Monthly Archives: September 2022

Suspending Disbelief

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I’ve always been someone who has a hard time focusing on the world around me in the immediate aftermath of leaving a cinema. The story played out before my eyes in rich and large visual colors and resounding about my ears in the surround sound systems used in modern cinemas is entrapping and beguiling to say the least. Every film I have ever gone to see, that I can remember, has been met by this same internal thought process as soon as the picture ends and I wander back out into the lobby. I imagine myself in the story, in its settings, walking and talking with its characters. I guess I’ve always been a bit of a day dreamer.

I’ve also been a storyteller for much of my life. Much of those energies that were once spent inventing fabulous fables of remote realities and fantasies in my youth are now often spent trying to think through my professional writing, both here at The Wednesday Blog and in my research. Still, I do like to daydream from time to time. I find it helps me focus on the good things in life. Those dreams are less extraordinary than they used to be, they are populated less by characters from the books and films I enjoy than by my own hopes for the future, however domestic and ordinary those hopes may be.

In recent months as I’ve allowed more of the dolor of our times creep into my thoughts, I’ve found my ability to daydream has become less and less pronounced. Maybe that’s what C. S. Lewis meant in The Last Battle when he said that of all the Pevensie children, the only one not to return to Narnia in its last days was Susan because she had grown up and didn’t believe in those stories anymore. Yet this fading ability to daydream has left me somewhat bereft. I find I’m less able to write when I can’t imagine a happy future. I’m less able to tell the stories I know both recent and quite ancient when I can’t imagine my own near and distant future. So, I hold onto that need for dreams, and do my best to keep that fire of my imagination alive despite the troubles of our time and the worries seemingly inherent in adulthood.

Over the last few weeks since I returned to Binghamton, I decided to watch a series of films that I loved as a child but hadn’t seen in full for at least a decade. Yet now with the extended editions of The Lord of the Ringson HBO Max I figured it’d be fun to see them again, and not only to remember them as I knew them years ago, but to relive those stories as an adult with everything that I know now guiding my eyes and ears through that modern epic. I often like to think of these sorts of stories that I enjoy, whether they be Tolkien’s legendarium or the near future of Star Trek, along the same general continuum of time and thought. Yet I quickly found myself asking the question, “how can these stories of a far distant past fit into what I know of the world and its origins?” The rational thinker in me posed a fundamental question about suspending disbelief.

So, how do I rationalize these stories of some ancient primordial past just before the dawn of human memory when we weren’t the only such people to walk this Earth? That after all is the setting of The Lord of the Rings, a time long lost when the Earth was young. There are plenty of old stories that tell of an age when humans lived alongside more supernatural creatures, whether they be the monsters and demigods of Greek mythology or the Tuatha Dé Dannán of the distant Irish mythic past. Tolkien set his stories in this same vein, they are a modern recreation of those old myths, those old epics & sagas that he loved so much. And those stories come from a different world than our own, one where the long history of the Earth cannot be explained by evolution or science, but where all things are created through divine music, described in the opening of Tolkien’s Silmarillion.

I for one do feel that there’s still a way to balance the old stories with the new. Our modern narrative for the creation of the Universe, of which the creation of the Earth and all life upon it is but a small verse, is yet another one of these stories. Yet among all the stories our modern one, our new one, is grounded in an understanding of the rational roots of Creation; it sings less of God and angels, supernatural spirits guiding the world into being, and more of Creation urging itself into existence through the very energy that burns at the heart of all things. I still think there’s room for these old stories in our new one, there’s room for us to acknowledge and embrace ancient interpretations of how we came to be in that we are richer for knowing what our ancestors thought and believed.

Tolkien’s stories are beautiful in their own way. They echo the great myths and sagas of the myriad cultures of Europe. They remind me of the Penguin translations of the old Irish myths that I read as a boy and could recite from memory today. Suspending disbelief allows us to let ourselves go from our lives, even for a few moments, and experience something incredible that we otherwise would not. 

