Flight Of The Aerolark

In the early 1950s, my uncle drove up in a new car. New Car, wheeee! It was an Aerolark sedan, made by Willys of Jeep fame, sold to people who wanted the sturdy dependability of a service vehicle in their family cars. I scampered out to see it.

Uncle had the hood up so we could see its works. There was no light alloy anywhere. Valves were in the block, and the block was all heavy slabs of cast steel secured by big black bolts. Six pistons and twelve tappets made no more noise than a soft spring rain. Carburetor drew with satisfied, throaty sighs. It was an engine built for the ages and I was entranced.

But what most fascinated me was visible only after the great gray curve of the hood banged shut. It had an ornament on its snout, a sculpture in chromed steel of a streamlined dreamship, an avicular aerodyne that seemed to speed thru space despite being bolted down. I was lifted and held up where I could look down on it. And there it was, the essential Aerolark, the soul, and beneath, reflected in the shiny hood, a sky of scudding clouds.

Yesterday I got out my sketchbook and returned to that moment. I drew and remembered. The '50s were a very forward-looking time but there were setbacks. For example, sometimes I was given a dime, and I liked dimes. I liked Mercury's winged head. It represented fleetness and futurity, but one saw fewer and fewer of them. New dimes had Roosevelt on them and I supposed it was prudent and accurate to leave wings off him but I was disappointed. There were many disappointments.

Then I began to grow. After my tail dropped off, I commenced to think, and realized much of thinking is the creation and identification of reliable analogies. One encounters symbols sacred and profane, pedestrian and sublime. One fashions them into patterns and, from patterns, derives axioms. One strives for algorithms of enduring stability. One strives for method, synthesis that embraces the outer nebulae and the human heart. We strive for a design that will always choose the future that best includes us.

So I share here an image that has soared across my sky in dreams and hopes, a shape composed of negative drag and anti gravity that speeds, despite its antiquity, into a bright future. It has its own vitality, its own life, roaring and streaking over all stages of labor, love and living. One looks up and sees the Aerolark caroming into the future, raises one's hat-brim, wipes the sweat from one's eyes and says, almost reverently, "Geez! What the hell was that?"

Pumpkin Pants, Evolution Or Creation?

This weekend, from a woman whose opinion I have always treasured, I've been learning some excellent lessons about pumpkin pants. She is a theatrical costume designer of substantial experience. The subject was trunk hose, about which I had read the following: Trunk hose and slops can be paned or pansied, with panels of fabric over an inner lining. Pansied slop is a bulbous hose with a layer of fabric strips from waistband to leg. These are called "pumpkin" pants.

She replied that pumpkin breeches are not always slops: "Slops are similar in that they are also big, balloon-y shorts that can have slashes and panes in them, but slops predate pumpkin breeches and are both less structured and usually hit lower on the thigh. Pumpkin breeches hit quite high on the leg and are much more structured. Slops were more drapey."

I wanted to try on a pair, but was wary of going to a clothing store and asking for pumpkin pants with pansied slop. Who knows what that'd get me in this day and age? So I did the next best thing. I got out my sketchbook and headed back to the 16th century. I even made myself a little younger and better-looking for the trip. As you can see by the middle figure in the sketch above, I also got a doublet and wacky hat thrown in.

Not only did I feel as silly as I looked, the outfit inspired me to greater curiosity. So I cast my thoughts a hundred years ahead, to the late 17th century. There I met two handsome fellows. One on the left is a French peasant. On the right is a mounted gendarme. Fashionwise, both appeared to have been thrown together at random --frills, sashes, hangy-down things all over them-- which argues in favor of evolution. But I had my suspicions.

Both wore frock coats of considerable length, with distracting amounts of buttons. Gendarme had high, broad boots and peasant had a skirt on. These boys were hiding something! What? I decided I did not want to know, but suspected they had pumpkin pants somewhere. This would argue pumpkin pants were part of their creation. Concealment suggests creation and evolution equally.

I brought these findings forward to my authority, who pronounced my trunk hose slopless. She said:"I have a less precise visual shorthand for differentiating between the two: Slops=Pirate pants, pumpkin breeches=Shakespeare pants." This meant I would have to backtrack, prior to 1564 --Shakespeare's birth year-- to get any idea of proper slops. I decided to go lie down instead.

However, this question is by no means settled: Pumpkin pants, created or evolved? There is much to do and more data to collect. Data is important! Except for my gendarme using a (at the time, uninvented) snaffle bit to control his dinosaur, my account is historically correct. But did slops disappear or evolve into disguise? Until I am rested enough to deal with pirates, I must be content to live with the mystery.

Time Travel

[Lunching with Willie. Trying to remember the name Rasputin so I could order another stout. Hair highlights caused by misfiring synapses.]

Time travel, with its paradoxes, enigmatic loops and plot lines is a staple of science fiction. Wellsian machineries cast our thoughts swiftly back and forth through time. We are thrilled in incomprehensible forces. We should also be thrilled to know time machines actually exist.

Real time machines fall somewhat short of imaginary ones. They travel slowly and into the future only. They do last a lifetime, but tend to go to pieces before the journey's end. I refer to the normal process of ageing, which goes forward in reality but only virtually into the past. One recalls the past --a memory, a figment-- less precisely as time goes by.

This by no means presages mental weakness. I have devoted much work to getting older and can attest, the power of progressive memory loss should not be underestimated. Most of politics and all of public opinion are based upon it. With practice, we can persuade ourselves it is not always what we remember that interests us, but what we forget. And, of course, there are some experiences for which amnesia is simply the most accurate memory. Wisdom stirs.

It does not stir quietly. How distressing to find the wisdom of age predicated on a falsehood, not upon experience so much as just keeping one's mouth shut. One has something to contribute to discussion but exact names and places are on back-order. Time is not travelled uniformly, and prudence demands a dignified, alert silence. Happily, this can serve to sensitize us to truth.

Age quiets us into keen observers of truth. We tend not to view it as ultimate, absolute good but as something quite dangerous, best rationed out over a period of time. Time. As we recognize truth, especially in places where it is neither expected nor plentiful, possibly not even welcome, we gain some control of our time machine. If we keep our own counsel, we can explore undisturbed.

There is a freedom in restraint. Perhaps it comes from gradually concerning ourselves less and less with the good opinion of young people. The reasons we older people go about things need in no way trouble them. Let's consider that a prime directive.

Young people are in better repair than we are, mechanisms less encumbered by the past. I have said the past is virtual, and it is. It has no mass, no weight, yet if we dwell on it overmuch it can crush us. This new world, with a few jarring differences, is much like the world I was young in. I spent considerable resources learning how to have a past and am qualified to advise a policy of non-interference.

These new time machines are tuning themselves over our imperfect past, a dream in which the floor moves and the house keeps coming down. They have much to contend with, but it is more likely during their spans of operation than ours that the secrets of time will be solved and all our journeys explained.