Human Meme

Twelve thirty-three in the afternoon. Monday, April 28, 2025. The electrical grid of the Iberian Peninsula loses fifteen gigawatts of generation in about five seconds. Spain and Portugal go dark together. Trains stop between stations, on viaducts, in tunnels. Airports fall back on diesel. The Madrid fire service alone logs a hundred and seventy-four elevator rescues. The national tax portal goes down and stays down until Wednesday. Police officers stand in dead intersections and run the traffic with their hands. The shopkeepers who stayed open made change the way their grandmothers had, out loud, coin by coin. Clerks did the arithmetic in their heads while the registers sat blank. Officers directed two capitals' worth of cars with a grammar of gesture older than the signal light. Everything rented from the wire stopped that afternoon. Everything carried kept working.

The book is history, and the book is news, and the seam between those two things is the subject. Here is the oldest voice in it. In May of 1881, the city of Chicago passed an ordinance declaring that any person "diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed" could be fined for being seen on the public way. Being visible was the offense. The law rode the railroads west after that, and in 1889 it arrived in Lincoln, Nebraska, which adopted the Chicago wording nearly letter for letter, down to the dollar fine and the commitment to the county poor farm. Omaha followed a year later. I grew up in Lincoln. I performed on television there as a teenager. Nobody told me my city had once made it a finable offense for certain bodies to stand where I stood. That silence is one of the reasons this book exists.

For most of Western history, the word art meant something wider and harder than it means now. Ars in Latin, techne in Greek: a principled, teachable discipline of making and doing, judged by its work. The family album that held the painter also held the physician, the pilot, the general, and the geometer. When Aristotle wrote the Poetics, the small treatise that barely survived antiquity through a cellar, a conqueror's cargo hold, and a chain of translators from Baghdad to Latin Europe, he pulled six working parts out of tragedy: plot, character, thought, diction, song, and spectacle. Mythos, ethos, dianoia, lexis, melos, opsis. Six load-points where a made thing carries weight, and where it can be built sound or built rotten. Then, in the eighteenth century, a wall went up.

January, in the year 897. A courtroom in Rome. In the defendant's chair sits a pope who has been dead for nine months. His name was Formosus. The reigning pope ordered the body pulled from its tomb, dressed in full vestments, and propped upright for trial. Church law required that a defendant answer, so the synod supplied a voice: a junior deacon stood beside the throne and replied to the prosecution on the dead man's behalf. The court convicted the corpse, stripped the vestments from it, cut the three blessing fingers from the right hand, and threw what remained into the Tiber. A monk fished the body from the reeds and kept it hidden until saner men could bury it again.

I want to start with a red pen. In August of 1977, a volunteer astronomer named Jerry Ehman sat reviewing computer printouts from a radio telescope in Ohio called Big Ear. The telescope had been listening to the sky and printing what it heard as columns of numbers and letters, and most of every page was the quiet hiss of the galaxy. Then Ehman's eye caught a vertical run of six characters, seventy-two seconds of signal at more than thirty times the background of the universe: 6EQUJ5. He circled the sequence in red and wrote one word in the margin. Wow! The signal never repeated. The day after it reached Ohio, Elvis Presley was found unresponsive at Graceland, and the country turned to a different grief. Four days after that, a Titan rocket stood on a Florida launch pad carrying a machine named Voyager, and bolted to its side was a gold-plated phonograph record.