*-SORRY.AS SOON AS I HAVE THE TIME, I'LL REFINE AND POST THE FOOTNOTE HERE.
"...if you think a Rembrandt self-portrait is a collection of specks of paint of a known chemical composition, then you have missed the point of the painting."
(And:) "We would be gravely diminished if we thought the only things worth knowing in life were those that science could tell us. If we rejected the insights of art and ethics and religion, our lives would be in fact subhuman."
I already have a preliminary manuscript form of the book of
poetry, to which i'm now adding drawings, titled, "What Lies Beyond This Door".
The original theme of the poetry, as is explained in the "AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION"
(to the manuscript), was "to simply write how i felt about love
and the many kinds of it that all of us have to experience
during our lives...But the older i got and the more 'experience'
i acquired, the more i found that the distinctions and
classifications broke down and that living and loving (and
understanding how to) don't have a handy instruction book to
rely upon."
International diplomacy (i decided) and science (Professor Polkinghorne decided) have this problem, too.
It may be more widely known by the time of publication of
"Tesseracts3" (depending upon the decisions of those
often apparently illogical politicians) that in 1978 i was the
first authority to formally advise Ottawa that in 1976 the
Pentagon began the strategic defensive systems research that
ultimately became the basis of Ronald Reagan's "Star
Wars"/"Strategic Defense Initiative" some years
later...perhaps the most outlandish bit of science fiction (at
least as far as Reagan and his supporters tried to
explain its pursued functions) devised in human history.
Unlike the best works of admitted science fiction writers like
Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and their peers,
very poor efforts were made by the pseudo-science fiction
perpetrators to reconcile genuine science with their claims.
And in exploiting human fears about a nuclear holocaust to raise
funding for their scheme, no reasonable regard was given to
these human fears and their psychological consequences as time
goes forward.
This is a concern, however, that i considered in my diplomatic work...and the poetry (given its original theme)--including in "Science Fiction".
Beyond doing groundwork for the nuclear arms reductions
processes, i also did a lot of work re determination of how to
encourage the peaceful dismantling of apartheid in South
Africa--which is why i'm considering a separate, preliminary
book about my work in that field.*
But what, you may ask, does this have to do with (Canadian)
science fiction?
This is why i'm adding this explanation about "Science
Fiction".
Many of the "Tesseracts3" readers probably saw the
"M*A*S*H" episode i did in which a racial bigot white
American soldier insists that the medical staff be careful he
isn't given "colored blood" as part of his treatment. Hawkeye
and his cohorts devise an elaborate ruse to convince the bigot
that he is given the blood he's so afraid of, and that
it's changing him into a Negro.
At the end of the episode, Hawkeye eloquently tells the man
about Dr. Charles Drew, the black American who was a
pioneer in plasma and blood transfusion sciences, who was
seriously injured in a 1950 car accident in the American South,
rushed by ambulance to the nearest hospital for a blood
transfusion--and who bled to death in the back of the ambulance
because he
*-SORRY.
AS SOON AS I HAVE THE TIME, I'LL REFINE AND POST THE FOOTNOTE HERE.