Late for the Sky: The Mentality of the Space Age
Late for the Sky: The Mentality of the
Space Age
Southern Illinois University Press, 1992
David Lavery
Middle Tennessee State University
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Late for the Sky: The Mentality of the Space Age
Introduction: To Hear Us Talk
The most radical change in the human condition we can imagine would be an
emigration of men from the Earth to some other planet. . . . Neither labor nor work
nor action nor, indeed, thought as we know it would then make sense any longer.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
As an epigraph to his Toward Distant Suns, physicist and space advocate T. A.
Heppenheimer quotes the following lines from Eliot's "Little Gidding" (in Four Quartets):
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Heppenheimer intends, it seems, that we understand Eliot's poetic vision as support for
his own extraterrestrial proselytizing. Humankind's true home, our place of origin, we are
supposed to think--since, as inheritors of the Copernican revolution, we are in fact
universal creatures--is the cosmos. Heppenheimer evidently hopes to imply that both
sides in the war between Snow's "two cultures" agree at least over the pursuit of "distant
suns," but in his zeal to support his own argument with poetic evidence, he badly
misreads, indeed betrays, Eliot's very Christian and earthbound vision.1
The four lines Heppenheimer selects as his epigraph are, in fact, the opening of a verse
paragraph which, when quoted in its entirety, reveals a point of view diametrically
opposed to his advocacy of infinite prodigality. For the "place" mankind will one day come
to know for the "first time" is not the cosmos.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of Earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning. (59)
In the 1970 rock song "After the Goldrush," Neil Young tells, through the persona of a
1960s stoner, of two seemingly unrelated dreams. (The first and third stanzas of the
song relate his marijuana-induced reveries; the second sets the scene for us.) The
speaker, we learn, is "lying in a burned-out basement" staring at the full moon, but in
reality he is the one burned out. "Hoping for replacement," free-associating, his brain
filled with music ("There was a band playing in my head"), his dreams, as dreams often
do, exhibit more wisdom than the dreamer knows.
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The first is distinctly medieval, its imagery Arthurian.
Well I dreamed I saw the knights in armor coming
Saying something about a queen
There were peasants singing and drummers drumming
And the archer split the tree
There was a fanfare blowing to the sun
There was floating on the breeze
Rock lyrics, of course, are not known for their coherence, but the lines that end Young's
first stanza are more than ordinarily obscure. Without transition, the singer leaps from
thinking about jousts and chivalric pageantry to pondering our species' current
domination of the environment. "Look at Mother Nature on the run/In the 1970s," he
intones.
Again seemingly without transition, a second dream takes us, via a flash-forward as
astonishing in its own way as the bone-to-spaceship match cut in the first sequence of
2001: A Space Odyssey's, from the Middle Ages to the Space Age, from trumpets
symbolically raised to the sun to spacecraft actually journeying there. "Well I dreamed I
saw the silver spaceships lying/In the yellow haze of the sun." This poet's opium fog has
engendered not a fleeting fantasy of a stately pleasure dome but a prophetic vision of
exodus from the Earth.
There were children crying and colors flying
All around the chosen ones
All in a dream, all in a dream
The loading had begun
Flying mother nature's silver seed To a new home in the sun (My emphasis)
Taken together, Heppenheimer's high-tech misreading of Eliot and Young's rock and roll
reverie, though radically different in origin, amount to the same evolutionary Freudian
slip, one commonly made these days. For the many who, ready to heed the logic of what
Krafft Ehricke has called the "extraterrestrial imperative,"2 now insist on the necessity
and calculate the means of escape from this planet, the Earth itself is often left out of the
equation. A misrepresentation like Heppenheimer's, a quantum leap like Young's, merely
make their true colors visible and their hidden assumptions blatant.
Humankind, they would have us believe, is late for the sky. Their far-out language and
spacy behavior; their "Just Visiting This Planet" buttons and "Beam Me Up, Scotty"
bumper stickers; their Space Age, "out of this world," "upwardly mobile" life-style, which
more and more seems a simulation of an unearthly future; the "Space Boosting" through
which the cosmos has become the metaphoric ground for Space Age marketing; their
lack of genuine alarm over the possible wholesale destruction of this planet through
ecological catastrophe or nuclear Armageddon; the extraordinary bravado, the "infinite
presumption," with which they have persuaded themselves (and seek to convince us all)
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that the longing for the stars is not a betrayal of destiny but is in reality its apotheosis;
their conviction that the species has been given a cosmic mandate to inseminate the
universe with the human-- all testify to minds seldom any longer on the Earth, minds
thathave, in fact, come to think of the Earth as "beneath" them. All are premonitions of
departure: cultural symptoms of a species seemingly about to rupture into two distinct
species, one earthbound, the other--Young's "chosen ones"--universal.
Eliot's lines, of course, speak to us of a very different destiny and an older, more
traditional culture: of the rediscovery of Earth as a kind of Eden, of the enchantment of
the commonplace, of a wondrous "condition of complete simplicity" attainable only
through the oroboros of history ("costing not less than everything"): of the true purpose
of human longing. They speak of being and becoming, of the attainment of the beginning
and the discovery of the original: of the humiliation--a word that shares a common
ancestry with humus, "Earth"--of humankind, and our accommodation to the world. They
speak of a cessation of prodigality: of the completion of humanity's odyssey, of an end to
longing.
II
At the very beginning of the Space Age, Hannah Arendt had already remarked (in the
"Prologue" to The Human Condition) on the extraordinary ease with which belief in our
species' universal nature and cosmic destiny was coming to be accepted as standard fare.
"Such feelings"--as she wrote, Arendt had in mind the funeral obelisk of the early Russian
space pioneer Tsiolkovsky, on which appears the epitaph "Mankind will not remain bound
to the Earth forever"--"have been commonplace for some time." (The Human Condition
was published in 1958.) These feelings are part of a historical and philosophical context
that she explains definitively in a passage I must quote in full.
[These feelings] show that men everywhere are by no means slow to catch up and
adjust to scientific discoveries and technical development, but that, on the
contrary, they have outsped them by decades. Here, as in other respects, science
has realized and affirmed what men anticipated in dreams that were neither wild
nor idle. What is new is only that one of this country's most respectable
newspapers finally brought to its front page what up to then had been buried in the
highly nonrespectable literature of science-fiction. . . .3 The banality of the
statement should not make us overlook how extraordinary in fact it was; for
although Christians have spoken of the Earth as a prison of mind or soul, nobody in
the history of mankind has ever conceived of the Earth as a prison of men's bodies
or shown such eagerness to go literally from here to the moon. Should the
emancipation and secularization of the modern age, which began with a turningaway, not necessarily from God, but from a god who was the father of men in
heaven, end with an even more fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the mother
of all living creatures under the sky? (Human Condition 1-2)
Whatever our ambitions, "The Earth," Arendt hastens to remind us, remains "the very
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quintessence of the human condition," and "earthly nature, for all we know, may be
unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which they move and
breathe without effort and without artifice" (Human Condition 2).
Now humankind seems increasingly committed to its abandonment, intrigued by the
challenge of perfecting a world ruled solely by human artifice. The desire to explore and
eventually to colonize space represents, as Arendt insists we remember, the most farreaching means yet imagined for "cutting the last tie through which man belongs among
the children of nature." Yet "there is no reason to doubt our abilities to accomplish such
an exchange," Arendt adds, "just as there is no reason to doubt our present ability to
destroy all organic life on Earth" (Human Condition 2, 3).
As a rational alternative to such a rash and momentous course of action, Arendt
suggested more than thirty years ago that we stop for a moment in order "to think what
we are doing" (Human Condition 5). With some notable exceptions, however, few have
heeded her recommendation. ("Considering the quarter-century duration of the Space
Age, its primacy in national and international affairs, and the way it has affected our
lives," David Ehrenfeld has noted, writing in 1986, "surprisingly little intelligent thought
has been devoted to it" ["Lesson" 367].) When we have stopped at all--as we did, for
example, after the Challenger disaster--it has only been to think in a calculative, not a
meditative, way:4 for purposes of technological reassessment or political reappraisal, not
in pursuit of wisdom, not to seek a philosophical or psychohistorical understanding of our
extraterrestrial urges prior to their enactment.
A series of interrelated essays or reflections on various facets of the "science fiction"
culture (Sofia 45) of the Space Age, this book seeks to track the path of what Arendt has
called "the twofold flight from the Earth into the universe and from the world into the
self" (Human Condition 6)--a flight that in our time, and especially in America, would
seem to have attained escape velocity.5
III
I was already at work on these pages when I first read Chris Van Allsburg's astonishing
Mysteries of Harris Burdick as a bedtime book to my daughters. Purporting to be a
collection of fourteen black-and-white drawings by a man who had delivered them to a
children's book publisher and then disappeared, these enigmatic sculptural line drawings
exhibit the same Magritte-like "magic realism" found in other Van Allsburg books
(Jumanji, The Polar Express, The Garden of Abdul Gasazi, Two Bad Ants).
As we excitedly turned the pages, pulled on by a powerful sense of discovery, as we
encountered, amazed, children by a lake skipping a stone that always returns to their
hands, a nun on a flying chair, a mysterious cellar door concealing a deep secret,
Escheresque wallpaper that has captured into its pattern the doves flying outside the
window, a frightened man fending off amysterious presence beneath his carpet, the
Space Age was not really on my mind.
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But then we came to the book's end. Burdick's final illustrations, The House on Maple
Street, depicted an old-fashioned three-story American house mysteriously blasting off,
its rocket exhaust flaring out beneath it, from its customary spot, its assigned lot, on a
city street. The picture's caption read only, "It was a perfect lift-off."6
For the author of these pages, Van Allsburg's picture was worth more than a thousand
words; it may, I might suggest, be worth all the words of this book, for which it could
stand as the controlling visual metaphor, a semiotically cogent rendering of my central
paradox. Each picture in The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, including The House on Maple
Street, presents a visual conundrum; my conundrum is cultural. How can something so
seemingly real, so apparently earthy, as modern life be so unreal, so unearthly?
Everywhere we turn in these final days of the century and the millenium, the "lift off
limits"--as William Irwin Thompson calls them in Passages About Earth--have been
surpassed. In the cultural landscape in both its material and mental forms; in the
vicissitudes of popular culture, in the lifestyle of us postmoderns; in our literature, film,
art, and music; in our changing conception of the human psyche; in our frequently
revised history and politics, our "philosophical anthropology"--our self-conscious vision
and revision of humankind's place on (and off) this planet; in our search for ecological
wisdom; in our radically altered conception of the human body; in the wild thinking of our
futurists--in all these Space Age venues we find abundant signs of our increasingly
problematic earthliness.
In The Flight from Woman, psychoanalyst Karl Stern notes that one of the genetic
tendencies of modernity has been for "methods [to] become mentalities" (77). (Stern has
in mind, of course, his pivotal example: the conversion--in less than two centuries--of
Cartesian method into an all-embracing Weltanschauung.) The "method" of the Space
Age, these pages will argue, has, in only three decades, become our mentality.
"What is it that makes the Space Age unique?" Walter A. McDougall asks in . . . the
Heavens and the Earth. His own monumental, Pulitzer Prize-winning scholarship brings
him to the conclusion that the true uniqueness of the era lies in the rise and development
of technocracies, first in the Soviet Union, then in the United States. In the Space Age,
McDougall writes, "There was no transformation of the international system, no revision
of priorities toward global 'welfare' and cooperation, no metamorphosis in human
philosophy and values. Instead, there was only the maturation of the power complex of
the R & D State. For the present and foreseeable future, this maturation defines the
character of the Space Age in history (9)." Such thinking is difficult to comprehend.7 For
even a glance at what rhetorician Janice Hocker Rushing has called the "public mythic
discourse" of the era suggests that a profound "metamorphosis in human philosophy and
values" is actually underway.8
The New World of the Americas was not "the result of a purely physical discovery" but
rather "an inspired invention of Western thought" (4). According to Edmundo O'Gorman's
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phenomenological geography, in fact, the historical and political conquest of any new
realm can never be accomplished without a concomitant "philosophical conquest" like the
one he chronicles in his reconstruction--five centuries after the fact--of "the invention of
America." Space, however, is being invented now; what we term the "Space Age" is the
work of its creation. Though often unaware of it, we are witnesses at its birth.
Prolonged confrontation with the unthinkable possibility of nuclear holocaust, it has been
argued, can result only in "psychic numbing," a decreased consciousness of a toothreatening, too-terrifying public, political world and a redirection inward--toward
narcissistic, "living for the moment," hedonistic values. "The denial of nuclear awareness-like the massive underwater mountain chains that influence ocean currents, marine life,
and weather patterns in all kinds of hidden ways--affects a culture as profoundly as
acknowledging it does."9
The Space Age, the Atomic Age's younger contemporary, has not, of course, threatened
our survival in any comparable way. In fact it has brought with it dreams--largely
delusional, I will argue--of an escape from apocalypse. Yet it,, too has influenced us,
pervasively and continuously, from beneath the surface of conscious thought, numbing
us to the earthly as the Atomic Age has numbed us to the worldly. In the Dark Ages all
was not dark. In the Renaissance not all individuals were reborn to a new sense of
possibility for themselves and their world. In the Enlightenment not all men and women
became enlightened. And in the Space Age, of course, not all minds are on space. Three
decades in, twenty years after landing on the moon, four years after the Challenger
disaster, one year after the Hubble telescope fiasco, manifest popular interest in space is
seemingly at low ebb.
We may forget, in our day-to-day life, that we live in a "Space" Age, just as we ignore
the quotidian reality of the Atomic Age, but the manifestations of our cultural sensibility-from our colloquial speech, to our "lifestyles," to popular and high art, to science and
technology--do not forget it, and in their mirror we see reflected our spaciness, our
mentality.
Scholars of language have noted that popular new ideas, concepts, and inventions often
enjoy a second birth in the usually unconscious metaphors of an age. The clock, for
example, made a "ubiquitous appearance . . . as a metaphor shortly after it had been
invented . . . turning up everywhere anybody was trying to describe the way things work
in nature"--in the philosophy of Deism, to cite one example. Eventually "the clocks
stopped--but the metaphor went on," and the world itself thus came to appear, albeit
unconsciously, clocklike, mechanistic, not because it really was, but because--through a
process that might be called "metaphoric internalization"--a metaphor had become an
idol (Barfield, Rediscovery 65-78). The root metaphor of the computer is currently
undergoing a similar process.
A future observer might likewise stand astonished at the way the conquest of space-space travel, exploration, and colonization--is becoming in the Space Age a ubiquitous
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vehicle for metaphor, "counter-nature" masquerading as "second nature" (Kenneth
Burke), appearing everywhere humankind now seeks to explain its role on Earth and its
place in the cosmos: indeed its whole destiny.10 Before such metaphors--and their
attendant memes --become, like those of the clock, so unconscious that we can no longer
see ourselves and our world through them, before we must resort to etymology and
historical semantics to discover their place in our present contribution to the evolution of
consciousness, I propose we try to think out their origins, meaning, and implications by
studying the idolatry of space in our time.11
"A critic or narrative analyst," Rushing has shown, "can treat seemingly separate
discourses as interdependent parts of a larger 'plot'" that may not exist in linear or
chronological time. Consequently, individual "rhetorical events" may be "critically
reconstructed into dramatic wholes," allowing a critic to study an "interdependent set of
discourses in teleological time which maps the movement of social
consciousness" ("Mythic Evolution" 268-71). In these pages I want to hear and record-on location--public mythic discourse about Earth, space, and the destiny of humankind.
As a parenthetical subtitle to Robert Frost's poem "On a Tree Fallen Across the Road," we
find the words "To hear us talk." Poetry, John Stuart Mill thought, is not so much heard
as overheard, and in Frost's poem we overhear humankind talk; we eavesdrop on the
inner dialogue of our species contemplating its accommodation to things.
Some men encounter a fallen tree blocking their passage along a road. The tree, Frost
tells us, is an affront to their human purposiveness. It seems "to ask us who we think we
are/Insisting always on our own way so." But it will not, the poet knows, "bar/Our
passage to our journey's end for good." Humankind "will not be put off the final
goal." (Even the tree itself knows, as Frost informs us, "obstruction is in vain.") For men
in their longing have a higher purpose
We have it hidden in us to attain,
Not though we have to seize Earth by the pole
And, tired of aimless circling in one place,
Steer straight off after something into space.
(238; my emphasis)
"To hear us talk" in the last decades of the twentieth century, we are indeed weary of
Earth and the obstacles and limitations it throws down in our path: tired of embodiment,
bored with nature, annoyed with growing old, sick of dying, no longer willing to proceed
"step by step through the labyrinthine complexity of the horizontal world" (the words are
James Hillman's ["Senex and Puer" 24]). To hear us talk, we are more than ready (and
quite able) to "seize Earth by the pole." To hear us talk we are now terribly anxious to
end the monotony through a vertical leap beyond the hindrance of Earth.
IV
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In the following pages, each chapter (except the conclusion) is followed by a Probe, a
concentrated, sometimes experimental, interlocutory exploration of and further reflection
on the subject and themes of the preceding chapter. The first probe is called "The Two
Cultures." Historian of science J. D. Bernal once argued that mankind must eventually
break into two distinct species: Earthkind and Spacekind. In our time, these pages argue,
this cleavage is already manifest in the development, more profound than C. P. Snow's
famous formulation, of what might be called the "real" two cultures.
Chapter 1, "Due Back on the Planet Earth: Notes Toward a Definition of Spaciness,"
begins with an introductory section examining contemporary spacy language and then
goes on to pinpoint the major parameters of the mentality of spaciness. The probe that
follows, "Gnosticism in the Cult Film," seeks (by means of a "thought experiment") the
root causes of spaciness in six contemporary cult films.
Chapter 2, "Departure of the Body Snatchers; or, the Confessions of a Carbon
Chauvinist," explores the increasing tendency to dream of a human-engineered
"exosomatic evolution" out of the body--a dream that we now routinely (revealingly)
posit in an out-of-this-world setting. Taking as its focal point President Reagan's
nationally broadcast eulogy (1986) for the space shuttle's crew, "Nemesis and NASA: The
Tragedy of the Challenger" offers, in a subsequent probe, an imaginary, rewritten,
"Carbon Chauvinist's" version of the speech to impart a very different Space Age
message about human aspiration and escape from the "surly bonds of Earth."
Chapter 3 is entitled "Infinite Presumption." Against the backdrop of two science fiction
tales that seem to be as influential for contemporary Spacekind as Jules Verne had been
for the original space pioneers, I go on to present a wide sampling of current rhetoric
about our future in space. I find the wishful thinking it exhibits guilty of "infinite
presumption" (the phrase is Pascal's). Two probes complement the chapter: "The AntiGnosticism of E. M. Cioran," an examinination of the Romanian essayist's meditations on
infinite presumption, and "'Body's Earth': H. E. Francis' 'The Ballad of Carl Feldmann,'" a
close reading of a short story that dissects the mentality (and growing madness) of a
NASA rocket scientist.
"The Simulator," Chapter 4, examines the cultural landscape and our material culture for
signs of unearthliness. My subject here is modernity (and postmodernity) as a prototype
for a future in space. America as a Space Age nation, I argue, is not just a technological
pioneer; America as a historical force is a kind of simulator for an extraterrestrial human
culture. "Space Boosters: The Marketing of Unearthliness" details the role of
contemporary advertising in promoting the mentality of the Space Age.
Chapter 5 is entitled "The Abandoned Earth." "There is no uncannier notion," Elias Canetti
notes in an aphorism, "than that of the abandoned Earth, abandoned by human beings."
In the Space Age, however, we have routinely considered just such a notion, fully
imagining the possibility of an Earth abandoned because of either our extinction or our
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departure; this chapter will take a close look at these fictions, visions of a "post-homic
Earth" offered, surprisingly, by both cultures. "The Revolution of the Earth" contemplates
one last possibility of human humiliation.
"Dreaming Nothing," which begins as a personal essay--a memory of a terrifying
childhood dream of the void--and becomes an intellectual detective story about the place
of consciousness in modern cosmological theory, brings Late for the Sky to a conclusion.
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PROBE: The Real Two Cultures
Two souls, alas, cohabit in my breast,
A contrast one of them desires to sever.
The one like a rough lover clings
To the world with the tentacles of its senses;
The other lifts itself to Elysian Fields
Out of the mist on powerful wings.
Goethe, Faust
If we have two souls within our breast, we now have "two cultures" as well, as novelist
and physicist C. P. Snow insisted in his 1959 Rede Lecture at Cambridge (later published
as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution). Intellectual life since the Renaissance
has bifurcated into armed camps of humanists, who know little or nothing about the
achievements of science (cannot, to use Snow's prime example, explain the second law
of thermodynamics), and scientists, who often remain uncultured and unlettered in the
classical sense. Members of each culture, sharing common methods of inquiry and a
specialized language, do not communicate or socialize with members of the other. They
remain--as Owen Barfield put it in a later examination of the dualism--"worlds apart."
Consider the dichotomy--brought to contemporary attention by the evolution/
creationism debate of the last decade--between the religious-minded and "secular
humanists." According to the former--traditional believers in religious dogma (usually
Christian)--the culture of secular humanism includes all those who believe that the world
and humanity's place within it can and must be explained without recourse to God: that,
in fact, "man is the measure of all things." Such a classification, obviously, would make
strange bedfellows of individuals who, under Snow's system, might not even speak to
one another: historians and physicists, artists and engineers, literary scholars and
mathematicians might all be considered secular humanists, sharing a similar mind-set.
Yet such types do not always sleep well together under such a superficial arrangement.
Building on the earlier research of Jacob Getzels and Philip Jackson, British psychologist
Liam Hudson has suggested that the two cultures actually result from different modes of
thought but do not shake out quite as simply as Snow's two cultures or the religious/
secular humanist opposition suggest. For Hudson, the distinction should be between
"divergent" and "convergent" thinkers. The divergent mentality longs to make many from
one; it seeks open-endedness. By contrast, the convergent mentality, craving answers
and solutions, wants the many to become one--wants closure. Though empirical evidence
suggests that divergence and convergence are often the special darlings of, respectively,
the humanities and the sciences, the matter is hardly that simple. (See Hampden-Turner
104-7.)
In a similar vein, William Irwin Thompson has noted that Snow's version of the split is
frought with ambiquities. Observing that there are as many "reductionistic" humanists as
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there are "visionary" scientists, Thompson suggests that we should instead describe the
respective cultures according to their methods of thought as "Pythagorean" and
"Archimedean": those who value imaginative vision above all else and those who seek
rationality, order, and control (Darkness 117-19).
Snow's premature identification of the two cultures came at the very beginning of the
Space Age. But neither his conception nor the others mentioned would seem the best fit
for understanding the two souls of the era. A clear indication of its provisional status is
the current attempt to rename the species. When we find rocket pioneer Krafft Ehricke
suggesting that we rename the species, or at least that part about to abandon the Earth,
Homo extraterrestris ("Extraterrestrial Imperative" 18), and when we learn that futurists
Jerome Clayton Glenn and George S. Robinson reclassify humankind into subspecies they
designate "Earthkind" and "Spacekind," we begin to suspect that one of our two souls
does indeed seek a trial separation.
II
Ray Bradbury's classic science fiction short story "Frost and Fire" tells of beings living on
an unheard-of world where all life transpires in accelerated motion. Because of the
peculiarities of the planet (it lies very close to its sun), the metabolism of its residents is
radically altered. Because their hearts beat at one thousand pulses per second, their life
span is reduced to a total of only eight days, days within which each individual is born,
grows to adulthood, falls in love, procreates, deteriorates, and dies. For the inhabitants,
life is nasty, brutish, and unbearably short, and death is ever-present. In fact, in this
time-lapse world death can actually be seen in progress.
These cave people do not live in total resignation to their fate. Within some of them-Sim, in particular--a kind of Jungian ancestral memory exists, which speaks to them of a
time when life was not so hideously brief. Inspired by a premonitory vision from within,
Sim becomes obsessed with the search for the "long life": "This was so impossibly unfair.
Was this all of life? In his prenatal state hadn't he dreamed of long lives, valleys not of
blasted stone but green foliage and temperate clime? Yes! And if he'd dreamed then
there must be truth in the visions. How could he seek and find the long life? Where? And
how could he accomplish a life mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing
days?" His mental searching brings him another memory: of "metal seeds, blown across
space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet.
From their shattered hulls tumbled men and women" (127). It is one of these metal
seeds, Sim realizes, which, according to tribal lore, lies unbroken on a mountainside
beyond his valley. He dedicates his life to reaching it.
His quest is really religious in nature and his great longing is for escape from his world.
After an arduous trip, full of struggles not only with frost and fire but his barbaric fellow
beings, who do not, indeed cannot, comprehend the nature of his quest, Sim crosses the
valley. For a time he joins the scientists who live in the foothills of the mountains. Like
Tibetan holy men, these scientists live ascetic lives of dedication to their one great task:
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like Sim, they hope to escape their planet. "Normal science" consumes their brief lives,
and only over the span of generations do they make any progress toward their goal.
Knowledge is to them a collective possession, passed on beyond their individual deaths.
They scoff at the rank hedonism of the men of the valley and believe that the true hope
of his kind lies with them and their dream of a distant future in which all will escape to a
better world. But they will not brave the elements to make the long journey to the seed
ship in the mountains, and so Sim, committed to "revolutionary science," turns his back
on them and their ways.
He undertakes the journey the scientists will not dare. After more torturous struggles
with his own kind and the weather, he reaches the ship. Safe within, shielded from the
sun's tyranny and the oppressive cold, he gains precious extra days of life. He returns as
a would-be savior to the cliffs of his birth; he comes to offer them escape from their cave
of illusion, their living hell. Superstitious, unable to believe at first in Sim's vision, his
people receive his message with hostility and even try to kill him. At last he convinces
two hundred to return with him to the seed ship. Only one hundred survive the difficult
journey. The ship departs and the world of "frost and fire" from which they have escaped
seems to them only an impossible dream, a nightmare from which they have awoken.
Now Bradbury's fable, I like to think, has a deeper, allegorical significance as well. The
planet of "Frost and Fire," we apprehend, is, of course, meant to signify the Earth: an
abode where, to some among us at least, three-score years and ten have come to seem
as inadequate, torturous, and repugnant, as "impossibly unfair," as Sim's eight days. To
hear those I call the "New Gnostics" talk, the human condition, with its limitations and
accommodation, its confusion and imprecision, can hardly be distinguished, in this age of
relativity, from the world of "Frost and Fire."
"Frost and Fire" is likewise a story of "two cultures"--of those resigned to enduring the
givens of their condition, however horrible, and those determined to escape it (a culture
that includes both unsuccessful Archimedean scientists and the Pythagorean Sim). In this
germane Space Age tale we find the prototype for the "real" two cultures and what James
and Alcestis Oberg call "the coming schism."
III
In 1929 British physicist and historian of science J. D. Bernal published a small book, The
World, the Flesh, and the Devil: Three Enemies of the Rational Soul, which suggested
that, under the selective pressures of worldly limitations, the mortality of the body, and
the irrational nature of human action (the "world," the "flesh," and the "devil,"
respectively), it is inevitable that humankind, as the direct result of the development of
science, will eventually evolve into two entirely distinct species, one earthbound, the
other cosmic.
Humanity, Bernal argued, "would defeat the World, its limited resources and living space,
by leaving the planet for free-floating colonies in space. Man would defeat the flesh, its
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various diseases and infirmities, with the aid of bionic organs, biological engineering, and
self-reproducing machinery. Man would defeat the Devil--the irrational in his nature--by
reorganizing society along scientific lines and by learning intellectual controls over his
emotions."2
Assuming (thirty years before Sputnik) that humanity will inevitably master the
technological complexities of space travel, Bernal concluded that "once acclimatized to
space living, it is unlikely that mankind will stop until he has roamed over and colonized
most of the sidereal universe, or that even this will be the end." Indeed, Bernal asserted
that "man will not ultimately be content to be parasitic on the stars but will invade them
and organize them for his own purposes" (27-28). But such developments will have a
prehistory.
