Imagine that you are going to come visit me in Morris, Minnesota — you’re welcome, anytime, since it’s not as if we’re overwhelmed with visitors. You’ll probably come from our major metropolitan center to the east, Minneapolis/St Paul. Get on I-94, heading west; follow the signs to Fargo.
As long as we’re imagining, imagine it’s mid-winter and late at night. That’s the best time to drive the lonely roads. You usually don’t have to worry about the condition of the highways, because it’s Minnesota, and if it’s been snowing there will have been teams of plows out, quickly clearing them.
You leave the big city, and you’ll pass through the smaller, but still substantial, city of St Cloud about an hour later. Prepare yourself, everything from there on out is progressively more rural and thinly populated.
Don’t drive all the way to Fargo, although it would be easy to do. Get off the freeway at Sauk Centre, birthplace of Sinclair Lewis (and they won’t let you forget it). Sauk Centre has a population of about 4500 people, and it’s mostly downhill from here. You’re going to get on a little two lane country road, Highway 28, and keep heading west through Glenwood (pop. 2500), Starbuck (pop. 1300), and Cyrus (pop. less than 300). It’ll take you about an hour to get from Sauk Centre to Morris, and you’ll need to take your time, because Highway 28 is a notorious speed trap all along its length.
I recommend the night journey in winter because while there isn’t much engaging scenery, as you travel farther and farther from the population centers, it gets darker and darker. Our winter skies tend to be crisp and clear, and you’ll get spectacular views of the stars, and if you’re lucky, you’ll see the northern lights off to your right. You’re in no hurry — we’ll be home to let you in however late it is when you arrive — so feel free to pull over, turn off your headlights, and let your eyes get adjusted to the dark. It’ll be beautiful.
Unless it’s gray and snowing. Sorry. That happens fairly often.
Keep going, keep going.
After passing through Cyrus, which you’ll only notice because the speed limit abruptly drops to 30 miles per hour (and trust me, you’d better obey it), you’ll hurtle on through the darkness. The first portent that Morris is ahead will be three slowly pulsing red lights in the sky. They were my first sight of the town when I came here, 17 years ago. They are the aircraft warning lights atop the radio antenna masts around the edge of town. They’re particularly noticeable as you drive through the flat and empty cornfields because they hover above the horizon and are so clearly human artifacts, but there isn’t the usual clutter of a cityscape to distract your attention from them.
They fascinate me.
Two hundred years ago, there were very few Europeans here — an occasional French explorer — but many scattered communities of the Lakota, their populations depleted by waves of diseases. They, like virtually every human population around the world at that time and earlier, had networks of communication with other communities. Like every population up to that time, though, communication required that someone get up and get on a horse or boat or on their own two legs and travel elsewhere. The transmitters and receivers and medium of signaling were the people themselves. A village would have a trading post or post office or the equivalent as locus of interactions between communities.
About one hundred and fifty years ago, that began to change with the invention of railroads and telegraphy. At that point we added rails and wires connecting communities for much more rapid signaling, and the new features added to our towns were the telegraph office, the railroad depot, and the water tower. Every thriving town would have a water tower and supplies to feed the locomotives, and would be linked to other town with a parade of telegraph poles.
This was the start of a revolution. Now towns were linked by cables and rails, and that was only the start; look up, and everywhere you go there is a webwork of wires above you, carrying power and information. There is also an invisible network of cables and pipes and fiber optic lines beneath your feet. We’re part of a grid of connections, the middle part of a sandwich of layers and layers of connectivity that bridges the continent, with steel giants marching across the landscape carrying high tension lines. These humming wires are the ley lines of reality.
But it was only the start. A bit over a century ago, there was another change: it was the age of Marconi and Tesla, spark-gap transmitters and coherers. They scarcely knew what they were doing, at first, building larger and larger devices with greater and greater voltages, generating great powerful thunderbolts that would arc across circuits and produce immense electromagnetic waves that would ripple long distances. They were crude radio transmitters, no finesse at all, that relied on brute force to produce strong enough signals that could be detected without wires. So Marconi built forests of antennae in Poldhu, Cornwall and Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia to sense the sparks produced in each and bridge the ocean with information.
