Thursday 20 April 2000

Pic of the day: Waiting for spring ... Nature endures the protracted chill, biding its time.

The Easter holiday is upon us. Here in the nominally Christian nation of Norway, practically everything is closed on the holy days, which here are Thursday, Friday, Sunday and Monday. Saturday, the Sabbath, is ironically open for business. :) This is fine for us who don't place great importance on days and seasons and new moons. We do not need to fill the fridge even more than it already is. (I guess I could throw out those things who are more than a month old. Or at least two.)

A number of people deplore the Easter celebration: Either because it is Christian, or because it is not Christian enough. But most anyone is happy to have a few days off from work. (Work sucks, as you know. It is God's will that work shall suck, according to Genesis. Or perhaps it is God's will that all shall be farmers. It's sometimes hard to know exactly what Genesis means.) Anyway, here in Norway the stereotype Easter means going to the mountains and trudging around on ski there. As if people had not been grumbling for weeks or months about how cold it is and stuff, and then off they go to chase the snow when it disappears. The next time Norway applies for membership in the European Union (we have done that twice before and then reconsidered) - the next time, I bet they won't let us in. (Not that this is a bad thing.) I mean, who wants 4 million complete nutcakes within their borders anyway?

So anyway, last night I did not go up in the mountains to freeze my ass off, not to mention paint it blue, green and yellow by trying to stand on my skis down the slopes. I did what I do best: Played computer games. And knowing that I would not go to work today, I played till well over 3 in the night. Of course, I was only barely conscious some of that time. Certainly not conscious enough to wake up and decide that I had played enough Alpha Centauri for one night.

To be honest, I'm playing at the easiest level. This is the first time I play this far into Alpha Centauri - I made a couple trial starts when I learned the game - and I am fascinated. The game starts out very like Civilization II (also by Brian Reynolds and with Sid Meier as brand name and inspiration). But as it develops, things slowly start to diverge. The native wildlife, the Mindworms and their watery brethren, behaved suspiciously like Barbarians at first. There was even the Isle of the Deep sailing up to the coast near your cities and setting ashore a couple of Mindworm boils, just like the barbarian ships used to set ashore units in Civ. And the native plant life, the Xenofungus, barred your way and gave little or nothing back, like swamp and jungle or perhaps even mountain terrain in Civ. So the obvious thing to do would be to put your Formers on the terrain and remove the Fungus and make farms and mines and stuff. Eh, no.

In Civ, the barbarians eventually disappear if you keep your area civilized. In Alpha Centauri it's the other way around. The planet grows weary of you hogging its surface, and strikes back. The more aggressively you terraform it, the more ticked off it becomes, and one day it suddenly blows up parts of your carefully terraformed terrain, returning it to wild fungus landscape. And out of the red fungus comes hordes of enraged worms. That is, of course, unless you're Lady Deirdre Skye.

It seems at this point obvious to me where Reynolds' sympathies lie. Deirdre and her Gaian faction are obviously right, and the rest are obviously wrong. The planet really is a semi-sentient organism, and the obvious thing to do is to win its friendship. Research xenobiology like mad, make "secret projects" (not related to Victoria, these are the Centauri-name for Wonders of the World) and city improvements that relate to forest and wildlife. Hybrid forests and Centauri preserves are good examples. As soon as possible, phase out farms and mines and rely on forests and fungus instead. As the Planet grows to like you, the fungus squares will give plenty of food, minerals and energy. You are essentially adopted into the native ecology.

Right now, I've reached the point in the game where I actually plant fungus when I found a new city. And the Voice of the Planet has warned me of a coming cataclysm that may wipe all human life from its surface, unless I can convince it to stay its hand (or ideally spare my cities and clean the floor with the rest, hee hee). Problem is, in a multiplayer game I would probably not have survived this far. The ecologists get a penalty to growth, and their military is not impressive either. Still, I'm pretty sure I know whose side the game designers are in their heart. :)

Speaking of voices: In days of yore, each tribe had a shaman or some such. Witch doctor, noad, whatever they were called. The shaman was a living portal between the everyday world and the spirit world. I have pondered if this is related to some of the more severe mental illnesses today. I mean, anyone can have psychological problems at some time, but some seem to be destined for serious psychosis. A genetic disposition seems to be part of it, though it is not quite as simple as hair color.

Now observe that we humans have spread virtually all over the planet. Some times there have been really narrow population bottlenecks: A study from a UK-based research institute claim that most Europeans can trace their lineage back to one of seven ur-mothers who lived nearly 50 000 years ago. The settling of the Americas or Australia was probably also done by one or a few small teams, rather than whole nations on the move: This explains why they even look different, not to mention have different resistances to various diseases. But despite this, the insane are everywhere. Not quite to the same proportion everywhere, but pretty near. My conclusion is that they were important to survival.

I think that at least some of the people we today consider insane, carry a heritage that made their ancestors natural born shamans: Able to hear the voices from beyond, or rather from the deeper layers of the subconscious, the layers that regulate not just a single person's life but also the life of the tribe. Born with a special opening to this realm of myth and symbol, their fate was probably hard even then. But some of them, or borderline cases perhaps, managed to harness this portal to the subconscious. They became shamans, mediators of the spirit world.

Today, society is so thoroughly regulated that there is hardly a role for shamans any more, least of all insane shamans. If you want to be a shaman now, you have to have higher education in shamanism or something. But I wonder ... are the forces of primitive mythologism still active under the ordered, "terraformed" society? May they perhaps some day explode through the trappings of civilization, reverting large tracts to chaos like the xenofungus blooms of Alpha Centauri?

Or is it possible, now that neither shamans nor prophets are allowed to warn us, that their work has subtly been taken over by others? I have read that poets and other creative artists more often than others suffer from certain forms of psychosis, or have relatives who do. Meaning that they may carry the shaman genes. And who know who the Voice of the Planet will find to speak through in the future? Perhaps game designers? Or online journal writers?

Took a walk today. It is chilly outside, though not quite freezing. You would not think it is soon May. But I can see the trees curling up their leaves inside the buds. Give us one day of heat, and the forest will explode in green, as suddenly as the fungal blooms of Alpha Centauri...

A less welcome flowering of native wildlife is happening in my left sinus and nasal passage. I can feel the recurring infection there is coming back, as the air I breathe now feels uncomfortably cold as it passes in under my left eye, and it makes my eye feel cold and watery. Usually after some hours this developes into a moderately painful infection, with some feeling of pressure. Then after a day or two, it rots. I was just nearing the end of the previous rotting stage. Gah. I can live with this, though, as long as it does not turn more serious in the middle of the holiday. The only thing that can break this cycle seems to be enough sleep. Yeah, right. Show me someone who gets enough sleep, enough money, and enough love - and knows it. I'm not sure you'll find them on THIS planet...