"It happens," Bernal wrote, "that at the moment, for the first time in [its history,
[humankind] consists virtually of one society, and we have no precedent for the
development of any new types, particularly of solitary types, from the middle of a single
society; but what, of course, could develop from a society would be another society, at
first simply a part of it, but afterwards differentiating itself more and more clearly."
Though he concedes that the future might lead to a "not impossible state in which
mankind would be stabilized and live an oscillating existence for millenia," he finds it
more likely, judging from historical precedent, that a split will occur into "a progressive
and unprogressive part" (72).
"Over and over again in history," Bernal reminded us, "there has occurred the raising of a
particular class or a particular culture to a point at which there seemed a permanent gulf
between it and other cultures or classes. Yet the gulf was not permanent; the particular
aristocracy fell or its advantages spread themselves so widely that they became common
stock" (72). But all previous aristocracies "differed only superficially from the many" and,
more significantly, they possessed no means of accelerating their progress by increasing
the actual distance between themselves and
general humanity.
Though convinced that "the aristocracy of scientific intelligence" (73), once scattered and
lacking cohesion, will more and more come to rule the world in the name of rationality,
Bernal had no utopian illusions.3 He recognized that such a state, in which scientists
serve merely as advisors without themselves becoming "philosopher-kings," is
"essentially unstable and bound to lead to revolution," a revolution engineered by the
"increasingly effective insurgence of the excluded intelligence." "Even a [purely] scientific
state," Bernal asserted, "could only maintain itself by perpetually increasing its power
over the non-living and living environment." Failing to do so, it would "relapse into
pedantry and become a perfectly ordinary aristocracy" (74).
In short, science can come to full fruition only by physically separating itself from those
who have not evolved to its high level of development. A culture of scientists and
technocrats (amounting, Bernal estimates, to about 10 percent of the world's population)
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will break off from humanity as a whole, which would most likely not seek to hold them
back. "Mankind as a whole, given peace, plenty and freedom," Bernal writes, "might well
be content to let alone [these] fanatical but useful people . . . ; and if, at some time, the
magnitude of the changes made them aware that something important and terrifying had
happened, it would then be too late for them to do anything about it." And even if the
mass of men returned to the dark ages, "even if a wave of primitive obscurantism then
swept the world clear of the heresy of science," the new culture would have already made
its escape: "science would already be on its way to the stars" (75).
Whether we think of those departing as "a new species" leaving "humanity behind" or
envision humanity as a whole changing "en bloc, leaving behind in a relatively primitive
state those too stupid or too stubborn to change," the conclusion seems inevitable to
Bernal's detached, prophetic objectivity that "there may not be room for both types in the
same world and the old mechanism of extinction will come into play" (79).
The better organized beings will be obliged in self-defence to reduce the numbers
of the others, until they are no longer seriously inconvenienced by them. If, as we
may well suppose, the colonization of space will have taken place or be taking
place while these changes are occurring, it may offer a very convenient solution.
Mankind--the old mankind--would be left in undisputed possession of the Earth, to
be regarded by the inhabitants of the celestial spheres with a curious reverence.
The world might, in fact, be transformed into a human zoo, a zoo so intelligently
managed that its inhabitants are not aware that they are there merely for the
purposes of observation and experiment. (79-80)
Such a "prospect," Bernal concludes, "should please both sides: it should satisfy the
scientists in their aspirations towards further knowledge and further experience, and the
humanists in their looking for the good life on Earth" (80).
It should be noted that while Bernal merely predicted the trial separation of mankind into
two species, intellectual heirs Glenn and Robinson have actually issued a bill of divorce.
In a "Space Migrants' 'Declaration of Independence,'" these Space Age Thomas
Jeffersons, founding fathers of "Spacekind," call for an immediate severence from
"Earthkind": a dissolution of "the political and biological bonds which have connected
them with their progenitors," and the assumption "among the powers of the solar system
and galaxy [of] the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and their
Creator entitle them" (231-37).
As support for the rationality of their declaration, Glenn and Robinson offer a point-bypoint comparison of "The Human Future" with and without the space migration they
champion. Clearly, Earthkind must be highly reactionary--real "stick-in-the-muds"--not to
follow Spacekind beyond the planet. To select column B is to willingly seek limitation over
growth, close-mindedness over open-endedness, controlled boredom over fulfilled
curiosity, homogenization over almost infinite diversity, pessimism over perpetual
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discovery, Brave New World over Star Trek.
IV
"Did Bernal foresee," writes Kenneth Brower in The Starship and the Canoe, "that the
split [between Earthkind and Spacekind] might appear between one generation and the
next?" (34). Brower's book--a profound meditation on the real two cultures--does indeed
find the dichotomy present in a father and son: Princeton astrophysicist Freeman Dyson
and his counterculture son George.
While Freeman Dyson has conceived of an immense spaceship (the Orion) propelled by
nuclear explosions, his son, a high-school dropout, lives a spartan existence in a Douglas
fir in British Columbia and dreams of building an Aleutian-style kayak in which he hopes
to sail the world's oceans. While Freeman has advocated the wholesale dismantling of
Jupiter in order to secure its natural resources for humankind's use and the colonization
of the stars in order to guarantee human immortality, George seeks to live in simple,
ecological harmony with nature. While Freeman eats virtually every meal in fast-food
burger parlors, George lives on a largely vegetarian, natural-foods diet. While Freeman's
science is abstract and largely mathematical, George's is "concrete" (in Levi-Strauss Strauss's sense); his approach to nature is that of a bricoleur.
The Starship and the Canoe is a journalistic account of the reunion and attempted
reconciliation of the two men; the elder Dyson journeys to Canada to visit his son in his
own element, and they do, in a way, come to understand and admire each other anew.
But the sharp contrast remains between them. In a climactic scene, they journey out
onto the ocean to observe killer whales up close. Listening to their mating call, Brower
(son of Friends of the Earth founder David Brower) finds in the ocean's mysteries the
stuff of allegiance to Earthkind:
The tendril of sound unraveled over the bottom. It traveled through the night
waters and right up my spine. I had heard it on records, and I had heard it several
previous nights on Harmon Island, but I was still not prepared for it. It was a
communication from an unexpected quarter, and it raised goosebumps. It was a
nonterrestrial intelligence, it was probing the void, it passed without discovering us.
The other intelligence that Freeman seeks is right here on Earth, I thought, but we
have never really connected with it. (264; my emphasis)
Freeman, on the other hand, does not really seek connection; his Spacekind mind is
elsewhere. "He stood apart, hands clasped behind him, staring out at Blackney passage. I
saw him glance up at the clearing sky, then down again towards the whales. A moment
passed. Eyes seaward, he groped in his pocket. He found his spectacles. He put them on.
He gazed up again at the stars" (265; my emphasis).
In Bernal's conception of the two cultures, the schism remains, for all its uniqueness,
essentially a contrast--as in Snow's formula--between scientist and non-scientist.
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Brower's telling account demonstrates, however, that the division between the real two
cultures should perhaps be described as a generation gap.
V
Yet Oriana Fallaci's If the Sun Dies, the Italian journalist's investigative report into the
American space program--a much more profound exploration than Tom Wolfe's betterknown The Right Stuff--shows that neither culture is the exclusive possession of a single
generation. For in Fallaci's book it is she who belongs to Spacekind, her father who
swears allegiance to the Earth.
In effect a four-hundred-page letter, an apologia, to her eighty-year-old father back in
Italy, If the Sun Dies traces Fallaci's conversion from Doubting Thomas to True Believer.
Initially skeptical not only about the space program itself but about Space Age American
culture, a culture that with her European sophistication, she finds ersatz, plastic, and
crass, she is eventually won over to membership in the other culture.4
"What's the use of going to the Moon," her father responds with Earthkind exasperation
to his daughter's interest in the "extraordinary" achievement of Sputnik:
The thought of it makes me wince . . . [he explains]. Men will always have the
same problems, on the Moon or on the Earth; they will always be sick and wicked,
on the moon or on the Earth. They tell me that on the Moon there are no seas, no
rivers, no fish, no woods, no fields, no birds. I couldn't even go shooting or
fishing. . . . I love the leaves and the birds, the fish and the sea, the snow and the
wind! And I love green and blue and all the colors and the smells, and that's all
there is, do you understand? That's all we have, and I don't want to lose it on
account of your rockets, do you understand? (5)
Always intrigued by the calling of space, in her youth vicariously thrilled by the
achievements of Gagarin, Shepard, Titov, and Glenn, Fallaci confesses to her father that
his antipathy for such things has kept her silent: "On the one hand there was myself, the
child who believes in the stars, and on the other hand there was you, the adult who
believes in the Earth." She vows to break her silence, even if it widens the gap between
their two cultures. "I couldn't keep quiet any longer: it was as if a war, a gulf, had
opened between us" (6).
The conflict is complicated, however, by Fallaci's dual allegiance, her attraction to both
above and below: "And I told you . . . that I love the Earth too, Father. It's my home and
I love it." But like Tsiolkovsky, she finds this home claustrophobic, and it is this
dissatisfaction that separates her from her father: "a home you can never leave isn't a
home at all [Fallaci contends], it's a prison, and you have always told me that man isn't
made to stay in prison, he's made to escape from it and too bad if he risks getting killed
escaping. . . . For the love of God, Father, if a door is closed don't you have the urge to
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open it and see what's behind it? Isn't the story of man a story of closed and open
doors?" (6).
Her father will not have his own wisdom turned against him. Continuing her metaphor, he
exposes its dangers: "You can open it, of course. You're able to open it, so you open it.
But if that door is the last door, where will it take you? I'll tell you where: headlong into
the void. The future you're dreaming of is nothing more than a headlong leap into the
void" (7). Far from daunting, her father's challenge inspires her to undertake the
research and writing that lead to If the Sun Dies.
By the book's end she has been won over. When at its close she watches a Saturn
launch at Cape Canaveral, she declares much more than journalistic curiosity about the
promise of space: "how happy they [the astronauts on board] were forgetting me,
leaving me here on Earth. Don't leave me, I wanted to shout, I don't like it here, people
are unhappy here, they break everything, please take me away, take me there with
you" (381; my emphasis).
Soon after, she receives a letter from home with the news that her father has purchased
a huge oak in a neighbor's yard, saving it from destruction, a tree which Fallaci had loved
dearly as a child; bought it, that is, as a symbol of her return, of an end to his daughter's
prodigality. But the news comes too late; Fallaci, now a convert to the other culture, has
already "departed": "I shook my head as I read it. I thought how crazy he is, my father.
Buying me a tree. Saving the life of a tree. How crazy he is, my father: I don't
understand him any more" (382).
If determining one's "cultural" membership can seem (in Fallaci's words) like "finding
yourself on the brink of doubt when you're about to leave one religion and embrace
another" (350), then If the Sun Dies should be understood as a chronicle of conversion:
of her change of allegiance from Earthkind to Spacekind.
VI
As yet another sign of "the coming schism," consider the angry exchange of letters
during the 1970s in the counterculture magazine Co-Evolutionary Quarterly between its
editor Stewart Brand and poet, essayist, environmentalist, and farmer Wendell Berry.
Asked to respond, along with other writers, scientists, and philosophers, to Gerald K.
O'Neill's conception of space colonization for a special issue of the journal, Berry, one of
this century's most sagacious and eloquent advocates for voluntary simplicity and
ecological values, angrily attacked not only the Princeton physicist's proposals but also
Brand's support of them, which he took to be an inexplicable, hypocritical betrayal of the
down-to-Earth philosophy long championed in his Whole Earth Catalog and in CoEvolutionary Quarterly.
While Brand finds O'Neill's colonies the most novel idea yet for solving earthly problems,
from overcrowding to environmental destruction, Berry considers the entire project the
same old story.
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For what is remarkable about [it] . . . is not its novelty or its adventurousness, but
its conventionality. If it should be implemented, it will be the rebirth of the idea of
Progress with all its old lust for unrestrained expansion, its totalitarian
concentrations of energy and wealth, its obliviousness to the concerns of character
and community, its exclusive reliance on technical and economic criteria, its
disinterest in consequence, its contempt for human value, its compulsive
salesmanship. . . . As a salesman, Mr. O'Neill faithfully utters every shibboleth of
the cult of progress. If we will just have the good sense to spend one hundred
billion dollars on a space colony, we will thereby produce more money and more
jobs, raise the standard of living, help the under-developed, increase freedom and
opportunity, fulfill the deeper needs of the human spirit, etc., etc. (36)
While Brand is excited by the rebirth of a sense of frontier space colonization is likely to
produce, Berry finds such excitement guilty of historical amnesia. "[O'Neill] sees himself
and his American contemporaries as the inheritors of the frontier mentality, but not of
the tragedy of that mentality. He does not speak as a Twentieth Century American, faced
with the waste and ruin of his inheritance from the frontier. He speaks instead in the
manner of a European of the Seventeeth and Eighteenth Centuries, privileged to see
American space and wealth as conveniently distant solutions to local problems" (36).
While Brand finds O'Neill's optimism about the human future invigorating in a time of
doomsday prophecy, Berry finds O'Neill guilty of "moral despair." For at the heart of his
project lies the unstated premise that human beings on Earth are incapable of change,
that they cannot revolutionize their thinking in order to live in harmony on this planet
(37).
Brand believes O'Neill's colonies could stimulate an evolutionary advance for the species;
Berry, however, is astounded by the utopian nature of the plan: "Like utopians before,
[O'Neill and Brand] envision a clean break with all human precedent: history, heredity,
character. Thanks to a grandiose technological scheme, nothing is going to happen from
now on that is not going to improve everything" (82).
While Brand thinks an extraterrestrial existence will teach humankind ecological wisdom-he is impressed by the small-scale simplicity, the appropriate technology demanded by
life in O'Neill's self-contained colonies--Berry sees in the birth of a universal species only
a blank check for new destructiveness. O'Neill's scheme has been forged in ignorance of
what Berry calls "the moral law of the frontier": that "humans are destructive in
proportion to the supposition of abundance; if they are faced with infinite abundance,
then they will become infinitely destructive" (36).
"Mr. O'Neill has apparently never thought to ask," Berry observes, "what good might be
accomplished by the proliferation in space of a mentality that cannot forebear to do
anything at all that is possible" (37). Taking care to note that O'Neill's advocacy of
ecology is accompanied by plans to mine the planets and bring raw materials and cosmic
energy back to Earth, Berry finds him guilty of "the thug morality of the technological
specialist, by which we blandly assume that we must do anything that we can do" and
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demands to know "Do we not live in a universe? Is there no ecology of the
heavens?" (82).
Damning space colonization as "the most audacious scheme so far in the struggle to
abolish all small solutions" (85), Berry finally issues angry "parting words" to his former
champion and friend.
VII
A final illustration of the genesis of the real two cultures. In the Space Age, the
government of the United States has gone so far as to commission top-secret
assessments by the Hudson Institute, a major public policy think tank, of the
evolutionary causes, psychological effects, and historical and political consequences of
humanity's otherworldy ambitions. Fortunately, I have been able to procure copies of the
"findings" that resulted from its investigation (Hudson Institute Paper HI-3182P, "The
Perils of the Steady-State," and HI-3014P, "The End of the Neolithic Noosphere:
Implications for U.S. Policy"). These reports--written for and addressed to ("for their eyes
only") the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of NASA--are worthy of our consideration
here, for in their Space Age thinking we can discern the basic rationale for the coming
schism.
The Space Age, the Hudson Institute reports explain, is not merely a matter of
technology or of politics; at its heart lies a psychological dilemma for the species, "a crisis
in this planet's Noosphere (to borrow the theologian Teilhard de Chardin's word for the
zone of operation of the human mind)."5 In a sense, the turning point we now face has
been with us "since the Neolithic Revolution first ushered in the germs of a technology
that would transform the natural environment" and represents "the logical outcome of
technological civilization itself." After embarking on the "technological path," we are told,
"Man must elect to expand outwards by means of this technology--or else collapse. No
steady state is conceivable or desirable once expansion has begun.
The steady state may be dreamt or fantasized about--but it is merely a pipe-dream which
will not work in practice, and which would have disastrous cultural and psychological
repercussions if any sustained effort was made to make it work." Thus the species dare
not de-escalate. Cultural evolution, like the biological, is anti-entropic and must scale
ever new and more complex levels of perfection or wither and die.
We live at a perilous moment that threatens this process: "the stage where there appear
to be no further worlds to conquer--and where the side-effects of conquering the one
world that is available appear to be producing an increasingly negative pay-off." But
conservation and ecologically minded restraint--or any form of steady state thinking--are
not the solution, as the report emphatically states. "The assault that has been gaining
momentum for a decade now, of ecopolitical protest groups, implies a profoundly
damaging psychological withdrawal from these delimited boundaries. It would terminate
Stage One without ushering in Stage Two. The result would be certain apathy and decay
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on a planet-wide scale--besides being politically contrary to what we conceive to be our
fundamental identity as a nation." If, the reports conclude, the species is to be saved, if
we are to continue to grow and prosper, "a take-off to Stage Two technological culture
has to occur--the stage of planetary and stellar exploration and expansion." The
alternative is too awful to contemplate: "Otherwise a disastrous and traumatic collapse
must surely ensue."
No such documents actually exist, of course, at least not to my knowledge. The above
words are, in fact, quoted from a completely imaginary study reported in Ian Watson's
science fction novel The Embedding (173-74) and will not actually help to shape future
American domestic and foreign policy. The conclusions reached by these apocryphal yet
completely credible findings by an actual Stanford University think tank, both on "deep
background" and future concerns, are nonetheless revealing. For the argument they
present--that the question of space must be answered in an evolutionary context; that
the choices that face us are of the utmost psychological importance; that no perilous
"steady state" will ever satisfy human longing; that humankind must ignore all "limits to
growth" thinking, all temptation to accommodate itself to the illusory possibility of a
merely earthly existence and "expand outward" through the development of an
extraterrestrial, technological culture--underpins the Space Age's coming schism. As
position papers, they must be ranked as state of the art, cogently summarizing the
essential conflict.
VIII
In his book The Omega Seed, architect and Teilhardian visionary Paolo Soleri offers, by
way of conclusion to a discussion of "the splitting of the human species into subspecies,"
the following parable: "Once upon a time, two divine beings came out of the sea and
dwelled on the land. They toiled within an environment which turned out to be harsher
than the one they had left, but through their toil a new radiance emanated from them.
They were conscious of their consciousness. They were becoming creating creatures.
Then one day, one of the beings fell victim to loss of anima and returned to the sea. He
was the ancestor of whales and dolphins. The creature that stayed (fast) on land was the
ancestor of man" (161; Soleri's emphasis).
Soleri's implication is clear enough: we are witness now to a similar emergence. Life is
about to leave one environment for a new, harsher, more challenging one, where
evolutionary pressures will solicit--indeed demand--"new expressions of spirit." Those
who return to the sea now--that is, those who remain on Earth: Earthkind--are to
become the equivalent of whales or dolphins: dreaming, essentially innocent beings, a
very different species from those "creating creatures" who leave the Earth.
As far as we know, dolphins and whales have no spoken language--or at least not one we
know how to hear--and indeed Earthkind's voice will in these pages be largely silent. It is,
after all, the rhetoric of Spacekind that these chapters seek to overhear. To hear us talk
is to listen to their arguments, their myths, their rationalizations: their "infinite
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presumption." But another voice, another vocation, remains faintly audible and
throughout these pages will have its say.
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1. Due Back on the Planet Earth:
Toward a Definition of Spaciness
I
It is likely that the off-worlders will develop their own gestures, mannerisms, and
speech characteristics. During the two world wars, counterespionage agents could
often spot a spy by the manner in which he smoked a cigarette or held a fork. Such
telltale signs will pop up in space natures. Their gestures might be slightly
exaggerated. . . . they may not be aware of the oddness of their facial expressions
since they are accustomed to their own facial messaging. . . . The way they cut
their meat, spoon up their soup, hold tools, write with a pen, and all the other
unconscious motions will be points of difference.
James E. and Alcestis R. Oberg, Pioneering Space
In Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977), during Alvy Singer's Easter weekend visit to
Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, and Annie Hall's home, and after an uneasy dinner with
Annie's waspish parents and anti-Semitic grandmother, Alvy finds himself summoned into
the bedroom of Annie's peculiar brother, Duane.
As Alvy (Woody Allen) listens, uneasily, Duane (Christopher Walken) describes for him a
secret desire: "Can I confess something? . . . Sometimes when I'm driving . . . on the
road at night . . . I see two headlights coming toward me. Fast. I have this sudden
impulse to turn the wheel quickly, head-on into the oncoming car. I can anticipate the
explosion. The sound of shattering glass. The . . . flames rising out of the glowing
gasoline." Though he is trying to be polite, the look on Alvy's face betrays his sudden
realization that he is in the presence of the deranged. He rises quickly from his chair and
inches his way out of the room, excusing his flight with the explanation that he has a
prior obligation elsewhere: "Right. Tsch, well, I have to--I have to go now, Duane,
because I-I'm due back on the planet Earth" (Four Films, 57-58; my emphasis). To
remove oneself from an awkward situation by lying about a supposed prior commitment
is natural enough, of course, but Alvy's excuse is no mere pretense: it is the recognition
of a counterespionage agent of the presence of an "off-world" spy. In the Space Age,
such an acknowledgment of the alien could well become commonplace.
II
"Earthbound," for Freeman [Dyson] and those of his persuasion, is a common, sad
pejorative. For me the word has a snug and comfortable sound.
Kenneth Brower, The Starship and the Canoe
"Spacy"--the word first appeared, according to the Dictionary of Slang and
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Unconventional English, in the late 1970s and originally was used to describe the
mentality of someone under the influence of narcotics.
In Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard, writing in the middle of the nineteenth
century, imagined a heroic individual he called the "knight of faith." Filled with "infinite
resignation" to the conditions of this world, Kierkegaard's knight aspires toward the
infinite but ultimately learns the way of the finite. He makes "the movements of
infinity . . . with such correctness . . . that he constantly gets the finite out of it." In doing
so, the knight of faith, Kierkegaard explains, becomes like a dancer able to "leap into a
definite posture in such a way that there is not a second when he is grasping after the
posture, but by the leap itself he stands fixed in that posture." He can leap into the air,
after the infinite, and "fall down to Earth in such a way that the same second it looks as if
[he] were standing and walking," and thus he is able to "transform the leap of life into a
walk, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian." To the knight of faith,
Kierkegaard thinks, "finiteness tastes . . . just as good as to one who has never known
anything higher" (121-23). To achieve such knighthood, the Danish philosopher believed,
is the legitimate project of modernity.
The antipedestrian language of the Space Age, however, would seem to suggest that it is
certainly no longer the human project. Increasingly spacy, we no longer seek to integrate
the leap into a walk, the vertical into the horizontal. It is "infinite presumption," not
infinite resignation, the desire to fly and not to walk, the dream of soaring above human
and earthly conditions, not mastery of repetition and consistency, which govern our
sensibility, as the spaciness of our language reveals.
In the colloquial speech of a people in any given era we find mirrored often unconscious
changes in worldview. Why, for example, should it be the case that pedestrian--a word
central to Kierkegaard's philosophy--which simply denotes one who walks on the ground,
has come to connote, through metaphoric extension, "boring, commonplace, ordinary,"
as it does today? After all, we pass our lives today in urban environments meant to
exclude the pedestrian; we move along highway landscapes purposely constructed to be
seen and understood only at the speed of a passenger in an automobile; we live in
buildings designed by postmodernist architects who have come to think of "the ground"
as merely "the traffic-flow-support nexus for the vertical whole."
Almost from its origin and nearly universally mankind has fallen prey to "ascensionism,"
the "general psychic orientation toward brightness, levitation, flying, climbing, upward
pointing and moving" (Henry Murray, cited in Mumford 34-35). In the Space Age, the
language of ascensionism has come into its ascendancy. Now it is only the leap that
matters.
And now beings dwell among us known as space cadets, a term in wide use by those
forty and under and yet a concept with a very imprecise meaning. Originally (circa
1960s), a space cadet was someone (customarily played in later cinematic incarnations
by a Sean Penn or a Crispin Glover), whose excessive use of drugs had severely impaired
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the ability to function normally in a pedestrian world: one whose common sense had
been largely eradicated along with a great deal of gray matter. Later, the term was
extended to describe "Me Decade," psychobabbling Marin County residents, or the
galleria-obsessed "awesome" mentality of vacuous valley girls. But space cadets (like
Body Snatchers) escaped their native state of California and began to spread across
America. Just as the slang of hippies and valley girls, once scorned in Dubuque or
Cincinnati, became, with the aid of the media, the common coin for youth across the
nation, space cadets likewise colonized other states and cities--and Madison Avenue--as
they spread beyond the bay area.
Experiences that promised a high degree of hedonistic pleasure for the participant--a day
at the beach, a good movie, a night of beer drinking--were judged to be "far-out."
Sometimes, when the mood seemed appropriate, such experiences were deemed "out of
this world."
People, it should be noted, were also said to be "far-out" and "out of sight." For example,
an attractive body, male or female, might be said to be "out of sight," as if the tendency
to disappear over the horizon were worthy of the highest praise, and an individual who
thought in an abstract or even in an unusual way--indeed one who even thought at all-might be termed "far-out." Indeed, I have myself been deemed "far out" and "spacy" by
my students, not, I have discovered, because of the usual absent-minded-professor
eccentricities, but because of the way I think. As I have learned through interrogation of
their looks of disbelief, I am most likely to be branded spacy when I am in fact most
earthy, or when I am attempting, as I do in this chapter, to describe and define spaciness
itself.
The desire to "get high" became for a time a Space Age obsession. To "come down" after
a high could be a real bummer. A movie or a book which provoked deep thought, which
made a reader or viewer contemplate his or her own mortality, for example, or seriously
consider a social or political issue might threaten to "bring you down." And the work in
question might be judged "heavy, very heavy."
In a revealing study of "words and values," Peggy Rosenthal has studied such "leading
words" as "self," "growth," "systems," and "relativity" and speculated about "where they
lead us." It seems quite clear where "spaciness" and its adjunct meanings lead us. With
characteristic audacity and insight that could only be described as Space Age, Timothy
Leary--once a research psychologist at Harvard, then "high priest" of LSD in the 1960s,
and, in a later, 1980s incarnation, founder of an advocacy group (SMI2LE: Space
Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension) extolling the evolutionary necessity of
space colonization for the species--acknowledges this lead:
It is no accident that the pot-head generally refers to his neural state as "high" or
"spaced-out." The transcendence of gravitational, digital, linear, either-or,
Aristotelian, Newtonian, Euclidean, planetary orientations . . . is, in evolutionary
perspective, part of our neurological preparation for the inevitable migrations off
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the home planet, now beginning. This is why so many pot-heads are Star Trek
freaks and Sci-Fi adepts. (88)
But we need not resort to Leary's antigravity evolutionary metaphysics to explain the
birth of space language and spaciness in general.
Behind our contemporary cultural style, Peter Marin has observed, speaking more literally
than he perhaps realized, lies "the unrealized shame of having failed the world and not
knowing what to do about it" (48). But "the real horror of our present condition," Marin
goes on to say in "The New Narcissism," "is not merely the absence of community or the
isolation of the self--those, after all, have been part of the American condition for a long
time." Our true terror, Marin insists, is rather "the loss of the ability to remember what is
missing, the diminishment of our vision of what is humanly possible or desirable." We are
afflicted now by a kind of spiritual amnesia.
