MDMD(1) Time & Distance

[jporter]

First, before any of my comments: THANK YOU ANDREW DINN, for the effort,
the insights and the choreography. This is a damn fine ridotto! Let the
grape, the corn, the cafe, and whatever else ye may, flow and help fuel the
festivities!

My favorite paragraph from chapter one, if one can be singled out, [pardon
the cuts] 6.9:

 "The Christmastide of 1786, with the War settled and the Nation bickering
itself into fragments...<cut>...Nerve lines of concentrated
light..<>..Clouds blown to Chalksmears..<>..an ancient Elixir upon the
seething Pot of Politics,- for the Times are as impossible to calculate,
this Advent, as the Distance to a Star."

Love it, and this before the intro of Wicks, is unmistakeably the "not
quite omniscient" narrative voice. Whether or not it was possible to
calculate star distances in 1786- and I am not sure when the ablilty to
measure parallax became accurate enough- but even today, with our much more
refined techniques  (especially today) an equation for "the Times" is still
impossible.

Yet all of the past continues to break each instant on the shore of the
present, like the collective light from all the stars- some having
travelled across the universe- to land just here, just now, and become
reduced to a particular certainty.

The paragraph seems to hover in the sensibilty of the pre-modern
enlightenment:  *There is causality behind all this, although at the
moment, it lies just beyond the ken of our still primitive but improving
instruments...* But the narrative tone belies  a post-Heisenberg
sensibility as well. It is hovering before Wicks has been introduced and
therefore has the advantage of looking back on 1786, yet the tone suggests
a limit to certainty.

There is a note of expectancy, however, and well there should be. This will
not be just another Advent in Philadelphia, this 1786. Five "states" (or,
some priviledged people from them) will have already met to discuss the
need to revamp the Articles of Confederation. By May of the coming year,
what will turn out to be the Constitutional Convention will have convened,
and six months later the core of the document will have been forged.

It is the Advent of what, then, a miracle?...or perhaps just another
version of Pierce's last will and testament? Looking back, considering our
own times, or looking ahead, it's still hard to calculate.

jody