As The Return of the King finished on the evening of Labor Day, I found myself wondering what different characters from the Star Trek series would think of The Lord of the Rings and its characters. What would Spock make of the elves and their similar anatomy to his own Vulcans? What would Worf make of the fierce warriors of Rohan steeped in their honor charging to certain death before the walls of Minis Tirith? What can I learn from these two different yet similar stories of people trying to make their world a better place? I think the answer lies in the question. I’m drawn to stories such as The Lord of the Rings and Star Trek because they offer hope even in the darkest of times. The Hobbits prove that even the smallest among us can save the world, and Star Trek offers us today a vision of a better tomorrow that may still come. And if I need to suspend disbelief, if I need to shake the scales of my worldly cynicism from my eyes in order to see those two hopeful lights in the darkest night, then it’s worth doing.

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A Trek Among the Stars

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I first started watching Star Trek a month before the first waves of the pandemic hit the U.S. early in 2020. I knew a fair bit about the characters of the different series and some of the overarching stories, so when Star Trek: Picard was released in February 2020 I figured I wanted to see what it was all about. Thus began the next two years of my life in terms of TV viewing. Since then, I’ve gone all in and seen the entirety of the first two seasons of Picard, with a third coming in February 2023, as well as all seven seasons of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, all four seasons of Enterprise, and what’s so far been released of Lower Decks, and Strange New Worlds. I’m now watching the original series, Star Trek starring William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and DeForest Kelly that aired between September 1966 and June 1969 on NBC.

Like with the other Trek series, I’ve found the characters relatable and enjoyable to watch. I’ve also found some of the futuristic settings and technologies depicted on the show inspirational to my own imagination as a storyteller. Yet I’ll freely admit I find this series harder to get excited about compared to the later Trek series released in the ’80s,’90s, and 2000s, perhaps because this original Star Trek sought to depict the future of the late 23rd century as the 1960s dreamed it might be, whereas the later series looked to the late 24th century as the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s aspired it to be. Being a child of the ’90s and 2000s, that post-Cold War worldview fits my own far more closely than the background surrounding the Original Series during my parents’ childhood in the ’60s.

Still, when I do get into an episode of the first of these shows, I often find I do like the stories. They’re in the same spirit as other mid-century sci-fi shows that I’ve always admired like The Twilight Zone or the older William Hartnell era Doctor Who serials. What’s more, the vibrant colors used to light the sets of Star Trekalways catch my eye in a way that keeps me focused on the action of the story.

So, a few months ago when I learned there was a recreation of the sets of the Starship Enterprise in a building in Ticonderoga, New York, I knew I had to pay a visit. I arranged things with my good friend Alex Brisson, and we made a weekend trip out of it, visiting the Star Trek: The Original Series Set Tour around noon on Saturday, 17 September. The sets were built by a local guy named James Cawley, who interned on the production of Star Trek: The Next Generation at Paramount. Over the intervening years, the team in Ticonderoga have built with meticulous detail the sets of that original Enterprise as they appeared on the soundstages at Desilu Studios in the late ’60s. In many ways, the tour is both an opportunity for fans to experience walking on board the Enterprise as much as it is for film and TV buffs like myself to see what a TV set from the ’60s would have looked like.

When we walked on the bridge and saw all the stations set out in their circle, the captain’s chair in the center of the room, most of the people in our tour were hushed, a sense of respect among us. I got a chance to sit in the chair, as did everyone there, and I’ll admit the picture of me sitting there looks a fair bit deer-in-headlights as I couldn’t decide what to focus on with so much around me to see. For me, the original Trek isn’t necessarily the show that I prefer the most, that’d have to be Deep Space Nine with Next Generation and Voyager close behind it, but it spoke to a common thread in my life over the past two years as I’ve continued with my own work and studies while in the evenings taking an hour or two to watch another story set a few centuries down the line.