It is this cultural style--a sensibility Marin deems "elsewhere" (56)--which I call
spaciness, the psyche, the state of soul, which life in the Space Age engenders.
III
The rational Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness embarked upon in the American
Revolution translates into the flaky euphoria of the late twentieth century. Every
advance in an objective understanding of the Cosmos and in its technological
control further distances the self from the Cosmos precisely in the degree of the
advance--so that in the end the self becomes a space-bound ghost which roams
the very Cosmos it understands perfectly.
Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos
As the title of this chapter suggests, "spaciness" is not easily comprehended, and I will
offer here no clear-cut definition but only "notes toward" a definition. At this time in the
Space Age, however, the parameters of spaciness may be identified. Though I do not
claim to be able as a "counterespionage agent" to pinpoint the spacy way to hold a
cigarette or lift a fork, I can delineate with some clarity the key features of the Space
Age's episteme.
Spaciness is placeless. In a book on the "invention of the future" at M.I.T.'s "Media
Lab," Stewart Brand decries, in a telling phrase, "the tyranny of place" (Media Lab 24). In
the Space Age, as Brand himself recognizes, such tyranny is about to be overthrown,
though the price we pay for freedom is likely to be an increase in spaciness.
Architect and urban planner Christian Nieuwenhuis once imagined a postmodernist utopia
he would call "New Babylon." In New Babylon all ordinary sense of locale would
disappear; it would be a placeless city. "In New Babylon people would be constantly
traveling. There would be no need for them to return to their point of departure as this in
any case would be transformed." On the opposite end of the scale from a Levittown, New
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Babylon would be a totally ideal metropolis, as Nieuwenhuis admits: "It follows that New
Babylon could not have a determined plan. On the contrary every element would be left
undetermined, mobile and flexible" (quoted in Norberg-Schulz 35). In the process of
perfecting our simulations, we have come surprisingly close to realizing Nieuwenhuis's
mad vision. Depersonalized, disincarnated, in truth we now have no place to stand,
having pulled the rug (indeed the ground, the Earth) out from under ourselves. Our
spaciness is placeless.
Two examples of Space Age placelessness come to mind.
Placelessness and architecture. In Body, Memory, Architecture, Kent Bloomer
demonstrates the loss of qualitative values in our phenomenological orientation in the
world and their replacement by space as a Cartesian coordinate system:
At the very beginning of our individual lives we measure and order the world out from
our own bodies: the world opens up in front of us and closes behind. Front thus becomes
quite different from back, and we give an attention to our fronts, as we face the world,
which is quite different from the care we give to our back and what lies behind us. We
struggle, as soon as we are able, to stand upright, with our heads atop our spines, in a
way different from any other creatures in the world, and up derives a set of connotations
(including moral ones) opposite from down. In our minds left and right soon become
distinguished from each other in quality as well as in direction, as words like "sinister"
and "dextrous" record. (1)
Such distinctions, subjectively, "Ptolemaically" derived, transform space into place, make
the external world lived-in and personalized. In this measuring and ordering, the "tacit
dimension" (as Michael Polanyi calls it) of the individual and the species is created. We
develop a vast, nonrational, embodied intelligence, a genius that "always knows more
than it can tell "about the actual world in which we dwell.
But in the modern world the tacit dimension is "implicitly called into question" by formal
education's inculcation of the Copernican, Cartesian world view. This new system
enhances the precision with which spatial relationships are understood, but at a high
cost, as Bloomer describes:
The quality of location is safely ignored. This system can locate precisely a point along x,
y, and z axes even as it renders all the possible points somehow the same. Our cities are
stacked up in layers which bear testimony to the skills of the surveyor and the engineer
in manipulating precise Cartesian coordinates, but they exhibit no connection with the
body-centered, value charged sense of space we started with. (1)
Placelessness and the media. According to Joshua Meyrowitz's No Sense of Place,
another kind of Space Age placelessness has likewise resulted from the impact of
electronic media on social behavior. Radio, television, telephone, and computer are in the
process of destroying traditional and unique environments, Meyrowitz's impressive study
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shows, radically altering the tacit "situational geography" (6) that has long governed
normal behavior. (As an epigraph to his book, Meyrowitz quotes, appropriately, Marshall
McLuhan's observation that "nothing can be further from the spirit of the new technology
than 'a place for everything and everything in its place.'")
"It is extremely rare," Meyrowitz writes, "for there to be a sudden widespread change in
walls, doors, the layout of a city, or in other architectural and geographical structures.
But the change in situations and behaviors that occurs when doors are opened or closed
and when walls are constructed or removed is paralleled in our time by the flick of a
microphone switch, the turning on of a television set, or the answering of a
telephone" (39-40). (Nieuwenhuis' New Bablyon, Meyrowitz's analysis would suggest, is
already being forged not with bricks and mortar but via new channels of
communication.)
Once how we behaved depended largely on where we were and who we were with. Public
and private places, men and women, superiors and inferiors, children and adults--all
required us to behave in particular ways. But now these distinctions are becoming
blurred. Now "Many Americans may no longer seem to 'know their place' because the
traditionally interlocking components of 'place' have been split apart by electronic media.
Wherever one is now--at home, at work, or in a car--one may be in touch and tunedin" (308).
Spaciness is ageographical and ahistorical. "Lost on the Planet Earth" reads the title
of a Newsweek story (Leslie 31) on the results of a National Geographic Societysponsored Gallup Organization survey of geographical knowledge in industrialized
countries (the United States, Sweden, West Germany, Japan, Canada, the United
Kingdom, France, Italy, Mexico), which discovered surprising ignorance--especially in
American young adults (age eighteen to twenty four, who finished dead last. In this
country, knowledge of world geography has sunk to an all-time low. Almost a quarter of
high school seniors, for example, cannot find the United States on a map, and the
overwhelming majority cannot say where Australia or Japan are located. (See "Which
Way Is the Pacific Ocean?")
In A Study in Scarlet, Dr. Watson is astonished to learn that Sherlock Holmes is not
aware that the Copernican revolution has taken place. Holmes defends his Ptolemaic
ignorance by explaining that the knowledge that the Earth goes around the sun and not
the other way around has no possible relevance to his daily life and work. As a
manifestation of our spaciness, geographical obliviousness could be explained away by an
opposite post-Copernican excuse. For those whose displaced minds are elsewhere, no
longer on the Earth, there is little need any longer to know "where it's at." As Arendt
endeavored to remind us, it is world alienation and not alienation from the self that truly
characterize the modern (The Human Condition 254). (Revealingly, psychologist William
Niederlander now projects the need for a new branch of psychology--"psychogeography"
he calls it--dedicated to the study of "the psychological separation of the species from
Earth" [quoted in Oberg and Oberg 261].)
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Our obliviousness to the past reflects our unqualified acceptance of the simulations of the
present. It is as if, in this age in which capitalism (as Sontag shows in On Photography)
has reduced the past to outmoded styles of consumption, we can barely imagine a time
before our own. "How did people live in the old days, how did they eat, how did they
drink, how did they sleep?" J. H. van den Berg asks in The Changing Nature of Man, and
the answer is that, for twentieth century men and women the past is almost
inconceivable.
We have no idea how our parents lived. When they tell us about it, when they take
us with them into the past, we are amazed; we hear of a world in which everything
was different. . . . What our grandparents tell us is even stranger, at least if we try
to understand what their story contains. "There were no cars"; that is all right; but
let us not have the idea that we understand what this simple information, this
facts, implies. A city without cars is radically foreign to us . . . the past cannot
come to us because there are no points of contact, no similarities. Discontinuity
permits no communication. (Berg 38)
"Those who know history are doomed to repeat it," artificial intelligence (AI) expert
Marvin Minsky proclaims, attacking reactionary resistance to new technologies in a
misquotation of Santayana that is distinctively Space Age in its logic (in Brand, Media Lab
103). Indeed, under the "cultural logic of late capitalism," we encounter--as Fredric
Jameson has explained--"a new and original historical situation in which we are
condemned to seek history by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history,
which remains forever out of reach" (71).
Spaciness is Archimedean. In the Space Age--according to Hannah Arendt--an age-old
ambition has finally been realized. Since the Copernican revolution, Arendt observes, it
has been the great dream of the West to attain a detached, out-of-this-world
perspective--to find the "Archimedean point." Indeed many of the supreme achievements
of the last five hundred years, as Arendt shows, have been the result of "having looked
upon and treated Earth-bound nature from a truly universal perspective." Now this
intellectual quest has culminated in technological realization; we have indeed "found a
way to act on the Earth as though we disposed of terrestrial nature from outside, from
the point of Einstein's 'observer freely poised in space'" ("Man's Conquest" 539-40).
Drawing inspiration from this achievement, the dream has spread throughout Space Age
culture. Colonization of the Archimedean point in the Space Age is no longer restricted to
scientists. We can and do journey there on a daily basis. To hear us talk, some minds
have already set up housekeeping.
In the Space Age, a photojournalist's eight-year-long investigative journey over the North
American continent, from the American Southwest to the Canadian Far North, studying
"what people think of outer space," can result in the conclusion that there exists, at least
at the level of folk culture, a widespread and growing "nostalgia for the future." Douglas
Curran's In Advance of the Landing: Folk Concepts of Outer Space provides a visual,
anthropological record of the "daydream[s] of technology," "the symbols of
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transcendence and freedom," which dot the North American landscape: a rocket on a
launching pad outside a general store in Quebec; a flying saucer-shaped gas station in
Saskatchewan; a Ford compact rebuilt into a rocket-powered "Billenium Falcon" in
Venice, California; a "Space Age Lodge" in Gila Bend, Arizona; a UFO house in Pensacola
Beach, Florida; a flying saucer house in Signal Mountain, Tennessee.
In the Space Age, the twenty-story Earth Sciences Building at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, designed by architect (and MIT graduate) I. M. Pei, a building
exhibitionistically mounted on four, narrow, two-story-tall pylons, suffers from all sorts of
structural problems. Its windows crack periodically, and because Pei's design for a
building to house the academic study of the planet absurdly neglected to take into
account that it would actually exist on the Earth, the wind sweeping down the building's
sides and through its legs makes the doors almost impossible to open.
In the Space Age, Roland Barthes notices the advent of a new kind of being he calls "jetman": a creature, "nearer to the robot than to the hero," who, turning "speed into
repose," surrenders all sense of adventure or destiny, all the "romantic and individualistic
elements of the sacred role [of aviator]," indeed all humanity, in order to colonize the
vertical plane, affecting a "kind of anthropological compromise between humans and
Martians" (71-72).
In the Space Age, a book on "Space Exploration and Human Evolution" (Frank White's
Overview Effect) insists that our species can never expect to attain "universal insight"
until it learns to adopt as a species the "Copernican Perspective"--an outside-in
"overview" of earthly affairs--that so moved many of the first astronauts.
In the Space Age, an "off-planet journalist" (Howard Rheingold) assembles a collection of
essays (Excursions to the Far Side of the Mind) exhibiting the practice of "extraterrestrial
anthropology" on a variety of contemporary phenomena.
In the Space Age, a visionary San Francisco filmmaker, Jordan Belson, makes an
experimental film ("Re-Entry") based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead using footage of
John Glenn's epoch-making Friendship 7 flight into space as the metaphoric basis for his
depiction of the Buddhist conception of the soul's journey out of the body into the Bardic
spheres (Youngblood 157-77).
In the Space Age, the German electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen insists in an
interview that music is the spiritual means not only of self-discovery but of cosmic
orientation: "Sooner or later, when one has achieved this [cosmic] consciousness," he
tells Jonthan Cott, "one will travel there as a cosmic tourist and by that show that
everything exists at once." He notes, too, that he is "really not interested in staying in
this body an unlimited time because certainly I want to fly without airplanes and go much
further and faster" (Cott 17, 104-5). Among his most important compositions are such
space music as Kurzwellen, a variably scored, completely intuitive improvisation based on
periodic, random scanning of the shortwave spectrum, and Ylem, a musical record of the
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soundscape of the universe from one Big Bang to the next.
In the Space Age, French cultural critic Paul Virilio discovers in the increasing abstraction
of the war machine--the end of hand-to-hand combat, the importance of invisibility
(stealth technology, for example) and camouflage, laser sighting, infrared night vision,
the pivotal role of surveillance, the equation of perception and destruction--a
development counterpointing the colonization of the Archimedean point in the modern
age.
Spaciness is protean. In Woody Allen's Manhattan, Isaac Davis (Allen) describes his
first wife to a new girlfriend: "[She] was a kindergarten teacher, you know. She--she got
into drugs and she, uh, moved to San Francisco and went into est [Erhard Sensitivity
Training] . . . became a Moonie. She's with the William Morris Agency now" (Four Films
241-42).
Robert Jay Lifton has described such individuals as Protean ("Protean Man" 311-31). A
generation ago an individual took pride in maintaining a single identity over the course of
a lifetime, often working at a career long after it had ceased to be fulfilling, staying in a
marriage even though love had died, keeping faith with a basic set of key ideas. By
contrast, today's Protean man or woman may change hats on a regular basis, practice
"serial polygamy," and embrace, without any real intellectual crisis, a sequence of
seemingly contradictory ideologies: such individuals may undergo as well quite radical
personality metamorphoses, shape-shifting throughout a lifetime without ever settling
into the known and predictable, without ever feeling the need for stability or consistency.
(Such a phenomenon is not restricted to American culture. In Boundaries, Lifton
chronicles the life histories of Proteans in Hong Kong and Japan whose development
makes Allen's fictional kindergarten teacher/hippie/Moonie/talent agent seem an
exemplar of coherence: one Japanese youth, for example, mutated from a member of a
radical, anticapitalist, anti-Western terrorist group into a corporate executive in less than
ten years. Such journeys Lifton characterizes as "psychohistorical.")
Contemplating the possibility that the Nuclear/Space Age might well give rise to
individuals capable of living "on the very conditions which once had been next to death
itself," Norman Mailer wondered more than two decades ago if we were not likely to see
the development of human beings thriving "on the stimulations of the uprooted and
displaced" (282). As a psychic symptom, Proteanism would seem to indicate that such
beings are now being generated from modernity's natural selection. No doubt, New
Babylon will actively recruit them as prominently spacy citizens, and their malleability
may make them valued space colonists as well.
Spaciness is narcissistic. For cultural critics like Tom Wolfe ("The Me Decade and the
Third Great Awakening"), Christopher Lasch (The Culture of Narcissism and The Minimal
Self), Dorothy Dinnerstein (The Mermaid and the Minotaur), Peter Marin ("The New
Narcissism"), and Richard Sennett (The Fall of Public Man), the most distinctive
characteristic of the last decade and a half of the Space Age is its narcissism. "The
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withdrawl of commitment, the continual search for a definition from within of 'who I am,'"
Sennett writes in a concise assessment of the malaise, has resulted in "self-absorption
which prevents one from understanding what belongs within the domain of the self and
self gratification and what belongs outside it" (9).
Narcissism is often simplistically equated with egoism, but nothing could be further from
the case, as Lasch has reminded us, seeking to clarify (in The Minimal Self) his own
complex position. "As the Greek legend reminds us," Lasch writes, "the plight of
Narcissus" is not "egoism" but "confusion of the self and the not- self": "The minimal or
narcissistic self is, above all, a self uncertain of its own outlines, longing either to remake
the world in its own image or to merge into its environment in blissful union" (19).
The "Me Decade" of the 1970s, as Tom Wolfe notes in a similar vein, was actually the
product of a new license to try to climb out of the stream of human history and change
the natural order of things. As a phase of the Space Age, the Me Decade was for Wolfe a
period characterized by an obsessive, narcissistic attention to self and the suspension of
belief in "serial immortality"--faith in one's children, one's inheritors, one's people as part
of a "great biological stream" whose needs outweigh the limited demands of the
individual. "Most people," Wolfe notes, "have not lived their lives as if thinking, 'I have
only one life to live.' Instead they have lived as if they were living their ancestors' lives
and their offsprings' lives and perhaps their neighbors' lives as well. They have seen
themselves as inseparable from the great tide of chromosomes of which they are created
and which they pass on." In the Space Age, intimations of mortality have, for perhaps the
first time in human history, given "the license to try to climb out of the stream and
change the natural order of things" ("Me Decade" 145-46).9
True selfhood, however, Lasch wisely remarks, "is the painful awareness of the tension
between our unlimited aspirations and our limited understanding, between our original
intimations of immortality and our fallen state, between oneness and
separation" (Minimal Self 20). Unable and unwilling to bear the tension of which Lasch
speaks, spaciness resolves each dichotomy in favor of the first term. Viewed in a
psychohistorical perspective, "Faustian, Promethean technology," Lasch concludes, is the
result of a failure to accept such a definition of the self; the Faustian, the Promethean
"originate . . . in the attempt to restore narcissistic illusions of omnipotence" (19). And
spaciness, too, has its genesis, wedded through a common birth and common dreams to
contradictory ambitions of remaking (terraforming) not just the world but the universe, of
reuniting the human soul (sans body) not just with earthly nature but with the cosmos.
In the Space Age, a philosophically minded American novelist, the late Walker Percy,
authors a strange, unclassifiable study which he calls "The Last Self-Help Book," for
which he offers the following revealing sub-sub-titles: "The Strange Case of the Self, your
Self, the Ghost which Haunts the Cosmos," "Why it is that of the billions and billions of
strange objects in the Cosmos--novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes--you are beyond
doubt the strangest"; "Why it is possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab
Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you presently know about
yourself"; "How it is possible for the man who designed Voyager 19, which arrived at
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Titania, a satellite of Uranus, three seconds off schedule and a hundred yards off course
after a flight of six years, to be one of the most screwed- up creatures in California--or
the Cosmos?" (7-8).
In the Space Age, a rock song--David Bowie's "Space Oddity"--presents, through
dialogue between "command control" and a space capsule in orbit, a portrait of an
astronaut so beleaguered by earthly problems and enraptured by the ecstasy he
experiences when free from gravity on an EVA (extravehicular activity) that he refuses to
return.
In our "otherworldly," spacy psyches, we have come to seem more and more like
astronauts in orbit in a damaged craft, longing for reentry, due back on the planet Earth
yet incapable of return because our heat-shields have been destroyed.10
Spaciness is unaccommodated. In the Space Age, a book on developmental
psychology (Joseph Chilton Pearce's Magical Child argues that modernity is in the process
of destroying a primordial process through which the mind and imagination of every
growing child is bonded to earthly nature.
According to Jean Piaget's "genetic epistemology" of the developing child, the adaptation
of an infant to his or her world--"the continuous process of using the environment to
learn, and learning to the environment"--progresses by "accommodation" and
"assimilation." In accommodation, the child realizes that it is necessary to "give in" to the
things of the world, accepting and then molding behavior to its textures, its contours, its
temperatures, colors, shapes, hardness or softness, and size, because to do so is
essential if the individual is to live in the world and not against it. But spaciness cannot or
will not give in, cannot or will not adapt to things as they are; consequently it develops a
psychic orientation that requires either total mastery of an environment perceived to be
hostile and threatening or a distancing from things: a perpetually detached posture on
the surface of life.
An ancient Hindu fable tells of a wealthy king who, after stubbing his bare toe on a rock,
subsequently issued commands that his entire kingdom be carpeted to prevent such a
future injury. A wise counselor intervened, however, and recommended that the king
might instead carpet only his own foot, a suggestion that resulted in the invention of the
shoe. Clearly a fable whose moral is accommodation, yet Space Age modernity, viewed in
the mirror of this tale, is just as spoiled, just as puerile, as the king. Demanding freedom
from all future risk and from the vicissitudes and uncertainties of nature, we have
constructed an unreal simulation of the world. Housed within it, we dream of never giving
in; of defying accommodation for ever and ever; of never giving up, and never growing
up. (Our refusal to accommodate ourselves to the earthly has now resulted in futuristic
fantasies of escape from the body itself, a subject to which I devote an entire chapter
below ["The Departure of the Body Snatchers"].)
In the Space Age, an architect (Witold Rybczynski) writing a history of the idea of
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comfort can detect an extraterrestrial, unaccommodated development of the concept.
During the design phase of the Space Shuttle, Rybczynski notes, "a cardboard mock-up
of the cabin was built. The astronauts were required to move around in this full-size
model, miming their daily activities, and every time they knocked against a corner or a
projection, a technician would cut away the offending piece. At the end of the process,
when there were no more obstructions left, the cabin was judged to be 'comfortable.'"
The implications are clear: "The scientific definition of comfort would be something like
'Comfort is that condition in which discomfort has been avoided'" (225-26).
Spaciness is weightless. We have already seen how the ascensionistic language of
spaciness reflects a disaste for the "heavy." Indeed, spaciness might be described as
weightless.
In the Space Age, the late Italian writer Primo Levi, a profound chronicler of the horrors
of the Holocaust, expresses great envy of the astronauts because of his own fond dream
of finding himself freed, "if only for a moment, from the weight of [the] body"--a dream
he takes to be "a prelude to the future, as yet unclear, in which the umbilical cord which
calls us back to mother Earth will be superfluous and transparent" (122-23).
In the Space Age, Hillel Schwartz, in Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets,
Fantasies and Fat, argues that "the culture of slimming [of the 1970s and 1980s] has
reached its apogee when dieters imagine foods without calories and bodies without
weight." "The weightless body," according to Schwartz, "is a body without any sense of
gravity, detached from the body politic" (303). (In the Space Age, a book on "the tyranny
of slenderness" in modern America (Kim Chernin's The Obsession) argues that at the
heart of our obsession with weight loss lies a fear of the mature woman's body in the
wake of growing female power in a time when the cultural dream is to remove the body
from nature.
In the Space Age, a brutally sadistic character in a novel (Anthony Burgess' Clockwork
Orange) depicting an ultradecadent and ultraviolent not-very-far-distant future society
refuels his "creative" energies by listening again and again to Beethoven's Ninth
Symphony, music he thinks of as "like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all
nonsense now" (33).
Spaciness is senseless. Life in the Space Age is increasingly senseless. We now live
largely indoor lives in "sensory deprivation" environments and artificial light. Our vast
knowledge of the world is increasingly "dashboard knowledge."14 In our "misplaced
concreteness" (Alfred North Whitehead), we mistake our instrumentation for reality, as if
the reading on the speedometer were speed itself.
In the Space Age, acoustician R. Murray Schafer, contemplating the history of
"soundscapes," suggests that in the development of not-to-be-listened-to music--from
the avant-garde experiments of Erik Satie to contemporary elevator music, especially
commercial systems like Muzak ("Moozak")--we have discovered "the embalming fluid of
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earthly boredom" (96).
In the Space Age, we are not surprised to find the philosopher Daniel Dennett engaged in
a thought experiment ("Where Am I?" 217-31) in which NASA removes a man's brain
from his body-- placing it, "disembodied in Houston," in a life-support system at the
Manned Spacecraft Center--so that "he" can be sent on a rescue mission into a highly
radioactive underground chamber. This cautionary tale leads to much futuristic
speculation on the possibility for and implications of "remote sensing" and
"telepresence" (Marvin Minsky's term), and a meditation on mind-body interaction, the
nature of reality, and the location of the self. (Such imaginings, in fact, have become
increasingly common: the anthology in which "Who Am I?" appears--The Mind's "I"-collects several similar ones.)
In the Space Age, the "cyberpunk" science fiction of William Gibson (Neuromancer, Count
Zero) portrays certain gifted individuals of the next century who have learned to
negotiate a new form of reality, a "consensual hallucination" called "cyberspace," a
simulated, all-encompassing three-dimensional space generated by the information
produced by computer programs.
The "real world" of the late twentieth century sees the development of virtual reality
systems (VRS), replicant forms of consciousness, sometimes deemed the "LSD of the
1990s," which permit the wearer of a special computer-assisted special helmet--complete
with "eye phones"--and "data gloves" to substitute momentarily for the normal input of
the senses a multiple, simulated, wraparound, all-encompassing, computer-generated,
alternate reality in which he or she may move about at will.15 Revealingly, no one to
date has been able to endure exposure to the senselessness of a VRS for longer than
forty five minutes without developing signs of psychosis. The device's creators have come
to call the mental state that results from overexposure "Simulation Sickness."
Cyanide-laced Tylenol, mass murder in a McDonald's, a plethora of barbaric-elementary
school shooting sprees, terrorist bombing of a Pam Am jet, fatal child abuse . . . hardly a
day goes by in the Space Age without a new revelation of horrors beyond comprehension.
"Is it possible," Neil Postman wonders, "that a 'senseless' crime has its origin in an acute
deprivation of real sensory experience? Is it possible that immersed in a world of
surrogate experience, we simultaneously lose our senses and lose touch with them
both?" ("Teachings" 428).
Spaciness is puerile. An adult human being who never grows up, who remains an
"eternal youth," is known in archetypal psychology as a "puer" (from the Latin for "boy").
All puer figures, James Hillman observes, suffer from an obsession with "vertical" values-symbolized in Greek myth by the flying and falling of puers like Ikaros and Ganymede.
But as Hillman explains, this soaring stems not just from high spirits but from a weakness
of character.
[The puer] must be weak on Earth because it is not at home on Earth. Its direction
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is vertical. . . . The horizontal world, the space-time continuum which we call
"reality," is not its world. . . . The puer therefore understands little of what is
gained by repetition and consistency, that is, by work, or by moving back and
forth, left and right, in and out, which makes for subtlety in proceeding step by
step through the labyrinthine complexity of the horizontal world. These things but
cripple its winged heels, for there, from below and behind, it is particularly
vulnerable. It is anyway not meant to walk but to fly.
Being young and therefore not yet disillusioned, failure does not frighten the puer
because, as Hillman observes, he is certain he can always begin again, can always start
over, a certainty not shared by the old. The puer thus believes himself to have "vertical
direct access to the spirit," and he seeks every imaginable shortcut to it in an effort to
make his vision of his goals and the goals themselves one. Thus he "cannot do with
indirection, with timing and patience" and "knows little of the seasons and of waiting."
For the puer figure, life is no "odyssey of experience." "It wanders to spend or to capture,
and to ignite, to try its luck, but not with the aim of going home. No wife waits; it has no
son in Ithaca" ("Senex and Puer" 24-26).
In the Space Age, French social scientist Michel de Certeau finds the development of the
skyscraper, and of the voyeuristic view of city life made possible by it, to be the product
of an "erotics of knowledge" that sanctions a "scopic or a gnostic drive" (122-23). To
descend back into the horizontal world, to submit to the "tricks of Daedelus in his shifting
and endless labyrinths," he writes, is to experience anew the fall of Ikaros. ("It's hard to
be down when you're up," reads a puerile but revealing advertisment--cited in de
Certeau's essay--for the observation deck at the World Trade Center.)
In the Space Age, a movie critic (Pat Aufderheide in an essay entitled "Earth: Love It or
Leave It") surveys recent science fiction films and concludes that more and more the
genre exhibits a surprising lack of faith in the world and that, in a strange
metamorphosis, science fiction aliens--once menacing threats to human existence--have
become "escape hatches" for humans completely alienated from earthly existence.
In the Space Age, viewers of the monumental thirteen part PBS series Cosmos watch the
astronomer Carl Sagan, one of the era's major scientific popularizers, venture forth
naturally, almost effortlessly, into the universe in a sporelike, thistledown spaceship of
the imagination, while wearing the regulation college professor uniform (a corduroy
jacket with patched sleeves) instead of an ugly and cumbersome space suit.
