The Future Is Uncertain Country

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Photo: Christopher Evans.

These days as prospects grow dim, men of high seri­ous­ness rise into the head­lines, experts anointed as sooth­sayers, com­forters, bear­ers of bad news. In ancient days the ora­cle at Delphi responded to the ques­tion of what the future would bring with auguries suf­fused in bar­ley smoke; today the ques­tion is put by pun­dits, colum­nists, editoria­lists, pan­elists, talk-show hosts and talk­ing heads — the com­men­tariat, pro­fi­cient in the jar­gon of upswings, down­swings, deep­en­ings, con­trac­tions, cor­rec­tions, hurts and pains, rem­edy and fraud; and a tor­rent of par­tici­ples: plung­ing, col­laps­ing, sink­ing, squeez­ing, etc. Oracles by tra­di­tion resist the ques­tions put to them by respond­ing with conun­drums, brain­teasers, non sequiturs, blath­er­ings and bull­shit. A bank­ruptcy con­sul­tant on the cbc Radio drive-home show pauses before mak­ing him­self clear. “The future,” he says (igno­rant or unafraid of the pathetic fal­lacy), “is not all that opti­mistic.” Another expert observes that “fore­cast­ing is dif­fi­cult, espe­cially if it’s about the future.” In the Globe and Mail, a real-estate mogul invokes the spec­tre of evo­lu­tion: “What we are look­ing at is Darwinism,” he says. “And that is hard to pre­dict right now.” A reporter restates the case for his lay read­ers: “The sin­gle fac­tor that char­ac­ter­izes the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion,” he writes, “is a lack of insight into what hap­pens next.” 

Who can be faulted for want­ing to know what the future holds? We take our prog­nos­ti­ca­tors, our hypoth­e­ca­tors, wher­ever we find them, whether in head­lines (experts say dis­mal num­bers mean growth ahead) or sound bites (“As bad as things are, they can still get worse”). “Clearly,” another expert on cbc Radio put it brightly at 9:15 one morn­ing in the mid­dle of February, “clearly, there’s a lot of crystal-balling going on.”

A lot of crystal-balling going on. When I heard these words I remem­bered a man run­ning for the num­ber 10 bus thirty-five years ago as my brother and I, who were on the bus, watched him through the rear win­dow. “That guy should stop run­ning,” said my brother. “This bus is not hap­pen­ing for him.” The run­ning man kept com­ing along as the bus doors closed and then the bus lurched out from the curb; as he stum­bled to a halt on the side­walk and flung his arms into the air, we could feel the future turn­ing away from him, at least the future that con­tained the num­ber 10 bus with my brother and me in it. The bus con­tin­ued to move away and the man receded into the dis­tance, a fig­ure of despair suf­fer­ing pre­cisely from what the reporter in the Globe and Mail iden­ti­fied only (or finally) last February as a lack of insight into what hap­pens next.

The plight of the run­ning man cast a shadow (or per­haps a light) on an exper­i­ment that my brother and I were car­ry­ing out under the guid­ance of an astrologer named Ray, a mild-mannered clerk who worked the late shift, check­ing the math on tax returns in the office where I was part-time man­ager. Ray had devel­oped a method of cal­cu­lat­ing horo­scopes with a pre­ci­sion that was bring­ing him ever nearer to his ulti­mate goal, which was, as he put it in words unusu­ally strong for him, “to tell you when you’re going take your next piss.” On the after­noon of the run­ning man, my brother and I were on our way to the race­track on the num­ber 10 bus with bet­ting horo­scopes that Ray had pre­pared for us the night before. We had con­cluded after sev­eral tri­als that Ray’s cal­cu­la­tions (which always came close to, and often suc­ceeded in, pre­dict­ing win­ning horses) increased in accu­racy when the first race set off at its sched­uled time of 6:00 p.m. If it failed to start pre­cisely at six, we would have to make adjust­ments on the spot with the horo­scope charts spread out on our knees (while around us pun­ters scru­ti­nized the Racing Form); the moon and sun, being nearer than the stars, were the vital agents of influ­ence at these moments. As the evening pro­gressed and the start­ing times of indi­vid­ual races drifted away from plan, the mar­gin of error grew. This was our intro­duc­tion to the clas­si­cal prob­lem of “ini­tial con­di­tions” that haunts sci­en­tists who try to deduce the future of the uni­verse from a spe­cific moment in time.