I think the thing that has kept me so interested in Star Trek is how aspirational it is. Unlike so many other futuristic films and shows out there, in the stories told here humanity has figured out how to get out of our cycles of violence and greed and work with the best parts of our nature to achieve the closest we could ever come to returning to Paradise here in our own mortal lives. They are stories that say, “no matter how bad things may be now, no matter how much the pandemic and all the other troubles that came out of it have become, there’s always hope.” 

I’ve always been one to trust in the fundamental goodness of humanity, it’s an idea that really does have some deep roots in my Catholic faith, as well as in my lived experiences. I’ve been fortunate to live the life I’ve led so far, in the places I’ve lived and with the people I’ve known, family and friends who I’ve loved. The seeds of a better future are laid in that fertile soil of hope. Had I grown up in the midst of the wars that my country waged over the last 20 years in Afghanistan and Iraq or in a country with less opportunities for success than my own, my worldview would likely be quite different. Yet if we are going to ever get out of this mire we’ve been in for so long, our adolescence as a species as Carl Sagan put it in his novel Contact, then we’ve got to let our hope for a better tomorrow guide us just as much as our cynicism and bad memories of past wrongs guide us now.

In the future that Star Trek depicts humanity finally begins to overcome our faults in the last half of the current century when first contact between humans and an alien species, in this case Vulcans, occurs. Our technology, and their helping hand (however hesitant it may be) moves humanity up from an age of nation states and superpowers battling each other for supremacy and resources on Earth and into a new age where humanity is one small island in the great ocean of Space, learning to live amid our galactic neighbors, and finally contributing to the creation of a Federation of Planets in the mid 22nd century that brings about a new Golden Age of sorts not just to us on Earth but to many other worlds floating in this cosmic sea.

It’s fiction, I’m well aware of that. It’s a collection of stories dreamed up by writers and showrunners over the past six decades that could very well remain stories in our cultural memory. But maybe there is some room for our future to be more peaceful, more prosperous, and more equitable than our present is or our past ever has been. In the decades since Star Trek first premiered in 1966 so many technologies inspired by the shows have become realities from tablets to personal communicators to now virtual reality taking the place of the holodecks and holosuites of the Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. I’ve been drawn to these stories because they came at just the right time for me. I began watching Voyager in the long dark winter of 2021 when I was preparing for my Comprehensive Exams. That winter, being so far from home and so isolated by the continuing pandemic, I found the story of a lone ship lost 70,000 light years from home to resound with my own situation. These are stories that laud curiosity and teamwork, and while just stories with the odd bizarre plot or weekly new alien with different nose ridges, they offer us a vision of what our world could be like.

Why not give that future a try?

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How Irish Understands the World

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After I released my previous episode “Summer School in Irish” back at the beginning of August, I had a good conversation with one of my best friends and one of my most frequent listeners, past Wednesday Blog guest Alex Brisson, about the utility of keeping smaller languages like Irish alive. How do these languages benefit humanity when we’re moving toward a time of greater linguistic conformity, when there are a handful of global human linguae francae, such as English, Mandarin, Russian, Arabic, Spanish, and French (the official languages of the United Nations)?

I responded by lauding the beauty of Irish, by the fact that Irish helps the speaker understand the nature and world around them differently. Take the phrase Tá mé i ngrá leat for example. This means “I love you,” though not quite in the same sense as the English. In English, there’s the subject “I” who’s doing an action “love” to the object “you.” This is the same way that this sentiment is expressed in many other languages from German “Ich liebe dich” to French “Je t’aime” to Spanish’s “Yo te amo” or more simply “Te amo.” 

Irish, on the other hand takes a less forceful approach, instead having the subject “mé” being in a state of love ” i ngrá” with the object “leat.” Thus, in Irish the expression Tá mé i ngrá leat says less that one person is expressing love toward another and more that both people are in a state of love with each other, a model of relationship that I personally prefer far more. Losing a language like Irish loses this elegant worldview, it takes away one particular means of understanding how one group of humans has long perceived the world around them.

