Stranger in a Strange Land

Alternate History

By John Wilson | posted 11/01/2004

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Guy Davenport tells a story about the filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who grew disgusted with newspapers and stopped reading them altogether. Instead, at the breakfast table, he read aloud each morning to his family from the Roman historian Suetonius. On November 22, 1963, they had arrived at Suetonius' account of the death of Julius Caesar.

Elsewhere in this issue there's a window into a parallel universe where Bono is president of the United States and Warren Sapp is his secretary of defense. In this alternate America, the cabinet also includes a secretary of history, Books & Culture's own Mark Noll.

In the familiar world we inhabit, this cabinet post is unlikely to catch on. That's a pity. Imagine the president meeting every two weeks, say, with his historian. Everyone else around him is focused relentlessly on the present, not least on the ever-proliferating opinion polls. When his advisers venture into history, they generally do so in the spirit of a raid—to rip from its context a precedent, an anecdote, a jeweled phrase that will serve some partisan purpose. But for a half-hour every fortnight, the president simply listens to his historian telling him about another time, with its enigmas and ironies intact—yet also, always, a tale of choices made for better or worse, hence bearing on the choices to be made today.

And in that parallel world, resentment burns against the Cubs' dynasty, the cost of medical insurance is rapidly declining, and Richard Dawkins—following his dramatic conversion— preaches at the largest Pentecostal church in the UK.

Christianity, of course, is the ultimate alternate history, with a premise far more fantastic than anything imagined by Harry Turtledove and other masters of the genre. The Creator of the universe sends his son, who is also God himself, to Earth to be born of a virgin. The son grows up, is crucified, and rises again from the dead, somehow conquering death itself. Then he ascends to heaven, sending the Spirit—who is also God (there are three persons, but one God—perfectly clear, no?)—to dwell in and re-form all those who follow him. And the world, the broken world that we know so well from our histories and our newspapers, is changed, once and for all.

In this season of Advent and Christmas, we have two poems for you: one directly below, by Scott Cairns (readers who have been with us for a while will remember his icon-inspired poems in this space two years ago), and the second on p. 17, by John Leax, concluding his series of "Tabloid Poems" with "I Want to Have a Space Alien's Baby."

Christmas Green

Just now the earth recalls His stunning visitation. Now
the earth and scattered habitants attend to what is possible: that He
of a morning entered this, our meagered circumstance, and so
relit the fuse igniting life in them, igniting life in all the dim
surround. And look, the earth adopts a kindly áffect. Look,
we almost see our long estrangement from it overcome.
The air is scented with the prayer of pines, the earth is softened
for our brief embrace, the fuse continues bearing to all elements
a curative despite the grave, and here within our winter this,
the rising pulse, bears still the promise of our quickening.

—Scott Cairns is professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the author most recently of Philokalia: New and Selected Poems (Zoo Press).

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