The Importance of Being Human
[My thanks to Marc, Kathryn, and Julia from WLAC; and Tricia,
Once, not too long ago in terms of the age of the universe, European humans believed that all planets and celestial bodies revolved around the earth and that man was of paramount importance in the scheme of things. This idea was challenged in the 16th century by Nicolas Copernicus and things haven’t been the same since. But the central importance of humankind is not an easy idea to shed – we retain some hope that there is a meaning to the universe and that human beings are somehow important. Modern SF often challenges that idea. In The Pride of Chanur we saw how human beings were unknown until the kif captured Tully and his colleagues, and even by the end of the book humans are relegated to a remote corner of Compact Space.
With the two stories we read last week, we are back on earth in two near future scenarios, with a look at the impermanence of our human identities.
“The Best Christmas Ever” by James Patrick Kelly:
This story takes us to an after-the-disaster world – with a twist. The first sentence “Aunty Em's man was not doing well at all” does not hint that we are in a future world. But we will see later that “Aunty Em’s man” doesn’t mean what we think it does — referring not to a boyfriend but to the man assigned to Aunty Em’s care. And within the first paragraph we will see a reference to something that we know did not happen in our present world, the
We don’t know exactly why Albert and Mrs. Marelli are the last human beings–- there are references to a plague, ruins, and contamination -- When later in the story Albert wants to start a garden, the seeds he is given “were possibly contaminated and might not germinate.”
The twist to this story, and what makes this primarily speculative fiction rather than extrapolation from our own troubled present, is the existence of the biops. Biological entities with shape-changing abilities, who communicate with each other by beaming “interactions,” they clearly feel it is their duty to take care of the two remaining humans and to preserve the records of the almost extinct human race.
The story is told through the perspective of Auntie Em who observes the last man Albert carefully, trying to understand him. With her incomplete knowledge of human emotions, she often gets him wrong: “The man needed cookies, he needed presents, he was absolutely aching for a sleigh filled with Christmas cheer.” In her misguided efforts our present time is cleverly satirized. Human beings are consumers, so the biops take Albert to Walmart. Human beings like holidays, so let’s have Christmas every few months. That the biops do not know very much about human traditions is evident when the girlfriend biop calls the wiseman on the fake camel the King of the Shepherds. And the talking animals? Perhaps the biops have seen too much television where “[o]n the screen the Jolly Green Giant rained peas down on capering elves.” It must be hard for an intelligent species to guess at what human culture was like. "On Dasher, now Dancer, now Comet and Nixon”?
We aren’t certain where the biops come from. Albert “lived at the edge of the biop compound, away from the bustle of the spaceport and the accumulatorium with its bulging galleries of authentic human artifacts and the vat where new biops were budded off the master template.” The fact that biop compound, vat and accumulatorium (like “biops,” one of those SF neologisms I warned you about) are in proximity to the “bustling space port” --and that the space port is “bustling” instead of deserted -- suggests that biops are aliens who have come and are still coming to earth like eager anthropologists to preserve what they can of human civilization.
But the biops are changing: “They were all so much more emotional than they had been when they were first budded.” Thus the girlfriend biop is “desperate” when Albert doesn’t want to see her and his current depression is very difficult for Auntie Em and all the rest of them.
The story shows how much Aunty Em and the other biops in her “team” try to make to make Albert’s last years happy, much as one might try to please a child. Auntie Em provides “Bertie” with Christmas out of season, a shopping spree at the ruins of a Walmart stocked with old human artifacts from the accumulatorium, an ever-changing girlfriend, pets who talk, pals who bring gifts -- everything but “real” human companionship.
There seems to be only one other human being left alive, Mrs. Marelli, a woman in her late sixties, who may or may not be suffering from dementia or traumatic stress syndrome, much like Tillie in “A Flock of Birds.” Mrs. Marelli is “always upset” at seeing Albert, so they are not given many opportunities to interact. When they meet at the Walmart shopping expedition, she is busy smashing light bulbs –“just practicing,” she says with a sly look, one of several covertly hostile remarks that the two humans make about the biops -- and then she turns to that symbol of American womanhood, the Barbie doll:
The woman threw the doll at [‘her” biop, Dr. Watson] and picked up another. This was a brunette that was wearing only the top of her hot pink bathing suit. The woman jabbed at the button.
"It's time to get ready for my date with Ken," said the doll in a raspy voice.
The surreal comedy of the Walmart expedition comes to an end when we see that Mrs. Marelli knows she is being manipulated, when she sees through the well-meaning but false cheer of the Auntie Em persona:
"You're following us." The woman snatched the Barbie away from her."Who are you?"
