MODES OF THOUGHT IN ANTERRAN LITERATURE
c667, 2nd year classics
file: 201
————————
INT. LECTURE HALL - DAY
Drop in mid-stream during the lecture--
Professor: --only perceive time as an arrow, but perhaps we are only seeing a small sliver of the circle at any given time, the rest of it just beyond our view. That’s it for today, folks. Don’t forget the essay topics for your final paper go up on the class webpage today, so take a look. And do your own research alright-
Like a record skipping…
Professor: Own research...own research...
A small RIP as time heaves forward.
Professor: Own research, ok?
Exaggerated groans.
Chris: Um, professor? You have blood on your shirt.
Professor: Oh, my nose.
Chris: Need a tissue?
Professor: Yeah, thanks. Class dismissed, everyone.
Indistinct murmurs and the shuffling of feet as the students leave the lecture hall. The tape clicks off. A few seconds lapse, and then the tape starts up again.
Professor: What the fuck.
The lecture comes back into focus.
Professor: Can anyone tell us what we’re looking at here? Yeah?
Hai Rong: The Lebombo bone. First mathematic artifact. Dates to 30,000 BC if I remember correctly.
Professor: 35,000 BC actually. Very good. There’s a quite popular meme about it. Yes, my young friends, there is such a thing as an archeological meme. Quote: When I was a student at Cambridge, I remember an anthropology professor holding up a picture of a bone with 28 incisions carved on it. “This is often considered to be man’s first attempt at a calendar,” she explained. She paused as we dutifully wrote this down. “My question to you is this – what man needs to mark 28 days? I would suggest to you that this is woman’s first attempt at a calendar.” So once again we come back to language and gender in academics. Everybody, let's do our part individually and collectively to move beyond the kind of misapprehensions that make us see everything through a male gaze and in a frame of patriarchy. Okay, the 28 day calendar, marked on a bone from 35,000 BCE. We don't know what gender the person was who made this. The fact that it's 28 makes us think of the lunar calendar. It also makes us think of the human menstrual cycle. So we just don't know. Smart idea to embrace what we don't know here. At the risk of being labeled anti feminist, there are some issues with this interpretation, as powerful as it may be. Can anyone tell me why that is? Hai Rong?
Hai Rong: There’s 29 incisions on the bone, not 28. And it’s broken off at one end so we only know that there were at the least 29 marks carved on it.
Professor: Right. And women's menstrual cycles vary widely as well, right? We know that physiologically. Uh, I show you this as a cautionary tale. Much of our interpretation of artifacts is colored by our own perceptions and our wants. Artifacts don't care about your feelings, kid. Boom. I know, I know, I'm funny. Okay, today we’re going to be talking about the Anterran calendar and what we can extrapolate. To their conceptions of time…
Dev: Here's where it gets a bit more technical.. Has anyone ever heard…
Professor (warped): I already said that… Why am I saying this again.
Warping.
Professor: Societies shape their concept of time in order to suit their social needs, which then perpetuates into their rituals and customs. For example, a college buddy of mine is studying the Mandala tribe in the Amazon. The tribe has no word for time or periods of time, like month or years. They have no clocks or calendars, which some say means they don't have the notion of time as a framework in which events occur. They don't celebrate birthdays. They don't know how old they are. As always, let's start with the relevant discovered text. We're gonna be working mostly off fragments here. Unfortunately, um, fragment, um-
The warping continues. Things begin to overlap.
Professor: 1B… describes mem Te’Hilah waiting for his lover to return.
Professor: Stop! Stop! What the fuck…
We can hear the audio of panicking on the submarine…
Dev: Can we create almost every single basic rhythmic pattern that humans have been using across cultures and across history? A strange exception is Indian classical music and all the other traditional musical rhythms of the world they all follow a basic structure.
Professor: Can you hear me?
Dev: It seems, this mathematical device has been intuitively present in our brains from the beginning of music.
Chris: You're right, I do not believe Anterra exists.
We warp back into the lecture.
Professor: Okay. I'm quoting here. And he stared sightlessly onward until his gaze cycled back to him. And, she-
Skipping.
Professor: left and fell backwards… backwards…
The tape begins to speed up.
