under. world. of. stuck. miners.

Ian thinks about big things. He thinks about problems and solutions. And I am pleased to say that Ian has developed an alternative solution to the crisis of the miners stuck in that deep mine, miles underground, in Chile last year. Ian understands that the miners have already been "rescued," but that didn't stop him from devising an entirely different solution to their former dilemma. Not so much a solution as a "workaround," but one that he apparently finds at least as good as the way that the problem was resolved, if not better.

As most people who don't live in a basement full of cats probably realize, the miners were lifted, one at a time, out of the mine and returned to their lives above ground and their loved ones. But that was only one way of approaching the problem, and this "solution" defined the problem around the narrow assumption that what the miners really wanted or needed was to come out of the mine and be back in "society." What occurred to Ian is that it might have been just as good, if not better, instead to construct a world for the miners underground, so that they would never need to leave.

Toward that end, Ian took a scrap of paper and drew out, with a ball-point pen, this shining Utopia where miners might have been able to settle, if only the Chilean government hadn't opted for the path of least resistance, instead. It is a picture of houses, and there's a smiling stick figure, and a dog, and an elevator. The elevator serves to move the miners between "levels" of the underworld ("Ian's term) rather like something out of Ovid or Virgil. And the artist/visionary narrated the diagram of the proposed alternate solution a bit, telling me that the elevator would ding and the dog would bark, almost like they were singing together.

Ian described the whole paradigm as follows: "It's kind of like a basement that's actually a world."

One aspect of this project is the comedic one. Ian tends to laugh as he discusses the solution or displays the mock-up drawing. This is by no means intended as insensitivity to the plight of the miners; instead, he is laughing at the whole idea of the solution, even though he does seem to approve of it.

But best of all is the label for the project, which he wrote on the back of the same scrap of paper that models the final product:

"under. wold.[sic] of. stuck. miners."

I think he used a period after each word in order to make sure that no punctuation was neglected.

It's too late for those poor Chileans, forced to live in an above-ground world without an intra-underworld elevator and a dog that sings with it. But perhaps next time people get stuck in a mine, the "experts" will be able to solution a whole new approach, thinking "outside the box" that we call "Ground Level."

The earth's crust is the limit. Or perhaps China is, if we could dig through that hot core between North America and the other side of this under-explored sphere.

(February 6, 2011)