In the Space Age, military planners begin to think of war in space as clean, scientific, and
precise. Reagan's Star Wars "Atari program" (aka SDI), Mark Crispin Miller argues, now
"offers the deft consultant a realm where, yes, it finally will be possible to deploy
machines that enable a kind of war 'in which the heat of personal feelings has no
place' [Herman Kahn], a place where battle can flash silently, decisively, without leaving
any mess" (154)16
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In the Space Age, an Indian sage, founder of the International Society for Krishna
Consciousness (the Hare Krishnas), writes a book explaining how to use yoga in order to
travel to other planets. The desire to actually journey to other worlds, the Swami writes,
is only the latest manifestation of the puerile "natural desire to live forever in happiness,"
but he warns against falling for the materialistic dreams of the space program. Our true
ambition should instead be the transcendence, by purely spiritual means, of this
"miserable land of birth, old age, disease and death" in search of planets--he assures us
that there are many--where "life is eternal and blissful."
The Space Age is thoroughly puerile. Its culture fosters puerility; life in a simulator
demands it.
Spaciness is gnostic. To hear us talk, the Space Age has engendered a rebirth of
Gnosticism. In The Arrogance of Humanism, David Ehrenfeld suggests that the peculiar
Space Age illusion that "we can escape the earthly consequences of our arrogance by
leaving the mother planet either for little ersatz worlds of our own making or for distant
celestial bodies, some of them as yet undiscovered"--a pipedream Ehrenfeld finds
"immature and irresponsible"--is in fact the modern, debased, secularized reincarnation
of an ancient faith:
Space with its space stations and space inhabitants is just a replacement for
heaven with its angels. Even the idea of immortality is there, fuzzy like everything
else in this imaginary humanist domain--for if one looks closely at the writings of
the futurologists and the would-be L-5 pioneers one finds hazy references to
relativity and time-warps, ways of making immense journeys of many light-years
distance without dying, except perhaps with reference to the people left behind on
Earth. Space is nothing more than a watered- down heaven for modern
unbelievers. Only now we have located heaven more precisely in the solar system
than in the days when Dante wrote about paradise. (120)
The validity of Ehrenfeld's contention would seem apparent to all but those who, hell-bent
upon ascending to such a heaven, take ignorance of history and the history of ideas as
virtually a sign of election and seldom trouble themselves with such ironic insights.
Such a revealing comparison, however, does not precisely capture the intellectual
genealogy of these "futurologists and . . . would-be L-5 pioneers." In their advocacy of
the extraterrestrial imperative it is not so much the voice of mainstream Christianity we
hear as the come-back-from-the-dead, dissident protestation and prophecy of the
heretical religious movement of the early Christian era known as Gnosticism.18 To call
spaciness Gnostic is, in a sense, to imply all the above.
Though Gnosticism is a designation given to the beliefs of a wide variety of early
Christian sects, its central tenets can be summarized with some accuracy. A
"transmundane" religion with a dualistic and transcendental conception of salvation,
Gnosticism taught that "the world is a stupendous mistake, created by a foolish or vicious
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creator-god . . . [a] Demiurge . . . of a very low grade on the celestial hierarchy, himself
the result of an error, who thinks that he is supreme." "The gnostic God," Hans Jonas
writes, "is not merely extra-mundane and supra-mundane, but in his ultimate meaning
contra-mundane. The sublime unity of cosmos and God is broken up, the two are torn
apart, and a gulf never completely to be closed again is opened: God and world, God and
nature, spirit and nature, become divorced, alien to each other, even contraries" (Jonas
251). In the "mutant thought" of Gnosticism, men thus came to seem "planetary
detainees" "waging war against the very nature of our presence here on
Earth" (Lacarriere 20).
Despite this radically alienated state, the Gnostic was nevertheless sustained by the faith
that above the tyrannical, monstrous Demiurge there exists another, truly divine being,
and that enlightened beings might, by raising their consciousness, reach out beyond the
dissimulations of the pretender and find the true God. Without hope of the beyond,
Gnosticism would have lapsed into "a hopeless worldly pessimism" (Jonas 261),
surrendering itself to that "universal shipwreck which is the history of matter and of
man" (Lacarriere 20).
Thus the great "Gnostic drama," enacted on a worldly stage that had itself become the
equivalent of the underworld, came to seem "the metaphysical history of the light exiled
from Light, of the life exiled from Life and involved in the world--the history of its
alienation and recovery, its 'way' down and through the nether world and up
again" (Jonas 50). Motivated by "the conviction that there exists in man something which
escapes the curse of this world, a fire, a spark, a light . . . man's task is to regain his lost
homeland by wrenching himself free of the snares and illusions of the real, to rediscover
the original unity, to find again the kingdom of this God who was unknown, or imperfectly
known, to all preceding religions" (Lacarriere 10).
"The fundamental difference" separating the Gnostics from their contemporaries, writes
Jacques Lacarriere, in a passage that could, almost without altering a word, be adopted
as an accurate characterization of the most radical of contemporary space advocacy, was
"that, for them, their native 'soil' [was] not the Earth, but that lost heaven which they
[kept] vividly alive in their memories." As "autochthons of another world" who had "fallen
onto our Earth like inhabitants from a distant planet" and "strayed into the wrong
galaxy," they experienced a perpetual "longing to regain their true cosmic homeland."
"The sense of uprootedness," the alienation, experienced by the Gnostics, Lacarriere
shows, was "not merely geographical but planetary." "To treat them as aliens in the
political or civic sense"--as their contemporaries did--was as absurd, Lacarriere suggests,
as "giving a Martian a temporary residence visa" (29-30).
Gnosticism held, of course, that all humans were Martians, though few ever attained to
the esoteric insight, the gnosis, that enabled such self-knowledge. And to hear the
Gnostic-minded among us talk today--let us call them (with Lacarriere) the New
Gnostics--the situation has not changed: our species still suffers from "this universal
exile, this galactic dispersion that has caused us to be dumped on the mud of planet
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Earth" (Lacarriere 30).
The original Gnostics expected to be saved from the hell of Earth and body by knowledge,
by spiritual insight, not by technology, not by a cybernetically engineered, exosomatic
evolution or the deus ex machina of a rocket in which they could journey in search of the
real, the true homeland. Only the adepts of gnosis have changed in its Space Age rebirth,
not the essential message. Now "enlightenment" comes not to religious visionaries but to
rocket scientists, artificial intelligence experts, and space colonization gurus. Now we find
Barbara Marx Hubbard, prominent space advocate, arguing that the great religious
prophets of antiquity were actually "ancient futurists" whose vision of spiritual
transcendence was really a pre-hightech premonition of humanity's destiny in space
(285).
Spaciness is otherworldly. In The Great Chain of Being, historian of ideas A. O.
Lovejoy describes the "unit idea" (an early avatar of the meme) of "otherworldliness"
with great precision. Otherworldliness, Lovejoy writes, is "the belief that both the
genuinely 'real' and the truly good are radically antithetic in their essential characteristics
to anything to be found in man's natural life, in the ordinary course of human experience,
however normal, however intelligent, and however fortunate."
For the "otherworldly mind," "the world we now and here know --various, mutable, a
perpetual flux of states and relations of things, or an ever-shifting phantasmagoria of
thoughts and sensations, each of them lapsing into nonentity in the very next moment of
its birth--seems . . . to have no substance in it." Under the rule of such a mentality, "the
objects of sense and even of empirical scientific knowledge are unstable, contingent,
forever breaking down logically into mere relations to other things which when scrutinized
prove equally relative and elusive" (Lovejoy 26-27).
The mentality of the Space Age--placeless, ageographical, ahistorical, postmodern,
Protean, senseless, narcissistic, unaccommodated, weightless, puerile, and Gnostic--is
otherworldly.
IV
In Federico Fellini's acclaimed 8 1/2 (1963), a film director, troubled by the demands of
his art, by his loss of inspiration, and by marital trials, seeks to "steer off after something
into space." A movie about a movie, a metafilm, 8 1/2 tells the story of Guido Anselmi's
abortive struggle to complete his current project: a dark commentary on the modern
world in which survivors seek to flee to another planet in "an attempt to escape atomic
pestilence." Throughout the film, Guido and his cast and crew look on as the set for the
spaceship's immense launching pad is constructed.
We know from the film's opening sequence--in which Guido imagines himself
miraculously floating away from his troubles into the sky, only to be pulled back to Earth
and to responsibility by his producer ("Down! Definitely down!" he calls to Guido)--that
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escape upward is his constant fantasy. But by the film's close he has abandoned his
dream of vertical escape, accepting instead--in a Nietzschean amor fati--his earthly fate,
past, present, and future, troubles and all. In the film's final sequence we watch the
launching pad being torn down and all the characters of Guido's life--both real and
imagined--descend from its scaffolding back toward the Earth. Though few critics have
noticed it, 8 1/2 should be understood as an important and revealing document of the
Space Age, one that ultimately rejects the escapist temptation to simply leap over worldy
obstacles.
But to hear us talk, Guido's acceptance is uncharacteristic. To listen to discourse of the
Space Age, we seldom heed any longer the command of "Down!"
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PROBE: Gnosticism in the Cult Film
In our new myths we begin to deny once and for all the existence of what we
once believed both possible and good. We proclaim our grief-stricken
narcissism to be a form of liberation; we define as enlightenment our broken
faith with the world. . . . It is a condition one can find in many places and in
many ages, but only in America, and only recently, have we begun to
confuse it with a state of grace.
Peter Marin, "The New Narcissism"
The particular form of contemporary myth we now call the "cult film" would seem to be
an especially adept medium for recording the unearthly, Gnostic condition Peter Marin
describes here, as I will try to make apparent with the help of a thought experiment.
In an important essay on the cult film, semiotician Umberto Eco declares, in the best
postmodernist prose, his semiotic faith that all "works are created by works" and
"texts . . . created by texts," that "all together they speak to each other independently of
the intention of their authors." The cult movie in particular he takes to be definitive
"proof that, as literature comes from literature, cinema comes from cinema" (198).
This probe was inspired, however, by a different faith: that in tracking down the
intellectual roots of the memes inherited and displayed in the cult film we perform a
worthy piece of intellectual detective-work, one equal in value to the often ahistorical and
apolitical solipsism of our contemporary obsession with signs and signifiers.
Eco speaks of a cult film like Casablanca as "a palimpsest for future students of 20th
century religiosity." Picking up on Eco's hint, allow me if you will to imagine such a latterday student of the cult film, not, however, with the postmodernist intent, advocated by
Eco, of merely conducting "semiotic research into textual strategies," but of pursuing
what might be called a "memetic" investigation into the possible pre-modern cultural
origins of the contemporary cult film.2 Eco would have us believe that in the "cosmic
result" the cult film we can sometimes miraculously overhear the "clichés" (that is, the
"archetypal" signs) "talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion." We are struck by
the impression that "Nature has spoken in place of men" (209). I want to argue that the
voices we hear in the cult film are not the work of some cosmic ventriloquist but have
identifiable human and historical origins.
A Thought Experiment
You are a cultural anthropologist from a future century (say, the late twenty-second)
participating in the excavation of a site believed to have been, in the late twentieth
century, a public place known as a shopping mall. Inside one of the stores, a nearly
destroyed building, you unearth six small, black, plastic boxes containing some kind of
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tightly wound plastic tape. Thanks to your knowledge of the material culture of the
twentieth century, you know that these boxes are in fact videocassettes, containing films
(as the labels indicate) from the late 1970s and 1980s--twenty years into that period
which history has come to call "The Space Age." Excited by this unique find, you secret
them away from the dig, anxious to study them in private. Reputations, you know, are
made from such discoveries, and anthropologists and historians have long sought a
better understanding of the mad, paradoxical, decadent, period to which the artifacts you
now hold may provide a key.
The display case in which they were housed, you recall, had been marked "Cult Film,"
though nothing in your reference books enables you to understand precisely what such a
designation might mean. Other shelves in the store likewise bore the names of the kinds
of films housed there--for example "Children's," "Science Fiction," "Horror," "Action/
Adventure," "Drama"--all categories whose basic natures are clear enough, familiar as
you are with the concept of "genre films" in the latter half of the twentieth century.
(Genre, you recall, refers to a particular grouping of movies sharing a common set of
conventions and expectations either as the result of a film's authorship or because of its
audience's anticipation of certain recognizable meanings that result from its close
relationship to other films of its type.)
"Cult film," however, is a classification unknown to you. A computer bibliographical
search discloses that several books and articles were in fact published on cult films in the
1980s and 1990s, but none, it seems, still exists. In the absence of more precise
knowledge, you therefore conclude (1) that "cult film" is also the name of some genre or
recognizable (in its day) type of film; (2) that this genre, whatever its form and content,
must have been an ephemeral one and did not endure long enough to "go down in
history"; (3) that such films may have been intended for special audiences, made to
appeal to one or more of the many cults--religious, psychological, and scientific/
technological--known to have proliferated in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, a period
famous for its efforts at producing a counterculture.
Fortunately, you know where to find an ancient but still operative video cassette recorder
on which to play back the videotapes. With utter fascination, you watch the six "videos,"
studying them carefully with an anthropologist's eye, hoping to learn about the culture of
the period. (Next to garbage dumps, the received wisdom of your discipline teaches,
films, even inferior films--often revealingly called "trash" in the twentieth century--are
thought to be excellent mirrors of popular attitudes and "life- styles" of the time and
place of their making. A popular art like the movies, you understand, can in fact be a
fascinating revelation of the often unconscious controlling metaphors of a culture, of its
mythological self-understanding.) As you watch, enthralled, you take special note of the
following:
In the first film: A man appears mysteriously in the American Southwest. In one
early scene, he slides down a long hill, battling the scree unsuccessfully as if being pulled
toward the valley below.
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You learn that this stranger, Thomas Newton, is actually an alien who has journeyed to
Earth from a drought-ridden planet in search of water. Using his own advanced
technology, he succeeds in making hundreds of millions of dollars in worldly business
ventures, money he hopes to use to finance a rescue mission for his native planet. His
attempts to do so are constantly frustrated, however, by human avarice, government
interference, personal betrayal, and his own loss of motivation.
In flashbacks, Newton dimly recalls his apparently happy life with his family on his desertcovered home world.
At one point, Newton decides to reveal his true form to his girlfriend, Mary Lou.
Removing his disguise--contact lenses, fake nails, artificial nipples, a wig--he finally
stands before her as he truly is, naked, no longer masquerading as an Earthling. She is
horrified.
Though fabulously wealthy, Newton more and more becomes an eccentric recluse.
Seduced by the world, he turns to alcohol, sex, and television to numb his guilt over his
failed mission.
In the second film: A mad scientist, a colleague of the man who developed a
weapon called a "neutron bomb" and himself the victim of a frontal lobotomy (an
operation he recommends to others), drives all over the American Southwest in an
automobile called a "Chevy Malibu" with a kidnapped dead alien in its trunk. His motives
are obscure, but he seems intent on making public the extraterrestrial's existence against
the wishes of the government.
When the car's trunk is opened, the radiation emanating from the alien causes anyone
looking on to disintegrate immediately.
The story's main character, a young man named Otto, takes a new job stealing cars
professionally for the "Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation," a company that engages in
an inexplicable activity (from which the film gets its name) known as "automobile
repossession."
Before joining this new group, and occasionally thereafter, Otto "hangs out" with a crowd
whom, thanks to your knowledge of the period, you readily identify (by their purposely
repugnant dress and violent behavior) as belonging to a cult known as "punk rockers."
A veteran car thief (Bud) takes Otto under his wing and teaches him the ethics and
mores of his new profession. He also initiates him into some of the secret knowledge of
the group: for example, when to take drugs known as amphetamines (all the time) and
the meaninglessness of day and night.
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The following dialogue between Bud and Otto occurs:
BUD There's going to be some bad shit coming down one of these days.
OTTO Yeah, and where are you going to be? On the moon?
BUD No, I'm going to be right here, doing 110 flat out.
Bud and Otto, along with many other repo men, frantically search for the abovementioned Malibu, on which a $20,000 reward (roughly equivalent at the time to a year's
living wage) has been offered. Their search--and the equally energetic efforts of an
unnamed government agency likewise secure the vehicle--constitute the basic "plot" of
the video.
Throughout, you take note that labels on goods sold in stores and consumed in people's
homes are singularly nondescript (for example: "Food," "Good," and "Drink"), while-oddly enough--many of the characters themselves have taken on the names of what you
know to be actual commercial products of the period (all of them types of an alcoholic
beverage known as "beer"): "Bud," "Miller," "Oly," and "Lite."
A janitor named Miller--rumored to have taken too many hallucinogenic drugs back in the
1960s and convinced that "everybody's into weirdness"--explains his faith in the "lattice
of coincidence" that unites all events. He proselytizes to Otto on behalf of his theory that
all missing persons have been abducted and carried away to the future by flying saucers,
which (he believes) are in reality time machines.
The same philosopher insists (presciently) that he refuses to learn to drive a car because
"the more you drive the less intelligent you are" (a hypothesis that, of course, you now
know to be absolutely true).
When the Malibu, having turned white-hot and nearly translucent from radiation,
becomes unapproachable by interested scientists, this same philosopher is, for some
reason, the only one able to enter it. ("Just going for a little spin," he explains.)
The Malibu--now containing Otto as well, who boards it on Miller's invitation--ascends
into the heavens, levitating straight upward, cruises over the Los Angeles skyline ("This is
intense!" Otto observes, as he looks down upon the city of confusion below), and then
attains warp speed and disappears from the screen in a flash of light in the film's last
image.
In the third film: A tiny flying saucer, less than two feet in diameter, lands on a ledge
overlooking the New York City apartment of a fashion model (Margaret). (In one frame-a kind of "still life"--we see the saucer settled unobtrusively beside a plastic crate and
empty, discarded bottles of something called "Perrier.") The saucer contains a tiny alien
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(looking something like an eyeball) who has journeyed to Earth hoping to fuel a heroin
habit.
A German scientist, who has come to the United States to study UFOs, explains to a
friend that aliens have been discovered in specific subcultures--among punk rockers, for
example.
The fashion model and her lesbian roommate (a musician and drug dealer) you
tentatively identify (by their shockingly unorthodox clothes, apartment decor, music,
drugs, and hairstyles) as belonging to yet another cult of the period known as "New
Wave"--a sect about whose actual beliefs almost nothing is known.
The alien soon discovers that its heroin need can be satisfied through acquisition of an
endorphin produced in the human brain at the moment of sexual climax. (At the time the
film was made, the existence of endorphins had only recently been discovered.) In
securing its fix, however, the alien kills the individual involved.
Unaware of what is actually going on, the fashion model kills several lovers, at first
believing the cause to be her own sexual power. "I can't have all these bodies," she
complains, "Please, no more bodies." From then on her victims (six all told)--including
her former college professor and a man who had previously raped her--instantaneously
and conveniently disappear. Since each dies with a tiny arrow in the back of the head,
Margaret calls her invisible, admired collaborator "Indian" and comes to think of him as
living on the Empire State Building (visible outside the window of her apartment).
When Margaret finally discovers the alien on her roof, she pleads, "You can't leave
without me!" and injects herself with heroin as a gift. Transformed into a beam of light,
she, too, disappears, united in a moment of mystical transcendence with her alien savior/
lover.
In the fourth film (a Spanish language film with subtitles): A strange man named
Rantes appears at a hospital for the insane. Though he seems to have no identifiable
past, the man claims to be an emissary from another world, one of many sent to Earth
and placed in mental hospitals in order to study humankind.
The stranger spends many hours standing, facing southeast, in an almost catatonic
trance. To his fellow patients, he becomes a saintly, ascetic figure, capable of a terrible
empathy for the human condition.
A sympathetic but personally troubled psychiatrist (Dr. Denis) engages the stranger in a
movie-long dialogue about his past, the doctor's own life, and humanity's
Finally, Denis's inability to either believe Rantes's story or cure him of his delusion causes
him to resort to psychopharmacological treatment. The drugs that he forces on Rantes
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destroy his spirit, and he dies a broken man. Whether Rantes was, in fact, an alien or a
schizophrenic remains a mystery.
In the fifth film, a movie apparently made in Australia (and set in Melbourne in
1978, as an opening title indicates): A group of strange young people, both men and
women, live together as "hippies" (a little known tribe, first identified in the 1960s) in a
filthy, trash-strewn old house in a poor area of town, their only apparent connection to
one another being their interest in a punk rock group called "Dogs in Space."
The center of the "household" appears to be a young man named Sammy and his
girlfriend (yet another fashion model). Both are heroin addicts who frequently "shoot up"
during the course of the film. By its end both are dead from a bad dose.
All of the film's characters engage in anarchic and wild behavior, all seemingly obeying
the maxim scrawled on the wall of the house: "Boredom is counter-revolutionary." They
"party," smoke marijuana, engage in anonymous sex with perfect strangers, set fire to
television sets, and the like.
Interspersed throughout the film, scenes from documentaries about space exploration
counterpoint the bizare behavior of the characters. We see the dog Laika which the
Russians sent into orbit in Sputnik 2; we watch as an astronaut demonstrates the joys of
zero-gravity, effortless movement; we listen to a history of Spacelab, an American
satellite that plummeted to Earth in 1978 (on the radio the hippies listen with interest to
a radio station's announcement of a $1000 award to anyone who finds a piece of it--"I
wonder how much heroin that would buy?" asks one of the characters).
And in the sixth (and by far the strangest) film: A bizarre young man named Henry,
living in a twentieth century industrial wasteland, fathers a hideously deformed,
seemingly inhuman baby, which by the end of the film dies a horrible death after his
father unraps the bandages which cover its entire body.
All the film's characters are grotesque and abnormal. Many (in addition to the baby) are
physically or psychologically deformed. A strange girl with swollen cheeks lives in Henry's
radiator and apparently redeems him after the death of the monster baby. The behavior
of Henry, his betrothed, and her parents all seem neurotic if not psychotic.
In the film's opening sequence, we see a deeply cratered planet; floating around it, in
orbit, is a horizontal image of Henry. We then see shots of a brooding, physically scarred
being, staring from on high out a window. Gradually we realize that he is observing
Henry, and when he sees a worm-like creature emerge from Henry's gaping mouth, he
pulls mightily on a lever at his side. As the result of his action, the worm falls toward a
pool of water and, after it breaks the surface, plummets deeper and deeper until it
passes through an opening filled with light, an entrance, evidently, to our world,
revealing in the process the first shot of the earthly, paranoid Henry, nervously looking
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about him.
You look again at the titles of the six films: The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Repo Man
(1984), Liquid Sky (1983), Man Facing Southeast (1987), Dogs in Space (1987), and
Eraserhead (1978). The first four, you recognize, could be classified as science fiction
films, concerned as they are with alien beings visiting our world--a staple of the genre.
Yet all were categorized in the video stores as "cult" films. Why?
Working on the assumption that even such bizarre cultural phenomena as these films-each, it would seem, completely eccentric--must nevertheless have identifiable historical
sources and be part of the intellectual tradition of the civilization that produced them, you
make use of your knowledge of the sister discipline of memetics in order to trace their
genealogy.
A special data base in your computer enables you to identify a given cluster of memes
exhibited by a religion, a philosophy, a social trend, or, for that matter, a movie, and
then to ask that such a configuration's likely historical genesis be identified as specifically
as possible. Since they are "cult films," you naturally seek, as one of your parameters, to
identify their cultic origin. You attempt to track down the memes--extreme selfindulgence, world-weariness, alienation--all of which you know to be symptomatic of a
troubled period in human history, espoused in their secret, vatic, almost idiolectic
language.
Familiar with A. O. Lovejoy's characterization (in The Great Chain of Being of
"otherworldiness"--the "belief that both the genuinely 'real' and the truly good are
radically antithetic in their essential characteristics to anything to be found in man's
natural life, in the ordinary course of human experience, however normal, however
intelligent, and however fortunate" (25)--you immediately classify the films in question
as otherworldly in tone and content. Familiar too with the hypothesis of Elias Canetti, in
Crowds and Power, that any "sudden suppression" of a cult results invariably in the
"revenge" of secularization, and conversant with the work of Max Weber, you begin to
wonder what hidden cultural streams, what dormant memes, might have given rise to
the strange belief systems--radical alienation, the reenactment of an age-old longing for
escape from Earth and eternal union with the heavenly powers, the "otherworldly
hedonism," the psychically numb, "far-out," unearthly narcissism--portrayed in such cult
films.
Along with general observations on the governing ideas that appear to inform both films
and the essential historical facts of their making, you input basic descriptions of the key
incidents of each, asking the computer to search its meme index for the particular
configuration present in the three specimens. And the computer's response is
unequivocal. Probable Origin: Early Christian Gnosticism.
Subsequent research into the heresy known as Gnosticism supports the validity of the
computer's hypothesis. Though seemingly strange bedfellows, their memetic similarities
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are unmistakable. The cult films in question, you conclude, can unequivocally be
described as Gnostic. For reasons unclear to you, the dormant memes of Gnosticism
experienced a resurgence in the later twentieth century. (According to Oswald Spengler's
morphology of historical eras in The Decline of the West), the early Christian era and the
twentieth century were, after all, contemporaneous.) And, truly, many of its scholars
appear to have felt a strong resonance with the movement. "The concerns of gnostic
Christians," Elaine Pagels had concluded, "survived only as a suppressed current, like a
river driven underground" (179). Similarly, Hans Jonas observed that Gnosticism,
considered in historical perspective, must be judged "a profoundly new attitude whose
heirs at a far remove we [twentieth-century humankind] are still today" (264-65).
Revealingly, all the significant extant scholarship on the sect dates from that time.
Judging from your data, Gnosticism must have manifested itself as well in the forms of
expression of the period. The enigmatic nature of these films must certainly have been
decipherable only by those who possessed the necessary gnosis to read their hidden
messages.
Only twentieth century followers of the cult could have understood The Man Who Fell to
Earth, Man Facing Southeast, Dogs in Space, and Eraserhead as Gnostic allegories of the
entrapment of an "autochthon of another world" by the snares of Earth and the body;
only a fellow Gnostic would have recognized the tragic poignancy of the plight of each
film's "planetary detainees."
And only those in the know could have grasped that Repo Man, Liquid Sky, and
Eraserhead are in reality stories of the liberating grace of alienation, of the realization of
the "divine spark" within, and the heeding of "the call" to surmount the "stupendous
mistake" of this world. Only they would recognize the man-on-high who damns Henry's
to incarnation as the evil demiurge who rules the world.
Only fellow Gnostics would have understood the omnipresence of the ersatz--in food,
dress, religion--in the six films as a symbolic description of the world's immersion in
illusion, or would have accepted the libertine immersion in drugs and sex of Newton,
Otto, Margaret, and Sammy as legitimate responses (though unsuccessful in the cases of
Newton and Sammy) to the falsity of the world.
Only the insight granted by membership would have made it possible to see that Otto's
and Margaret's pursuit of absolute experience has prepared them to detach themselves
from "the real." The contempt of the original Gnostics for earthly existence did not, after
all, inevitably lead to asceticism. Some Gnostics, it is true, preached and practiced the
avoidance of "further contamination by the world." But others believed that libertinism
was the proper response: that the "privilege of absolute freedom" could lead to
transcendence. For these "the first task was therefore to use up the substance of evil by
combatting it with its own weapons, by practicing what might be called a homeopathic
asceticism. Since we are surrounded and pulverized by evil [these Gnostics would say],
let us exhaust it by committing it; let us stoke up the forbidden fires in order to burn
them out and reduce them to ashes; let us consummate by consuming (and there is only
one step, or three letters, between 'consuming' and 'consummating') the inherent
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corruption of the material world" (Lacarriere 76). For a time the two seemingly
incompatible strains of Gnosticism--the ascetic and the hedonistic--existed side by side.
