anchors in the infinite.

for stella r.

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep
It hooked itself into the altar rails

-seamus heaney, Lightenings viii

biggie & bette

his past saturday, cem and jph and i were talking about biggie's place in history. to wit: right now he's a veritable legend of the hippity-hop, but cem opined that, as the ocean of media we are collectively swimming in swells over the years, biggie will inevitably be awash in anonymity. makes sense to me. imagine someone looking at an encyclopedia of hip-hop one hundred years from now. biggie will be one of hundreds if not thousands of entries. better still, imagine someone looking at said encyclopedia 500 years from now. how can biggie not be a tiny entry by then? how can anyone, in any field, not wind up a miniscule dot on history's veritably infinite plane?

well, actually, i believe there's a way. but it has much more to do with luck and timing than talent. (doesnt it always?)

this might not be the most original idea, but i havent heard anyone else say it, so what the hell:

i think people who either start or find themselves at the beginning of a genre or discipline will enjoy inexorably prominent places in history, for virtually all time.

for instance, let's take the subject at hand - hip-hop. grandmaster flash and the sugarhill gang were just two mc's, just like biggie (well, i guess they were actually one mc and a gang of them, respectively, but whatevah), and they were prolly not as talented as he. but, unlike biggie, they were there at the beginning of rap. and, no matter how many entries that hypothetical encyclopedia of hip-hop accumulates, no matter how it categorizes the evolution of rap, and its various and sundry subcategories, it will always have to have a section documenting the beginning of the genre. i mean, that's compulsory, n'est-ce pas? flash and sugarhill prolly arent as famous as biggie is now, but id venture to say that the longer hip-hop exists, the more the latter will be swallowed into the middle of its timeline, lumped with countless others, while the former two will always be anchored to the beginning of that timeline, anchored to prominence. perhaps this is because judging a rapper's talent is by nature subjective, but we can objectively say who was rapping first.

it's more obvious in other areas. the presidency, for instance. as long as there's a u.s. of a, the name george washington is gonna enjoy some notoriety. yeah, people are prolly always gonna remember yer lincolns and your roosevelts, but for each of those cats, there's five millard fillmores. im sure in his day, mill-fill was up in the sauce as much as biggie ever was, and who remembers him now? but everyone remembers washington, and he was a goddamn slave owner! speaking of which, even lincoln's stature is more than anything a product of him happening to have been in office during a pivotal time. theoretically, if the u.s. lasted, say a thousand more years, lincoln could conceivably be forgotten, but washington never will be. (unless we change the name of washington, d.c. to lincoln, which is a topic for a whole other post ill never write.)

ike newton is gonna be remembered not b/c he had an iq that would make steve hawking punch 'im blushing' on his lil keyboard (im guessing on that; i couldnt think of anyone better to plug in there), but b/c he's the one who friggin discovered so many of the rules and theorems and whatnot that are used in physics and math. (and why do i cringe when i think of jph reading that?)

babe ruth's records will eventually all fall, but the fact that the bambino was the first baseball superstar will keep him around.

and speaking of people traipsing around in black and white, this whole deal is particularly stark when it comes to movies. brangelina, tom cruise, julia roberts, jack nicholson, the governator, dusty hoffman, theyre gonna fade. because as long as there are movies, most of them are gonna be in color, and eventually the color-era stars will all lump into each other, simply cuz there will be so many of them. but the silent and black-and-white era stars, theyre a different story. they comprise such a finite number, those doug fairbankses, chaz chaplins, gretta garbos, jimmy cagneys and joan crawfords. drew effing barrymore might be oodles more famous than bette davis right now, but three hundred years from now, there wont be a human being alive who's seen a drew barrymore flick (i hope), while you can be certain that at the very least, some film class somewhere, possibly on mars or the moon, will be watching jezebel.