It`s almost a sci-fi scenario because it takes seriously attempts to master life on a planet that spins in space through faith and culture. A legal fiction is something that may or may not be true in real life, but it is believed to be real or true in order to make laws. The age of majority or consent is a legal fiction: it is arbitrary (not necessarily in the wrong way, but arbitrary nonetheless) and varies by jurisdiction. Under international law, diplomats often operate under the fiction that they are in their own country and not abroad – although geographically, there is no doubt that they are indeed very far from home. Efforts to give personality to chimpanzees and rivers are also based on such a fiction: by considering these non-humans as persons, even if they are obviously not, a court can grant them certain rights that only legal persons enjoy. Humans, as Empson describes them, are confined to all the usual terrestrial species: as mortals, they cannot access the sky or the underworld, fly or teleport. But legal claims to new types of property – in this case, air and mining rights – can prolong man`s „short stakes“ indefinitely. It is obviously ridiculous to claim to possess the air or the stars, and we all know it. But national and international property laws claim to do just that — and nothing but an alien invasion can do anything about it. As a genre, science fiction probably owes as much to late Victorian anthropology as it does to late Victorian science; It may have flourished only because anthropology had developed as a field; in any case, Empson`s own anthropological inclinations are better understood in the context of science fiction than in the context of anthropology, since he does not usually write about other cultures, but about their beliefs as technologies of the mind. He is not the only author whose work proves the link between science fiction and anthropology: the great novels of Ursula K. LeGuin do the same.
A naturalistic union of life and existence; a desire for a form of life that does not need to resolve the split between consciousness and material being; it rejects monotheistic religions and dissolves them in their approach to a magnolia flower; it is as certain (in its rhythm, but also in its intellectual activity) as any poem written by Empson, and without being a work of science fiction, it perpetuates its fictions about science, imagining in human terms a form of life that is not human but real. It could be an angel he describes. One of the keys is to think generically: Empson writes poems about humanity`s place in the universe as if he were writing science fiction. He writes science fiction texts; moreover, unlike Lewis or Milton, he wrote humanistic science fiction texts. Empson said the poem was written as an excuse for not showing „enough love“ to a girl. In his sexual images, his attempts at persuasion, one feels like a poem from Give to a Woman. The subject of the poem is a fairly normal lyrical thing; the images come from the boys` adventure literature, especially Haggard (King Solomon`s Mines); But the spirit of the poem is again science fiction (which is hardly mutually exclusive with adventure literature), for it takes a perspective that the world must be governed by technology, prone to discovery and understanding through observation and empirical means, just as it thinks another person might be; The effect is again twofold, so that we approach a person as a world, but also a world, and an approach to this world is brought to a new meaning by comparison with a relationship. The relationship of the poem depends on a world in which a science fiction adventure could be set.
A way out was accidentally suggested to me by Ricks; He suggested students read C.S. Lewis` Out of the Silent Planet as an introduction to Paradise Lost and take the epic`s relationship with science fiction seriously. Empson had read Donne in the same way in his essay „Donne the Space-Man“, in which he argued that Donne took seriously the possibility (taken up by Milton and Lewis) of life on other worlds; The poems deal not only with unity and diversity, but also with centrality and distance, isolation and communication; They are poems about the human perspective as one perspective among others. Legal fictions can also interfere with our understanding of what is real. There is a reason why philosopher Jeremy Bentham believed that in law, „fiction is syphilis that goes in all directions and carries the principle of rot in every part of the system.“ I know nothing about Empson`s politics, but for me his poem openly criticizes capitalist property regimes. What is even more understandable, however, is his sense of simultaneous disgust and wonder: at the ingenuity of our absurd laws that weave their fictions and create new truths out of nothing. In both cases, the poems shape the need for technologies of faith, love, and art if we are to cope and stay healthy. The rainbow often appears in poems, an image with a rich symbolic heritage: the promise of God, the messenger of the gods, the product of Newton`s prism, the light that passes through space to strike the eye with the chance of beauty and the immediacy of color; It has two points, it contains a whole spectrum of possibilities, it invites interpretation and discovery. A major achievement of poems is to model the potential of the technologies, art, and learning we possess, while using them to represent the circumstances of life and existence that make us cling to their potential. The assumptions and visions of science fiction are embedded in poetry, and it founds and surrounds its moral reasoning and the depth of its love.