Evidently, you conclude, they still did at the time the films were made--in the Space Age.
And only a Gnostic would have recognized that the dissonant, absurd, illogical, spacy
form of the films is in fact intended as a faithful, indeed realistic record of the world's
"noise."
What forces brought the memes of Gnosticism back to cultural life in the 1970s and
1980s, you cannot say with any real certainty; the era is too, too obscure, too much a
historical conundrum. The only hint you can discern is in the inexplicable juxtaposition of
images of debauchery in Dogs in Space with snippets of the history of space exploration.
Judging by a quite inadequate knowledge of early cinematic language, such contiguous
editing might have been intended to imply some sort of causal relationship.
Those of us who have actually lived during the years that witnessed the creation of the
cult films so puzzling to my imaginary anthropologist recognize than the mystery of their
origin is not so esoteric as he might think. For we know what he does not: that these cult
films are more mimetic and less symbolic that he could imagine. We know that they are
films worthy of being put in a time capsule as record of the contemporary psyche. We
know that if they are Gnostic it is because we have become, in our spaciness, in "our
broken faith with the world," increasingly New Gnostics ourselves.
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2. Departure of the Body Snatchers; or
the Confessions of a Carbon Chauvinist
I
Our frustration at the knowledge that we are merely mortal is vastly intensified by
the knowledge that we have created a technology which, seemingly omnipotent
and immortal itself, has not extended our only allotted life span much beyond the
biblical three-score years and ten. So we identify unconsciously with this
technology which, being inanimate, cannot die. . . . We find reason to hope
that . . . atomic or some still more magical power will have enabled immortal
technology to leave this planet behind for limitless interplanetary homes, and we
secretly nourish the hope that we shall be among the handful it brings with it. In
this realm of omnipotent fantasy, in fact, mother Earth is equivalent to all of
reality, which is a drag and a hindrance to our yearnings for unfettered
omnipotence, and we want to be rid of it.
Harold F. Searles, "Unconscious Processes in Relation to the Environmental Crisis"
In The Invisible Pyramid, an almost inhumanist meditation on the evolutionary meaning
of space exploration, the late naturalist Loren Eiseley compares, in a disconcerting
analogy, the history of humankind to the growth of a slime mold colony. A slime mold, in
order to reproduce, must scatter its spores from atop a "spore tower" that the whole
development of this strange, composite organism struggles to build, and in the end only
a few spores survive to begin another colony after their dispersion, as they grow another
tower, spread more spores . . . Time may yet reveal, Eiseley suggests, that human
existence on Earth and our place in the natural order of things resemble on a vast scale
the cycle of a slime mold.
Spacekind's desire to explore and eventually to colonize the cosmos may be, Eiseley
hypothesizes, our response to a primordial urge within us and not merely the logical
culmination of our tremendous scientific and technological achievements. "Perhaps,"
Eiseley suggests, "man has evolved as a creature whose centrifugal tendencies are
intended to drive it as a blight is lifted and driven outward across the night" (Invisible
Pyramid 54). (The explanation of the source of this urge, Eiseley liked to think, may lie in
the old theory of the Swedish chemist Arrhenius that life on Earth originated from spores
falling from outer space, the desire to launch into space then being the result of a longing
to return home.)
But "to climb the fiery ladder that the spore bearers have used," to reach that point in
our evolutionary, historical, and technological development when space travel even
becomes a possibility, it has been necessary, as Eiseley reminds us, to first "consume the
resources of a world," to become what he calls world eaters, all in order to hurl only a
few spore-individuals into the reaches of space, where, as is the case with the slime
molds, only a handful will survive. History, Eiseley endeavors to show, is therefore an
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"invisible pyramid"--an all-consuming project, secretly enslaved to a monomaniacal
yearning: to construct the means for leaving the planet Earth (63, 76).
"I have said [civilization] is born like an animal," Eiseley ponders, "and so, in a sense, it
is. But an animal is whole. The secret tides of its body balance and sustain it until death.
They draw it to its destiny. The great cultures, by contrast, have no final homeostatic
feedback like that of the organism. They appear to have no destiny unless it is that of the
slime mold's destiny to spore and depart" (Invisible Pyramid 132). Such speculations on
the fate of our species lead Eiseley to serious consideration of "the possibility that we do
not know the real nature of our kind. Perhaps Homo sapiens, the wise, is himself only a
mechanism in a parasitic cycle, an instrument for the transference, ultimately, of a more
invulnerable and heartless version of himself" (Invisible Pyramid 54-55).
"To what far creature, whether of metal or of flesh," man's departure into space may be
the bridge, we do not yet know. But, as Eiseley observes,
if such a being is destined to come, there can be no assurance that it will spare a
thought for the men who, in the human dawn, prepared its way. Man is part of that
torrential living river, which, since the beginning, has instinctively known the value
of dispersion, He will yearn therefore to spread beyond the planet he now threatens
to devour. This thought persists and is growing. It is rooted in the psychology of
man. (Invisible Pyramid 81)
These words first appeared in 1970, and clearly nothing in the intervening years has
diminished the persistence and growth of the idea.
II
Should there be an oncoming self-destruction for the species, it is not unreasonable
that unconscious warnings would exist. . . . In a landscape of pollution and disease
when the roots themselves are poisoned, the healthy man might begin to prosper
on the very conditions which once had been next to death itself--he could learn to
live on the stimulations of the uprooted and the displaced. In morphological terms,
it is as if the cancer becomes the continuation, as if life leaps a step and the
anomaly acquires the art of reproduction.
Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon
In our science fictions, social-psychologist Philip Slater has observed, "leaders of alien
civilizations . . . often have motives that seem hilariously trivial, but the joke is on us
since those fantasies are simply projections of our own culture" (23). The motives of the
aliens in both film versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 and 1978) are hardly
trivial of course, for they are world conquerors on a vast and insidious scale. Still, Slater's
observation rings true: as any member of Earthkind would recognize, these "Body
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Snatchers" are our projections; they are us. Their psychology is our psychology.
Originally a 1950s B movie directed by Don Siegel, Body Snatchers gained a cult
following during the paranoid and conspiracy-obsessed 1960s and was remade--or,
rather, "continued," as its writer and director (W. D. Richter and Philip Kaufman) have
described it--twenty-two years later. Like many remakes or continuations, it thus
provides an interesting mirror in which to observe basic changes in America's mythic selfunderstanding as a culture.
In both films mysterious pods, produced by plants that grow out of spores from outer
space, generate exact replicas of human beings they are placed in contact with and, after
the cloning process is completed, replace the original human with a newly-minted
creature that, unlike the prototype, is devoid of all emotions, indeed all personality--is, in
short, a pure automaton. These passionless new beings, we learn, are untroubled
creatures, perfect conformists, governed by clear and distinct ideas, content with their lot
in life; they are, in fact, interchangeable cells in a collective organism sweeping the
planet, intent on ferreting out and exposing as imposters any and all remaining humans
so that the "absorption" (as they call it) may finally be complete.
After absorption, each then becomes a True Believer in Body Snatching, proselytizing to
the still reticent that there is no need to resist. Once the initial reactionary repugnance
against total loss of individuality is overcome, contentment, it seems, is the only side
effect. (Like a neutron bomb, the invasion leaves all material possessions--and all lifestyles--intact; in the second film, for example, yuppies continue to be yuppies, even after
absorption.) Even the eccentric and outspoken poet of the 1978 version (Jack Bellicec,
played by Jeff Goldblum), who early in the film protests vehemently against every
cultural tendency toward collectivism, begins to spout the party line immediately after his
own inevitable absorption. With a flat, unemotional, prosaic voice, he proclaims that it
was, after all, silly to resist, and he becomes a mere yes-man for the leader of the Body
Snatchers, a man he had previously despised.
In both films a man named Bennell (played by Kevin McCarthy in the original and Donald
Sutherland in the 1978 continuation) discovers that his community is being gradually
taken over by the pods and their progeny, every trace of individuality and humanity in
his fellow citizens effaced by the mysterious invasion and conspiracy that he seeks to
expose. In the first Body Snatchers (essentially an allegory of McCarthy-era terrors), the
story's hero, a doctor, flees at the film's close from the small California town (Santa Mira)
in which he has discovered the fiendish plot, only to learn that the aliens are expanding
their endeavors by exporting more pods--and their project to take over the Earth--by
truck to the next town. This ending, however, proved too terrifying for the studio bosses,
who demanded that a frame tale be added in which Bennell manages to convince the
police that the FBI be called in to investigate his seemingly paranoid claims.
But in the 1978 version of the story no such promise of a possible end to the spread of
the invaders reassures us at the movie's end. The Donald Sutherland character, a health
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department inspector, is warned early on of the coming invasion of his city (this time San
Francisco) by no less than his namesake from the first film. In an early scene he appears
running madly down a busy city street, fleeing the enemy, shouting hysterically "They're
coming! They're coming!" and eventually colliding with Sutherland's car. Nevertheless,
Sutherland is unable to stop the Body Snatchers' advance. By the movie's conclusion, in
fact, he has, in a shock ending, been absorbed himself, thus leaving the audience with no
center of sanity whatsoever and absolutely no hope. In the film's last image--certainly
one of the most terrifying in contemporary film--the camera takes us into the black hole
of Sutherland's gaping, accusing mouth as he "squeals" in characteristic Body Snatcher
fashion on a screaming Nancy Bellicec (Veronica Cartwright, the poet's wife), the last of
the unabsorbed, and then leaves us there as the shot becomes a fade to black preceding
the closing credits. (It says something, does it not, that end-of-the-century Americans
can take the 1978 version's horrific conclusion flat, while a less despairing close unnerved
our 1950s counterparts.)
Before Sutherland meets his own demise, he discovers that the invasion has progressed
since the 1950s to include more than merely California (we hear of pods being exported
to Seattle), more even than the United States: for at San Francisco harbor he finds a
huge freighter loaded with pods about to be exported overseas. And there is no FBI to
call to the rescue. When he earlier tries to phone Washington to seek government help,
he only confirms Jack Bellicec's post-Vietnam, post-Watergate suspicion that "those
guys" (the FBI and the CIA) were the first to be absorbed. For in Washington Sutherland
is already known as subversive--as an enemy of Body Snatching. He is already on the
"master list."
The 1978 film makes visually apparent the origin of the world conquerors (only vaguely
revealed in the original), and this revelation constitutes another important development
in the morphogenesis of the myth. The film opens with a mysterious credit sequence
showing a decimated world from which plantlike organisms release spores that float away
into space toward a distant, targeted Earth. (During the sequence, we actually see--in
subjective camera--from the spores' point of view; we see the Earth, we enter the
atmosphere--the first identifiable object in our view, interestingly enough, the TransAmerica Building--and we plummet to Earth.) It is from these spores, we are given to
understand, that the plants (which are shown in the process of gestation, captured in
time-lapse photography) and later the pods actually sprout.
The "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," then, is a dehiscence--an interplanetary
dissemination of seeds from a doomed world by a "world-eating," "spore-bearing" form of
life. The aliens' chief advocate in the film, Dr. David Kibner (Leonard Nimoy), is a
psychobabbling, best-selling psychologist who blends the worst traits of Weston in Out of
the Silent Planet and Leo Buscaglia (against fears of absorption he counsels hugging).
According to Kibner, the real function of life is brute survival by any means possible.
Nothing else matters: "We came here from a dying world," he tells Matthew Bennell. "We
adapt and we survive. The business of life is survival."
Now if the story of the Body Snatchers should be continued yet again, say in the year
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2000 (allowing another twenty-two year interval for the plot to evolve, keeping up with
our changing, ever-revisionary sense of our earthly destiny and cosmic calling), this
paranoid tale will no doubt undergo another morphological twist. Having crossed the land
and the sea, having taken over the Earth, the aliens' colonialist aims will no doubt
continue with the loading of pods on board a spaceship bound for another not-yetconquered, uneaten world, departing again from a doomed planet --this time our own-doomed precisely because its ruling form of life was already bound for the next not-yetconquered world . . . Something about the life-style of Body Snatchers, it seems, is not
ecologically sound; of necessity they must--in order to fuel the next leap and as an
essential premise in a concept of destiny that is, in reality, a vast, evolutionary, selffulfilling prophecy--abandon their ephemeral physical bodies and "consume the resources
of a world."
But perhaps, I have come to think, in light of my suspicions about the end of humankind,
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (2000) will not be "only a movie." Perhaps it will be
history. by then, if our own planet despoiling continues at its present pace, or a nuclear
holocaust engulfs us, Earth itself may well become the desolate, no-longer-inhabitable
planet from which an endless migration must commence. Perhaps, I have thought,
Invasion of the Body Snatchers has succeeded in presciently chronicling, with true mythic
power, the preliminary stages of our own unearthing; perhaps on another world, in other,
extraterrestrial movie houses, inhuman eyes watch similar paranoid tales, prophecies of
insterstellar invasion--of the coming of the spores of Earth. (Asked to respond with their
thoughts on the first moon landing, J. G. Ballard, the noted British science fiction writer,
replied, "If I were a Martian I'd start running now," and fellow novelist Robert Shaw
suggested that the proper symbolic image to put on a plaque commemorating the
emergence of humanity into space would be "something like a grabbing hand, with its
fingers clawed into the Moon's soil" (quoted in Aldiss 286).
My own paranoia races ahead of rationality as I recall recent speculations that sound for
all the world like preparatory rationalizations for a future, disembodied dissemination.
Has not Francis Crick suggested that all life on Earth originated as the result of the
"directed panspermia" of a distant, higher, ancient race? Has not Richard Dawkins
insisted in The Selfish Gene that our genes are more real than we are, that we are
merely their temporary carriers? Are not plans--infinitely presumptuous plans-- being
made to inseminate the universe with the human? And if Earth is only a temporary
abode, a "nursery planet"--as Timothy Leary is now found of calling it--and the human
body a mere "technological" instrument for the gene's survival (trust the DNA, Leary
advises: it would not have trapped our species on this dying world "without having
figured a way out" [151-53; Leary's emphasis]) . . . The handwriting on the wall seems
plain.
Because I think these thoughts, I have come to feel like the McCarthy/Sutherland
character of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but in reverse. While their warning was an
insistent "They're coming!" mine has instead become "They're going!" Please understand:
I do not regret their departure; I would, in fact, welcome it if--as Wendell Berry has
commented--these technological romantics, these Spore-Bearers and Body Snatchers,
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would "depart absolutely from all that they propose to supersede, never to
return" (Standing by Words 60). But because I deeply distrust their true motives, I fear
that in their desire to fly up to the high frontier they may very well take Earth down with
them. They are among us already, I fear, urging our excarnation, seeking to convince us
that we should not be "trapped in old concepts" like the need for bodies and planetary
homes. I have seen them.
III
This afternoon, in bright sunlight, I saw a young woman waiting for a streetcar,
accompanied by her body.
René Magritte
I would have recognized the species to which he belonged even if the occasion at which
we clashed (as fellow panelists on a forum, held in a public library, on "Computers,
Robots, and You") and his name tag (identifying him as a computer language expert at
one of the major aeorospace firms in Huntsville, Alabama) had not already revealed it.
The fierce abstraction of his eyes, something in his condescension to matter, his uneasy,
careless inhabitation of his clothes tree/taxicab/body--all spoke, spoke loudly: computerjock. But really that was his subspecies. He was, more specifically, a Body Snatcher.
A humanities professor with a vital interest in science and technology, a profound
solicitude for the evolution and destiny of our species, and a growing, disturbing ability to
identify Body Snatchers in any disguise, I had been invited to participate in the gathering
to present an overview of science fiction's portrayal of computers and robots. Having
done so, moving rapidly in my allotted ten minutes from Capek's R.U.R. to Vonnegut's
Player Piano, Asimov's "rules of robotics," and 2001: A Space Odyssey, I concluded my
remarks by reading the closing words of NASA scientist Robert Jastrow's Enchanted
Loom: Mind in the Universe, a description of our true evolutionary destiny in the cosmos
as he sees it. It was a passage whose implications I for one found absolutely terrifying,
for in it lay the philosophical groundwork for exosomatic evolution--for Body Snatching-as a prerequisite to our future everlasting, Faustian pursuit of knowledge:
At last the human brain, ensconced in a computer, has been liberated from the
weaknesses of mortal flesh. [Jastrow is here imagining humanity's future cosmic
voyages.] Connected to cameras, instruments and engine controls, the brain sees,
feels, and responds to stimuli. It is in control of its own destiny. The machine is its
body; it is the machine's mind. The union of mind and machine has created a new
form of existence, as well designed for life in the future as man is designed for life
on the African savanna.
It seems to me that this must be the mature form of intelligent life in the Universe.
Housed in indestructible lattices of silicon, and no longer constrained in the span of
its years by the life and death cycle of a biological organism, such a kind of life
could live forever. It would be the kind of life that could leave its parent planet to
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roam the space between the stars. Man as we know him will never make that trip,
for the passage takes a million years. But the artificial brain, sealed within the
protective hull of a star ship, and nourished by electricity collected from starlight,
could last a million years or more. For a brain living in a computer, the voyage to
another star would present no problems. (166-67)
As expected, Jastrow's words had the ring of poetry and prophecy for many in the
audience, those evidently weary of being "immature." There was no need to convince
them that they--that humanity--should, in Jastrow's sense, be born again; that they
should, excarnated, identify themselves with "immortal technology" in this "omnipotent
fantasy" (see the epigraph from Searles).
Why, then, did I feel an unearthly terror? Why did Jastrow seem to me to be a rational
madman, an apologist for Body Snatching? Why did such thinking seem to me to demand
a psychohistorical explanation--linking as it does excarnation and space exploration as if
theirs were a marriage made in heaven--while for many in the audience it seemed wellnigh axiomatic? (Why now? Why in the West? Why in America? I wanted to ask of
history.)
And the computer jock was the first to answer. "I guess you're just a Carbon Chauvinist,"
he suggested, good-naturedly enough. He for one could not wait to have his
consciousness translated permanently to "indestructible lattices of silicon." He for one
could not believe I was so old-fashioned, such a stick-in- the-mud ("mutter," "matter,"
"mother") as to want to remain incarnated, earthy.
I was, of course, familiar with the tendency (beginning in the 1960s) to call anyone
trapped in old concepts (the supremacy of the male, for example) a "chauvinist." I
recalled space colonization guru Gerald K. O'Neill's description of anyone unwilling to
embark on, or at least to sanction, his ambitious plans for humankind's
extraterrestrialization as a "Planetary Chauvinist" (35). I thought, too, of my own
frequent use of the term species chauvinist to describe our kind's reckless, nature-bedamned, incestuous human-ism.
But this phrase was one I had not heard before in all the semantic dissemination of the
original concept, though I immediately realized what its user meant by it.6 In the back of
my mind I heard the android in the first Star Trek movie announcing "V'ger's" intention
to exterminate the "carbon-based infestation of the Creator [Earth]." I heard, again,
David Kibner in the most recent version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers lecturing a
reluctant-to-be-absorbed character--still fighting for his reactionary, carbon-based,
earthy, human values; still believing in the psychosomatic individuation that comes with
bodies, lived bodies--that he must not be "trapped in old concepts," must not fear
liberation from the "weakness of mortal flesh."
I turned to look at my accuser--and fellow carbon-based unit --ready to retaliate. But no,
I thought; he's exosomatic already, though his name was "Skip" and he was dressed in a
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leisure suit; but he had every right make such a charge, for he was, at least, no
hypocrite. I accepted his allegation--I have since, in fact, become proud of it--and
counterattacked. "And you," I replied (incisively, I felt, but far too abstrusely for the
audience that evening), "are a Cartesian Body Snatcher."
My wit fell on deaf ears then. Perhaps--like Donald Sutherland in the last image of the
second Invasion--I should have countered not with a recondite intellectual barb but by
leaping to my feet, pushing away my podium, and exposing my adversary with a
pointing, accusing finger and moanlike scream of discovery, announcing to all the
presence of an alien in their midst. But who, I wondered, was the alien now?
Though I failed then, in my close encounter with Skip, to expose and decry the presence
of the invaders (departers?) among us, I ask now that you indulge my paranoia as I
present the evidence for my conspiracy theory in a more systematic way. If the following
pages are dismissed by some as personal ravings, no doubt it is because they are
intended to be a full disclosure--the Confessions of a Carbon Chauvinist, if you will. Not
merely autobiographical, however, these confessions are meant to be a psychohistorical
and philosophical meditation on the paradoxes of human embodiment, our "supreme
difficulty" (as Pascal observed), and our growing unwillingness in the Space Age to
endure it any longer.
IV
Man is to himself the greatest prodigy in nature, for he cannot conceive what body
is, and still less what mind is, and least of all how a body can be joined to a mind.
This is his supreme difficulty, and yet it is his very being. The way in which minds
are attached to bodies is beyond man's understanding, and yet this is what man is.
Blaise Pascal, Pensees
I had called Skip "Cartesian," ineffectually but accurately, for René Descartes--the
unanimously celebrated "father of modern philosophy"--was as well the great progenitor
of all such Body Snatchers. At the heart of the famed Cartesian method (and thus at the
heart of modernity), we find a strategic distrust of the body and the senses, a systematic
doubt of common sense designed to extricate the precious mind from all those false,
body-dependent beliefs--like the geocentric picture of the cosmos--that had occluded the
correct, objective, scientific Truth for centuries. In the wake of that Copernican revolution
in thought that had generated a new and powerful skepticism about earthly truth and
sent humankind off on a still-in-progress quest for an Archimedean point from which to
observe all mundane things with the detachment of a godlike, extraterrestrial being,
Descartes sought to build a new edifice of knowledge on a firm bedrock of indubitable
ideas. And the "school of suspicion" (Nietzsche) to which his philosophy gave rise in turn
educated a new kind of being, Homo faber, man the maker, distrustful of all that was not
of his own making, an inhabitant of an increasingly mechanical natural world (for in
Descartes's thought all that was merely matter was merely mechanical).
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The human mind, thought Descartes, must make itself immune to the seductions of the
"evil genius" of the world, and the price (readily paid) for this immunization was denial of
the body, as he explains in a famous passage from the Meditations, a concise outline of
his method:
I will suppose not that God, who is most good and the fountain of truth, but rather
that some evil genius, at once very powerful and cunning, has bent all his efforts to
deceive me. I will suppose heaven, air, earth, colors, shapes, sounds and
everything external are nothing but the delusions of dreams that he has contrived
to lure me into belief. I will consider myself not to have hands, eyes, flesh, blood,
or any sense, but as falsely thinking myself to have all these things. I will remain
obstinately attached to this point of view, and thus, if indeed it is not in my power
to know anything of the truth, still, in virtue of a power I certainly do have, I will
resolutely guard against assenting to falsities and against whatever this deceiver
can employ to trick me. (195; my emphasis)
Descartes knew very well, of course, that he had a body, a body that impregnated a
maid, a body that liked to stay in bed until very late in the morning (so that he might
"think," he explained, rationalizing), a body whose prematurely graying hair brought him
to vainly dream of inventing a corrective--a seventeenth century Grecian Formula. But it
had become methodologically expedient for him to imagine that his res cogitans (thinking
substance) was more real, more primordial, because only it could withstand the
temptations of the evil genius.
But Descartes's philosophical motives for adopting such a method may have been a
smoke screen, intended to obscure his deeper, psychological ones. As Stern has pointed
out in The Flight from Woman, the French word decu, which Descartes uses to describe
the "deception" by which material things mislead us, implies as well "disappointment."
Cartesianism, Stern suggests, thus represents a particular kind of psychic stance before
the things of the world: "if we encountered Cartesianism . . . as a mode of everyday
experience of an 'ordinary man,' merely in its psychology, as it were--we would find that
the ideal of the cogito . . . means denial, a defense against the flesh because the flesh is
synonymous with anguish; and the clean fission between mind and body is an isolation, a
setting-apart and rendering innocuous of all that spells dread" (100).
Descartes's zealous rationality, then, constitutes the inability to accommodate oneself to
the supreme difficulty of embodiment given philosophical respectability. Cartesianism is
not just the passion for clear and distinct ideas, but a form of cognitive dissonance: an
essential repugnance for the ambiguities of embodiment, a dread of the weaknesses of
mortal flesh, become a method and given a historical destiny. (It is characteristic of the
modern, as we have already seen, that "methods become mentalities.") No wonder, then,
that when Goethe first learned of the Cartesian stance in his youth, it seemed to him and
his classmates "so grey, monstrous and death-like that we could hardly stand it; we
shuddered as though facing a ghost" (quoted by Stern 86). Humanity in a Cartesian
world has indeed come to seem, in Gilbert Ryle's famous phrase, a "ghost haunting a
machine," and thus an easy target for Body Snatching.
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But despite its lip service to cold rationality and clarity, Descartes's thought might also be
described, as Paul Zweig has suggested in The Heresy of Self-Love (124), as essentially
Gnostic, and this quality, too, has contributed mightily to its unconscious legacy to the
modern world. Like the Gnostics, Descartes--at once the inheritor of the fundamental
Gnostic predisposition and the conduit for its memes' later propagation in those who,
albeit unconsciously, now adopt a similar posture--simply had no trust in the earthly.
While mainstream Christianity enshrined the Incarnation--both Christ's and our own--as
the central mystery of its faith, the cross that must be both born and transcended,
Gnosticism found repugnant everything bodily, everything concerned with matter. The
fall into matter was for them unbearable and unacceptable. "Just as the semen of man,
the minute, invisible, seed possessing a scarcely measurable weight, acquires size and
weight as it develops," so for the Gnostics, Lacarriere explains, "do the primordial seeds,
the potentialities of a hyper-cosmic world, acquire weight by falling into the lower world,
becoming more and more dense in substance" (18). The Gnostics sought to reverse the
process, to break the chain of being.
Gnosticism was convinced that (in the words of Jacques Lacarriere) "our thinking being is
tied to evil as ineluctably as our physical being is tied to the carbon in our body
cells" (24; my emphasis). "Why did ye carry me away from my abode into captivity and
cast me into the stinking body?" one Gnostic text beseeches. "To surrender oneself to
weight, to increase it in all senses of the term (by absorbing food, or by procreating,
weighing the world down with successive births)," the Gnostics believed, "is to
collaborate in this unhappy destiny. . . . To discard or lighten all the matter of this world,
that is the strange end the Gnostics pursued" (Lacarriere 19). Even the most elemental
phenomenon--nutrition--was thought to be a "maleficent interaction," part of "a neverending circle, as vertiginous as the whirpool of the stars or the cycle of time" (Lacarriere
24). And so in the Gnostic mythology, Christ, for example, was idealized as a being who
"ate and drank but did not defecate. Such was the strength of his continence that foods
did not corrupt in him, for him there was no corruption" (Lacarriere 37).
For the Gnostics, "The simple fact of living, of breathing, feeding, sleeping, and waking,"
implied "the existence and the growth of evil" (Lacarriere 24). Only the eye, the Gnostics
believed, is immune from worldly corruption; unlike the mouth, the anus, the navel, the
eye lives on light instead of matter, on spirit instead of filth. Vision alone allows escape
from the "noise" of this world to pursue the truly real.
"The Gnostic," Zweig notes, "felt that he had been thrown into a desert" when born into
the mundane world. "But he was not entirely lost, for he could retreat into his mind, to a
point he called the 'apex' of his soul. . . . Persecuted by the world, the Gnostic found
refuge in his 'spirit.'" The similarity to Descartes is obvious. "If we substitute Descartes'
malin ge'nie [evil genius] for the Gnostic Demiurge," we find "that the Meditations
propose an analogous situation. On the one hand there is the persecuting God who
governs over a world of deceit, on the other the individual who discovers in his own
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thought a source of inalienable freedom" (Zweig 124-25).
