In a storage closet in the science building of a small Iowa liberal arts college on a shelf next to the nation's largest private collection of meteorite fragments (a box of rocks a man used to pay his daughters tuition twenty-some years ago) is the world's first safety pin. It's in a small box that might have held an old necklace at one time. It's a little rusty, but otherwise it looks almost disappointingly like . . . a safety pin.
I was told the inventor left the pin to the college in his will (It could have been worse. Shakespeare left his wife a barrel of nails he didn't even invent.) and it has sat in various closets ever since. And sadly, that's not even the most bizarre thing lying around that tiny campus. The government documents repository, for example, contains such national treasures as pogs with nutrition facts on them (and if you don't know what a pog is, you can give up any notion of being ironically retro-cool right now). While I was there, they also unearthed a pile of 1969 yearbooks that had been banned from distribution because they contained pictures of people smoking pot. But other than that one picture, which was lame, those books are absolute photo masterpieces. To this day, it's the only yearbook I own. (Incidentally, the two photographers who worked on the yearbook nearly flunked out because all they did was work on the book. When it was finally finished, they were prevented from graduating anyway, and the final page is a picture of them picketing the commencement ceremonies.) Bear in mind that this is a campus of less than 2,000 students in a town of less than 6,000 people, and still nobody can keep track off all the stuff lying around.
I haven't really thought much about that safety pin since I saw it. Iowa also has the world's largest ball of twine, and it's nothing to get fixated on either. But that little pin popped back into my mind at an odd moment recently: standing barefoot at the Taj Mahal. See, behind the Taj is a river, and across the river are some trees and what look like rice paddies. Among the trees are tarps and makeshift tents that form a small shanty town, and I thought about what it would be like to live in the shadow of one of the most amazing buildings ever built. Then I thought, wait a minute, I live literally in the shadow of an active volcano, and I hardly even think about it. Why don't I contemplate my fiery demise every morning over breakfast? I'm sure a bunch of impoverished Indians have better things to think about than long-dead Lord Akbar and his wife's mausoleum. In fact, it has been proven repeatedly that we pay the least attention to the things that are closest to us. Supposedly the majority of traffic accidents happen within a couple kilometers of the driver's house. After almost two years I still haven't mastered the contents of my own apartment, and I'm taken by an anxiety that the human race has lost or forgotten more things than it has found or remembered.
A massive chunk of human history is stored away in boxes, crates, and envelopes, lost in the mail, buried in tin cigar boxes in people's backyards, etc., and most of it got there without ever having been history in the first place. Want to know who killed JFK or Janis Joplin? Want to know what's going on in Roswell? Want to know what the Japanese really did to the Chinese in Nanjing? Mektub, Arabic for, "It is written." Most war crimes trials after WWII have been based on the Nazi's own meticulous records of what they did. And even scarier than that: time is still progressing at the same rate, but our data storage capacities are growing exponentially. Someday every moment of our lives will be documented in a hundred different places, but most of the data will vaish instantly into the bureaucrosphere. An art history professor I know once discovered a famous (i.e. expensive) Jackson Polock painting at the University of Iowa. Where? Hanging anonymously above the reception desk at the library. And I'm not talking about a postcard print. It's 30 feet long by 10 feet high, and was commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim for her front hallway. How it got to the library (where it spent a number of years in obscurity) is no mystery. Nobody was paying attention.
This point was driven home on my recent bike trip to Sado Island. Actually, this is true anywhere I ride my bike: people stare at me. They gawk. They gape. They blurt out a whole spectrum of ridiculous things. I don't blame them, I guess, but what really fascinates me are the people who don't even notice. I'm not craving the attention. But I am a bit shocked by the sheer number of people who simply oblivious to things going on around them. Often other bicyclists are the worst, cruising along with their eyes fixed downward, hypnotized by their own rotating front wheels. But the space-cases are everywhere, doing everything, and they have forced me to make two promises to myself: that I will ride carefully (and with a helmet), and that I will do my best not to be so absorbed by the space right in front of me that I don't notice a lunatic on wheels. Even if, thanks to television, I can't remember the things I see and hear five minutes later, I would at least like to have noticed.
Further proof that Japanese and English are mutually untranslatable comes from the Daily Yomiyuri on Tuesday, May 21, 2002, page 12. The article is about NASA's Space Launch Initiative (SLI), for which it plans to build a "next-generation space shuttle that would withstand the effect of repeated use." In the current shuttle design, much of the shuttle returns home, but things like fuel tanks and launch boosters are lost during takeoff. According to the article, "A NASA official said the reusable parts could lower launch costs—currently $500 million—by as much as 90 percent."
But as usual, something has been lost in the trip across the Pacific, and Atsushi Noda of the Advanced Mission Research Center of the National Space Development Agency of Japan was critical of the project, saying, "Costs of current space shuttles are already high. There won't be a very large demand (for SLI shuttles) unless they can be reused numerous times." Thank you, Captain Obvious, for saving us from ourselves. But the article continues:
"In September, Noda's team proposed a plan for the construction of Fuji, a manned and almost entirely disposable Japanese spacecraft." My question is, what moron would agree to blast into space on the Good Ship Waribashi?