One of my duties as part-time office man­ager was to extin­guish fires in the Xerox copier sta­tioned in the bay win­dow at the front of the office. In that dis­tant time before com­put­ers, the Xerox, a large, lum­ber­ing, expen­sive machine, was the icon of leading-edge tech­nol­ogy. My boss had installed the Xerox next to the key-cutting machine in the win­dow, where it would draw the atten­tion of passersby, and, as he said to me con­fi­den­tially, attract new busi­ness by act­ing as a loss leader: the sign in the win­dow read: while u wait!—xerox copies 10¢—keys cut 50¢; and a sand­wich board on the side­walk promised Tax Returns: $5+UP. The con­cept of the loss leader lay at the core of the busi­ness, which was financed, to my great delight, by a Woodward’s Department Store charge card and a fleet of old cars that my boss sold back and forth between com­pa­nies, each time with new bank loans (the ’52 Studebaker assigned to me had no reverse gear and no hand­brake, but it was worth more than five thou­sand dol­lars on the books).

The Xerox tended to over­heat when more than a few sheets of paper were run through it, and the result­ing fires, sig­nalled by tongues of flame spit­ting from seams in the side panel, made a strong impres­sion on the clien­tele and on any­one look­ing in the win­dow. My job was (calmly) to pop the panel, haul out the burn­ing sheet and drop it in the waste­bas­ket. While per­form­ing this duty I met the well-known poet Earle Birney, who had brought in a sheaf of poems for copy­ing; I was the only per­son who rec­og­nized him, and it was I who, to his great relief, put out the sub­se­quent fire and appeared to have saved part of his oeu­vre. I had met Ray the astrologer when a sim­i­lar fire broke out as he was mak­ing copies of a blank horo­scope chart (the cost of which, he assured me, would go onto his “per­sonal account”); as soon as I under­stood the pur­pose of the charts I wanted to know more. Later in the sea­son our shifts over­lapped and I began spend­ing time with Ray after mid­night in order to talk about horoscopy, and I soon learned that he had been inducted into an order of Rosicrucians (to whom he had applied when he was a teenager, in response to a notice in Popular Science) by a robed fig­ure who appeared in the night at the foot of his bed. Further vis­i­ta­tions from more robed fig­ures resulted in astral jour­neys and the acqui­si­tion of sev­eral mag­i­cal tech­niques, includ­ing a way of show­ing peo­ple their past lives in a mir­ror — a skill that became a party trick until, as Ray told me, he renounced party tricks after an unpleas­ant expe­ri­ence with a friend whose past lives had been, as he put it, “unfor­tu­nate.” We sat in the brightly lit office until well past mid­night on many occa­sions: our reflec­tions could be seen in the big bay win­dows, which had been trans­formed into mir­rors by the dark­ness beyond; and often as he told sto­ries of the occult life I was unable to look up at what might be reflected there.

Ray’s sys­tem of divin­ing his own future had led him to con­clude that he would never profit greatly from his astrol­ogy, but that he was enti­tled to small rewards such as the bingo jack­pots that he picked up at least once a week after care­ful tri­an­gu­la­tion of his chart: sums of fifty dol­lars, a hun­dred, and once I recall a jack­pot of a thou­sand, which he took by stay­ing on until the eleventh game after win­ning a small pot in the tenth (ten and eleven had been dom­i­nant in his horo­scope for that night). 