Not surprisingly, as Zweig observes, "The 'I' of the Meditations," the persona revealed by
the text, "casts no shadow" (143), for to cast a shadow one needs a body, and Descartes
seems reluctant to have one. Recall, if you will, the scene in the 1978 Body Snatchers in
which Elizabeth Driscoll, hoping for reconciliation, tries to throw her arms around her
lover Jeffrey, the yuppie, space-cadet dentist who is the first individual in the film we
actually know to have been absorbed. Already suspicious of his behavior, Elizabeth recoils
immediately, as if she had touched something inhuman, as if her own body were tacitly
repelled by the alienation of the "other." I can imagine feeling a similar repugnance to
the physical presence of René Descartes, could I somehow be transported back into time:
I know I felt a comparable antipathy, a psychosomatic chill, in the presence of Skip. For
Carbon Chauvinists, I like to think, the response is still instinctual, though we now live in
the midst of evolutionary, Gnostic changes in our being-in-the-world that could well make
such abhorrence one day vestigial and doom us to extinction.
I am fairly certain that the Body Snatchers are not yet spreading their pods among us;
they do not yet conduct their conspiracy with megaphones on street corners. But they
are spreading their memes, trying to convince us, like the converts in the two films, that
there is nothing to fear in surrendering our bodies for absorption, seeking to assure us
that we no longer need to show any real, long-term care for these heavy, burdensome,
demanding vehicles of mind, acclimating us to the prospect of shedding our flesh when
the time comes for final metamorphosis.
V
We are so far divorced from it that we immediately feel a sort of loathing for
actual, "real life," and so cannot even stand to be reminded of it. . . . We are
oppressed by being men--men with real individual body and blood. We are
ashamed of it; we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of
generalized man. We are still-born, and for many years we have not been begotten
by living fathers, and this suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for
it. Soon we shall somehow contrive to be born from an idea.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
In Up-Wingers, an utterly mad treatise on technological engineering and the
extraterrestrial imperative, the Iranian-born futurist F. M. Esfandiary insists that the only
solution to all our pressing earthly problems is to embrace a cosmic alternative to our
current political viewpoints: what he calls "the up-coming Up." He seeks to lay out a
blueprint for a totally open-ended, "cosmicalized" future in which humankind transcends
not only the old bifurcation into left-and right-wing thinking but resolves as well the old
dilemma of mind-body dualism (a dualism Descartes locked into place for the modern
age) through a vanquishing of the physical and material in which human beings
overcome the need for (among other things) mothers, families, children, the seasons,
planets, suffering of any kind, bodily functions, bodies themselves, and, of course, death,
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as he seeks to colonize "All-Time and All-Space" (15). Up-Wingers is a naked,
unequivocal tract on Body Snatching.
We have no freedom if we die, Esfandiary insists; thus the body must be entirely
redesigned--this time according to our specifications: "The more we remake our bodies
the more human we will grow. We have been prehuman." ("Eating drinking defecating
reproducing sleeping walking dying--all these are prehuman," he proclaims, renouncing
punctuation too as reactionary.) Because he trusts the "cumulative wisdom of humans far
more than the slow arbitrary workings of evolution," Esfandiary has nothing but disdain
for the body we have inherited and all its functions, and unlike his intellectual forebear
Descartes, he does not even attempt to mask his disgust in philosophical language. Just
as the Body Snatchers themselves worked in secret early on in both films, spreading their
blight clandestinely until increasing numbers allowed them to go public with their
conspiracy, their historical advocates, too, once spoke only in hushed, subdued tones and
only in carefully reasoned, scientific, cautious voices until their mentality was so widely
disseminated, so much common sense, that the pretense can now be dropped, and they
can come out of the closet--as Esfandiary has done--about their actual Gnostic loathing
for the physical and the earthly, announcing openly their true cosmic motives. Here is a
sampling.
The animal human organism is structurally a robot. A rigid robot manipulated by its
pre-determined biology and environment.
What is more robot-like than having at regular intervals to inhale and exhale to eat
drink urinate evacuate sleep? All these mechanical functions are programmed into
me. I have nothing to say about them. They are beyond my control.
If I stopped breathing for only a few minutes--a few quick nothing minutes--that's
it. If I don't eat or drink or sleep at regular intervals my body begins to flounder
my mind begins to go fuzzy. Last night in the middle of a deep merciful sleep I
suddenly jumped up robot-like and rushed to the bathroom. There I was in the
middle of sleep half-conscious half-alive holding my thing.
Is there anything more programmed more manipulated than all this? (108)
To Esfandiary, in apparent "frustration at the knowledge [that he is] merely
mortal" (Searles 240), consumed with the aspiration to become a new, exemplary
version of the non defecating Gnostic Christ, the human body is an utterly loathsome
thing, beneath contempt: a "fire hazard heavily polluted poorly ventilated badly insulated
and handicapped with countless other structural defects. . . . To hell with this natural
body," he screams (128, 135), seemingly unafraid he might be judged insane by his
contemporaries, convinced, it would seem, that the future at least will take him to be a
prophet. In boldface type he proudly shouts his longing for excarnation at us: "The Body
has been our greatest hangup. Our most serious obstacle to a higher evolution" (128).
We must escape it, he proclaims again and again, and we must conquer death; for only
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then will we be free.
And this freedom will come only through "up-winging," only by escaping the "drag and
hindrance" (Searles 241) of the Earth. "The world is Satan, and Satan is the world,"
Martin Luther concluded at the beginning of the modern age, helping to usher in a
"worldly asceticism" (Max Weber) that, according to many critics, contributed
substantially to contemporary desecration of the "evil genius" of the natural world. Now,
in the otherworldy, extraterrestrial asceticism of an Esfandiary, the world and all things
physical have metamorphosed into a modern equivalent of the satanic, at which
Esfandiary throws his inkwell; have come to be seen, in his eyes, as an evolutionary culde-sac, an "evil" impediment to our species' cosmic progress toward immortality.
Psychiatrist Herbert Plügge, in "Man and His Body," explains that for his dying patients
the "bodily live"--the body experienced as instrumental to and inseparable from all
experience, the very substance of our being-in-the-world--is transformed by the
encounter with death into the "bodily as physical" (the body experienced only as an
opposition, as a burden and a nuisance, as mere vulnerable flesh). With this
transformation comes grave "discomfort and malaise," for the body begins to take on the
"character of husk": "the shabbiness of an old worn out suit which no longer fits: the suit
is no longer really 'lived.' It droops in fold, wrinkled, devoid of any actual connection with
us as if hung on a clothes tree." An inevitable "negligence and indifference" to the body's
appearance results, Plüggeexplains, for "what no loner belongs to me . . . no longer
requires care" (298, 305).
Clearly, Esfandiary's experience of the body--which he assumes to be universal rather
than deranged--is comparable to that of the dying as described by Plügge. But he is not
himself dying, we must remind ourselves, only terribly aware of his own mortality and
anxious to distance himself from all that might bring anguish, and it is the species body,
not just his particular body, which he advises us to no longer care for, encouraging us to
drop our husks in preparation for--and inseparable from--our own "omnipotent fantasy"
of cosmicalization. (Committed to reminding his Space Age contemporaries of the coming
"Transhuman Age," successor to the Aquarian, Esfandiary recently changed his name to
"FM 2030" and published a book of self-tests designed to enable individuals to identify
whether they have truly become "new evolutionary beings" [see Koennen].)
Such cheerleading is now being given considerable intellectual support and credence. (As
Philip Slater has noted, "The conviction of many schizophrenics that the brain could
function better if only the annoying body in which it is imbedded could be lopped off, is
now shared, not surprisingly, by scientists" [23].) Outspoken, prophetic voices, speaking
as if from the Archimedean point, fearlessly propound the inevitability, the naturalness,
of an evolution beyond the physical body.
As already noted in a previous chapter, human action, seen from the perspective of the
Archimedean point, comes to seem akin to the behavior of laboratory rats: "Seen from a
sufficient distance," Arendt observes, "the cars in which we travel and which we know we
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built ourselves will look as though they were, as Heisenberg once put it, 'as inescapable a
part of ourselves as the snail's shell is to its occupant'" ("Man's Conquest" 540). In the
"Flesh" chapter of The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, Bernal had already projected a
future "superseding" of bodies by the processes of evolution and foresaw such a step as a
quantum leap for the advance of intelligence, allowing humankind to take its destiny into
its own hands, redesigning its own chemistry, dispensing with useless body parts as
necessary. The conception of exosomatic evolution now emerging consistently but
unconsciously assumes just such a radical point of view, which is taken, of course, to be
only common sense.
And so in the Space Age we find the "Neville Chamberlain [of] humanity's relation to
technology" (Slater 22), futurist Alvin Toffler, insisting (in Future Shock) that the time
has come to abandon the concept of fixed bodies and accept instead the idea (already in
preparation in modern medicine) of "modular bodies" and the eventual wholesale
redesign of the race.
We learn that MIT's Marvin Minsky believes that human beings --already carbon-based
"machines"--will certainly grow "tired of their limitations," will "get fed up with their
bodies," and design new ones. And though some Carbon Chauvinists may fear that in
seeking incarnation in machines of our own devising, something of our humanity will be
lost, Minsky counsels that such thinking represents only the reactionary squeamishness
of those who "worship death." Death, he hastens to remind us, is after all "only bad
luck," an engineering flaw that can certainly be overcome.9
And we read that Hans Moravec of Carnegie-Mellon dreams of a "robotic immortality for
Everyman," made possible by means of the creation of a computer copy of a mind that
would then be transplanted ("downloaded") into a robot body. "Moravec's idea," Grant
Fjermedal has observed, is "the ultimate in life insurance":
Once a copy of the brain's contents has been made, it will be easy to make multiple
backup copies, and these could be stashed in hiding places around the world,
allowing you to embark on any sort of adventure without having to worry about
aging or death. As decades pass into centuries you could travel the globe and then
the solar system and beyond--always keeping an eye out for the latest in robot
bodies into which you could transfer your computer mind. (5)
"Bodies," Moravec is convinced, "have served their purpose" (60). With such a
technological advance available, the original body would, of course, be of no use. After
copying the mind, there would be no real need to "wake" the body again. After all,
Moravec has observed with out-of-the-closet candor, the body is "so messy. Humans
have got so many problems that you might just want to leave it retired. You don't take
your junker car out if you've got a new one" (5).
Not surprisingly, Moravec sees such exosomatic evolution as most advantageous for
space exploration. Convinced that our species faces inevitable extinction if we do not
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disseminate our kind into a variety of niches across the galaxy, and certain that we
should--though we continue to stubbornly remain "biologically committed to personal
death"--"rejoice" at the continuation of our culture in any form, we should willingly accept
that evolution will leap beyond the merely human. We must remember, Moravec reminds
us, anticipating the complaints of Carbon Chauvinists, that "away from Earth, protein is
not an ideal material. It's stable only in a narrow temperature and pressure range, is
sensitive to high energy disturbances, and rules out many construction techniques and
components" ("Endless Frontier" 394). Thus "the high cost of maintaining humans in
space" will insure "that there will always be more machinery per person than on
Earth" ("Endless Frontier" 393).
Such machines will eventually undergo their own natural selection:
When humans become unnecessary in space industry [an inevitability, according to
Moravec], the machines' physical growth will climb. When machines reach and
surpass human in intelligence, the intellectual growth rate will rise similarly. The
scientific and technical discoveries of super-intelligent mechanisms will be applied
to making themselves smarter still. The machines, looking quite unlike the
machines we know, will explode into the universe, leaving us behind in a figurative
cloud of dust. Our intellectual, but not genetic, progeny will inherit the universe.
Barring prior claims. ("Endless Frontier" 393)
Again anticipating his readers' qualms, Moravec hastens to explain that the prospect he
describes "may not be as bad as it sounds." For the "machine civilization" he envisions
"will certainly take along everything we consider important. After all, human beings need
not become nonexistent, since "real live human beings, and a whole community, could be
reconstituted if an appropriate circumstance ever arose"--an easy matter, since all that is
important about human beings is reducible to "the information in our minds and
genes" ("Endless Frontier" 393).
We listen very carefully when another MIT scientist--Gerald J. Sussman--insists that
"everyone would like to be immortal" and proclaims that, though the time is not yet
"quite right" for such a step (a threshold he likens to "the transition from life to nonlife"), it is certainly not that far off: "it's close. I'm afraid, unfortunately, that I'm in the
last generation to die" (Fjermedal 259-60).
We hear the prominent space advocate Barbara Marx Hubbard express her utter
amazement at the old-fashioned nature of her human body: "Who ever thought that this
particular model of the body is it forever? A little, mammalian, furry body, it forever?
Sometimes I notice my body. It has little fur, little fangs, ears still slightly pointed. We
are spiritual beings still in animal bodies and it always struck me as weird."
At present, death is "scheduled into the evolutionary process" for such a body, but we
could and should, Hubbard insists, through technological innovation and the psychic
advances (high consciousness and high tech being closely linked in Hubbard's worldview),
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"reset that clock" and move "out of the mammalian body consciously." "We need no
longer feel that it is 'bad' to die," Hubbard's Space Age, Teilhardian Christianity tells her.
"If you don't really need a body, you might as well die. . . . However, if you need a body,
because you want to do work in the cosmos that is still on the physical plane, even
though it is transcending the mammalian physical plane, then you will keep a body. This
is a new option that evolution is keeping open to us as a species" (290).
We are witnesses to the birth of "bodies which will not perish," engineered by modern
science and technology, and though "right now it sounds rather awkward: replacing
parts, cyborgs, computerized intelligence," all this, Hubbard reassures us, will be
somehow, someday, spiritually transformed; all will be made beautiful. "Anything that
survives in evolution," she insists, "is beautiful" (290-91).
We discover even a member of Snow's culture of humanism, the literary scholar and
culture critic O. B. Hardison, Jr. (in Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture and
Technology in the Twentieth Century [333-49]), captivated by the exosomatic. Sanguine
about the "disappearance of man" as the natural result of evolution, dismayed (though
without Esfandiary's disgust) at the fragility of the "carboniferous fabric," cognizant of the
"voracious" needs and ecological impact of carbon life ("It consumes the resources it
needs for survival. . . . the more successful carbon man is, the more hostile the
environment becomes"), Hardison is more than ready to conclude that the "dreams of
carbon man are nightmares." Silicon man's dreams are elsewhere; no longer "planetcentered," its natural sphere is space.
Perhaps, Hardison hopes, "the relation between carbon man and the silicon devices he is
creating" will prove to be analogous to that of "the caterpillar and the iridescent winged
creature . . . the caterpillar unconsciously prepares to become." His own sympathies are
with the butterfly. Confident that it is only a matter of time before all that is really
important about carbon man--intellect, imagination, creativity, vision--is transferred to
silicon, he wonders if the time will not come when "the spirit finally separates itself from
an outmoded vehicle." Such a moment, he imagines, may prove to be "less like a death
than a birth of humanity." Like Heppenheimer, Hardison finds the poets supportive of his
plans, this time quoting Yeats--"Sailing to Byzantium"--as a prophetic vision of his own
Body Snatcher dreams of being "Once out of nature."
And we hear Arthur C. Clarke's prophecy that "one can imagine a time when men who
still inhabit organic bodies are regarded with pity by those who have passed on to an
infinitely richer mode of existence. . . . One day there may be a second and more
portentous adolescence, when we bid farewell to the flesh" (Profiles 209). Indeed, such a
step, Clarke is convinced, is absolutely necessary if we ever hope to expand into the
universe:11 "Creatures of flesh and blood such as ourselves can explore space and win
control over infinitesimal fractions of it. But only creatures of metal and plastic can ever
really conquer it, as indeed they have already started to do. The tiny brains of our
Prospectors and Rangers merely hint at the mechanical intelligence that will one day be
launched at the stars" (223). "In the ages to come," Clarke suggests, championing the
separation of the two cultures, "the dullards may remain on placid Earth, and real genius
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will flourish only in space--the realm of the machine, not of flesh and blood" (Profiles
223).
But a fusion of human and machine will not long satisfy our yearning. In 2001: A Space
Odyssey, Clarke speaks of thinkers with "exotic views" who believe "that really advanced
beings" would not "possess organic bodies at all" (those "fragile disease-and-accident
prone homes that Nature had given them and which doomed them to inevitable death").
Though he acknowledges that "the brain might linger for a little while as the last remnant
of the organic body," eventually mind would have to free itself entirely from matter: "The
robot body, like the flesh-and-blood one, would be no more than a stepping-stone to
something which, long ago, men called 'spirit.' And if there was anything beyond that, its
name could only be God" (173-74).
Such thinkers, of course, are not the creations of science fiction, for Clarke himself--not
to mention Jastrow, Esfandiary, Minsky, Moravec, Sussman, Hubbard, Hardison--can
already be numbered among the believers. The exosomatic dreams of the Body
Snatchers are spinoffs of the science fiction culture of the Space Age.
VI
To say someone is "anal" means that someone is trying extra-hard to protect
himself against the accidents of life and the danger of death, trying to use the
symbols of culture as a sure means of triumph over natural mystery, trying to pass
himself off as anything but an animal.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
Is it not revealing that the exploration and colonization of space is increasingly envisioned
by its advocates as an essential step in extrication from our woefully mortal body? It is as
if we fantasize that occupying in fact that "higher" realm on which we have always
projected our fantasies of disembodied, afterlife immortality, we will miraculously be able
to attain a living, though technologized, otherworldly immortality, once rid of the gravity,
the cares, of the human condition on Earth.
It is in preparation for this "up-coming," Gnostic, higher life that we are trying out the
dropping of the body now, first ideally, then, with the aid of our technological magic, in
reality, cleansing ourselves in advance for that destiny we have long foreseen in our own
self-fulfilling religious prophecies. We may be witnessing here--as I suggested earlier--a
displacement of essentially religious values similar in kind and in scope to (perhaps even
a continuation of?) the one Weber analyzed, in which the "Protestant ethic" was rolled
over into "building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order." But there is a
much more basic, and more earthy, way of understanding the rationalizations and
behavior of Body Snatchers. Body Snatchers, I would like to suggest, are simply "anal";
and so, too, is the whole project to be freed from the body and unearth himself, from
Descartes to Esfandiary.
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Why is it that the chronically malfunctioning toilet on space shuttle missions (the latest
breakdown occurred in late 1990) has caused such embarrassment? On one launch
carrying experimental mammals, the air inside the shuttle reportedly turned "brownish"
from excrement, both human and animal! (Was it not to escape precisely this sort of
unpleasantness that we are heading for the stars? Imagine the reaction of an Esfandiary-a man "grossed out" by the necessity of relieving himself in the middle of the night--to
such a mess.) NASA understandably sought to hush up unfavorable publicity about this
noxious "glitch" in our extraterrestrial plans.
Nor does NASA seem anxious to discuss publicly that annoying problem, that nuisance,
which it has designated euphemistically as "space adaptation syndrome"--its forwardlooking, up-winging name for the obstinate reluctance of the human body, a product of
millions of years of earthly coevolution with terrestrial conditions, to accept immediately
the Cartesian intellect's transcendental, unearthly aspirations for it. Evidence
accumulated to date indicates that even relatively short periods spent in space can
produce surprising changes in the body: a small loss of red-cell mass, a decrease in the
ability to exercise, a diminishment of bone density and calcium, weight loss, cardiac
arrhythmia (resulting from failure to follow prescribed diet), a lengthening of the body
(because to the absence of gravity). One NASA research physician has candidly predicted
that an anticipated 250 day shuttle flight might produce "a significant calcium loss
leading to failure of skeletal integrity. . . . Whoever we send out there," he explains, "will
come back a skeletal wreck. Specifically, upon reentering earth's gravitational pull there
will likely be multiple fractures of arms, hips, legs--every major bone in the body as a
matter of fact. It will be a complete skeletal calamity at 1 gravity" (quoted in Goodall 8485).
Stopped-up toilets in space, "space adaptation syndrome"--these vexations of the spirit
for Body Snatchers are mortifying because they bring vividly into focus the essential
anality of the whole "modern" project as I have sought to trace it. "Trying extra-hard to
protect ourselves against the accidents of life and the danger of death" (especially
humiliating natural mysteries like excretion), fantasizing about escaping entirely our
animal past in an exosomatic leap of faith, the Body Snatching mentality is not just a
longing for a universal destiny, it is a running from the human condition, a "flight to
objectivity." A philosopher, asked by the U. S. Office of Technology Assessment to
contemplate the effects of a "human presence in space," wondered if space travelers
"must acquire a taste for the thin gratifications of spatial being, and may acquire a
contempt for the fat planet in whose service they were originally sent aloft" (Danto 15).
Body Snatchers, it would seem, have already acquired such a taste, are already
contemptuous of the fat planet which limits their carbon-based selves.
Claudio Naranjo and Robert Ornstein, in On the Psychology of Meditation, call attention to
the Surangama Sutra in which the Buddha "ties one knot after another in a handkerchief,
and after each . . . asks his disciple Ananda, 'What is this?'" Buddha then asks Ananda
yet another question, inquiring whether all knots can be untied at the same time. "'No
Blessed Lord!'" Ananda replies. "Since the knots were tied one after another in a certain
order, we cannot untie them, unless we follow the reverse order.'" The authors supply
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the following exegesis and commentary:
To start with the last knot, in the Buddhist darshan, means to start with the body,
and within the body (in the chakra system) with its most body-like region, the
foundation, or lower area. The contrast between East and West in this last aspect is
also suggestive of the predominant spirit of the respective cultures; Western man,
in his ambition to fly out of his body, has identified with the head, or at lowest,
with the heart. Orientals, with no less spiritual ambition, have stressed the
importance of attaining rootedness in the body first and have cultivated the feeling
of the center of gravity in the belly. (67; my emphasis)
Body Snatching is "anal" precisely because it does not first seek "rootedness in things."
Pretentiously claiming already to esoterically know, in New Gnostic fashion, the "origin of
all things," it proclaims itself to be capable of and deserving of fiddling with the very
constitution of the world, of untying the knots of creation. It seeks, in an age of advanced
technology at the service of an unquenchable res cogitans, to discover the means for
making possible an unearned, undeserved, quick exit through the head. "The leap into
the universal," Elias Canetti once observed, "is so dangerous that one has to keep
practicing it, and always in the same spot" (Human Province 189). We imagine the leap
into space, however, as a merely technical matter, requiring little or no psychological
preparation. We will make it up as we go along.
As I have decried this flight over the last few years, I have repeatedly encountered the
objection that my conspiracy theory fails to take into account growing awareness of the
needs of the body, the increasing consciousness of the primacy of health. However, as
Michael Ignatieff has shown, the culture of health that has risen to prominence in the last
decade in America is driven by hidden psychohistorical motives. Citing Nietzsche's
prophecy (in Thus Spoke Zarathustra) of the coming of "the last men"--"a future race of
beings who . . . [abandon] the pursuits of happiness for the pursuit of health"--Ignatieff
finds the German philosopher's "posthumous" vision coming to life around him in the "me
decade," yuppie life-style:
[Nietzsche] could see [the last men] jogging toward him: bright faced creatures in
their tracksuits, hearts beating, lungs dilating, heads brimming with the music on
their Walkmen. These last men and women would convert sex into recreation; the
asceticism of religion into the asceticism of athletics; the regimens of introspection
into the power of positive thinking; the human good--in all its tragic complexity-into the glow of physical well-being. (28)
Though the popular press proclaims the New Health to mark the end of Cartesian
dualism, Ignatieff demonstrates that it actually represents the apotheosis of what he calls
its "moral Prometheanism: the view that man's reason makes him the master of both
human and non-human nature." The guiding principle of the contemporary obsession
with health remains that "man's will will make him master of his fate" (29).
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Nietzsche, we should recall, did not need to look into his crystal ball to see those
contemporaries he would call in Zarathustra "despisers of the body": individuals oblivious
to the fact that "the body is a great reason," unable to accept that there is "more reason
in your body than in your best wisdom." He was not playing prophet when he observed
that these beings were "angry with life and the Earth" (146-47). But these despisers, he
knew, were progenitors of the last men: the ancestors of the Body Snatchers.
Body Snatchers, it would seem, have already acquired such a taste, are already
contemptuous of the fat planet that limits their carbon-based selves. Carbon Chauvinists
like myself, by contrast, are content for the time being to be "stuck in old concepts" as
we seek to discover our own rootedness--to feel at home here on Earth, completing our
earthly odyssey before embarking on an endless cosmic one. In the face of our accusers
we shout as our creed the words of that most earthy of writers, Montaigne:
It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being
rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our
own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside. Yet
there is no use our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our legs.
And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting on our own rump [sur
notre cul]. (459, 461)
I doubt, however that they would be amused. Body Snatchers are such a humorless sort.
VII
The greatest poverty is not to live
in a physical world.
Wallace Stevens, "Esthetique du Mal"
In Ron Howard's film Cocoon (1985), a trio of elderly men in a Florida retirement
community discover that a swimming pool in a nearby mansion has inexplicable
rejuvenating powers. After swimming in it, all three "feel like a million"; all regain longlost athletic and sexual power and experience a tremendous surge of energy--to the
amazement, and consternation, of their wives and fellow senior citizens.
The mansion, it seems, has been rented by some very advanced extraterrestrials-Antereans--who have come back to Earth to revivify comrades they were forced to
abandon in the Atlantic Ocean many thousands of years before. With the aid of a young,
previously unsuccessful fishing-boat pilot, Jack Bonner (Steve Guttenberg), the aliens
move their fellow beings--encased in cocoons--to the swimming pool, which, without
their knowledge, their neighbors have been surreptitiously visiting. Ethereal, almost
angelic beings, the Antereans it seems, have very nearly evolved beyond the need for
bodies (though their undisguised form is roughly humanoid, they appear to be made of
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light and not flesh), and their healing powers are limitless. Their very touch, as Bonner
learns, soothes any injury, and just the presence of the cocoons in the pool has
transformed even its chlorinated water into a cure-all.
Predictably, when the rest of the population of Sunny Shores learns the secret, they of
course demand to share it, and their mass assault on the pool results not only in the
death of several of the Antareans encased in the cocoons but also in the Antareans'
expulsion of all--even the original discoverers--from access to their fountain of youth.
Very forgiving beings, the Antereans do, however, offer their neighbors another chance.
Prior to their departure, they promise to take all who wish to join them away from their
earthly fates so that they may lead "productive lives" in a new world--their own--without
geriatric ghettos.
Later, Ben Lucket (Wilford Brimley) tries to explain the possibility they have been offered
to his grandson, David:
Ben: "Me and your grandma are going away, David."
David: "Where to?"
Ben: "That's not important. . . . When we get where we're going we'll never be
sick, we won't get any older, and we won't ever die."
David: "You're joking me, right?"
Ben: "No, no . . ."
David: "When would you go?"
Ben: "Soon, soon. And do you know where?"
David: "Where?"
Ben: "Look up! Outer Space, my lad, Outer Space!"
Virtually the entire community--anxious to transcend all intimations of mortality--accepts
the offer, making its escape (with Bonner's help) to an open sea rendezvous with the
Antareans' mother ship, which lifts their own Ship of Fools into its womb in preparation
for a supposed cosmic rebirth.
Earthkind can find at least one character to identify with in this Space Age parable, this
film of departure and Body Snatching. Bernie Lefkovitz (Jack Gilford) is dubious from the
very start about his friends' failure to act their age. While they accuse him of being the
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"most frightened man" they know, this man who is first identified--in the film's opening
scene--as he happily receives a promised bottle of Ex-Lax from the grocery store,
defends his reluctance by insisting, "Nature dealt us our hand of cards and we played
them. Now at the end you're trying to reshuffle the deck." He refuses to join them in
their trips to the aliens' swimming pool, claiming "I don't want to feel differently." Only
when his beloved wife, Rose, dies, does he finally succumb to the temptation: in a
poignant scene he carries her there in the futile hope that he might bring her back to
life.