The transmitters have gotten more precise and the receivers more sensitive, and now we swim in an ocean of patterned electromagnetic waves. We routinely carry radio transmitters in our pockets — absent the whip-crack snap of spark-gap transmitters or the lightning nimbus of Tesla coils — and we receive a constant flow of signals with far more elegance than the slow dots and dashes of Morse code. There’s an antenna in your pocket, there’s an antenna in your computer, there are antennae in your entertainment gadgets, and there are antennae all over your town. They are a new feature of humanity, these metal latticeworks scraping the sky for information everywhere you go. Even in my tiny town in the rural midwest, on the edge of nowhere, in ‘flyover country’, everywhere you look there are cables and antennae tying us to the larger world.
I’ve been looking.
This long prelude is an attempt to justify trying something different. You see, I’ve been distracted lately — for the past couple of years, in the face of aging, I’ve been cultivating an exercise habit. I walk 5-10 kilometers a day. Three times a week I go to a local gym and work out…and I get there by walking. I walk to the grocery store. I walk to the coffee shop. I walk to the movie theater. It’s all part of a necessary maintenance program for my unfortunately senescing body.
Unfortunately, it’s incredibly boring.
As it turns out, it’s difficult to read or write or scan the internet while walking or lifting weights — who knew? I’ve tried listening to podcasts, and still do, now and then, but I still have to stifle my urges to write responses, because I can’t. I hate this whole routine of having to invest time in maintaining the meat of myself when I’d rather be sinking it into the playground of the mind, but then, I have to remind myself I need to do this so my brain can keep playing longer.
So there I am, making the meat machine plod through town, my brain trying to idle and get it over with, and it can’t.
I look around. I scan the ground, I look at the rooftops, I notice odd stuff. I’m a scout droid patrolling an alien planet. I try to figure out what’s going on around me, but I’m hampered by the fact that I don’t have access to information, or rather I’m wasting time perambulating rather than tapping on a keyboard, so instead I…
I…
This is a terrible confession. Instead, I make stuff up. I tell myself stories, in my head, about the imaginary purposes of the things I don’t immediately understand. They’re all lies. I think I’ve reinvented religion and fiction. So while disconnected from the internet and my books, I make up conspiracy theories, alien invasion stories, weird fantasies of malignant forces dwelling in town, awful dreams of where all this will end (it tells you something about me that I tend not to invent happy stories). I glom onto some odd feature of the environment and invent a purpose for it. It’s disgraceful. This is what happens when your brain is deprived of input, the gears get stripped and it starts spinning off in strange directions.
Lately, the features of the environment that have most snagged my imagination are the antennae. They’re everywhere! Have you noticed? Radio masts, cell phone towers, little whip antennas erupting out of the flank of a 19th century building, dish antennae locked into satellites, metal spikes on rooftops, we’re surrounded by these things that are either gleaning information out of the æther or beaming it to mysterious destinations. I know they’re mostly innocuous and utilitarian, but bored brains imbue the unknown with deep omens and surprising significance.
Shamelessly, I’ve been telling myself stories about them as I amble about. These are pure fiction, lies, which I’ve never indulged in before. But I’m thinking, as long as I’m making stuff up, I might try writing some of it down. And then posting it here.
So I may sporadically dump some of these lies here. Not often, I assure you, and they’ll be clearly labeled as entirely fictitious, but you know, when you spend so much time with these stories, and you’re used to just writing, it’s got to be let out. Every once in a while, then, I might post a story about the Antennae of Morris. You can just skip them. Treat them as the mad ventings of a trapped brain trying to get release, you know, as I do most of the fiction I read.
Forgive me.
Back when I was trying to write fiction, I realized that, to me, the “writer’s block” was the circuit you had to walk around in order to start the creation again.
Nowadays, when I can’t entertain my brain, and creating is useless or worse, I imagine a figure from the past… Ben Franklin or J.S. Bach or somebody.
And I try to explain things to them. Our politics. The car we’re driving in. The economy in which I work. My actual job, the mechanics of which are very hard to explain to an 18th century man, believe me.
But it keeps my brain working.
Iktomi’s Web.
I sometimes find that my brain projects narratives onto the world around me when I’m walking along too. Usually I find myself imagining battles between ancient armies across the rolling fields, or elves and monsters flitting between the trees. Urban environments are really weird though – with those I find myself mentally editing the skyline so it looks more pleasing to me – making buildings properly symmetrical, changing colours and decorative styles, adding or deleting floors to taste.
When I’ve been playing rather too much of certain video games, though, I sometimes find myself thinking about the real world environment around me in the way the game makes me think about its environment. When I had been playing Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, for instance, I found myself taking note of all the secluded alleys that would be good for ambushing passers by to drink their blood. Staines on Thames is surprisingly full of good vampire ambush spots apparently.