My brother and I arranged to make the exper­i­ment with the horse races using cal­cu­la­tions that Ray would pre­pare the night before. We made sev­eral excur­sions to the track but often mis­read plan­e­tary angles as the evening unfolded, so that horse num­ber 3 would come in when we expected horse num­ber 2, and so on. All of our fail­ures were attrib­ut­able to an unsteady hold on ini­tial con­di­tions. Everything depended on the tim­ing of the first race — even a five-minute dif­fer­ence would affect the angu­lar rela­tions of sub­se­quent moments. We soon began to expe­ri­ence the world at large in this way, as a kind of clock­work mech­a­nism tick­ing away inside the events of the mun­dane sphere. We were fre­quently stymied by ini­tial con­di­tions in our attempts to get to the track on time (an empty gas tank or a full park­ing lot, to name just two), and then the whole evening would go out of whack and we began to sus­pect that our own horo­scopes might have to be cal­cu­lated in synch with the race­track chart if we were to suc­ceed in win­ning con­sis­tently. The expe­ri­ence of the man run­ning for the bus seemed to con­sol­i­date this rather weary­ing sense of a clock­work uni­verse: we were learn­ing to see or feel that well before he started run­ning for the bus, it was already “too late” for the run­ning man; in fact it had been too late for him since before he was born, since before the uni­verse started. By virtue of the same lack of insight into what hap­pens next that we had per­ceived vaguely to be his fatal flaw, he was spared the knowl­edge that every­thing that is going to hap­pen is going to hap­pen. Such was the mys­tery behind future-seeing that my brother and I faced as we strove to pre­dict the out­come of a horse race.

I con­tin­ued meet­ing with Ray for most of the sum­mer. I wished to grasp his under­stand­ing of the nature of real­ity: he was patient with me, and he freely if slowly recounted his nightly trav­els with his astral guides and his ini­ti­a­tions into higher lev­els of arcane under­stand­ing. He described his learn­ing as a series of ele­va­tions — a pro­ces­sion through and toward ever higher lev­els, but never high enough to know (or at least to tell me) how many more lev­els there might be in the process. As I pressed him on this ques­tion, he began describ­ing the uni­verse as a kind of con­struc­tion: a tower or sky­scraper to be ascended, floor by floor. Was the tower a metaphor or was it just a tower, I wanted to know, and even­tu­ally he said that he thought it was just a tower: the lev­els were real, and from each level more lev­els could be seen. 

In the end the fig­ure of the tower was all that Ray could offer me, and when I real­ized that my aes­thetic, if not my phi­los­o­phy, required more, I soon let my atten­tion slip away from the clock­work turn­ing of the zodiac and the spi­ralling tow­ers of astral lives, and my brother and I fell again into the slap­dash willy-nilly exis­tence of the man run­ning for the bus, the plain world so eas­ily obscured by the gar­bled utter­ances of experts. In the world of income tax, as I dis­cov­ered in my job as assis­tant man­ager, the future is pro­tected for the few — investors in oil com­pa­nies, for exam­ple, are com­pen­sated in advance for the even­tual dis­ap­pear­ance of the oil that is already mak­ing them rich, through the ludi­crous pro­vi­sion of the deple­tion allowance.

Years later, after my boss had saved his busi­ness from bank­ruptcy in a few breath­tak­ing show­downs with men in suits, and I had moved into other enter­prises, I received a post­card from Earle Birney, with whom I had had no fur­ther exchange after the fire in the Xerox. He had fallen from a tree some­where in Ontario and bro­ken an arm or a leg; the mes­sage on the card con­tained a short, tri­umphant poem writ­ten in cel­e­bra­tion of his fall.

The philoso­pher Hannah Arendt reminds us in The Human Condition that just as we are given the fac­ulty of for­give­ness as the sole means of undo­ing deeds of the past “which hang like Damocles’ sword over every new gen­er­a­tion,” so also are we given the abil­ity to make promises (and to keep them) as our only means of cre­at­ing, in the ocean of uncer­tainty that lies just beyond the next moment, those “islands of secu­rity” with­out which there would be noth­ing durable in our rela­tions with each other.