But Bernie, uninterested in switching his cultural allegiance, refuses to join the
community in their final escape, though he wishes them well: "I hope you find what
you're looking for." And to their final plea to join them--"Why stay?" they ask
incredulously--he answers simply: "This is my home. This is where I belong."
Spoken like a true Carbon Chauvinist.
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PROBE: Nemesis and NASA: The Tragedy of the Challenger
For a living organism there is no such thing as full autonomy. There is only
variability in the pathways through which its parasitical dependency can be
exercised. A fish is not autonomous in relation to water at the moment it is gasping
its life out in the bottom of a boat. Nor is an astronaut in relation to the
atmosphere of the Earth when he is shut up in a metal ball a hundred thousand
miles out, sucking oxygen and responding to messages from someone he cannot
see, while relying on the construction skills of men he may not have known.
Philip Slater, Earthwalk
In a 1981 essay on "Ronald Reagan's American Gothic," historian Michael Rogin
discovers, in the context of a discussion of the 1941 film King's Row, a central key to the
mind-set of the Great Communicator. King's Row is, of course, a film central to Reagan's
own myth of self. A lurid "American Gothic" tale of family violence, sadism, and incest,
the film incongruously provided the title of Reagan's autobiographical Where's the Rest of
Me?--words spoken by the character he had played in the film after discovering his legs
had been amputated. Reagan's transformation from actor to politician, his book explains,
was the result of a similar shock: his realization that "To remain an actor was to be only
'half a man.' He left the movie 'monastery' (his word suggests both holiness and
impotence) to put his ideals into political practice, 'find the rest of me,' and become
whole" (57).
The ironies of this controlling metaphor for the president's life--the placing of
"amputation at the center of Reagan's life" and the location of his "conversion experience
in an American Gothic nightmare"--Rogin takes as his subject, and he finds it of great
significance for comprehending the contradictions at the heart of the Reagan years.
Reagan's whole understanding of the problems of the nation and the world, Rogin insists,
owe everything to the unreality of his movie past: "The people in his celluloid dream
world can be twisted and twirled, bent and curled, without suffering real damage. They
can lose their legs on film and keep them in life, and since no real harm comes to
anyone, the President appears benign. He is cut off from the effects of his political
program. But Reagan's dream of law and perfect order has punishing consequences for
the sensuous, living humans down below" (57).
As an epigraph to his essay, Rogin quotes, with satiric intent, the following caption, taken
from an advertisement Reagan did as part of the promotion for his film Law and Order:
You
You
You
You
can
can
can
can
twist it . . .
twirl it . . .
bend it . . .
curl it . . .
The new revolutionary collar on Van Heusen century shirts won't wrinkle
ever.
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"The neatest Christmas gift of all!" says Ronald Reagan. (51)
Not surprisingly, Rogin also finds the advertisement quite suggestive, neatly summarizing
as it does Reagan's dominant fantasy: the "it's only a movie world" of a "Teflon
President."
On 18 January 1986, this fantasy was put to a stern test when the space shuttle
Challenger exploded only a little over a minute into its flight, killing all seven members of
the crew, including Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher in space. Seven "American heroes"
and their supposedly infallible craft had been not just twisted, twirled, and bent, but
obliterated--in instant replay, stop-motion, frame-by-frame analysis, and enlargement-before our very eyes.
Media critic Ellen Seiter, in a semiotic dissection of the "myth" of the Challenger, has
noted that "on the connotative level, the space shuttle was used as a signifier for a set of
ideological signifieds such as scientific progress, manifest destiny in space, U.S.
superiority over the U.S.S.R." As a sign, the Space Shuttle "consisted of a signifier--the
TV image itself--that was coded in certain ways (symmetrical composition, long shot of
shuttle on launching pad, daylight, blue sky background) for instant recognition, and the
denoted meaning, or signified 'space shuttle.'" This signification had been built up
throughout the shuttle's brief history until it had become an ideological given. The
explosion of the Challenger "radically displaced" these connotations.
The connotation of the sign "space shuttle" was destabilized; it became once again
subject--as a denotation--to an unpredictable number of individual meanings or
competing ideological interpretations. It was as if the explosion restored the sign's
original signified, which could then lead to a series of questions and interpretations
of the space shuttle that related to its status as a material object, its design, what
it was made of, who owned it, who had paid for it, what it was actually going to do
on the mission, who had built it, how much control the crew or others at NASA had
over it. At such a moment, the potential exists for the production of
counterideological connotations. Rather than "scientific progress," the connotation
"fallibility of scientific bureaucracy" might have been attached to the space shuttle;
"manifest destiny in space" might have been replaced by "waste of human life";
and "U.S. superiority over the U.S.S.R." by "basic human needs sacrificed to
technocracy." (31)
"Ever since the garden," an editorial writer would note, seeking to explain the emotional
effect of the disaster, "our lot has been to strive beyond ourselves, to test the broad
seas, to scale the skies, to erect ceaseless towers, to unlock all secrets. Who would settle
for mere limits?" ("Lessons from Space" 67). At the time of the crash, in Ronald Reagan's
second term as president and a year before Irangate would call into question his whole
presidency, fallibility remained quite far from our minds, so far in fact that, as Fred
Bruning eloquently observed in Maclean's, the crash seemed to induce, at least
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momentarily, something like national shock, a shock often compared by those who had
lived through both to the effect of John F. Kennedy's assassination twenty-three years
before.
Those of us who doubted that a space mission could fail so tragically now must
confront our own naivete. We believed too strongly in the notion of a boundless
American destiny, of a cosmos that was ours for the plucking. We trusted science
and industry beyond what was reasonable. Surely we had become complacent and
cocksure. . . . Failure simply wasn't perceived as being part of the program. For
Americans, failure rarely is. Steadfastly, we hold to the notion of ourselves as an
anointed people, safe from the snares of history and happenstance--special, to be
sure. (13)
The timing of the Challenger explosion was thus anything but auspicious--especially for
the White House. Canceling, after some embarrassing indecision, the upbeat, "The Pride
is Back," rah-rah-America State of the Union address scheduled for that evening,
President Reagan went on national television to eulogize the Challenger Seven. At the
close of his talk he proclaimed, with attempted poignancy, "We will never forget them nor
the last time we saw them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved
good-bye and slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God."
Quick to explicate an allusion, the media readily sought to identify the source of Reagan's
closing words. We soon learned that they came from the sonnet "High Flight," written by
John Gillespie Magee, Jr., who at nineteen, while a volunteer with the Royal Canadian Air
Force, had died in action off Britain, December 11, 1941. The next day the New York
Times printed the poem in its entirety and, if memory serves me correctly, Dan Rather
declaimed the sonnet that same night on the CBS Evening News. I will attempt here no
exegesis of its largely self-explanatory lines. (Indeed, if they were not self-explanatory,
indeed cliched, appealing emotively to easily predictable public sentiment, they would
probably never have been used in a national television address in the first place.) Heavy
with personification ("laughter-silvered wings," "tumbling mirth/Of sun-split clouds,"
"shouting wind," "eager craft"), laden with hyperbole ("long, delirious, burning, blue,"
"touched the face of God"), and filled with imagery evoking sound and light, "High
Flight," considered simply as a specimen of the art of poetry, could probably pass muster
as every bit the equal of, say, Joyce Kilmer's "Trees."
Not often, though, do we hear presidents of the United States allude to poetry--even bad
poetry--in their addresses to the nation; nor is it customary for news anchors to read
entire poems on national television. The interest the press immediately showed in the
source of the allusion was entirely understandable. What interested me at the time of the
shuttle disaster, however, was not so much the trivial question of its source, but rather
the metaphorical usefulness, both to a president and the media, of this particular poem,
of Magee's trite and maudlin lines: its serviceability in paying tribute to fallen heroes,
rallying support in a dark time for America's role in space, and (in the case of the
president) maintaining a public image as the fearless leader who restored America to its
rightful, God-given, manifest destiny as the "last, best hope of Earth."
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A Commonweal editorial, published less than a month after the crash, noted, however
that the tragedy's immediate impact had been quite the opposite of Magee's message of
high aspiration:
In an awful moment, our whole world stood naked and still: human aspiration
ceased, the computer froze, stock markets fell suddenly worthless.
We had all gone out that morning carrying our shields, our hearts high with
anticipation when we thought of a teacher going into space. How could we think of
failure when we saw such graceful limbs, such shining faces? We have forgotten
that Florida's Sooty Terns, not we, were meant for flight. ("Lessons from Space" 67)
Walter McDougall warned at the time of the explosion that in its aftermath the last thing
the nation needed was to "bluff ahead with brave words about human life being the
inevitable price paid of technological progress" (Wilford 106), and social psychologist
Robert Jay Lifton could be heard on the radio sagely advising that the disaster might
perhaps bring home to us an important lesson to which we constantly turn a deaf ear:
that our technology does not make us godlike or immortal.
But Reagan and the media showed no such wisdom. Through the aid of Magee's verse
cheerleading, our president told us instead that despite the Challenger tragedy, the
beyond was still our destiny, that we could and should touch "the face of God" through
our endeavors (unless we lose our nerve), that we could and should leave behind the
"surly bonds of Earth." In the State of the Union address Reagan finally did deliver, he
continued to stroke the American people with this rhetoric of aspiration, insisting that
"after all we've done so far, let no one say that this nation cannot reach the destiny of
our dreams. America believes, America is ready, America can win the race to the future-and we will."
And the "Monovox" of the media--Nicholas von Hoffman's term for "the voice of official
thought and prescribed emotion"--seconded the motion with hardly a moment's thought.
As von Hoffman would later write in New Republic,
within minutes of Christa McAuliffe's death, the mass media began moving past the
work-a-day idiocies of pack journalism. They left behind ordinary news bathos, and
took up their role as the voice of the unitary society. As Rather, Jennings, and
Brokaw sat in their anchor seats and fingered their space phalluses--those standtall model reproductions of the Good Ship Challenger--whatever skepticism they
may have once brought to their work vanished. They pledged to carry on the
"mission" of the seven heroes, now gone to the red, white, and blue Valhalla where
America's freedom fighters from Bunker Hill to Cape Canaveral sleep in glory.
Monovox's message, however, was not limited to honoring the dead, for it also
"coached the population to strike the correct pose of conformity as America
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dedicated, pledged, consecrated, and devoted itself to going on, as the dead
heroes and their families wished, to be first in our solar system and then in our
galaxy. From every orifice of communication it was repeated that we, living
vicariously through the NASA bureaucracy, were scientists, adventurers, space
conquerors" (14).
The rallying cries proved in the short run to be successful. Polls taken immediately after
the Challenger incident showed that an overwhelming majority of Americans still
supported not only the American space effort in general but the shuttle program itself. In
truth, the American people probably had not required that much persuasion in the first
place. As Wayne Biddle, a former technology reporter for the New York Times, has noted,
"In our society technological optimism is clearly a kind of religion, a matter of
faith" (quoted by Boot 29).
The widespread dissemination of the Challenger "sick joke cycle"--catalogued and
analyzed by folklorists across the United States--clearly demonstrated just how unsettling
the disaster had been to America's collective unconscious. In the brutal, scatological,
racist, grotesque humor of these jokes, the public mind admitted its disquiet.
In an essay in Columbia Journalism Review entitled "NASA and the Spellbound Press,"
William Boot has presented a telling analysis of the press's role in inducing both our
"techno-patriotism" in general and our True Believing in the shuttle. Accusing journalists
of "nagging" NASA about launch delays while not really investigating a mounting list of
reported problems, Boot concludes that "dazzled by the space agency's image of
technological brilliance, space reporters spared NASA the thorough scrutiny that might
have improved chances of averting tragedy--through hard-hitting investigations drawing
Congress's wandering attention to the issue of shuttle safety." He suggests that "In the
pre-explosion days, many space reporters appeared to regard themselves as participants,
along with NASA, in a great cosmic quest" (24, 29).
"NASA and the Spellbound Press" begins with a fantasy, in which Boot imagines the
space agency postponing a scheduled launch after press investigations reveal possible
dangers posed by defective O-rings. "Fantasies along these lines have gone through the
minds of more than a few journalists in the months since Challenger's fatal explosion,"
Boot concludes. "If only someone had alerted them to the rocket-booster problem. If only
history had a rewrite man" (23-24; my emphasis).
I, too, have a fantasy. I, too, seek a rewrite man. Let us pretend for a moment that a
Carbon Chauvinist had been the president's speech writer that fateful day; pretend that
somehow an on-the-record critic of Space Boosterism had infiltrated the Oval Office and
had the president's ear. (An impossibility, I realize, but let us pretend.)
Let us imagine that I, not Peggy Noonan, had been given the unenviable assignment
of preparing a eulogy on a few hours' notice. Let us presume as well that I have been
told, as part of my charge, to find an appropriate, moving quotation, preferably some
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poetry, to close the speech--one that would ring with sentiment, perhaps (dare we
hope?) with wisdom.
Pretend, too, if you will, that it is a president of the United States other than Ronald
Reagan for whom I write and that, instead of offering him the technoreligious patriotism
of Magee's "High Flight," with its resounding message of ascensionism and infinite
aspiration and the indomitable human spirit, I instead constructed a speech (playing
Edgar Bergen to the commander-in-chief) that, after suitably honoring the dead, built to
a peroration reading and exegesis of a far more subtle and far wiser poem by John Witte,
entitled simply "Home": a poem describing the life crisis experienced by a prodigal
astronaut on his return to Earth. Allow me, if you will, to sketch that speech's climax
here, bearing in mind that what I offer is, of course, pure fiction.
In this time of national mourning, we are struck by the essential irony of the
tragedy we witnessed today in disbelief. For the psychohistorical motivations of the
space program as a manifest technological enactment of our own cultural dream,
never entirely clear even to the dreamers, have now been made palpably apparent.
Let us think deeply about the validity and honesty of these motives. Let us
contemplate what exactly our destiny as a nation and a species is to be. Let us
think about what the poet John Witte tries to tell us in his description of a "fallen"
astronaut.
Returning to Earth after his life
of weightlessness, the astronaut cannot
lift the small bouquet of flowers the child gives him.
He cannot raise his head off the pillow, pulled down
by the gravity of a dream.
He remembers nothing, no sound,
in the wild pounding of his baffled heart. He lifted
a building in one hand, a pencil in the other.
This was what he wanted: the world
like a worn stone cast into the water.
He wanted to break the promise of the body
to the Earth, to stop the long descent of everyone
he loved under ground. He wanted
to rise an angel
in a paradise of exact data.
He spills his milk on his shirt. The Earth
has darkness, and then light. The Earth has birds
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bickering over the last seeds. His fork slips
clattering on the plate. The road is shining.
The magnolia is shameless in the rain.
Having experienced the giddy freedom of weightlessness, having been strong
enough in zero gravity to manipulate an entire building in one hand, Witte's
astronaut, feeling godlike, finds readjustment to earthly limitations arduous. Back
on the planet's surface, the simplest tasks confound him. He cannot pick up a
bouquet of flowers, is unable even to sit up in bed. His "tacit dimension" distorted,
perhaps even destroyed, he finds himself enfeebled, childlike, unable to drink from
a glass or to use a fork.
NASA has long known of the difficulties of what is sometimes euphemistically
termed "space adaptation syndrome": the hazardous adjustment of the human
body, the product of thousands of years of coevolution with terrestrial conditions,
to the extraterrestrial environment. Witte's astronaut would seem to suffer from
something like "Earth readaptation syndrome": like Antaeus, his temporary
removal from the Earth has impoverished him, robbed him of his ground, stolen his
customary powers--but in his case forever. For it is the Earth that now seems to
him the dream, and setting foot on it again does not bring back his strength.
Having "slipped the surly bonds of Earth," he finds himself no longer
accommodated to its demands.
Yet as Witte makes clear, he can blame no one for his condition but himself. You
must be careful what you wish for, the wisdom of fairy tales teaches us, for your
wish may be granted, and what the astronaut wished for--wishing not just for
himself but on the behalf of the civilization that has sent him as an emissary to the
stars--Witte articulates with great clarity, making explicit secret motives that
remind us of those promptings we normally hear only in our most private inner
ear:
This was what he wanted: the world
like a worn stone cast into the water.
He wanted to break the promise of the body
to the Earth, to stop the long descent of everyone
he loved under ground. He wanted
to rise an angel
in a paradise of exact data.
Now that "worn stone" on which he had longed to turn his back requires from him
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the earthy and not the angelic. Now it reminds him that the dualism inherent in the
brute fact of incarnation cannot be severed with impunity, for it must be borne
and, if wisdom permits, reunited. Now it teaches him that "the promise of the body
to the Earth" and the inevitable, literally humiliating "long descent" of us all to the
ground of our existence, cannot be reversed, even by Cartesian dreams of rising
"an angel/in a paradise of exact data."
Does not the cataclysmic failure today of the space shuttle Challenger's "exact
data" bring home to us a similar lesson? Does it not demonstrate blatantly that
such a dream is foreordained to produce, enantiodromically, contrary results?
As I watched the Challenger consumed in a ball of fire, it was not our infinite
aspiration to "touch the face of God" of which I thought. I remembered instead the
scene in Joseph Heller's Catch-22 in which Yossarian tries to help his young
tailgunner Snowden, wounded by antiaircraft fire, only to discover that his horrible
injuries are fatal.
Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples
clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret
Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the
message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop
him out of a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him
and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage.
That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all. (377)
The "promise of the body to the Earth" cannot be broken. Never have we known
this more clearly than today.
I intend to name soon an investigatory panel to determine the cause of today's
disaster and to recommend a future course of action for the shuttle program. But
whether it proves to have been a computer malfunction, human error, or a fuel
leak that brought about the explosion, I know very well that it was in fact Nemesis
that caused this tragedy.
As I said before, all the above is, of course, a hallucination. It could never, never, never
happen. Such a speech would never be written and could never be understood. Such a
president as Ronald Reagan could never deliver it. And I suspect sometimes that
television may be innately incapable of even broadcasting such words. I suspect it does
not, cannot operate on this frequency.
In the New York Times of 29 January 1986, at the bottom of the same page that
reprinted the complete text of Reagan's nationally televised tribute to the Challenger
crew, a brief note announced the Ford Motor Company's cancellation of the advertising
campaign for the Aerostar minivan. The ads, which juxtaposed the Ford vehicle with the
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shuttle in order to highlight the van's technological precision and aerodynamic shape, had
lost their power. The producers of the "soon-to-be-released" summer movie SpaceCamp
faced a similar problem. In the movie a woman astronaut and five boys and girls
participating in a shuttle engine test on the launch pad are unexpectedly sent into space
to prevent an on-ground explosion. Despite concern over how the film would be
perceived, they decided to release the film as planned. It did only mediocre business.
More than just seven brave men and women and a billion-dollar piece of machinery may
have been lost on 28 January 1986. The prime "vehicle" for the metaphors of America's
space boosting may also have been obliterated. "Since Challenger and Chernobyl," David
Ehrenfeld has astutely and conclusively observed, "it is no longer reasonable to doubt
that the world is entering a new phase of human civilization. The brief but compelling
period of overwhelming faith in the promise and power of technology is drawing to a
close, to be replaced by an indefinite time of retrenchment, reckoning, and pervasive
uncertainty. At best, we will be sweeping up the debris of unbridled technology for
decades, perhaps for a longer period than the age, itself, endured" ("The Lesson of the
Tower" 367).
Nonetheless, in fall 1987 my daughter's PTA sent home a "Dear Parents" letter displaying
at its top a drawing of the space shuttle ("USA/PTA" is visible on the tail assembly) and
beginning, "Successful Space Shuttle Missions depend on their dedicated crews to guide
them from liftoff to touchdown. Our PTA is no different." And in the college glossy
Campus Voice Bi-Weekly, the Air Force saw fit to place an "Aim High" recruiting
advertisement with the shuttle on its launching pad as its prominent central image and
the headline "Before you work anywhere, take a look at the tools we work with." Such
attempts to overcome the post-Challenger connotation of the "fallibility of scientific
bureaucracy" and reinstate the shuttle as a metaphoric vehicle reek of non-sequitur and
would seem to suggest a clear and perhaps contagious case of historical amnesia; yet
they testify as well to the resilience of the dream.
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3. Infinite Presumption
Something in us wants to get back every memory, every thing we have lost,
every thing that was put together ever and once to make us. It is a sickness,
but it is a wonder and a gift too. And though nothing in this century has
worked out, we still expect to survive intact and to deliver the torch to those
who will revive us in some other place in some other way. That is the garden
of childhood we come from and return to beyond the stars, and beyond the
figments and mirages of space and time.
Richard Grossinger, The Night Sky
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the founding father of the Russian space program, Robert H.
Goddard, the American rocket pioneer, and Hermann J. Oberth, the early German
theorist of space travel, all were greatly influenced in their youth--as they proudly
admitted-- by the science fictions of Jules Verne. The French novelist's fantastic tales
engendered in all three of these early visionaries the dream--fundamental to the early
Space Age--of literally traveling from here to the moon. The memes of Jules Verne, we
might say, were very infectious.
The dreams of today's science fiction writers are, of course, far more complex, fantastic,
cosmic, and ambitious--far more new wave--than Verne's simple, nineteenth-century
faith could have imagined, and the memes that these dreams spin off are more radical.
So too, as we might expect, are our attendant Space Age prophecies; we envision much
more than flying to the moon: to hear us talk, we are hatching extravagant schemes not
only of exploration and colonization but of supremacy. Whether or not any actual
influence--any implanting of memes--can be shown of the former on the latter, the
respective probes of science fiction and science fact remain in synchronous orbit, both
inspired by what J. G. Ballard has described as the need to ceaselessly invent the "infinite
alternatives to reality which nature itself has proved incapable of
inventing" ("Cataclysms" 130).
After reading widely in both the nonfiction of Spacekind and almost as widely in
contemporary science fiction, I think I may have discovered the seminal texts--the
memetic origins--of current extraterrestrial pioneering: Ian Watson's "Letter from God"
and James Blish's "Surface Tension."
II
In the tour de force "A Letter from God," Watson tries to imagine, from an omniscient
point of view and in a first-person narrative, the divine being's understanding of the
evolution of the cosmos, including the emergence of humankind. Awakened from a sleep
that has lasted for billions of years, God feels himself "incarnated" by a glimmer of
consciousness (quiet as "the footfall of an intruder in a darkened bedroom") coming from
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a distant point in space--from Earth, from the human race.1 Finally locating the source of
the disturbance, God is initially disappointed, distressed by the "singleness of being" to
which he is reduced by the limited consciousness of the human, the only true center of
awareness in the present emanation of the cosmos.
"There oughtn't to be a single simple 'I,'" God laments, for his newfound egoistic state
seems to him a fall from the "High Selflessness" that he considers more godly. "I
shouldn't have heeded the first tug," God's hindsight tells him. "I should have turned
over in my sleep, and slept through this cosmos till it collapsed! But in the vast silence
that single note of life had sounded like a gong."
From the outset, however, God feels a mixture of love and hate for Homo sapiens. "Like
a vagabond who has precisely one match to light one piece of kindling to keep warm by,"
God admits, "I directed myself toward you to cup my hands around that single prick of
life-light, and nurse it with my breath." Omnisciently aware of all our many brushes with
extinction (the Ice Age, global warming, overpopulation, nuclear holocaust), appalled at
our seeming death instinct, and yet profoundly, ironically aware that his own
consciousness is, in this manifestation of the cosmos, completely dependent on this
paradoxical being, God is alternately sympathetic with and critical of our reign on Earth.
Reminding humankind, with angry impatience, that he does not possess "the
micromanipulative ability to pluck the ten thousand matches from [our] childish hands,"
God sometimes seems to look forward to our demise.2 "My time should be eons, my span
whole galaxies!" he pontificates with Olympian detachment. "This attention to you is
straining my Godly eyes!"
Yet his admiration for Homo sapiens, the evolutionary accident, and its incredible "run of
luck" is unmistakable. In his heart of hearts, God almost seems often to wish for
humankind to endure and prosper, and after all, there is something in it for him. Noticing
our first futile attempts to expand outward into the universe early in the Space Age
("You've flown to your moon, though, in tin cans, you've sent tin cans farther out into the
first few inches of that aimless deadness that stretches out all around you everywhere"),
God begins to hope that our dispersion into space--as humankind inhabits various cosmic
niches and breaks into numerous sub species--may result in the creation of "all the
myriads of life-forms that are so sadly lacking," thus freeing him from his confining ego.
With this hope in mind, God concludes that he must intervene in our affairs; breaking
with tradition, he decides to "level" with humankind. His plan for enacting this goal
includes implanting ten-mile-high pillars in Russia and the United States, on which he has
inscribed a "Letter from God" setting the story straight about cosmic and human
evolution. For various reasons this plan fails, indeed backfires, precipitating a
catastrophic nuclear war--which proves to be a great embarrassment to God, who,
having an ego, is easily humiliated. Feeling incompetent, he ]bandons his involvement in
earthly affairs, withdrawing "to lick [his] wounds for a century or two."
While he isn't watching, however, humanity returns from the nuclear ashes to develop
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faster-than-light starships and begin to colonize other worlds (including the terraforming
of seemingly uninhabitable planets). Switching to "high-speed scanning" (for, as medieval
theologians taught, all time is to God a nunc stans--a standing now), God watches all of
our future in space unfold.
After millennia, he witnesses "starmen . . . constantly changing themselves into new and
diverse kinds of beings: beings who can inhabit dead worlds without air or water, beings
who can swim in gas giants, and coast through raw vacuum. Changing. A hundred forms,
a thousand forms." "Like fleas," humans "leap from the wooly spiral of the Milky Way
across into Andromeda."
Such diversification had once been God's fondest wish; through it, he hoped to free
himself from a restrictive single self. But now that it has actually come about, he finds
himself gravely threatened by the result. He senses that we have now become his
"Adversary": "You contribute nothing to my own expansion. None of you. I'm as
restricted as I ever was. I can't grow to anything like my full capacity. But you aren't
restricted." God, it seems, has become envious of human beings.
And then he begins to grasp humanity's true objective in space. This species whose spark
of life was once so weak that only his special attention could cause it to burst into flame
aspires to challenge God himself. "You're hatching a multibillion-year scheme," God
deduces, "to survive the collapse of this cosmos and make it through into the next,
differently cued cycle of existence. . . . Worse, to cue the next cycle yourselves so that it
starts out right." Paranoid, perhaps justifiably, he even suspects that we hope to bring
him to trial for his crimes!
Hiding "in the deepest deeps between the metagalaxies", God finds a last glimmer of
hope in the indisputable fact that he and humankind will eventually meet when the
universe begins to contract again:
I know that wherever I hide we'll all be rushed together in the end. Then you'll
catch me, sure as eggs is eggs.
Cosmic eggs are no exception. Particularly when they're all in one basket.
Our species' cosmic ambitions, both God and his scribe would seem to agree, is a
"wonder and a gift" as well as "a sickness."
And judging by the speculations and prophecies and visions of contemporary Space
Boosters, as we shall see, God's understanding of human destiny and motives would
seem to be almost omnisciently accurate.
In James Blish's "Surface Tension," a "seed ship" from Earth crash lands on the
distant planet "Hydrot"--a world, as its name implies, almost entirely covered with water.
