I NEED HELP trying to figure out if this is a TRUE MEMORY or if it is some confabulation. I am having terrible trouble maintaining the seals on my dreams and I feel like the dreamworld is leaking out into the waking world. So…
I COULD SWEAR that I read about Britain having a space program in the around the end of the middle ages or at the start of the Renaissance. I’m thinking it may have involved Francis Bacon or John Dee. Although it is easy to assume such a thing about John Dee, right? I have distinct memories of pictures in the article of drawings from the time of a flying ship with which they intended to travel into orbit or the moon — having no concept of the fact that space would be not be full of breathable air, they figured all they had to solve was the problem of an airborne boat. So it was a purely theoretical on-paper space program, but it was, nonetheless, a government (royalty) funded space program, probably the earliest one in history. I would be extremely grateful if someone could verify this memory for me. I have had no luck at all on Google, so I am full of fear that I’ve invented it.
Other than that, as mentioned a few times, I have this blog-to-book thing almost done and have had a lot of fun parsing and solving all the CSS and layout issues. Data mining and data manipulation is my favorite kind of recreational programming. What I don’t enjoy is realizing there were a couple bugs in the routine that converted my IAM blog to WordPress causing about a dozen images to be destroyed. It’s also been fascinating re-reading (or at least re-skimming) my thoughts from a decade ago until now. Fascinating to see my thinking evolve and mature over that period. It’s very obvious how much my divorce and the loss of BME as well as my illness — arguably the two biggest traumas in my life — have “matured” my sense of self for the better. As a shy and private introverted person thrust into an influential public role, it’s amazing seeing how unsure of myself I was, although I did my best to put up a much more resolute public face. But I think it all fit together just right, a perfect storm of person and circumstance, and I’m not sure that I’d tinker with it or give myself any advice if I had a time machine.
And now to take apart the couch to dig out all the little bottles of pain that I’ve let slip between the cushions so I can take a break from the joyful programming to do a little work on this plywood doodle.
3 Comments
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.
Speaking of BME, I recently logged back in (and even ponied up the $10 for 6 months of IAM), and when I saw what was left of the community that once was there, it made me really sad.
Have you read Liz Williams’ THE POISON MASTER?
IIRC it has something like you mentioned in the first part of your post: John Dee doing research on how to travel to other worlds, more or less sanctioned, if not funded, by Queen Elizabeth I.
The author may have tapped the same vein of imagination as you, or maybe she just did her research right.
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