Around here, we don’t have a lot of recorded history to shape our imaginings of the past.
Back in the Pacific Northwest, we at least had archaeological digs, and all along the Pacific Crest trail there are scattered pictograms — the natives there had been using those same trails to communicate up and down the coast, bringing trade goods between California and British Columbia. Rather than battles, I imagined young men hiking those same trails on long lonely journeys with full packs, stopping for the night to paint rocks with ochre and charcoal.
isn’t it obvious by now?
the universe is fined-tuned for the evolution of antennae!
PZ, I’m disappointed in you. A man of your stature in the atheist community should know that we atheists are all about dour, joyless realism at all times. Next thing you know, you’ll start believing in abstracts like justice, fairness, and equality. Or even… feminism. DUN DUN DUNNN.
Kidding aside, I’d love to read anything you feel like posting. (Glen Cook, author of The Black Company series, did his best writing while working a job that kept his hands busy, but required very little thought or imagination.)
I became “antenna aware” when I got my Ham radio license back in 2012. As you say they are everywhere!
We have a few examples of great big beam antennas for the 7 mhz and 14 mhz bands. I generally carry a “handy talky” with a bendy 17″ long antenna which lets me access several repeaters around town.
If you got your ham license you could put up a great big antenna of your very own to impress (or frighten) your neighbours.
Boring walking , nah you are doing it wrong. Well you are walking in the wrong places. Traipsing up and down streets and avenues is never going to be intellectually rewarding, yes your brain is going to crave stimulation. Explore a bit, back alleys are far more interesting, partly because you are not supposed to be there. Even better is a bit of green space. I can’t believe you wouldn’t be scanning hard and mentally recording growth and death along the Pomme de Terre/Potato River. Or get out to Dolven WMA. If you are really desperate get a dog. Not the sweat little ones, but a real sized one who is bat crazy and needs an hour a day. You’re then committed and watching something that stupid (or as stupid as I am) run like crazy all year long is just fun. And for winter you’ll just learn to HTFU with a big down parka.
After this intro, I really, really want to read any antennae stories. It’s beguilingly eldritch and lyrically eerie already.
@PZ #4
My nephew just embarked on a trhu-hike of the PCT after completing the AT two years ago. While he may not be drawing on rocks in charcoal, he’ll likely be blogging periodically when he has down time. Technology changes everything…
https://thetrek.co/author/nick-cellini/
The fifth picture down (search for “Highland Village, where many residents complained”) on the story from the only link on the next post must have inspired positively John Wyndhamesque nightmares in our esteemed host’s fevered imagination.
Well, at least it really alarmed and depressed me…
Ca. 1980, the late Fritz Leiber wrote a horror/fantasy novel set in San Francisco, “Our Lady of Darkness”, where the horizon/city scape with its antennae, high-rise buildings and urban hills played an unexpected role.
“This is what happens when your brain is deprived of input”
-After I read that novel, I began to make up imaginary stories about those structures rising from the horizon; power pylons, antennae with red lights. A cliff rising from forested land that otherwise was eroded flat by the glaciers.
There is not much old infrastructure in northern Sweden, but there is enough abandoned concrete towers and steel masts to give Tarkovsky’s Zone ( in”Stalker”, 1980) a run for the money.
PZ, speaking of that film, I recommend you wach it before you go off in some unkown terrain again, so you get some inspiration. Or read the book it is based on, “Wayside Picnic*” .
( * by the Strugatsky Brothers. Seriously good SF authors.)
(And if you have a flat landscape where things can be seen for tens of miles around, you seriously need to get some pyramids. With a tower on top. Orthanc?)
The mind-controlling brain parasite from Zeta Reticuli keeps inserting “seriously” in everything I write. My apologies.
BTW “cornfields” gives me associations to a Jack Reacher novel where people in a small town uses the darknet for evil purposes equal to anything Lovecraft dreamed up. They certainly used antennae. And don’t get me started on Stephen King’s novel “Cell.
That antenna circle looks like it could inspire HAARP “theories” about weather control mishaps etc.
I know HAARP antennae look nothing like that. Doesn’t stop paranoia though.
I’ll add that antenna as a waypoiint for a future road trip.
Sorry about the well-fucked blockquotes.
Not that you’d expect God to apologise. Oh well. That just makes me real, doesn’t it?
I am explaining things around me to a totally imaginary English-speaking friend (I’m not a native speaking but I enjoy speaking another language). I only realised I do this when I read about someone else doing the same.