"You know me, Mrs. Marelli. I'm Aunty Em."
"That's crazy." The woman's laugh was like a growl. "I'm not crazy."
But she tells Albert, "Just pretend.That's all we can do, isn't it?"
But pretense cannot last:
"I'm so lonely, Daddy." The last woman on earth began to cry.
The man opened his arms to her and they clung to each other, rocking back and forth. "I know," said the man, over and over. "I know."
At this point, the story is no longer amusing. It is ironic that in trying to protect the humans from harm and provide them with everything the biops think they want, the humans become increasingly depressed. Significantly, the possession of consumer goods doesn’t alleviate depression -- as in real life. Healing can only begin when truth is told, when the biops stop falsifying reality. When the girlfriend biop admits she is not Albert’s wife Kathy –“I’m no one you know” she says-- he asks for more truth: "’Kathy's dead,’ said the man. ‘Everybody's dead except for me and poor Ellen Marelli. That's right, isn't it?’"
This question affects the biops emotionally: “the girlfriend sank to her knees, rested her head on the coffee table, and began to cry. Only biops didn't cry, or at least no biop that Aunty Em had ever heard of...Aunty Em felt something swell inside of her and climb her throat until she thought she might burst. If this was what the man felt all the time, it was no wonder he was tempted to drink himself into insensibility."
When Aunty Em tells Albert that he is the last man, he thanks her: “’Sometimes I can't believe that it really happened. Or else I forget. You make it easy to forget. Maybe you think that's good for me. But I need to know who I am.’”
So do we all.
As in “Blood Child,” a gun plays an important role. Albert wants one. When Auntie Em finally does give him one, she neglects to give him bullets. But the girlfriend biop supplies them -- to Auntie Em’s chagrin.
Auntie Em had noted earlier that the girlfriend biop was behaving strangely: “Aunty Em thought she would have to do something about the girlfriend, but she didn't know what exactly. If she sent her back to the vat and replaced her with a new biop, the man would surely notice. The girlfriend and the man had been quite close before the man had slipped into his funk. She knew things about him that even Aunty Em didn't know.”
This sounds like a relationship!
The girlfriend biop in the Kathy body is the catalyst. When she is finally honest with Albert –-and cries—and Auntie Em also feels Albert’s sadness, it is the turning point. Albert has been making an effort to be kinder to his caretakers and now he capitulates:
"I really appreciate that you trust me with this gun. And these bullets too. That's got to be scary…" The girlfriend watched him scoop up the bullets. “Kathy, I don't need these just now. Would you please keep them for me?”
The girlfriend has become human, and Albert is reconciled to his life as it is, entrusting her with the bullets but also trusting she would give them to him if asked. And he calls her Kathy. Truth and trust win out.
At the end of the story we are told that “over the years” the biops and Albert universally agreed that this was “the best Christmas ever.” The subheadings numbering “Interactions” have been a clue that what we are reading are “beamed” and presumably preserved conversations between the biops and the last man on earth. The phrase: “over the years” pulls us forward from the action of the story into a future where the man no longer exists. Humanity is extinct.
But the biops are still there, changed by their encounter with Albert, going forward into the future, not Frankenstein monsters or alien predators, but intelligences, now capable of emotion, who will hopefully do a better job than their predecessors.
“I Hold My Father’s Paws’ by David D. Levine
In the future world of this story, human beings can choose whether to remain human or not, much as today people who are strongly motivated can change their physical appearance or even their gender—and in this way the story is an extrapolation from our present culture. Though people who choose to “transition” are in the minority, it is an option for the discontent. We hear not only of the doggy father in the story but of snakes and Siamese cats. Actually, while the technology for altering appearance to resemble animals is relatively recent, there are many ancient tales of creatures who are part human, part animal.
The story alludes, perhaps playfully, to ancient myths: Jason in Greek mythology was the hero, raised by a centaur --half man, half horse, who quested in search of the golden fleece, the wool of a sacred ram; Noah in the Bible was the patriarch who brought the animals two by two onto the ark and saved them from the flood. The sphinx is a mythological creature with a lion’s body and the head of a human being, a fitting description of Jason’s father after his first surgery: “A dog with his father's head.” It is also how Jason sees his father when he tries to draw him:
His father sat with his hind legs drawn up beneath him and his forelegs stretched straight out in front. “You look like the Sphinx,” Jason said.[....] Jason was left with a half-finished sketch of a sphinx with his father's face.”
