a something my brain did
Earlier this month, I was listening to the future robot avatars of Emma Newman and Adrian Tchaikovsky aboard their podcast, the Starship Alexandria (which I highly recommend). They were discussing The Golden Apples of the Sun, a collection of short stories from Ray Bradbury.
One of the stories was A Sound of Thunder, one of the most famous of stories, originally published in 1952. Interestingly, it wasn’t until 1963 that Edward Lorenz undertook the work that produced a first noted demonstration of deterministic chaos, which is in some sense the formal mathematical underpinning of this idea of small differences at the beginning result in large differences later on.
I suppose there there is also the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory, or Everett interpretation, which dates to 1957, which could be seen as a different interpretation of the story.
But this isn’t the thing my brain did. When I was an undergraduate, oh so many years ago now, we were given the poem Ozymandias by Shelley to read and interpret. I had not read the poem before, had not encountered it, and so didn’t know the standard interpretation. I don’t remember what it was I said, but it wasn’t the standard.
It’s times like this that make me wish I had kept some of my old school and university notes, so that I could look back and see what it was I said, but moving across an ocean persuades someone not to keep too many things.
But during the podcast, I remembered a line from Night Moves, a 1976 Bob Seger song. ‘I woke last night to the sound of thunder.’ It’s a song I know well; it was a standard part of radio play when I was growing up, and it was a song I was always happy to hear, the story of two young people who were restless and bored.
Could we, my brain said, reinterpret the entire song along the lines of A Sound of Thunder? For most of the story, I think the answer is no, at least among reasonable interpretations. But there is the one verse where it might be possible.
I woke last night to the sound of thunder
how far off I sat and wondered
started humming a song from nineteen sixty two
aint it funny how the night moves
when just don’t seem to have as much to lose
strange how the night moves
with autumn closing in
This verse almost works. It would have been a bit more intriguing if the song he’d been humming was from 1952, the year A Sound of Thunder was published, but alas the world is imperfect.
How wide should we sometimes cast our interpretations? On the one hand it’s clear that there is no reasonable way to interpret this song as a vision of an alternate world. But on the other, it’s fun to see how far we can go. I keep singing that line, ever hopeful that something more will come to me. Oh how strange the night moves.
multijimbo 