Okay, it's a dreary cold winter day, the world locked in snow and ice at least up here on the roof of Nebraska, and I got bored. Nobody's around because there's going to be something on television later today, ho-hum. It's been twenty days since I last had a cigarette, There's nothing to do here; the house is immaculately neat and clean, although if hard-pressed for some action, I guess I could scrub the ceilings or go outside and change the air in the automobile tires.
Instead, I ordered a carry-out pizza from the convenience store in town.
I was reading a collection of short stories and commentaries by Vladimir Voinovich, from when he was a dissident writer in the socialist paradises of the workers and peasants during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, until the socialists kicked him out of the Soviet Union. (Since then, he's prospered and flourished, although alas he is getting up there in years.....seventy-nine of them so far.)
There is one piece,
A Barrel-Shaped World, probably from the 1960s, in which he described the "good" Soviet citizens, the compliant ones, and one is struck by the similarity between them and the primitives of Skins' island today. It reads better in its original Russian than in this English translation.
One time I spent the summer in a dacha outside Moscow, and apart from doing some writing and making a failed attempt at growing some of the more guileless vegetables, like radishes, I engaged in idle observations of various life forms.
Uh huh.
That's what franksolich does too, and I suspect many more than just I do that.
On the grounds of our dacha there was an iron barrel, half full of water, long since stagnant, whose level was nearly constant due to the alternation of sunny and rainy days. During the summer some sort of swimming beetles bred in that foul water. They kept darting across the surface and diving deeply for some prey invisible to me. The life of those beetles struck me as extremely mysterious. What did they all live on? How had they or their larvae survived if the barrel had frozen solid in the winter?
Uh huh.
And thus the DUmpster's psychological, sociological, and anthropological fascination with the primitives.
Still, they had survived, somehow been fruitful and multiplied, living on something or other. But what if these beetles possessed the faculty of thought? What would their idea of the world around them be?
Hold it, hold it, hold it.
It's taking a while to grasp the absurd concept of the primitives having the faculty of thought.
Something like this: the world is barrel-shaped and half full of stagnant water. Stagnant is better than fresh (which sometimes falls from above), because it provides an ideal medium for movement, retains heat, and contains an assortment of nutritious elements. This world's frontiers are easily accessible, circular, and created of some hard substance.
Well, damn, if that didn't describe Skins's island to a tee.
But beyond the limits of that stable and intelligible world there obviously exist other worlds where things are not so stable, where darkness and light alternate. When it is light out there, something round and hot sails overhead, and when it is dark, shiny, predatory beetles come creeping out. That other world is much worse than this--it must be--because it is from there we get the scorching heat and cold. And sometimes things flash and rumble up there.
i.e., the primitive fear of the wider vaster real world.
We are born, we live, and we die in a barrel. We do not know what happens outside the limits of the barrel and cannot remember how we ended up in it. No matter how different our backgrounds, after years in that barrel, all come to have a shared view of the world: it is barrel-shaped.
Uh huh.
Those who live in the barrel have their own conception of what is good and evil; there are saints among them and villains as well. The most intelligent of them suspect that most likely other worlds exist, that there may be many other such barrels, where life has somehow taken different form.
But the primitives, having no imagination and curiosity and courage, prefer to stay safely in the barrel.
The most freedom-loving ones try to escape; they climb up the barrel's rusty sides, fall back down, then climb up again.
What's true of the beetles is not quite true of the primitive, but one lets that observation pass.
And suddenly, a new, never-seen, and many-colored world opens before them--grass, flowers, animals, fish, birds, butterflies, and dragonflies. There is water, solid ground, and air, and each creature moves as best it can in those three elements--some fly, some swim, some crawl. A boundless world.
But everyone must obtain his own food, and everyone has to take care to not be trampled, bitten, or swallowed. Good God, what's going on here? Quick, back in the barrel!
There are no flowers, no grass, in the barrel, and the food is meager, but life is peaceful.
