Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time

Although I've always thought of Marge Piercy, the author of Woman on the Edge of Time,  as a poet -  she is also a novelist.  This particular book is an odd and interesting novel which came out in 1976, one of a half dozen novels she wrote. According to Wikipedia it's "considered a classic of utopian "speculative" science fiction as well as a feminist classic."  (I picked this up this classic at Newtown's annual blow-out used book sale. It's a great sale!)

Woman on the Edge of Time is sort of a sci-fi tapestry woven with intricate anthropological/futurist twists, inner-landscape psychological-chatmeup, environmental philosophy and humanity.  It's not a quick read but I liked the heroine Consuelo, and felt compelled to keep reading.

Much of the plot occurs in some bleak present time in an insane asylum where regard for human rights is not in evidence and the abuse of the powerless by those with sometimes only a crumb more power, is rampant.  The other half  unfolds in fits and starts in a egalitarian argraian New England village in the far future where men and women are equals and balance in all things is important.

And it is a book that requires thinking as some aspects of the plot are not particularly obvious until you ponder them in retrospect. It's ending was not was I supposed.

And in the end it's hard to tell what really happened.  Did Consuelo save the future with her violent eposode in the present?  Was she railroaded by the power structure of patriarchy or was she really crazy?  I was also left wondering if Piercy meant to say that the end justifies the means.  Was it the 60s declaring war on what came before and perhaps what came after?

 Each reader must decide for themselves.
Woman on the Edige of Time at Google Books
Woman on the Edge of Time - Wikipedia
Woman on the Edge of Time - Amazon

NaPoWriMo #22 - Emporium of Earth Futures

Grey Heron in Bethel CT

Emporium of
Earth Futures

History is the track
of a flying planet
hurtling around a star
boisterous with life.
Where can we land?
What will we eat? How to
make a nest? Look!
In this fierce unfolding
we fit our lives into
what is already here,
nudge it with our living,
into something slightly
changed, die away into
what has already been.

- Mar Walker

For Earth Day 2010. Words used from the prompt include Emporium and Fierce.
I took this photo in Bethel CT last summer. Out of sight far in the lefthand foreground was an aeration fountain. The pond sits in front of an industrial building.

Nature's economy

I was looking out the window yesterday afternoon and noticed a big black crow on the lawn. It seemed to be watching something. Across the street in a neighbor's yard two squirrels sprinted face first down a straight tree trunk. They were moving very fast, hit the ground flat out. The first bounded across the road; the second was turned back by a car.

The lead squirrel had something in its mouth. I thought it was a hunk of  bread, and that must be what was so interesting to the crow. Then I realized the bread was wiggling, had legs and a tail. At first I thought it was a mouse, and marveled because I didn't realize squirrels were carnivorous.

When the victor squirrel got into our driveway, it stopped and started to eat the poor thing alive, opening  a bright bloody wound in its throat as it struggled. Of course I ran out yelling like a fool.  I  guess I thought it might drop its prize. As I approached I realized, this creature (whose species I had previously admired) was a cannibal. It was eating a live baby squirrel, and not a tiny infant either, a juvenile, about a quarter of his size, but still recognizable as a grey squirrel with a grey coat, white underbelly and a long but less fuzzy tail.

The crows, three at this point, were closing in too, and the squirrel leaped into nearby  tree with its poor prize clamped in its jaws. A neighbor approached and I had to explain why I was yelling.  By then I couldn't see where it went. So I went back inside the house,

Less then a minute passed and I looked out the front window. The crows had won the second round. They had the taken cannibal squirrel's meal which was now in three pieces, one bloody piece in front of each crow. And the crows were polishing off their meal. Nature is not gentle, but in its stark economy there is a great horrific beauty.  Trust me - it's not  the invention of a loving kindly god. I'd hope as a species we can have as a goal to be kinder  than nature.

I still don't know if the squirrel chasing the cannibal was the mother squirrel or a bystander like the crows, who was trying to steal dinner.

Eco-technic Con – a poem about pollution from Inverse Origami

Will technology and science save us from our busy productive, mess-making lives? From our decaying infrastructure, from our out of control technologies?  Or are the things we love the root of the problem? Nobody wants to give it all up.... The poem:

Slick streets,

Black-macadam hydroplane.

Slick world,

screaming 'round death's edge on two wheels.

Curling carburetor exhalations,

a boiler's breathing,

a flatulence of furnaces,

white-metal bones empty of marrow:

cooling coils empty, cans empty,

underground tanks empty,

jugs and jars and

50-gallon drums, all empty.

Dip these parts in the sonic washer,

clean them with a soft brush

the bosses used to say, and

when the fluid begins to cloud.

Pour it out in the parking lot.

Hey you want a job or what?

It won’t hurt a thing, take my word...

My well is near here.

Please don't ask me.

This stuff makes me cough.

Please don't ask me.

But I got a mortgage.

I got kids who need to eat,

Kids who need to play Nintendo

in air-conditioned peace,

who need lobster bisque in Lennox bowls,

compact disc players, Spandex cycle pants

and grad school.

Drink this cup of poison, they say.

Drink it now or we'll find somebody who will.

Breath this. Breath it now

or we'll get somebody to do it cheaper.

The health plan will be canceled any day,

two days before you retire,

the day you're laid off.

YOU KNOW HOW IT IS, NOTHING PERSONAL.

Yes, we know how it is

but...OSHA inspects next week...