It’s a very patient friend. He’s heard it all a thousand times before and he’s still interested.
When I am driving or walking by myself I often find my mind describing the modern world to historical figures, Ben Franklin is the most common but by no means only one.
Gee, when I’m out walking, a penguin, smelling slightly of herring, is zooming about, demonstrating her flying skills, as she hunts for wild cheeses. Everyone else can clearly see her too, since they ask things like “Are you Ok?”, obviously worried she may mistake me for a cheese. Or a pea. (Probably not a horse, however, since my ponytail is prehensile.)
Clearly, I need to develop a moar active imagination.
Some of those “metal spikes on rooftops” may be something more mundane than antennae. Then again, lightning rods could be evocative in their own way.
I look forward to reading them!
Sounds like fun!
You people are all nuts.
Caine
“Iktomi’s Web”
*raises glass*
To Tricksters and technology!
My most recent mental novel revolves around a person who apparently dies in a serious accident, and wakes up as a boy in his old home. At first he thinks it is some kind of dream, but it persists. He soon finds out that he can do anything, have any power he imagines, just by thinking about it. Have the powers of Superman? No problem. Travel anywhere in time or space? Comes easily. Travel with a Timelord? Simple, and with his powers he can defeat Daleks and Cybermen with a thought. Visit a galaxy far, far away? Fun, for a while. Because the laws of physics no longer apply, he becomes certain that whatever he is in, it isn’t reality.
This scenario raises a number of interesting questions. How do you avoid boredom if everything is easy? How do you treat people, if you don’t think they are real? He begins abusing his powers, but eventually realizes that if he wants to remain true to himself it doesn’t matter if the people around him are not real. Treating them poorly makes him into someone he doesn’t like. He evolves from someone fulfilling childish fantasies (be the hero, get the girl), to helping people because he doesn’t want absolute power to corrupt him absolutely.
Eventually the entities that set up that non-reality for him enter the picture, but that’s a different story.
I doubt I’ll ever have time to write it, but it’s a rich universe for figuring out what fantasies you would indulge if you could do anything.
it is becoming all to easy to see everything in some kind of prequel to a william gibson novel for comfort.
that veneer of progress is some what askew but where ever I find myself my eye is attracted to those little bits of headless wildness in every neglected corner full of drifted in detritus. Glorious rot and weeds and other plant pioneers spiders and grit amidst the trash,
tells me it still continues
uncle frogy
y’know, frogy
It would be nice if you would, sometimes, at least attempt formatting.
Also, you don’t have to signoff your comments. We can see who wrote them.
@29
if you could give me an example
maybe reformat what I posted as a demonstration
maybe I am missing something.
uncle frogy
Wait. Antennae are transmitting information from my vagina? Or are they receiving information there? I don’t know how long this has been going on but I need to know: what are they saying?!
Meanwhile in other (non-entertainment-related) antenna news, just today I picked up a continuous glucose monitor (Type 1 diabetic here). You insert a tiny glucose sensor under your skin, which is attached to a small wireless transmitter that sends the glucose reading wirelessly to a display device (like a smart phone). The data can be recorded and mapped for trends, streamed to anyone including your doctor, and trigger alarms when blood sugar levels get too high or low. You just change the sensor once a week. This is life-changing and potentially life-saving technology. This is probably why it’s taken three months of concerted effort to finally get my insurance company to cover one—and even then, my copay was $325. :|
So you see PZ, antennae are not aaaaaall nefarious. Some of them are my best friends.
#notallantennae
You are doing absolutely the right thing walking thinking idly. Walking around gives one a wonderful freedom from purposeful thought. Let’s face it. Everyone has to think about stuff in their lives. You also have to think to earn your living, and probably not enough of that thinking is fun science-y stuff. You should appreciate getting a few hours here and there to just think of whatever happens to please or entertain you for the moment. (I used to do this in class back in elementary school, but that’s another story.)
Narrative is one good way to think. Humans are naturals at inventing narrative. As you often point out on this blog, though, narrative can be used for bad things as easily as for good things. You don’t want to accidentally invent a religion, so be careful. It pays to try out different narratives to explain things. Is the neighborhood abandoned due to some horrible event or is everyone just at work. Can you imagine the people in the houses you pass. I mean, what kind of idiot would want a purple door, or perhaps it’s someone very creative. My father used to try and imagine what the physical environment told one about what people bought; he did very well on the stock market with this back when we had a demand side economy.
Make the most of it.