we will be using energy to make guns to use energy to kill and destroy and make some amount of energy forever and you will stay silent. Am I correct?’
Blavatsky
Blavatsky sighed again, from the valley, a thunderous wrench of a faintly-humorous sigh. ‘I don’t know so much about your Albion, girl, Miris, whatever your name is, except for the fervoured hotbed of London. But what happens when you reach it, hein? This green and pleasant land. How then shall you struggle?’
Hills
Arnold’s father had said ‘let there be artificial light’ and light there was, and he saw that it was good money and off Arnold went to Eton to be confused about his life’s purpose forever more blinking always in the artificial light and searching for reality. And Walther Nernst said ‘let there be light’ and there was incandescence glowering, 800-fold in 1900 in Paris but selling out to the Americans as usual. And still the train advanced and still he Clement both could and couldn’t think. I wrote something here, artificial light made you read it here thousands of miles away...go away America, stop colluding on time, we are closer to Germany than you know.
Nernst
Shortly after Clement Mackrow’s unfortunate and untimely passing, and just before the war, Professor Nernst came from Germany to London to tell us all about the Theory of the Solid State. He brought with him the latest ideas of light, energy, entropy, and matter. They were contemporary ideas at the time and they have not become obsolete in the intervening century. He presented his work, Einstein’s work, Planck’s work- all that was built upon the foundation of European knowledge developed by the likes of Newton, and Leibniz, Thompson and Maxwell, Clausius and Carnot. When he spoke of the cohesiveness of the Solid State he was referring to elemental matter. Diamond, aluminium, silver. He spoke of the bonds, of the relative strength of the molecular bonds, and energy required to separate pieces from the whole. Did he realise, did his audience realise, that the solid state of Europe was about to be torn to pieces by the energy of coal, or steel forged into ships and guns? Europe is of course not a crystalline solid. But everyone already knew that the bonds of the continent were not so strong as to withstand fragmentation. Through the endless wars over the course of centuries it had cracked, broken, and reassembled countless times, forming new permutations of culture and cartography with each new decade. But Nernst now spoke of permanent separation and the annihilation of matter. With enough energy this had been shown to be possible. With the energy of coal and oil and scientific knowledge, was it now possible to permanently fragment the European continent? We know now that all prior rearrangements had been low energy exercises in comparison to the war that was to come, and the war that was to follow that war. Through the extrapolation and continuance of the work of these great scientists, we know now that we can not only fragment the whole into parts, into molecules, but we can also release potential energy and fragment the molecule into oblivion. If we imagine that nation states are analogous to the solid states that Professor Nernst spoke, it is clear that the postwar coalescence of Europe, into the solid state of the European Union, is not as strong as we once thought it was. The solid state of the US is not so strong, nor the UN. These solid states cannot be taken for granted, and although nations and politics do not behave as elemental matter, these institutions are still subject to laws of entropy and will decay unless energy and effort is properly expended to further their existence. When it comes to the world as we know it, energy can be used to destroy or create. We can control our environment, to an extent, with focused efforts, and prevent the decay of institutions and order.
O Nernst-lamp, jack-o-lantern on demand. What makes you glow? Creating order here with your light. Do you create disorder somewhere else?
***
Arnold Hills
Feeling defeated as he watched the swallows fly south and disappear across the horizon of chimneys and into the fog, Arnold Hills began to reconsider it all. I thought I had some control. I thought I could change things. I thought my ideas were good. All these things he thought, not serially, but simultaneously. After years of oblivious engagement it had at once become clear to him that it was all predestined. His perceived accomplishments would soon be forgotten, irrelevant. The steel of his newest ship, now painted and polished, would soon turn to rust. The workmen, now strong, would become weak and die. The oil, like the coal and the trees before it, would be exhausted. He could suddenly see all these things as clearly as he could envisage the swarm of birds crossing the open water channel. And with this realisation, the weight he had carried for so long began to disappear. Defeat became resignation and to an extent, contentment. As he thought of the birds flying over Africa, he felt himself becoming smaller and wondered if he might just vanish. The mountains felt and absorbed this new mood, which was not merely confined to the mind of Mr. Hills, and observed that it seemed to be a generational phenomenon. Never sleeping, and with conversations transpiring over years and decades rather than seconds and minutes, the mountains always had a deeper wisdom and with a broader sense of time. ‘It seems that the humans are awakening’.
