Letters from Radio Quotidia Last Things 2

Welcome to Radio Quotidia, episode 7, 13 minutes or so of music and musings. Quentin Bega here at the mic. I’m broadcasting from our studio located somewhere in the depths of Quotidia inside a digital onion. My aim to keep you entertained for a while. The theme this month is Last Things.

Catholics will tell you that the four last things are: Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell. The first death recorded in Genesis was also the first crime: fratricide, when Cain killed Abel. Interesting, from the point of view of a contemporary audience, is the paucity of detail surrounding that murder.

Basically, all we are told is that God accepted Abel’s offering over Cain’s. Cain gets in a snit. Then they go out into the field where, in the words of the King James Bible, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and slew him. That’s it. Nothing more. The aftermath is more detailed, of course. When God enquires after Abel, Cain replies with the famous line: Am I my brother’s keeper?

God then condemns Cain to roam the earth as a fugitive and a vagabond, unable to till the ground as it has drunk the blood of his brother. When Cain complains that he will be a marked man, God replies: Whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.

So, originally the mark of Cain was divine protection! Fratricide has been a feature of legend, history, and society from this time: In The Antigone, by Sophocles, Eteocles and Polyneices kill each other by stabbing one another through the heart; Romulus kills Remus and founds the city of Rome- setting the stage for lots of family killings down through the centuries. In Hamlet, Claudius kills his brother, the king to grab the throne and Queen Gertrude.

At about the same time as the composition of Hamlet, it was not a recipe for long life to be the brother of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. In the reign of Mehmet III, upon the birth of a male heir to the throne, nineteen of his brothers were strangled with silk cords and buried with their father. In contemporary popular culture, Michael Corleone kills his brother in The Godfather, Part Two and, in Disney’s The Lion King, Scar kills his brother Mufasa. I wrote the first song of this episode for a TV show I was pitching to Ulster TV but left to return to Australia before it could be progressed- another still-born project, alas, but The Mark of Cain remains. [insert song]

In a cartoon from the sixties by Ron Cobb, entitled Progress, the upper panel shows two cavemen brandishing bones at one another. Then, dividing the upper panel from the lower, is the word Progress. The lower panel shows two men in suits; one has a pistol with which he has just shot his rival dead. The concluding song of this episode, also called Progress, inserts a few more panels between the cave-dwellers and suit-wearers of the Cobb cartoon, outlining the long history of warfare culminating in nuclear Armageddon.

But progress, in the few short years since I first published the song in May 2021 has delivered a new nightmare to trouble our slumbers. Artificial Intelligence will either usher in a Nirvana with humans achieving immortality within the next 20 years, if you believe the cheerleaders for this technology, or, as the Cassandras prophesy, the technology, having become sentient and taken control of the requisite means of production, will surreptitiously decide that we are superfluous to the future and devise our demise by, for instance, manufacturing myriad nanobots that will be introduced into the environment and infiltrate our bodies, every living human body on earth, and at a predetermined time, these little engines of death coursing through our bloodstream and brain will simply activate and cause every member of our species to…deactivate. [insert song]

The flamboyant Irish playwright, Oscar Wilde declared at a technical college in Dublin in 1872, Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more. Mmm, but maybe not more AI development until we actually learn how to rule ourselves. Just a thought.

Credits: All written text, song lyrics and music (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.

Technical Stuff: Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text. For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.