Professor: But I don’t know… He got separated a couple of years ago and it was so fucking messy. Ugh. He was so fucked up. But at the same time, he got tenure and it's part of the standard contract right? You know. Tenured professors can teach one class of their choice.
Things come back into focus.
Professor: In this, he made the moment. He created the hours and the days. And sick with longing, he birthed the seasons to winter and to summer. Now combined with the etchings found in Prime A of images of the full lunar cycle arranged in a circular pattern, we can posit that Anterra, like a lot of early civilizations, the Babylonians, Egyptians, Maya, Greeks, Jews, Chinese, used a lunar cycle as the basis for their calendar. Their major festivals and holidays, agricultural-
Things begin to skip AGAIN.
Dev: The next thing we look for is some sort of melodic structure. And again, we were running into the walls. Until we thought of the number nine.
Professor: Fucking wake up. Wake up!
We come back to focus in the lecture hall.
Professor: Um, to back up for a second, most ancient civilizations built their concepts of time around the Earth's cycles. They observed movement of celestial bodies, the seasons, The human life cycle. This cyclical perception, time is a circle, places great value on the past in judging the present and the future. Hold on a second. What we're saying is if you're seeing time as a circle instead of a one dimensional line in which you can only move forward, that your relationship with the future and the past is different, right? So in this way, Western cultures value action while cyclical cultures, cultures that use the cyclic, cyclical nature of time value reflection. Linear time creates a beginning and an end. And time cannot be regained. While cyclical time, it's, it's not a scarce commodity, you're just going to come back, and back, and back, and back. Linear time, in the sense of calendars, schedules, watches, and computers, they all allow us to predict the future, so we think. This train leaves at 9 a.m. and arrives to the next station at 9:11. This eliminates the unknowns to the best of our, you know, ability. On the opposite wall from Fragment 3681B, there's another story that describes the goddess's lover, the musician Mem Ictahl, on his next adventure. He is caught and punished by the goddess's immortal partner, who murders all his children. And the lover is forced to repeat that moment over and over for eternity. Like this ancient, horrific Groundhog's Day, right? Now, this is really interesting because another fragment repeats the musical sequence that we discussed over the summer, and he finally escapes the loop.
Things begin to… loop.
Professor: Could this be some sort of time loop? Could this be some sort of time loop? Time…
The loop ends but the drone continues.
Professor: By playing back the musical sequence, which brings him back to the moment before the god kills his children, the act of pedocide. He's unable to change the events of the past, but he's also no longer stuck repeating those events.
Warp.
Raquel: I mean what?
Hai Rong: Well, all the people I’ve talked to think he’s totally crazy, like certifiable…
Back to the present.
Professor: Until about 1915, when Einstein presented his theory of general relativity, time was, in the western thinking, absolute. It was an absolute moving forward at this measurable, steady rate. Post relativity, time was understood to move at a rate that depended on the observer. Linear time values the present, always in service to the future. Thus Western cultures…
Another time warp.
Chris: I'm a little confused.
Professor: About what?
Chris: You wrote a book on XXX and the Chico Norte. Everyone thought you were going to be the next Joseph Campbell.
Professor: Fuck! This isn’t working.
Chris: But then this weird Anterra thing, with zero evidence You must know people are talking about you behind your back.
Professor: Fuck! This isn’t working!
Professor: I do. And I admit, the evidence is getting harder to find.
Professor: But we have to be careful about…
Chris: But it's all second hand, Professor. You're making claims about an entire civilization based on second hand reports that could be…
Professor: Tainted?
Chris: Or worse.
Time warps back to the present.
Professor: Only perceive time as an arrow, but perhaps we're only seeing a small sliver of the circle at any given time, and the rest of it is just beyond our view. Okay, that's it for today. Everyone, um, don't forget your essay topics for your final paper. They go up on the class webpage today. So, take a look. And, uh, do your own research, alright?
Chris: Uh, professor? You have blood on your shirt.
Professor: Oh, my nose.
Chris: Need a tissue?
Professor: Yeah. Thanks. Um, class dismissed everyone.
Modes of Thought in Anterran Literature. This podcast is made possible by Harbridge University, a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Peeler Prize in Archaeological Literature, and the Harbridge Family Trust. With an in-kind donation and production assistance from Wolf at the Door Studios. For more information and a reading list, please visit wlfdr.com.