Girl
‘I’m vegetarian’ the Girl said, praying to the Giants of Albion. ‘But if I desperately needed energy, I would take it. I would try to take it from the sun, leaf-like, or the air, chameleon-like (said Hamlet), or the wind like a great foreboding turbine. But failing those things - and I imagine they would fail at this point in time - I would take it from a rabbit, or a squirrel, or a chicken.
‘What do you say, Giants? Will you scatter food at my feet if I do hunger and fail? If we work with you, this could come to pass. If we work against you, we will be using energy to make guns to use energy to kill and destroy and make some amount of energy forever and you will stay silent. Am I correct?’
Blavatsky
Blavatsky sighed again, from the valley, a thunderous wrench of a faintly-humorous sigh. ‘I don’t know so much about your Albion, girl, Miris, whatever your name is, except for the fervoured hotbed of London. But what happens when you reach it, hein? This green and pleasant land. How then shall you struggle?’
Hills
Arnold’s father had said ‘let there be artificial light’ and light there was, and he saw that it was good money and off Arnold went to Eton to be confused about his life’s purpose forever more blinking always in the artificial light and searching for reality. And Walther Nernst said ‘let there be light’ and there was incandescence glowering, 800-fold in 1900 in Paris but selling out to the Americans as usual. And still the train advanced and still he Clement both could and couldn’t think. I wrote something here, artificial light made you read it here thousands of miles away...go away America, stop colluding on time, we are closer to Germany than you know.
Nernst
Shortly after Clement Mackrow’s unfortunate and untimely passing, and just before the war, Professor Nernst came from Germany to London to tell us all about the Theory of the Solid State. He brought with him the latest ideas of light, energy, entropy, and matter. They were contemporary ideas at the time and they have not become obsolete in the intervening century. He presented his work, Einstein’s work, Planck’s work- all that was built upon the foundation of European knowledge developed by the likes of Newton, and Leibniz, Thompson and Maxwell, Clausius and Carnot. When he spoke of the cohesiveness of the Solid State he was referring to elemental matter. Diamond, aluminium, silver. He spoke of the bonds, of the relative strength of the molecular bonds, and energy required to separate pieces from the whole. Did he realise, did his audience realise, that the solid state of Europe was about to be torn to pieces by the energy of coal, or steel forged into ships and guns? Europe is of course not a crystalline solid. But everyone already knew that the bonds of the continent were not so strong as to withstand fragmentation. Through the endless wars over the course of centuries it had cracked, broken, and reassembled countless times, forming new permutations of culture and cartography with each new decade. But Nernst now spoke of permanent separation and the annihilation of matter. With enough energy this had been shown to be possible. With the energy of coal and oil and scientific knowledge, was it now possible to permanently fragment the European continent? We know now that all prior rearrangements had been low energy exercises in comparison to the war that was to come, and the war that was to follow that war. Through the extrapolation and continuance of the work of these great scientists, we know now that we can not only fragment the whole into parts, into molecules, but we can also release potential energy and fragment the molecule into oblivion. If we imagine that nation states are analogous to the solid states that Professor Nernst spoke, it is clear that the postwar coalescence of Europe, into the solid state of the European Union, is not as strong as we once thought it was. The solid state of the US is not so strong, nor the UN. These solid states cannot be taken for granted, and although nations and politics do not behave as elemental matter, these institutions are still subject to laws of entropy and will decay unless energy and effort is properly expended to further their existence. When it comes to the world as we know it, energy can be used to destroy or create. We can control our environment, to an extent, with focused efforts, and prevent the decay of institutions and order.
O Nernst-lamp, jack-o-lantern on demand. What makes you glow? Creating order here with your light. Do you create disorder somewhere else?
***
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