Another way that Irish does things differently from English is in the use of a habitual copular verb. In plain English this means there’s a version of “to be” that expresses an action that’s done on a regular basis, so Bím ag scríobh colún gach seachtain a The Wednesday Blog atá air. | I write a column every week which is called The Wednesday Blog. This particular verbal construction of Bím rather than the present active tense Tá mé as seen in the last example helps express the regularity of the action, the writing of the blog and podcast itself. It demonstrates that I, Seán, am on a weekly basis writing this string of ideas which you, dear reader or listener, then choose to read or listen to. It also offers a sense of much needed hope that yes, I’ll actually keep writing The Wednesday Blog, something which I’m always not sure about. Today though, looking back at the 40 episodes already written and the 38 blog posts that came before the launch of the podcast, I’d like to think I’ve gotten myself into a good rhythm.

If there’s any other chief argument I’ve made in the past for why Irish ought to be kept alive, even taken off life support one day and spoken as another one of Europe’s vibrant languages, it’s that so many echoes of its once and future vitality still exist on the face of our world today. Take my name, Seán Thomas Kane, which though not intentional is a highly traditional Irish name. In Irish, my name is Seán mac Tomás Ó Catháin, or Seán, son of Thomas, descendant of Cathán. Cathán was a King of Ulster who ruled in the late 9th century CE about the same time as Alfred the Great was on the throne of Wessex. Thomas is my Dad, Tom Kane, meaning that my name actually works quite well seeing as I am actually Seán mac Tomás, or in the more clunky English Seán, son of Thomas. You can often tell when a family over here in the U.S. are Irish Americans by the fact that the parents and kids tend to have similar Irish names like Brigid, Patrick, Maureen, Brendan, or Molly, among others. While we’ve generally lost our ancestral language through the generations spent living in English-speaking countries, we’ve still kept aspects of that culture alive.

One thing I would love to see someday is a vibrant, if spread out, Irish-speaking community here in North America. It would be neat to have that sort of communal connection through our ancestral language preserved and even slightly transformed by our own distinct experiences living in North America from the Irish that’s spoken today in Ireland. Perhaps this would be seen in the gradual creation of a North American dialect of Irish alongside the three modern dialects of Connacht, Munster, and Ulster Irish. I for one am finding it easiest to speak a bit of a mix of Connacht Irish (the dialect spoken by my family) and Ulster Irish, though I’ve also learned many a Munster mannerism and mode of doing things as well.

Here in the United States our monolingualism has so greatly influenced our way of thinking that it is strange to consider a life where one might speak one language at home and one out in society. This is something done by people everywhere, even here in the US. In that future, even if we do come up with some sort of universal translator that just renders all linguistic barriers largely null and void, there would still be room for people to speak their own languages in their own way among themselves.

Go raibh maith agaibh go héisteacht! Thanks for listening!

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Physical Books or Electronic Books

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Welcome to Season 2 of the Wednesday Blog Podcast!

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There’s a Thomas Jefferson quote that has stuck with me since the first time I saw it in the room at the Library of Congress that houses his first donation to that institution: “I cannot live without books.” It’s something I think of from time to time, looking around the office here in my apartment at the tall bookshelves lined with volumes covering topics from astronomy to ancient literature in Latin and Greek to Catholic theology to history, politics, and fiction. I collect books, largely to read but also because I love the potential that books hold; all the stories they have waiting to be revealed page by page.

Over the last few years, I’ve found myself more and more gravitating towards electronic books on Kindle, Google Play, and all the academic e-book hosting sites that I use for my research and teaching. E-books are just easier to carry. I can have an entire library right there on my phone for me to choose from when I’m having dinner alone in a restaurant here in Binghamton or when I’m tired of listening to podcasts or reading magazines on a long flight. E-books also make stories more accessible. There’s a now rare novel written by the actor Andrew Robinson about his character Elim Garak from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine called A Stitch in Time that I often see people complaining about how hard to find it is in paperback. Yet I was able to download it in just a few minutes on Google Play and read it cover to cover in a few days. 

