A work of art is a world in itself, reflecting senses and emotions of the artist’s world.
As the builders say, the larger stones do not lie well without the lesser.
Plato’s words could apply equally well to the construction of a building, a bridge—or a science fiction novella. In “The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” Kij Johnson uses the creation of a bridge to construct the story of the man who raises that remarkable span. The bridge becomes a metaphor for his life and his world.
We often think of a bridge as an engineering feat, a triumph of physics and math, but the relationship of architects to their creations is much like that of artists to their art. As so aptly described by Plato, every piece of that bridge, whether the largest stone or the smallest cube, is necessary to its creation. It is fitting that Plato’s quote comes from his work Laws, in that laws—whether they are created by our judicial systems or are natural laws that we have discovered—are highly analytical yet achieve results that tangle intricately with the emotional well-being (or lack thereof) of those who live by them.
“The Man Who Bridged the Mist” reminds me of the lithograph “Hand with a Reflecting Sphere” by M. C. Escher. Just as Escher’s creation is an image of himself holding a sphere that reflects both his image and world, so the process of building a bridge across the mist reflects the architect in the story and his remarkable world. Escher evokes the scene in his lithograph with careful detail, using simple objects to tell us about himself; so the details of how the builder constructs his bridge tell us about his hopes, his history, and the people who impact his life.
Escher’s image achieves a dramatic effect with no explosion of color and action; it is done in gray and white and is all the more powerful for that choice. Johnson is similarly subtle with “The Man Who Bridged the Mist.” It is a story in colors of fog and stone. We learn of “fish” living within the mist, shadowy creatures considered small at six feet in length. The legendary “Big Ones” hidden in the depths are an ever-present threat. Johnson could have taken the easy path and thrown in an action-adventure scene, where such monsters explode from the gorge and go about canonical havoc-wreaking activities. She chooses a far more nuanced approach that, in the context of her story, is eminently more effective, providing a metaphor for the half-hidden events that shape and so subtly shatter the lives of the characters. She leaves the reader with a question: Are the submerged “Big Ones” hidden beneath our emotional landscape as great as we fear? It is a fascinating novella with new layers that emerge every time I reread the story.
Art is a staple of mankind… urgent, so utterly linked with the pulse of feeling that it becomes the singular sign of life when every other aspect of civilization fails.
In “The Ice Owl,” Carolyn Ives Gilman tells the story of Thorn, a bright and edgy young woman. She centers the story on the girl’s interactions with her tutor, an elderly collector who repatriates artwork stolen during a war that took place more than a hundred forty years prior. The loss and return of such works offers an effective allegory in the novella for the price exacted by wars on the people who survive them.
Throughout the novella, Gilman makes explicit connections between art and math or science and, in doing so, creates allegorical gems for the reader. A central aspect of the story derives from an ingenious blending of art and math used by certain artists. If they apply a certain algorithm to their media, each artist can create a work of art that looks dramatically different depending on how a person views the image. It is a clever play on holographic images in our real world that are visible only at certain angles, such as those that appear on many driver’s licenses. That artwork is a fitting theme for Thorn, who must learn to face the ways that “truth” can change depending on how she views her world. In another instance, Gilman uses the aromatic chemistry of benzene-based compounds to define a combination lock formed from the ornamentation on a box, itself a piece of art, which may or may not contain yet more secrets. The layering of puzzles on puzzles is an effective metaphor for the layered design of this inspired novella.
Gilman uses the word Holocide to describe a war that—like a holograph—encompassed every dimension of its world and was viewed from all sides by an interstellar civilization. Its similarity to the word Holocaust is telling. During World War II, the Nazis confiscated hundreds of thousands of artworks, and to this day the repatriation of those stolen pieces continues. In Gilman’s able hands, repatriation becomes a symbol of the impact war has on our humanity. The theme had a particular resonance for me in that I was writing this introduction when I read that Anton Dobrolski, the oldest known survivor of Auschwitz, had died at age 108. As the last survivors from the concentration camps of World War II pass away, their oral histories fade into a few sentences in history texts. If we forget, will that allow the atrocities to happen again? In Gilman’s novella, where relativistic spaceflight allows people to jump into the future every time they travel, the memories of the survivors stretch out for centuries and spread across the stars.
Crying, whistling, calling, they skimmed the placid sea and left the shore. Make haste, make speed, hurry and begone; yet where, and to what purpose? The restless urge of autumn, unsatisfying, sad, had put a spell upon them and they must flock, and wheel, and cry; they must spill themselves of motion before winter came.
In “The Migratory Pattern of Dancers,” Katherine Sparrow writes about men who are genetically engineered with the DNA of birds, which have become extinct. Although the men remain essentially human, twice a year they are driven to travel the routes that birds once flew during their migrations. As part of their journey, the men make periodic stops to perform dances in places such as Yellowstone National Park, choreographing works that draw on the traits of those vanished birds—and that also make millions of dollars for the avaricious backers who sponsor their shows. The performances evoke the avian multitudes that once soared through our skies in the freedom of flight, yet that very evocation of freedom becomes a form of prison for the dancers.
Audiences come to the shows to be entertained, amused, and, yes, to see what fate might befall those dancers who dare to seek the closest that humans can come to unaided flight. As such, the story explores the ramifications of the human fascination with death as entertainment. Sparrow hints at an insidious end to humanity; will we become so inured to the loss of life through our entertainment that we participate in our own demise? Rather than a dramatic apocalypse, the story suggests that human extinction may come from within, prodded by the same instincts that led the characters in the story to reduce the once-great species of birds that flew our skies to an echo found only in human dances.
Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.