Metaphor and Possibility

McKinney, April 18 2026 (and below)

McKinney, December 30, 2023 (rare winter thunderstorm at sunset)

 
The appearance of mammatus clouds as the weather warms always seems to add a tinge of foreboding to both weather- and news-watching. They're so called because of their resemblance to udders or breasts, and are usually associated with thunderstorms.  I've always been a cloud fan (the atmospheric variety, that is), because of my father's meteorological interests. He had flown over and into Atlantic hurricanes during our time in Bermuda (ca. 1950) and often had a weather station in a back yard wherever we lived. Before I moved to north Texas, however, the most dramatic clouds I was familiar with were the lenticular "Sierra waves" that form regularly over the Owens River Valley. We watched this one develop at sunset during our last visit:

Lone Pine, California, June 2025

My first encounter with mammatus clouds occurred on April 10, 1979, just after I arrived in north Texas, on the day Wichita Falls was hit by an F4 tornado that killed 45 people. Although we were 140 miles away, the local sky was filled with the cloud formations I now always associate with the possibility of really bad storms. I was eight months pregnant with my daughter, and my son and our cats and I spent our first tornado watch in the bathtub, under a mattress. 

What brought all this cloud stuff to mind was an article in this week's New York Times Magazine, "Why Smart Products Have Started to Look Like the Dumb Choice." Nitsuh Abebe writes a column on language for the Magazine, and this one combines two of my particular interests: metaphor and the philosophical assessment of technology. 

Abebe takes us through the evolution of words like "smart" and "dumb" as metaphors, and explains how utterly absurd and problematic the designations have become. Smart phones, homes, TVs, and even kitchen appliances, now demand internet connectivity in order to work. I've been ranting about the notion of planned obsolescence for so long that I can hardly have a conversation with an appliance salesperson without spouting off about why I've had to buy a new refrigerator only ten years after I bought the one I now have to replace. And mine aren't even "smart" because I absolutely refuse to own an electronic object that talks to me. (And no, I do not use Siri.) I live in a hundred year-old house that can't even accommodate an automatic ice maker, so that a fridge that doesn't come with one is actually a selling point. 

Over the past twenty years, I've been working on a work of speculative fiction that (among other things) imagines a world without electricity. As a thought experiment, this is the perfect exercise for examining our dependence on a now-pervasive technology that was unthinkable only 250 years ago. And the premise isn't built on disaster or dystopia; it's based on choice. The focus of my graduate research was on William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, and central to Morris's philosophical approach to art and design was the education of desire. To Morris, human dignity, creativity, comity, and culture were all based on the distinction between need and want. His novel, News From Nowhere, imagined a world where work and art were conjoined rather than opposed. The machines responsible for the polluted air and waters of Victorian Britain were absent from Morris's utopia, and his musings inspired me to think about how the modern, post-industrial, digitally-dictated age might beget something more philosophically satisfying than what we're now experiencing.

Of course, it takes an old Luddite like me to even want to think about a life free of complex machines, but other visions of lower tech, more humane ways of living are emerging as I type. A newish literary genre commonly referred to as "solar punk" has generated a number of novels like Becky Chambers's Monk and Robot books (A Psalm for the Wild Built and A Prayer for the Crown Shy). Many of Ursula K. Le Guin's novels and short stories consider the relationship between need and want and delve deeply into human relationships with technologies. And then, of course, there are the deeply anti-technological and anti-industrial themes of J. R. R. Tolkien's novels. So I don't think it's coincidental that, as Abebe notes in his essay, "more than a quarter of younger Americans are curious about switching to a 'dumbphone.'" I'm also heartened by the growing interest in "retro" tech like vinyl records, portable turntables, and manual typewriters.

The current state of the world, with its various antagonisms--including greed, power hunger, and disregard for the consequences of the technologies we've fostered and embraced--doesn't offer many of us much hope that things will get better any time soon. But perhaps one way to approach the problems is to look for better metaphors: Sibling Dex in A Psalm for the Wild Built goes looking for cricket song. And Mosscap, the Robot, goes looking for what human beings need. 

I've been thinking lately, as I watch the fairyland of fireflies arise in our garden each evening (they're scarce anywhere else in the neighborhood, but because we don't use pesticides, we offer a sort of firefly utopia), I wonder if maybe fostering fireflies might be a good place to start. Or using the plenitude of cloud formations to represent the multitude of ways we could make things better. Mammatus clouds, for example, might be seen as motherly rather than scary, since they often signal the approach of thunderstorms that bring much-needed rain). 

A bit of silly speculation and wishful thinking, perhaps, but an alternative to spending time thinking along lines that will only make things worse: "The Cloud" as a "storage space" in which to cram all the digital output of the energy- and resource-consuming machines billionaires keep building to feed the coffers of people who don't really need any of it but produce simply because they can. 

I won't deal with this now, but we might start considering very seriously just who is going to benefit from all that stored "data" and all that AI. 

Earth Day 2026: Revisiting Earth Days Past

 In an effort not to purger myself, I've spent the last hour or so going through the history of this blog to make sure that I had, indeed, faithfully posted on each Earth Day over the years since its inception. The first year doesn't really count, because I didn't get talked into dipping toes into the blog-pond until June of 2007. But, indeed, there have been posts on April 22 of every year since. One year (2012) there were even two!

Themes are pretty consistent; one might even say repetitive. But then, the same might be said of the tribulations that continue to face this tiny little blue dot of a planet--a point of which we were reminded during this last couple of weeks when we got to join in the latest real-life space adventure when Artemis II made its flyby trip to the moon and back. NASA has put together an endlessly entertaining collection of digital media to document the mission, but my favorite has to be this one of the Earth setting over Ohm crater on the Moon,

the perfect companion to the 1968 Apollo 8 photo, "Earthrise." 