The sphinx has long been associated with inscrutability, with the riddle asked of the hero Oedipus as he made his way into
The question of Noah’s identity is paramount when Jason sees him after his first operation:
He was a magnificent animal. He was a pathetic freak. He was a marvel of biotechnology. He was an arrogant icon of self-indulgence.
He was a dog.
He was Jason's father.
Jason continues trying to find out why his father would change his human identity, and the sphinx gives many different answers:
"Because I can. Because the Consti... tution gives me the right to do whatever the hell I want with my body and my money. Because I want to be pampered for the rest of my life [….] Because I don't want to make any more damn decisions.”
The most important answer is, of course, the last explanation: "I want to be free of my human mind, free of decisions [….] I'll still be me. But I'll be able to be me, instead of thinking all the time about being me."
Noah articulates the trap of being human, the inability to exist without ego, to stop the mind from brooding upon itself. That Jason is also caught in the trap is obvious in the first scene where he cringes at the question he asks the receptionist:
"Did you have a question, sir?"
"No," Jason replied, and raised his magazine, but after reading the same paragraph three times without remembering a word he set it down again. "Actually, yes. Um, I wanted to ask you... ah... are you... transitioning?" The word landed on the soft tailored-grass carpet of the waiting room, and Jason wished he could pick it up again, stuff it into his pocket, and leave. Just leave, and never come back.
And a few minutes later:
“He looked down and saw that the magazine had crumpled in his hands. Awkwardly he tried to smooth it out, then gave up and slipped it back in the pile on the coffee table. They were all recent issues, and the coffee table looked like real wood. He tested it with a dirty thumbnail; real wood, all right. Then, appalled at his own action, he shifted the pile of magazines to cover the tiny scratch.”
Jason cannot "be himself." He is too busy judging himself. After a conversation with his father “[h]e sat there for a long while, feeling the knots crawl across his stomach.”
That father and son share a similar discomfort is clear when they meet shortly after the first surgery. Noah is already comfortable with his dog’s body, but not with his human mind:
Jason's father jogged into the doctor's office the next morning, his lithe new body bobbing with a smooth four-legged gait, and hopped easily up onto a carpeted platform that brought his head to the same level as Jason and the doctor. But he refused to meet Jason's eyes.
His son is equally anxious: “Jason himself sat in the doctor's leather guest chair, fully seated this time, but still not fully comfortable.”
Conflict between father and son is an age-old theme. It is suggested in the story by the photo Jason finds in a wastebasket: “a picture himself at age eight, standing between his parents. It had been torn in half, the jagged line cutting between him and his father like a lightning bolt, and crudely taped together." In the tragic Greek drama Oedipus Rex , Oedipus unwittingly kills his father Laius. The play defines what it is to be human: to act unconsciously, to do grave wrong to family members without realizing it, and then to discover it and hate oneself. In David Levine's story, the father harms the son by desertion, producing a son isolated and self-conscious like himself, and also incapable of relationship – until they are reunited. In Sophocles’s drama, Oedipus blinds himself so that he cannot see the results of his unintentional wrong. Jason’s father goes a few steps farther: “After the craniofacial procedure, his mind would be as much like a dog's as modern medicine could make it. He'd be happy, no question of that, but he wouldn't be Noah Carmelke any more.”
In ridding himself not of his eyes but of his mind, Jason’s father is released from the burden of being human (unlike Oedipus who, blind, wandered the earth for thirty years ruing his actions). And Noah finally achieves a relationship with his son: That Jason will become his father’s keeper is foreshadowed even after the first operation when “[s]ome part of him wanted to pet the furry shoulder, but he kept his hands to himself.” And again when “Jason's hand reached out -- to stroke the forehead, to ruffle the fur, he wasn't sure which -- but then it pulled back.”
Throughout their short acquaintance, Jason and his father have each pulled back in lives marked by ambivalence and lack of relationship. Finally a decision is made: “Jason's throat was so tight that he couldn't speak. But he nodded.” At the end of the story, the deed is done and tensions have been defused. Noah is no longer a sphinx: “Jason's father's face was long and furry and had a wet nose. But his head was still very round, and his eyes were still blue.” His identity problems and Jason’s are finally resolved. He is a dog, and Jason is his keeper. Noah has ended the split between human and non-human, opting for the loss of self-consciousness. He feels no ambivalence. His eyes are not shifting, not afraid to look into his son’s. They are "[t]wo deep wells of sincere, doggy love.”
Being human may not make us the center of the universe, there may be no meaning "out there." But each person needs to create his or her own answer to the riddle of identity.
Speaking of making meaning, the next part of this module contains more information about the midterm paper. Look it over and ask questions if you have them.
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