1966 was a colourful year remembered mostly in black and white.
The culture was colour.
The technology of memory was greyscale.
In the summer England lifted a gold World Cup.
Red shirts celebrated beneath a summer sky.
Most of the country watched it all in monochrome.
The autumn brought the first Cybermen.
Visitors from another planet.
All in grey.
Colour
Yet 1966 started out knowing the world would change.
Camberwick Green was filmed in colour.
They could see what was happening across the pond.
There Star Trek started its life in glorious technicolour.
The future had arrived elsewhere.
Here the Beatles album Revolver arrived carrying colours that seemed to belong to another decade entirely.
The cover hardly gave the game away.
Britain simply couldn’t see all of it yet.
Nor could the Cybermen.
Their home was a lot like ours.
Not our Earth.
A different one.
Close enough to recognise.
They travelled across the vastness of space.
And still all in monochrome.
Cyber Man!
What does the word cyber actually mean?
Just cyber.
Computers?
Robots?
The internet?
The trail leads backwards.
Past coloured screens.
Past black and white ones.
Past electronics.
Past electrical machines.
Past science fiction.
Until a sailor appears.
Not a Victorian sailor.
Not one heading west to discover colour television.
A Greek one.
Bright Bronze Age sunlight on the sea.
A hand on a wooden rudder.
Salt.
Wind.
Wood.
Beyond the horizon.
To Troy.
Or perhaps Ithaca.
Odysseus.
Steering here and there.
Or perhaps a labyrinth.
Theseus.
A maze of passages.
A maze of stories.
A maze of people.
The Minotaur wanders.
Agamemnon turns up speaking with a suspiciously Scottish accent.
A moment later Kevin falls out of the sky clutching a colour Polaroid camera.
Nobody seems entirely sure who is steering any more.
Words
Words wander.
They collect meanings as they travel.
They pick up stories.
Associations.
Misunderstandings.
Magic once referred to Persian priests.
Book may be related to beech trees.
London may not mean what Londoners think it means.
Meanings accumulate.
They rarely replace one another.
More often they travel together.
The word cyber travelled from a ship’s helm to the Cybermen.
Not directly, of course.
Few interesting journeys are straightforward.
At some point the old sailor encountered a French mathematician.
André-Marie Ampère called it cybernétique.
The science of governing.
Steering a nation rather than a ship.
The journey continued.
Control systems.
Feedback loops.
Communication.
Steering.
In 1948 Norbert Wiener called it cybernetics.
The world was still largely black and white then.
The word was too.
Then the fragment wandered off on its own.
Cybernation.
Cyberman.
Twenty years pass.
Computers.
Connected to televisions.
Showing things in black and white.
Sometimes black and green.
Cyberspace opens up to the world.
Cyberpunk.
Still mostly black and white.
Then things start to get dangerous.
Cybersecurity.
And continue to get more dangerous.
The offspring became more famous than the parent.
The sailor remained at the helm.
Most people stopped noticing.
Journeys
The Fool.
Doctor Who.
Odysseus.
Kevin.
Different stories.
Different centuries.
The same journey.
The Fool steps forward.
The Doctor steps into the TARDIS.
Odysseus leaves Ithaca.
Kevin falls through a hole in time.
The sailor steers towards an uncertain horizon.
The Cybermen leave a second Earth.
All departures.
All thresholds.
All transformations.
A word survives by acquiring meanings.
A story survives by acquiring versions.
Cards
Then there are tarot cards.
The Fool.
Death.
The Magician.
People often ask what a card means.
As if meanings are hidden inside cards waiting to be discovered.
Perhaps they are hidden there.
Perhaps they are not hidden.
But wherever they are they accumulate.
Like words.
The Fool means more than it once did.
Death means more than it once did.
The Magician means more than it once did.
They have histories rather than definitions.
Much as words do.
Much as people do.
Perhaps meaning emerges when a card meets a reader.
Much as meaning emerges when a word meets a listener.
Wake
The sailor continues steering.
He has been there all along.
Hand on the rudder.
Eyes on the horizon.
Steering.
The ship disappears first.
The wake remains.