Moonquake

Leaf 111 – Art Inspired

 

Arthur C. Clarke on the film set of 2001 (1965)

I have always been interested in space and astronomy. When I was young, I had a telescope and enjoyed looking at the stars at night, especially the planets – the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. I was, and still am, an avid reader of science fiction. I read John Christopher’s Tripods books when I was around thirteen years old, as well as the Lucky Starr and Foundation novels of Isaac Asimov. But the novels and short stories of Arthur C. Clarke were the ones which always appealed to me the most. There was something about Clarke’s technological optimism for the future, coupled with his open-minded speculations as to the nature of the divine and the limits of human comprehension, which is perhaps best summed up by one of his “laws” which states that: “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.” And that: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Or, to put it another way: “Magic is just science that we don’t understand yet.” The following tanka is a tribute to Clarke’s ever-expanding capacity for fostering and encouraging curiosity to carefully emerge and grow from the seeds which he planted in his writings – even when the social mores and the science upon which he based some of his early novels’ ideas were superseded, he continued to adapt – because in that sense, nothing can be too sacred.

 

 

 

MOONQUAKE

 

As when a tree falls

in the forest,

who hears the slow slump

of a fall of moondust

– in the void.