Today I’m going to do something I used to do often, write about the random rabbit hole my mind went down when thinking about something completely different. It’s how I spend a great deal of my life, now matter what else I seem to be doing. The path to this rabbit hole started with last night’s dinner. I used some of the frozen Italian meatballs we got from the boxes of free food they were giving out. I hadn’t taken anything out of the freezer and that’s exactly how I planned to use them. It’s a dinner I don’t have to prepare for the night before. It was great. I also used some of the mozzarella that came in the box, and the sauce and hero roll I had in the house. It was delicious. The odd thing I grew up not liking meatballs, god knows why as I love hamburgers and chopped steak. When there were large dinners my mother often made Swedish meatballs and I didn’t like them either. In Babylon 5 one of the aliens said that every planet has Swedish meatballs with another name. That’s the kind of stupid writing I expect from Babylon 5, as not even every earthly culture has Swedish meatballs. Do any other than Sweden? It’s not something like fried bread that gets repeatedly independently invented.
Bear with me, we are now at the entrance to the rabbit hole, not in it yet. They didn’t have Swedish meatballs in pre-Columbian America. That’s always a good place to think about when discussing what cultural developments are inevitable. The indigenous Meso-American cultures independently invented writing, astronomy, monumental architecture, and math. They even invented positional notation and zero, something not done in the Old world until about the same time. On the other hand, they never invented the wheel or metallurgy. They were an advanced Neolithic culture. No Old-World civilization developed that way. It’s hard to figure out what societal developments are inevitable as we have so few examples, civilization expands primarily by spreading, by cultural appropriation, more so than invention. We need the truly independent development of the New World and Australia to start to guess at what’s inevitable.
Swedish meatballs not being universal, as suggested by Babylon 5 is silly, but it reminds me of a science fiction idea that I’ve toyed with for decades. What art forms are universal? If we met extraterrestrial civilizations would they necessarily have music? How about painting, novels, drama, dance, and poetry? What struck me yesterday was that we can apply the same idea of comparing developments in the Americas and Australia, as we did with cuisine and technology. I know that both the America and Australia developed drawing, storytelling, music, and dance. They weren’t independent discoveries though as they are ancient and go back to our common ancestors. What about poetry? Was there indigenous American or aboriginal Australian poetry? Perhaps I should know but I don’t. The Spanish burned almost all the Mayan books, if they had poetry we wouldn’t know it unless the oral tradition survived the Spanish conquest. How about drama? Did they have plays? Did anyone have plays until the Greeks invented it? That’s the earliest civilization that I’ve heard of with theatre. We still perform them. How about China? Seem like something they would have invented but I don’t know if they did. Novels are a fairly recent invention. The Japanese The Tale of Genji is often called the first novel. It’s about a thousand years old. The first English Language novels didn’t come until the 17th Century. I could imagine an extraterrestrial civilization never inventing novels.
What interests me the most is what arts might other civilizations have developed that we never did. Were there any in the Americas or Australia that got imported to the rest of the world? Extraterrestrials with different senses might have developed art that humans couldn’t experience. Imagine a race with electrical senses like platypodes and sharks; they might create a medium inaccessible to humans? How about olfactory art? If there were intelligent dogs we might expect that. If everyone were blind might we have developed tactile art based on textures? What arts might exist that we can’t even imagine?
That’s it for the rabbit hole, one of my favorites. As for my own life, last night I finished off next week’s Gord’s Gold and sent it in to Folk Music Notebook. I want to be free to make plans on the weekend. I can see friends again. I can go inside places. I’m going to a baseball game next month, ironically the Yankees not the Mets. Somebody gave me the ticket they couldn’t use. I love baseball even if it’s not my Mets and I can and will walk to the game. Alan said he’d have a Met game for me in the end of May. It’s the end of May, I’ll have to find out when. I don’t want to have to break plans to see it. It’s Friday so I’m off to the Sunset Singing Circle tonight. I’m going to try and get out of the house earlier than usual so I can take a walk. I can explore Manhattan for a change. I’ll figure out what’s three miles from Battery Park and take the subway there.
Wise Madness 