Tales of Future Past

Oral tales will come once more to dominate

Princes All

For the past 150 years, the middle class in the foremost of the developed nations have seen their lot rise, so that by 1900 they found themselves in a state that only the lower nobility could have enjoyed in pre-industrial times, and by 2000 they lived beyond the means of onetime kings and rajahs. It is true that they had to work, but their work consisted of that which formerly would have been the province of grand viziers, sitting around and making decisions for the rest of the world below them.

This age depended upon science, and the machines science invented and refined. Those machines in turn depended upon abundant and cheap energy. And the lifestyle of these newborn princes and viziers was further enriched by the plunder of the earth.

This age is now reaching its end. The earth’s bounty is near exhaustion, peak oil signals that energy going forward will not be abundant or cheap (unless significant advances are made in alternative forms of energy production — and unless the raw materials needed to manufacture these alternative sources are found and refined on a vast scale).

So we who were born as princes, rajahs and worked as viziers, will see the state of our fortunes recede backward along the same path we saw it rise. We will sink back into the nobility, we will fall farther into the lesser nobility, and then, maybe, we will live like peasants once more.

Work Work Work

The peasant does not work for wages. He works for his life, and gets no guarantees. He has no pension, no sick days with pay, no vacation days. There is always something else for him to do.

The peasant has little time for idle amusements such as tales. He has, however, no less a thirst for amusements and tales. For the most part, he cannot find time for them, unless he can enjoy them while doing something else at the same time.

All this occurred to me the other day, as I was repairing a screen door. The task is fairly thoughtless: it involves pressing a flexible spline into a groove along the door frame; the spline holds the screen in place. It was very slow going, partly because I had never done this before, and partly because the replacement screen was a good deal thicker than the screen the door was designed to hold, which meant that there was a lot more work involved in compressing the spline and shoving it down into the channel of the groove.

Seeing this would take some time, I though I would watch a movie in the meanwhile. I soon realized that even though repairing the screen took little enough thought (once I had settled upon a way of working it, and gotten the tools I needed) it still asked that I give it attention both with my hands and my eyes. I couldn’t watch the movie except to look up at it from time to time, which of course slowed down the work on the screen.

Attending a movie’s tale requires both the ears and the eyes. Reading a book requires eyes and hands. Neither of these forms of enjoying a tale will do for a man with a bit of a task on his hands.

Tales Told Anew

There is though one form of tale that a man can attend to while he does work such as peasants must do, and that is the oral tale. So long as the task at hand does not ask him to think deeply or figure things out, a man can do it tolerably quickly (and to his impression a lot faster) even while he hears a tale recounted orally.

Radio trumps television here. Audiobooks trump books that must be read.

The first form tales ever took, in other words, is the form they will take in future.

And so I believe every writer must learn how to tell his tales aloud, ought to compose them with such reading in mind, and ought to give first place to the oral recording of his tales, and let the text fall to second place.

(Composed on keyboard Tuesday, May 6, 2008)