WAIT! DON'T POUR IT DOWN THE SINK.

WE'LL CUT YOUR PAY. WE'LL LAY SOME PEOPLE OFF.

WE'LL RAISE PRICES, WE'LL GET RID OF IT NICE AND LEGAL.

WE'LL ADVERTISE AS:

``POISONS INC, THE ENVIRONMENTAL COMPANY.''

Nervous men,

50-gallon drums and pickup trucks

cruise at 2 a.m. in the rain,

drizzling an inconspicuous trail,

down the interstate,

down narrow roads,

past the shacks,

past the housing projects,

past exclusive homes,

in the best secluded suburbs,

Hey — everybody share the risk,

after all they own it,

or they want to own it,

or they work there

or they want to work there,

or they buy the products

or they want to buy the products...

So we hide its byproducts

under a layer of grass

under a layer of dirt

under a layer of clay

under a layer of plastic

on top of two plastic liners

in a concrete pit, then

siphon off the seepage in Medusan pipes.

Industrial parks border the universal swamp,

jaundiced liver of earth, a new stew,

the complex primordial ooze, the

embryonic fluids for the chips we love,

(286, 386, 486 Pentium a series

like generations of children.

so many megahertzs strait to hell,

Zero wait state, dual pipe streams)

brought to you by the Game boys

and the home boys, the valley boys

down in Santa Clara.

And software is a clean industry, flashy

and fun, games and elegant logic so clean.

but first the hardware.

Brains, born in steaming sulfuric

on Germanium and silicone platters round as sums

shining with gold 'n aluminum 'evap'

Layer on layer on layer,

mapped in photoresist purgatory,

etched deep in Hydrofluoric hell

cleaned in brown porridge thick as shit,

stinking and simmering under reverse-flow hoods

Down in the clean room,

Down on the line,

Get me some B-12 injections in time.

50 to the inch where the acid's hit...

Down in the clean room

we all are sanctified

in our pure white robes

in our pure white hats,

The priests of this new theology,

offer chemical sacrifice

asking mysterious questions.

How many circuits

can dance on the head of a pin?

And every industry and all their customers hold mass,

celebrate the efficacious ritual sacrifice:

drink the blood of the present,

eat the flesh of the future.

The makers of batteries,

the metal platers, the printers, the copy machine makers,

the chemical makers, the makers of paints and paper,

of printed circuit boards,

the molders of plastic, the industrial opticians,

the weapons makers, the television makers, the stereo makers,

university researchers,

the private inventors,

tinkers in basements,

artists in attics,

the drivers of cars, the cleaners of ovens and toilets,

the removers of spots,

the strippers of paints, the strippers of life...

bug killers, weed killers, fungus killers,

Killers all,

(or merely motivation for mutation),

And every single living man and woman

pours a pint of poison.

We are too many.

There are too many pints.

So what if the damn unions don't like it?

And so what if 60 Minutes and Prime Time don't like it?

WELL THEN,LET THE TAIWANESE DO IT

LET THE JAPANESE DO IT

LET THE CHINESE DO IT

LET THE MEXICANS DO IT

LET THE KOREANS DO IT

LET THE AFRICANS DO IT

Let them breath it,

and drink it,

and compose odes to it...

Don't make me make this choice,

between the water

and my children's rice...

Rio Grande (Love canal II?)

HELL, WHO ELSE CAN WE GET, THE MARTIANS?

ROBOTS, THAT'S IT.

THEY NEVER CALL IN SICK.

THEY NEVER TELL.

THEY HAVE NO CHILDREN.

Sun shines.

Rain falls.

Salmon swim upstream.

Swallows come home to roost.

Land kissing air, air kissing sea, sea kissing land,

Endless passionate liplock over the whole earth,

infinite molecular exchange.

Love Canal,

I, II, III, IV, and V

mysterious chemical cesspools

as yet un-named

raining,

draining to the sea.

Meanwhile

doddering uncle EPA

fondles bloated lawyers

in the back seats of court rooms

in the anterooms of accountants

in the labyrinth

of futures

of northern oceans

of barnacles, of plankton, of small amphibians,

of dolphins, of the tribes of man.

In crusty heaps, corroding drums

on the murky floor of every harbor,

on the murky floor of rolling oceans,

the great dump,

the last material infinity:

finite, vulnerable.

And deep and uncharted, the bones and skins

of nuclear submarines

ticking, ticking

plutonium half-life ticking

half a million years.

Oh yes, go down to the shining sea

where tumored turtles die.

Cancer buds, like caulifower

on the Ancient Reptiles

encrusting the eyes,

encrusting the necks,

signs along a path,

in the garden of many paths.

Turn around. Turn around. Turn around...

Slick streets,

Black macadam, hydroplane

Slick world,

screaming 'round death's edge on two wheels.

Don’t make me make this choice,

says the mother: earth.

Will she die? Spin askew,

lifeless as Mars or Moon?

Will she metamorphose

too hot? too cold?

or spawn a viral giant-killer

and we will sleep sightless in gaseous pockets,

with tyrannosaurus rex

in perfect equality, in perfect unity,

in perfect harmony with the earth,

in perfect patience waiting to be tapped

and our crude dark form refined at last,

consumed in light resplendent,

illumining the blessed meek who inherit:

who crawl from crevices to listen

in empty kitchens

for footfalls that never come.

---

--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998

Page 25, Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding (1998, Puzzled Dragon Press)