It's not entirely coincidental that my last several months of reading time have been occupied by tales of solar system adventures (Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy--Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars--and Red Moon, as well as Andy Weir's The Martian) and planetary peril (Weir's Project Hail Mary). I tend to prefer scientific fidelity and at least possibility in my SF reading these days, since what's happening on the planet is scary enough, and it's difficult to imagine space aliens who could do worse by us than what our own government seems to be intent on carrying out. I'm also not convinced that space visitors would come to us wearing armor and with guns a-blazing. They're probably nicer, if they've existed long enough to get here.

So I guess my Earth Day contribution this year will be to point out that in the 70s the space programs (not just ours) seemed to offer the best hope that we might not do ourselves in, and that science might just give us a decent chance to overcome our worst impulses. 

Addendum:

As I've mentioned many times on the Earth Day blogposts, I celebrated the very first Earth Day in Philadelphia in 1970, when I purchased this poster by Martin Carey. It hangs in my kitchen and reminds me quite often of the part this kitchen itself plays in my attempts to help save the planet. I keep referring to it, but have only posted it once, so I thought popping it in here might tie these posts back to their origins. Out of curiosity, I checked to see if it's still available, and found it here (for 250 USD). Carey designed it for the Earth Week Committee of Philadelphia.

Image notes: The Artemis II image is from the NASA collection noted above. The Apollo 8 photo was taken by astronaut William Anders on December 24, 1968 and is from Wikipedia's article on the photograph.

After Long Silence

The Earth with the Moon and the Milky Way by Wladyslaw T. Benda
Produced to illustrate The Future of Earth by Maurice Maeterlinck

I've been absent from this blog for so long, and so preoccupied by events so complex and all-consuming that I don't even know where to start. But since one of my current adventures in rabbit-holery involves multiple space-related literary, visual, and journalistic media, I couldn't scrounge up an appropriate image from my own photo archives--so I turned to The Public Domain Review, looking for old photographs, paintings, or other illustrations that might evoke my current state of mind. The PDR seldom disappoints, and looking through images in the "Astronomy and Space" section of the image archive search engine I found several evocative candidates. I was quite tempted to use one of the illustrations by Henrique Alvin Corrêa of the 1906 french translation of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, for a couple of reasons. One is my recent plunge into Mars-related science fiction (rereading Andy Weir's The Martian, and Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and related short stories, and beginning the fifth season of For All Mankind). And then there's my current anxiety about the state of the world as we know it.

But it's the all-encompassing import of this last category, coupled with the current flight of Artemis II to the moon, that led me to choose Wladyslaw Benda's evocative image* created for the publication of Maurice Maeterlinck's piece for the March 1918 issue of Cosmopolitan (!). I found a reprint of the essay in a rather wonderful blog called "Voyages Extraordinaires: Scientific Romances in a Bygone Age" by a Canadian chap named Cory Gross. [His last post was in 2023, so I need to look him up, but his blog seems like a Steampunker's dream site. One more rabbit hole!] The date of Maeterlinck's essay is important to the connection with war and its proximity. And the essay itself is particularly apt.

While I'm explaining myself, I should also mention that this post's title comes from a poem by William Butler Yeats, which relates not to war but to age, which is more constant even than conflict is in my easily distracted mind these days. But the title's path to this post was less authentic than I make it sound. 

Over the last few months, spent recovering from a repair job on my sternum and raising a puppy acquired way too soon after the death of our beloved Nylah, I've felt guilty about not writing here, hoping that my remaining readers hadn't given me up for dead. And then I turned 78 (last December) and my son turned 50 (last month), and I finally twigged to the fact that tempus is fugiting faster than I'd realized, and decided to get serious about rejoining the blog-o-sphere. 

I actually did write a driblet in January, and have saved the draft, but I kept thinking about the title of a Sherri S. Tepper** science fiction novel called After Long Silence. I got it off the shelf and realized that the story had little to do with where my mind wanted to go, but I did decide to look up her title's source. And there it was: Yeats writing about age and speech and conversation, and this: "Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young/We loved each other and were ignorant."

It's not that I think old people are smarter than young people. In fact, most of the young people I know (now in their thirties, forties, and even early fifties) are much smarter than I was at their ages. I used to joke that I didn't become an adult until I hit forty. But now, almost forty years later, I do feel wiser. And so I'll probably spend most of my future blogtime waxing philosophical about how much fun it is to be able to wander around in those rabbit holes*** making connections, remembering old things and discovering newer ones. Because we are, none of us, getting any younger--and some really ignorant and unwise people are making it less likely that we're going to get much older.

Time to get wiser and relish what time there is left. I'll certainly be curtailing my silences from now on.

Notes

*Maurice Maeterlinck was a Belgian (Flemish, but wrote in French) poet, playwright, essayist--and Nobel Prize laureate (1911, for literature). He wrote a play, The Bluebird (1908), that was translated into English in 1911; I read the kids' version The Blue Bird For Children, which may have been my mother's but is now lost to me. Thanks to Project Gutenberg, however, it's available at the link. 

**I read Tepper's Grass after I'd already become a devotee of Ursula K. Le Guin. At that point my sources for women's perspectives in science fiction broadened significantly. I didn't love everything she wrote, but some of her works are still among my favorites. She died in 2016, and I do miss her.

***If anyone's interested in what a real rabbit "hole" (they're really called "forms") looks like, here is one our puppy Alan found in our garden; we immediately protected the babies and they've since gone off to do adult bunny things. More about that saga next time.

The crown of a baby rabbit's head, framed by two tiny ears,
 is visible just below the top leaf.