Today is the day, in 1980, that the Rubik’s Cube was introduced to the world. By the end of the year, it seemed like everybody had one. It was a full-fledged craze. The best-selling book just the next year was about solving it. By 1982 there was a world championship in cube-solving.
The thing was, most people couldn’t solve it. You’d start, maybe focusing on trying to get all the green squares on one side. Then you’d start thinking, probably triggered by the green color, that Edward Abbey was born on January 29, the same day the Cube came along. But Abbey came first, in 1927.
After just a few turns, you’d usually get the first green row lined up. You’d remember that in your mind, the color green was linked with Abbey because of his writing and activism around the environment. He wrote about anarchy, and whether it was necessarily as connected with violence as most people assumed. He got a jobs as a park ranger in various national parks and national monuments and wrote about it all in Desert Solitaire. It was his first nonfiction book, and when it was published in 1968 Abbey started to acquire his green reputation. Besides railing against too much development and tourism, and criticizing western civilization and US politics, the book is also one of the best pieces of environmental writing ever. It easily stands with Walden and A Sand County Almanac.
The row of green squares, though, doesn’t stand easily against the development of the red side. That’s the thing about trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube; once you get part of it the way you want, starting on the next part is apt to spoil what you did before. The red squares might remind you of W.C. Fields’ nose. He was famous for playing the part of a hard-drinking crab who didn’t like anybody, especially children. He was born exactly one century before the Cube, on January 29, 1880. As you assemble a row of red squares, you think about Fields — who was born William Claude Dukenfield and in real life usually went by Claude, started out by doing juggling shows when he was about 17. In later life, when his public persona was misanthropic and ornery, he told stories about being a child runaway who lived on the mean streets of Philadelphia. In reality, he had a pretty happy upbringing. It seems like in his private life he was a very nice felow, but tried to keep that as private as possible so it didn’t interfere with his public image.
You’re worrying about the public image of your Cube at this point; you’ve gotten some of the red and some of the green in place, but how are you going to keep the progress you’ve made and get another color arranged? It wasn’t just the top best-selling book in 1981 that explained Cube solutions; at one point three of the top ten books in the US were Cube manuals. If only Oprah had been around at the time she would have devoted several shows to Cubes and their solvers. There might have been a free Cube under every seat in the audience. Then you remember that she was around — she was born on January 29, 1954 — but her talk show wasn’t launched until a few years after the Cube craze. The craze itself only lasted about a year. But that was long enough for the number of possible (wrong) solutions was worked out; it was a very, very big number. Depressingly big. Your heart sinks.
If a talking raven visited you at this moment, like in that poem — what was the title? That’s right, The Raven, this Cube is driving everything else out of your head. That depressing Raven squawking about “nevermore” might as well be talking about your prospects of solving the thing. In keeping with your mood you try the black squares. But then you realize Rubik’s Cubes don’t have any black colored squares; there’s only white, yellow, blue, green, orange, and red. And at the same moment you recall that The Raven was published on this very day, January 29, in 1845. And it rewarded its author just about as poorly as the Cube rewards its solvers; Edgar Allan Poe only got $9 for it, even though it was instantly popular and is still one of the best-known poems ever published. Poe, like W.C. Fields, struggled in later life with alcoholism, and it may have killed both of them. Poe was discovered wandering around Baltimore, delirious, and unable to explain what had happened to him. He died in hospital a few days later. Fields died of a gastric hemorrhage probably associated with years of heavy drinking.
When Edward Abbey died, also from complications from cirrhosis of the liver, he wanted his body transported in a pickup truck and buried as soon as possible, without being embalmed or coffined. “I want my body to help fertilize the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or sagebrush or tree,” he had instructed. His friends complied, burying Abbey’s body “where you’ll never find it.” They put a marker nearby with the epitaph Abbey had requested: “No Comment.” And the Cube twists and spins, and the colors you’ve arranged become the victims, in their turn, of the new colors you’re working on. Abbey might have agreed with Fields, though, when he said “I spent half my money on gambling, alcohol, and wild women. The other half I wasted.”
It’s all enough to wish you hadn’t lost touch with your old flame, Lenore. If nothing else, you could ask her for some help with that infernal Cube.
