Looking at this today, The Future by Campbell McGrath in the Virginia Quarterly Review.
I was initially much seduced by a string of very engaging bucolic images in this one, in particular, a forest where infant ferns grow shapely as serpents or violins and I thought
… if I could drift among the stars
as among a cloud of milkweed spores, or jellyfish.
and
a place where atoms and stars
resemble shy animals learning to eat from our hand.
are lovely lines.
The notion of naming years as opposed to numbering them I thought was a very deft encapsulation – showing that what the author feels is at the root of our helplessness before time the future is our wonky/inadequate relationship with time the present and time past. But once I began to think about the intellectual structure behind the piece, I found some unsatisfying weaknesses, including a lack of convincing metaphorical progression or unity. Each element of the piece is metaphorically represented by way too many unrelated things for my liking – the future is a stream in a forest; it is stars; some undefined personified entity watching us (S6); an unexplored land; a frozen waste; then a lonely hermit. Similarly, too much happens to the self in S8 – a primitive settler in L1-2; a tree in L3; then an animal-charmer in L4-5. It would be nice to have all elements refer back to each with more coherence and parallelism. Also the intellectual progression doesn’t really work for me: the argument as I read it is: we have a deficient relationship with/conception of the past/present, we should fix that. The future can’t understand our not understanding it (even Einstein, by the way, only got a wispy glimpse of it, like Magellan, who in turn is like Eric the Red – do we really need these side-paths?). To get a better grip on the future, we need to reconfigure our relationship with ourselves (this is how I read S8). And I end up asking: what happened to reconfiguring “us and the years” from earlier on in the piece? It would have been nice to come back to that enticing and relevant specific, instead of ending on such a broad we’re all wrong and we need drastic fixing if we want to get the future conclusion.
This at the moment seems to me to be two separate pieces – S3-5 being one and the remainder being the second. They could be made to mesh – and you can see how that was intended – but right now it’s not working for me. But still, a very pleasant read and, as I said, some very attractive imagery. And I must say I love the notion of naming years, like hurricanes or moon craters, but how to make a common frame of reference? 1992 was “annus horribilis” for Elizabeth II, but it was a pretty good or at least OK year for millions of others, heh.