Kindle now even has a feature where if you have the book on their app and the recording of it on Audible you can listen to some segments of it when you’re driving and then your location in the e-book will update with your progress in the audiobook. I haven’t used it yet, there’s a biography I’m listening to now about the explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) that I could probably also be reading on the Kindle app on my phone when I have a free minute during office hours or at dinner, but I’m also enjoying just listening to it while driving around the hills here in Broome County, New York.

As an author, at least with the three books I’ve self-published to date (all available on Amazon) I usually prefer people buy the paperback versions because I’ll get more in royalties out of those than out of the e-book copies. Still, as a reader I admit I would often choose the e-book on a given day over the paperback solely for the convenience.

One thought that keeps coming to mind for me returns me to my own childhood and those wonderful mysterious days spent in the small library that my parents collected in our house in Wheaton when I was little. That same library came with us down to Kansas City and consumed our then-unfinished basement. At one point we had probably around 10,000 books in that collection of all sorts and stripes. Today, though I also picture not only my younger self but my own future children, if I’m so lucky, and ask “if I choose to go with e-books over physical ones, will my children have the same experiences I had pulling the odd book from the shelf because it looks interesting and flipping through it?” Those experiences of lounging around just flipping through books as a young child was instrumental in making me who I am today. There are so many stories that I read that way. Even now I sometimes like going into a library just to wander and see what I’ll find. 

On a recent visit to the Bartle Library at my university I had a specific book in mind that I was looking for, Gerald of Wales’s 1188 book the Topography of Ireland, which has been useful for my dissertation. Yet after I found it, I noticed another book next to it that seemed intriguing. It was bound in a blue cover, and called the Annals of Connacht, the westernmost of the four ancient provinces of Ireland, my ancestors’ home province. I pulled it off the shelf and flipped it open, quickly figuring out how to navigate its pages. Soon then, I looked up first my ancestors’ old parish, Burrishoole in County Mayo, and secondly, I looked up my own family name, Ó Catháin, to see what was in there. Both Burrishoole and Ó Catháin had entries, the former was less insightful to me than the latter, for it turned out there was a guy with my exact name who lived in Connacht in the 1520s, another Seán mac Tomás Ó Catháin. Maybe he was an ancestor of mine, it’s possible even though there are big gaps in the records during the height of the colonial period.

I could have stumbled upon that same collection of annals online and have done just that many a time with old books such as the Annals of Connacht, yet it doesn’t have quite the same feeling of accomplishment as finding that book in the flesh, holding it in my hands. I’ve joked that I deal with my primal desire as a human to hunt in two ways: firstly I hunt for food in the grocery store, and secondly I hunt for books in the library. Yeah, I know, it’s pretty corny. And while hunting for books in a library surely wouldn’t compare to hunting for a living animal in a forest, matching your wits against its own, I can say that hunting for books online can be more frustrating than hunting for books in person. When on foot in a library all you really need to worry about is that the library’s catalog system is accurate, when online you also have to figure out how to communicate with the various computer systems that are making your e-book hunt possible. 

Earlier this year when I was searching for import records and ships logs from the French port of Rouen between 1500 and 1567 for my research I found myself dealing with a third layer of complexity: a computer system that can’t actually read the original 500-year old handwritten documents, meaning you just have to hope that whoever imported the document into the system typed enough information into the computer that you can find what you’re looking for. On that one count: the easier legibility of e-books over printed ones, the easier transmission of their stories and information, and the fact that we can now share knowledge around the globe as fast as our data streams will carry that information gives me good reason to prefer e-books. But still, I want my future kids, if I’m so lucky, to have that experience of pulling books from my shelves and wandering through them, discovering that same love of reading that I’ve had all these years.

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The voice of Thomas Jefferson was provided by Michael Ashcraft, voice actor extraordinaire. You can learn more about his work by visiting his website here.