“That’s very true. I’d say it’s our impression that they didn’t have anything in mind. It’s not that we don’t understand it, it’s that there was nothing there to be understood.”
“This is the parallelism to the birth of the universe, Jared. We can’t understand what was going on before the birth of the universe, because nothing was going on, and we can’t understand what people had in mind before the birth of our culture because we imagine that they had nothing in mind.”
“That’s the way it seems, yes.”
“This is of course another result of the Great Forgetting. We’ve forgotten what people had in mind before our revolution.”
I said, “I guess I still don’t get it. Why is it important to know what people had in mind before our agricultural revolution?”
B sighed. “There are some teaching problems that can only be solved by parables, and I guess this is one of them. Let me think for a minute.”
I looked around at the others, but they were both keeping their eyes and their thoughts to themselves. We were at this moment just pulling into Frankfurt. B and I were sitting across from each other at the window side of the car, and with nothing better to do, I scanned the faces of passengers waiting to board and was surprised to see a familiar one. The train had glided past him by the time I remembered who it was. It was Herr Reichmann, the elderly gentleman who had advised me to drop Charles Atterley in favor of a person scheduled to speak at Der Bau—who of course turned out to be B. I was thinking vaguely of the possibility of introducing B and Herr Reichmann to each other when B began his tale.
The Weavers
“It’s well known,” B said, “that every piece of hand-woven cloth has an element of magic in it, which is the special magic of its weaver. This magic doesn’t necessarily die with the individual weaver but rather can be passed on from generation to generation and shared among families and even whole nations, so that one who is sensitive to such things can tell in a moment whether a piece of cloth was woven in Ireland or France or Virginia or Bavaria. This is true on every planet in the universe where weaving is practiced, and it was true on the planet I’d like to tell you about right now.
“It happened on this planet that a weaver named Nixt came along who was a strange compound of genius and insanity, violence and artistry, ruthlessness and charm—and this was the magic he wove into his cloth, and those who wore garments made from it became just like the weaver. The weaver was quickly renowned, and everyone wanted clothes imbued with his magic. Wearing such clothes, artists created masterpieces, merchants got rich, leaders extended their power, soldiers triumphed in battle, and lovers left their rivals in the dust. Almost immediately it was noticed that Nixtian magic had some drawbacks. It was so powerful that it tended to devour what it touched. Instead of lasting for centuries, artists’ masterpieces tended to disintegrate after only decades. Instead of lasting for generations, merchants’ riches tended to melt away in a single lifetime. Instead of lasting for decades, leaders’ power tended to ebb away in years. Instead of lasting for years, lovers’ charms tended to pall in months. No one cared. Artists wanted masterpieces, merchants wanted money, leaders wanted power, and lovers wanted conquests.
“Naturally every weaver in the land wanted to weave with Nixtian magic, and Nixt himself was soon so extravagantly wealthy that he was glad to share it with them. Within a generation, every single weaver in the realm was practicing only this one kind of magic and all others had been forgotten. From swaddling clothes to shrouds, everyone in the land wore clothes woven with Nixtian magic—and, as you can easily imagine, this nation almost overnight became preeminent among the nations of the world. There wasn’t a thing to stop them from taking over the entire planet, and they proceeded to do so in just a few generations, and in every land they conquered, weavers who were practicing other kinds of magic either learned Nixtian magic or they took up some other occupation.
“The spread of Nixtian magic revealed another of its drawbacks. Its exhaustive qualities seemed to increase exponentially. When twice as many masterpieces were created with Nixtian magic, they disintegrated four times as fast. When three times as many merchants were getting rich with Nixtian magic, their money melted away nine times as fast. No one liked it, of course, but artists still wanted masterpieces, merchants still wanted wealth, leaders still wanted power, and so on.
“Within a thousand years, every weaver on the planet knew only one kind of magic and all others had been forgotten. Within another thousand years, it was forgotten that any other kind of magic had ever been practiced in weaving, and people soon ceased to think of it as magic at all; it was just part of the process of weaving, and for all they knew, this had always been the case. In other words, they experienced a Great Forgetting of their own. They eventually came to view Nixtian magic as just part of weaving—just the way people of our culture eventually came to view totalitarian agriculture as just part of being human.
“The trouble was that once every man, woman, and child on the planet was wearing clothes woven with Nixtian magic, the exhaustive power of this magic was operating at such a high level that masterpieces were lasting only weeks—and no one wanted them. Fortunes were made and routinely lost within days, and merchants lived in a state of suicidal depression. Governments and whole political systems came and went like seasons of the year, and no one even bothered to learn the names of presidents or prime ministers. Romances and love affairs seldom lasted for more than two or three hours.
“It was at this point of total systemic burnout that some enterprising paleoanthropologists happened quite fortuitously to discover that weaving had existed long before the time of Nixt, and that people had for hundreds of thousands of years been very happy to wear clothes woven with other kinds of magic. And amazingly enough—even without Nixtian magic—artists had still occasionally produced masterpieces, merchants had gotten rich, leaders had become powerful, and lovers had made conquests. And, more important, these achievements had, by modern standards, been durable to an almost unthinkable degree.
“Terrifically excited, these paleoanthropologists brought their discovery to the attention of their department head and asked to be released from other duties so they could study ancient weavings and possibly even rediscover the magic employed in their production. ‘I guess I don’t get it,’ the department head said, after patiently listening to their proposals. ‘Why is it important to know what weavers were doing before the age of Nixt?’”
Now the parable is this
“I assume you see the parallels to what we’ve been talking about,” B said. “I believe your words were, ‘Why is it important to know what people had in mind before our agricultural revolution?’ Do you still need an answer to that question?”
“I wish I could say no,” I told him, “but I honestly can’t. Here is my problem. I can see what idea motivated us, because I can see what we accomplished. But I can’t see what idea motivated our ancestors, because I can’t see what they accomplished. As far as I can see, they didn’t accomplish anything. Show me what they accomplished, then maybe I can believe there was an idea motivating them.”
“What did the pre-Nixtian weavers in my parable accomplish?”
“You mean, between the time their race came into being and the era of Nixt?”
“That’s right,” B said.
“I guess they learned how to
weave.”
“Exactly—and not an inconsiderable accomplishment, surely. Our ancestors accomplished something similar in the first three million years of human life: They learned how to live like humans—how to live well, how to have a great life. They developed a lifestyle that was uniquely human, entirely different from all other primate lifestyles, a lifestyle for creatures capable of poetry, philosophy, music, dance, mythology, art, and invention on a wide technological front.”
“And is there an idea behind that?”
“I think you’ll find there is. In any case, that’s the challenge that confronts me, Jared: to reveal to you this idea. Right now I know it seems to you that all this—all this beauty and catastrophe of ours—was bound to happen. It was somehow in the very fabric of humanity to become what we’ve become, in the way that it’s in the very fabric of the caterpillar to become a butterfly.”
“Yes, that is the way it seems to me.”
“Someday, if I succeed, you’ll see that humanity was no more bound to become us than it was bound to become Gebusi. The people of our culture don’t represent the final stage of human development any more than the Gebusi do.”
“I hope you do succeed in that,” I said. “I really do.”