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The ship's mission, we learn, is to sow human life throughout the galaxy by means of a
device called a Panatrope, which permits modification of the human genotype to allow for
the fullest possible adaptation of humans to the various environments in which they are
to be sown. But Hydrot, it seems, had not been a designated target planet for such
insemination, its environment being unsuitable as a habitat even for altered humans. The
seed ship's unexpected arrival on Hydrot, one philosophical member of the crew
speculates, thus seems like a kind of punishment for humanity's hubris in believing that
we could and should seed the galaxy with our kind.
Although they soon recognize that they are themselves doomed, the crew vows to
attempt to populate Hydrot with humans in germ, even if their efforts are doomed to
failure. But with their cargo of human "germ plasm" destroyed in the crash, they must
use themselves as the bank from which they will borrow the stuff of the human for this
alien world. Like gods, they ponder what attributes they will give to these protohumens
they will leave behind--the reincarnation, in effect, of themselves.
They decide that the future colonists will be placed in fresh water, in a mere mud puddle,
where they will not have to compete with the predator jellyfish native to Hydrot. They
give the colonists webbed extremities, but also thumbs and big toes. They bequeath
them lungs that can be easily adapted to nonaquatic breathing. And they make them
microscopic, but neither the smallest nor the largest creatures in their world, reasoning,
with impeccable Darwinian logic, that competition for dominance of their environment will
promote the evolutionary selection of their latent skills and intelligence in a way that
sheer physical dominance never could.) They give them as well both an ancestral
memory--so that they will faintly recall having been left in an alien world--and metal
plates on which the true origin of their microscopic kind is recorded, though as the crew
recognizes, they may never be able to comprehend the enigmatic history revealed there.
Before the crew can perform a final transference into their minuscule heirs--before, as
Blish observes, Hydrot becomes the crew's Lethe--they must decide a last great,
essentially theological question: should these aspiring humans be allowed to know they
are microscopic? Otherwise how could they ever realize amidst the relativities of space
and time that their universe is a mere puddle of water? They decide against imparting
such knowledge--for would it not burden them with useless and intimidating, even paralyzing religious fear and awe?
Blish's story resumes sixteen generations later in a puddle of water on Hydrot and
describes how Lavon, a young "man" about to assume the role of Shar, or sage, among
the human colony becomes obsessed with the desire to seek out his and his kind's
origins, which he knows from the metal plates left by their creators lies in a world beyond
the watery one in which men have come to thrive. The "wisdom of the Creators,"
microengraved on the sacred plates, speaks of "space" and "spaceships" and fourteen
times mentions the mysterious word "star," but such mysteries do not interest Lavon
initially, and he rejects his role as Shar, preferring to live, like most of contemporaries,
only for the moment.
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But later he is strangely possessed by a desire to explore what lies beyond the sky above
(that is, the surface of the puddle), to discover the source of the mysterious light that
shines through it. Para, one of the protozoans who have formed a partnership with
humankind in this watery world, explains to Lavon that his own kind's ancient wisdom
teaches "that in this universe there is logically no place for man."
Our memory is the common property to all our races. It reaches back to a time
when there were no such creatures as men here. It remembers also that once upon
a day there were men here, suddenly, and in some numbers. Their spores littered
the bottom; we found the spores only a short time after our season's Awakening,
and in them we saw the forms of men slumbering.
Then men shattered their spores and emerged. They were intelligent, active. And
they were gifted with a trait, a character, possessed by no other creature in this
world. . . . Men had initiative. We have the word now, which you gave us, and we
apply it, but we still do not know what the thing is that it labels.
Such an understanding Lavon feels within. It fuels his longing for higher knowledge.
He dares to violate his people's consensus opinion that the sky is as impenetrable as the
bottom itself and embarks on a journey to this world's upper limits. In possession of the
"right stuff," he undertakes a heroic adventure to puncture for the first time the "surface
tension" of the liquid sky and glimpse the world of space that lies beyond; though he
nearly dies in the process from drowning and sunburn, he returns with a vision of escape
for himself and his people to become a kind of Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, and Chuck Yeager
all rolled into one.
But this great migration must be undertaken without the aid of the metal plates. Anxious
to circumvent if possible humankind's longing to depart, the Protos had thrown away the
plates when Lavon showed no interest in their message. Even without them, however,
humans--inspired by Lavon's passion for knowledge ("He could no longer tell what he
knew from what he wanted to know")--build a vehicle in which to make their journey. No
obstacle can obstruct them, and although they come to understand that hardly a "single
normal, understandable concept could be applied to the problem of space travel," and
despite complaints of wastefulness from some of society's youth ("Everybody these days
knows that there's no other world than this one," they protest), the vehicle is completed.
The journey commences and humans embark for the sky, joined by Para, who
accompanies its fellow species out of curiosity even though he cannot comprehend their
motives. As they are about to leave their "native universe" to enter the space that lies
beyond the puddle, Lavon begins to feel a strange kind of nostalgia for what he has left
behind. "The world looked different, now that he was leaving it. How had he missed all
this beauty before?"
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"Fear of the outside" mounts within as their vehicle, temporarily stalled by the surface
tension, pauses "upon the threshold of infinity." Like escapees from Plato's cave of
illusion, they are blinded at first by their encounter with the unmediated sun and the light
of knowledge of a cosmos wider than they had ever dreamed.
Intrepidly, they begin to formulate a new cosmology to explain the universe as they now
conceive of it.
I'm beginning to get a picture of the way the universe is made, I think. Evidently
our world is a sort of cup in the bottom of this huge one. This one has a sky of its
own; perhaps it, too, is only a cup in the bottom of a still huger world, and so on
and on without end. It's a hard concept to grasp, I'll admit. Maybe it would be
more sensible to assume that all the worlds are cups in this one common surface,
and that the great light shines on them all impartially.
Undeterred by this Copernican revolution in their worldview, they ignore the pleading of a
simple mechanic on board the ship to turn back because they do not belong in such a
realm. And though the immensity of space seems beyond all fathoming, they bravely face
the new universe they must now scale if they are ever to accomplish, as their creators
had done and hoped they, too, would do, the crossing of space, buoyed by Para's dying
tribute to human initiative: "What man can dream, Man can do. . . . There is nothing that
knowledge cannot do. With it, men . . . have crossed . . . have crossed space."
III
In science fiction, Ursula K. LeGuin has divulged, the future is always a metaphor (149).
Now if such stories as these have indeed become, as both tenor and vehicle, at once the
blueprint and operations manual for mankind's future in space, if their memes have, as I
have suggested, affected those who now envision our destiny just as Verne influenced
the first generation, we would logically expect to find them thinking along lines similar to
the following.
We might find those minds contemplating the philosophical anthropology of the
extraterrestrial imperative convinced that mankind's emergence into the cosmos, our
breaking of the surface tension of the sky, must be understood as an evolutionary stage,
a natural development, not just comparable to but homologous with the emergence of
life on Earth from the water, or the separation of a child from its mother. We should not
be surprised to hear of the following:
A rocket pioneer (Wernher von Braun--Oberth's greatest disciple) suggest in the 1960s
that putting a man on the moon "is equal in importance to that moment in evolution
when aquatic life came crawling up on to the land" (quoted in Mailer 69).
We might hear a renowned space scientist (Krafft Ehricke, in "The Anthropology of Space
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Flight") speculate that the discovery of the "extraterrestrium" can actually be traced back
to the arrival of life on land; that mankind is a true "amphibian," capable, because of the
adaptive capacity of mind, to evolve beyond the merely biological (265).
We might hear a science fiction writer (Arthur C. Clarke, in "Space Flight and the Spirit of
Man") conclude that the Space Age represents the intended culmination of evolution: "it
is often hard to avoid the feeling," Clarke writes, "we are in the grip of some mysterious
force or Zeitgeist that is driving us out to the planets, whether we wish to go or not" (7).
We might find the film critic W. R. Robinson, contemplating the famous scene in 2001: A
Space Odyssey in which a hominid ancestor's bone/weapon becomes, in a match cut, a
spaceship, suggest that we find the edit especially resonant because bones--indeed
skeletons--were the first technology, containing in germ all the others--including space
technology--to follow (Robinson and McDermott 36-37).
We might hear inventor, engineer, architect, and technological prophet R. Buckminster
Fuller maintain that "to all who are living in cosmic realism, the immediate inauguration
of additional Earth-Moon, around-the-Sun flying formations of our team could not be
more humanly normal." For space exploration is every bit as natural "as a child coming
out of its mother's womb, gradually learning to stand, then running around on its own
legs." The originator of the concept of "Spaceship Earth," Fuller insists that since "the
universe is nothing but technology," it follows that Space Age technology "is something
that's always been going on." For "we are in space and have never been anywhere
else. . . . We are already a space colony" ("Universe" 33).
We might hear a journalist (Oriana Fallaci, in If the Sun Dies) describe Earth as a
"comfortable" womb and then add "But you can't stay in your mother's womb forever. If
you stay there forever, you die, and she dies too" (18).
We might learn that a visionary physicist (Freeman Dyson)--who has himself designed an
interstellar spacecraft-- believes that "Man's gray technology is also a part of nature . . .
nature's trick . . . used by her for her own purposes": "to enable life to escape from
Earth . . . to adapt rapidly and purposely . . . spread and diversify and run loose in the
universe" (Disturbing 235).6
We might hear J. D. Bernal explain his theory of the creation of a new, extraterrestrial
species, pioneered by the visionary few (the Lavons among us), by citing an evolutionary
precedent. "More fish remain in the sea than ever came out of it," Bernal reminds (7172).7
We might hear an historian (Louis J. Halle, in Out of Chaos) declare his faith that "there
is no other prospect as promising [as space exploration]" for what he conceives as "the
mind's mission": "bringing order out of chaos by the progressive enlargement of the
world it comprehends." "Once in outer space," Halle insists, "we will have enlarged our
horizons as would the dwarf flea if it were to expand its vision from the limits of the
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single cell to encompass first the leaf, then the tree, then the forest, and then whatever
lay beyond" (632).
We might hear a psychiatrist (Patricia Santy) suggest that psychological consideration of
the problems of space exploration could most profitably focus, from an evolutionary
perspective, on "the concept of separation/individuation from this planet, Mother
Earth" (525).
We might also anticipate that the idea of seeding the universe with the human would be
given serious consideration:
We might hear Francis Crick defend his theory of "directed panspermia" against
detractors by pointing out that we ourselves could and probably will engineer a similar
feat itself in the foreseeable future (147-51).
We might find Iain Nicolson (in The Road to the Stars) envisioning a future period of our
history that he calls the "interstellar humanization era."
We might hear Timothy Leary maintain that bodies evolved in order to transport the
"seeds" of life "throughout the galaxies in the form of nucleotide templates." These
"seeds," according to Leary, "land on planets, are activated by solar radiation, and evolve
nervous systems," adapting themselves expeditiously but only momentarily to "the
atmospheric and gravitational characteristics of the host planet, the crumbling rock upon
which we momentarily rest" (114).
We might find Clarke (in Childhood's End) imagining the very substance of the Earth itself
to be only the contents of a seed intended to provide timely sustenance for a new kind of
organism, planted (and harvested) by higher beings, ripened through human evolution,
and bound for reunion with the cosmos.
We might hear a molecular biologist (Sol Spiegelman) suggest that "DNA invented man
to explore the possibility of extraterrestrial life, as another place to replicate" (quoted in
Calder 25).
We might hear Dyson proclaim with Lysenko-like faith that the universe will ultimately
welcome our cosmic propagation, for destiny is on our side: "The interstellar distances
cannot be a permanent barrier to life's expansion. Once life has learned to encapsulate
itself against the cold and the vacuum of space, it can survive interstellar voyages and
seed itself, wherever starlight and water and essential nutrients are to be found. . . ."
Though he recognizes that "there will be problems for life to solve in adapting itself to
planets of various sizes or to interstellar dust clouds," none will prove insoluble: nothing
"will . . . be able . . . to stop the expansion of life once it is well started. The power to
control the expansion will be for a short time in our hands, but ultimately life will find its
own ways with or without our help" (Disturbing 236).
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We might learn that Frederick Turner, a poet and critic, envisions the "gardening of
Mars"--its cultivation as a viable environment via bioengineering, nanotechnology, and
terraforming--as a world-historical project. As a replacement for both the great religions
and the great wars, the fertilizing and seeding of the red planet will "allow us to pursue
beauty and truth on a grand scale," resulting not only in the spread of Earth's ecological
diversity to another world but, most importantly, in the "spiritual metamorphosis of the
alchemist, of us" ("Life on Mars" 34, 37).
We might find two advocates of the "anthropic cosmological principle," astronomer John
D. Barrow and physicist Frank J. Tipler, demonstrating, with supreme mathematical logic,
that colonization of the galaxy by means of increasingly sophisticated probes--each
capable of constructing, based on new scientific knowledge and technological
sophistication, more and more advanced means for wider and more successful dispersal
of the human into cosmic niches--is not only economically feasible but a virtual statistical
certainty (578-86).
We would not be surprised to find those like Lavon (and Bradbury's Sim) suffering from
the claustrophobic limitations of their world and driven by an inexplicable initiative and an
almost forgotten memory of a higher calling to pursue a cosmic destiny, declaring their
ultimate independence from a planet they have never accepted as home:
We might hear Ehricke advocate escape from the Earth as our species' only hope for
survival: "If we insist on operating as one world Neanderthals instead of growing into
true polyglobal cosmopolitans, then nothing will save us. We certify our kind as
evolutionary failures." The time has thus come, Ehricke exhorts, to expand our "one room
apartment into a mansion" ("Extraterrestrial Imperative" 25).
We might hear space colonies expert Gerald K. O'Neill admonish his species (in The High
Frontier) that now is the time for the species to overcome the silly "planetary hang-ups"
and "planetry chauvinism" that keeps it shackled to the Earth and to begin to harvest the
riches of space (34-35).8
We might hear a futurist (Adrian Berry, in The Next Ten Thousand Years) observe that
"through some biological quirk that distinguishes us from other species, we have nearly
always had practical and energetic minorities who make the scientific progress that
carries forward the rest. Their work is often despised and ignored--until its benefits
become apparent, and everyone steps forward to claim them. Nobody knows why human
beings, alone among known species, should have the capacity for original thought. But
that gift will take him to the stars" (123).
We might hear Clarke argue that the human mind will "stagnate" if "compelled to circle
forever in its planetary goldfish bowl": "From time to time, alarm has been expressed at
the danger of 'sensory deprivation' in space. . . . I would reverse the argument; our
entire culture will suffer from sensory deprivation if it does not go out into space" (Voices
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4).
We might hear a technology expert (G. Harry Stine, writing in The Space Enterprise
[Chap. 11]) attempt to persuade us that "the slow realization that we were not trapped
on the treadmill cage of our home planet" has freed us from all doomsday thinking;
"emerging from the womb of Mother Earth" into the "open system," the "real utopia" of
space, "we can become a universal species capable of expanding into . . . and using the
universe."
We might expect to find some who, even without definite access to the revealed wisdom
of the creators, have nevertheless come to think of humankind in the Space Age as
potentially godlike, or at least god-sanctioned, however limited, however infinitesimal we
appear.
We might find Stephen Hawking, a theoretical physicist ravaged by Lou Gehrig's disease,
setting out to complete Einstein's "unified field theory" and become--despite great
physical handicaps--the first individual to totally comprehend the universe. His physical
incapacity, it has been suggested, may in fact be the real source of his genius: "His
wheelchair gives him a special vantage point for the major preoccupation of [his] mind:
the universe we inhabit, how it came into being, how it operates, and how it will end. A
totally cerebral human, he demonstrates the power of the human intellect to fathom the
universe when the restless mind is set free" (Boslough 13).
We might discover the neoteleological "anthropic cosmological principle" suggest that the
very existence of human beings and the human mind is the most important key to
understanding cosmic evolution. "It would be hard to imagine a faster evolutionary
scenario than the one that brought us into being on this planet," a poet writes in a brief
exposition of the principle. "There has only just been enough time, under the most
favorable conditions, for us to have evolved" (Turner, "Field Guide" 55). As a result, the
principle implies, it is highly plausible that we are the universe's only intelligent life and
the first to become conscious of the existence of the universe.
We might hear Wernher von Braun console us that not just evolution but the will of God
is with us in our quest: "Men must always travel farther and farther afield, they must
always widen their horizons and their interests; that is the will of God. If God didn't want
it to be so, He wouldn't have given us the ability and the possibility to make progress and
to change" (Quoted in Fallaci 231).
We might hear F. M. Esfandiary (aka FM-2030) openly promote divine aspiration for
humankind: "contemporary philosophers state that we humans are striving to be god.
Others more critical admonish us for arrogantly 'playing god.' They warn of dire
consequences." But such criticism is absurd, Esfandiary insists. "We humans do not want
to play god or to be god. We aspire to much more" (143).
We might hear the cofounder and president of the "Committee for the Future" (Barbara
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Marx Hubbard) recommendthat humankind should learn to identify "much more with the
Creator than with the created" (291).
We might hear A Russian historian (Zheva Sveltilova) insist that "when man conquers the
universe, he will learn to believe in self. People who now believe in God will reject him.
Such belief won't be logical or natural. Man will be stronger than God" (quoted in
McDougall 455).
And we might hear the author of a book called The Immortalist (Alan Harrington) argue
that, though human beings have always "conceal[ed] from ourselves the existence of our
underground drive against the cosmic establishment ("Men must keep it from themselves
that they are in revolt against the gods, or 'against nature,'" he writes. "Only by means
of this hypocrisy, has our species been able to keep the revolutionary program going. It
has enabled man to plot against his gods while he worshipped them"), the time has come
to stop dissembling. "The time has come for man to get rid of the intimidating gods in his
own head. It is time for him to grow out of his cosmic inferiority complex (no more "dust
thou art, and to dust thou shalt return . . ."), bring his disguised desire into the open,
and go after what he wants, the only state of being he will settle for, which is
divinity" (24, 58).
Would we not also presume that some--like the Proto Para in Blish's tale--would be ready
to proclaim, however prematurely, that men are the actual or potential conquerors of the
universe?
We might hear Adrian Berry insist that
We cannot reiterate too strongly the dictum of the physiologist Constantine
Generales that, although ourphysical strength is tiny, he can nevertheless
learn to use and control forces quintillions of times stronger than himself. If
there is some fundamental law that says we cannot, during the course of
millions of years, occupy and exploit our entire galaxy of 100 billion suns,
then that law is now hidden from us. (168)
We might hear a science fiction writer and editor of the magazine Omni (Ben Bova in The
High Road) guarantee that "colonies and arks in space will transform the human into a
truly spacefaring . . . immortal species, able to survive the death of its home planet or
even the wreck of its entire Solar System." "Like gleaming pearls on an invisible linkage
of radio waves," Bova's crystal ball reveals, "space colonies and arks will spread across
the void, carrying the human race to its destiny among the stars" (233).
And we might hear a Hoover Institute fellow and a space scientist and author (Stefan T.
Possony and Jerry Pournelle, in "Space Flight and the Longevity of Man") announce their
faith that: "[there is] no reason why humanity cannot take part in the evolution of the
cosmos." "Human direction of galactic events," they argue, "seems no further beyond our
present capabilities than space flight would be to an amoeba- -and we are closer in time
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to the amoeba than we are to our descendents 50 billion years from now" (87).
Some future scholar, working only from partial, textual evidence, might be tempted to
suggest that Ian Watson and James Blish be counted as imaginative fathers of the Space
Age thinking surveyed here. This contemporary scholar, however, knows of no actual
influence. If fiction and nonfiction, imagination and reality, speculative probe and
futuristic hypothesis now seem cut out of the same cloth, it is not because the von
Brauns, Dysons, Ehrickes, and the likes have been reading "Surface Tension" or mail
from god. These memes--whatever their particular form of communication and
promulgation--are in the air now, inescapable elements of the intellectual atmosphere of
the Space Age. Science fiction writers, space scientists and visionaries, and conscientious
objectors alike breathe them.
That the human mind is now coming to think this way customarily is nevertheless an
extraordinary historical and philosophical development: one worthy of a moment's further
reflection before we routinize it entirely.
IV
[Science] does not recreate a public world. Indeed it heightens the prevailing sense
of unreality by giving men the power to achieve their wildest flights of fantasy. By
holding out a vision of limitless technological possibilities--space travel, biological
engineering, mass destruction--it removes the last obstacle to wishful thinking. It
brings reality into conformity with our dreams, or rather with our nightmares.
Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self
Like the tiny creatures of "Surface Tension," the human species was not directly told by
its makers that it was microscopic, and although most of the world's cosmologies and
religions contain in their wisdom such a realization, at least in germ (for instance,
Jehovah's reprimand to Job--"Were you there when I laid the foundations of the world?"-implies human creatureliness and insignificance), it was not until the Copernican
revolution that the real precariousness of our place in the cosmos began to have an
existential impact on our self-conception and sense of destiny.
Contemplating the newly discovered seeming infinitude of the universe, Pascal, writing in
the seventeenth century, found only cause for terror.
When I see the blind and wretched state of man, when I survey the whole universe
in its dumbness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner
of the universe, without knowing who put him there, what he has come to do, what
will become of him, when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to
terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who
wakes up quite lost and with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched
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a state does not drive people to despair. (88; my emphasis)
In the face of such a prospect, Pascal counseled humility: "Let man, returning to himself,
consider what he is in comparison with what exists; let him regard himself as lost and
from this little dungeon in which he finds himself lodged, I mean the universe, let him
learn to take the Earth, its realms, its cities, its houses and himself at their proper value.
What is man in the infinite?" (89). Pascal realized that the acceptance of an infinitely
large cosmos ushered in a "new abyss" for humankind, so that we feel threatened from
all sides. Though humans are infinitesimal in comparison to the universe, we are as well,
Pascal reminded, a colossi compared to the infinitely small. We thus stand between
"infinity and nothingness": "a nothing compared to the infinite, a whole compared to the
nothing, a middle point between all and nothing, infinitely remote from an understanding
of the extremes" (89-90). As a result of our place, Pascal warned, we must not inquire
into nature "as if there were some proportion between [ourselves] and her," for even to
pretend to do so requires a "presumption as infinite as their object" (90).
Pascal's response to the discovery of the infinite must have been in the minds of those
genetic engineers from Earth as they redesigned the human for life on Hydrot. The
prospect of the universe's immensity produced in Pascal the religious fear and awe they
wanted to avoid in their microscopic heirs. However, we must remind ourselves that
Pascal's reaction was not the only one inspired by the new Copernican cosmos. Giordano
Bruno, for example, welcomed the infinite universe with true intellectual enthusiasm, as if
humankind had at last discovered a suitable challenge to its power of intellect. The
church, of course, found Bruno's thinking blasphemous, burning him at the stake in 1600.
But Bruno's memes have obviously found fertile soil in a certain kind of Space Age mind.
Humanity's awareness that we are "a nothing compared to the infinite, a whole compared
to the nothing" has--in a world-historical irony--produced results precisely opposite to
those presumed by the inseminators of Hydrot. For the Copernican revolution, the
transition from "the closed world to the infinite universe" (Alexander Koyre), has in fact
encouraged some, no longer able to tell the difference between what they know and what
they want to know, to redouble the human effort to comprehend the incomprehensible.
Contemplating the place of Darwin's conception of natural selection in the larger context
of the entire "evolution of consciousness," Owen Barfield has wondered (in Saving the
Appearances: A Study in Idolatry) what our understanding of evolution might have
become if it had not been an outgrowth of, wedded to, reductionistic, positivistic,
materialistic nineteenth- century thought. In a similar vein, we must remind ourselves
that it is not the spiritual heavens of ancient astrology into which humankind would now
embark, but a post-Copernican, deanimated, Cartesian cosmos, explained to us not by
religion but by technologically enhanced, scientific cosmology. (In the Flight from Woman
[105], Stern speaks revealingly of "the interstellar coldness" of the Cartesian system. The
formulation is reversible. One might also speak of the Cartesian coldness of interstellar
space since the Copernican revolution.) And it is not humankind in general that now
contemplates heeding the extraterrestrial imperative. It is not the ancient Greeks, or
medieval men and women, or Tang dynasty Chinese, or Native Americans, or
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Elizabethans who have penned these visions of the future but post- Copernican, Western
minds.
As the result of the evidence acquired about the place of Earth in the cosmos by means
of a human invention (the telescope), Copernican humanity concluded, once and for all,
that the impression given to us by our senses of the nature of things was wrong.
Cartesian doubt--a method of investigation designed to protect against the possibility
that an "evil genius" is running the world in such a way as to always deceive our
understanding--was born in response to the shame of the geocentric error, and the
senses and the world the senses perceive have been suspect ever sense.
The prime effect of the Copernican revolution was the newly acquired conviction that
humankind should (in Arendt's words) "abandon the attempt to understand nature and
generally to know about things not produced by man and . . . turn exclusively to things
that owed their existence to man." Human reason, long deceived by its reliance on
commonsense revelations about the world, thus came to seem "adequate only when
confronted with man-made objects" (The Human Condition 280-84). Homo faber
triumphed and remains the ruler still of human capacity. The Copernican revolution was
enacted on its behalf--to put it in power. Its values--its "distinctly modern suspicion
toward man's truth receiving capacities, the mistrust of the given, and hence the new
confidence in making and introspection . . . inspired by the hope that in human
consciousness there [is] a realm where knowing and producing would coincide."--are now
becoming the world's values, even in cultures that do not share its historical roots. It is
Homo faber that would enact the extraterrestrial imperative.
With the coming of the Copernican revolution, Homo faber also reinvented itself as a
discoverer, the potential explorer of the New Worlds of both the Earth and the infinite.
And with this self- invention came "the liberation of man from his cosmic prison, from his
ancient servitude and impotence--his liberation from an archaic way of understanding
himself" (O'Gorman 87). But such a liberation, as we have seen, loosed the human "into
a strange, ungovernable freedom" (Turner, Beyond Geography 255-56) and inspired the
never-to-be-satisfied and perhaps innately destructive urge to journey beyond earthly
limits. Such freedom sanctions the cosmic post-Copernican ambitions I have considered
here.
It may well be true, as Kierkegaard, the great analyst of the dialectic of finite and infinite
in the human spirit, documented in the middle of the last century, that at the heart of the
modern "project" lies dread--the dread Pascal experienced in the face of the terrifying
silence of infinite space--and that such dread now fuels humankind's energy. Riding the
crest of such energy, we have surmounted our "fear of the outside" and, in a newly
conceived leap of faith, actually broken through the "surface tension" of the planet. Now
with infinite presumption, fearlessly willing to burn their bridges behind them, even to
administer, as a parting gesture, a "scorched earth" policy to the Earth itself, some now
dream of entirely abandoning a planet that, in a planned obsolescence, they are anxious
to put behind them.10 We are witnessing, according to a radical critic of technology, the
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end of humility and the birth of a new, humanistic-with-a-vengeance cosmology. "It is
not humility that inspires the new cosmological jargon," Jeremy Rifkin writes, "but
bravado." In the Space Age, "We no longer feel ourselves to be guests in someone else's
home and therefore obliged to make our behavior conform with a set of pre-existing
cosmic rules. It is our creation now" (Algeny 244).
Humanity's whole life, William James observed nearly a century ago, has always been a
"quest for the superfluous. Prune down his extravagance, sober him, and you undo
him" (104). But what if those wants have become unearthly, their possible gratification
now infinitely far off? What if, as prelude, they have created a culture and given birth to a
psyche so spacy, so out of this world, that in our life-style and in our very soul we seem
"due back on planet Earth"? What if we are unconsciously governed by "the unrealized
shame of having failed the world"? Are such wants--which clearly no longer establish us
in the necessary --still to be trusted, as James counsels?
"Man is so necessarily mad," Pascal knew, "that not to be mad would merely constitute
another form of madness." "He hardly knew," Norman Mailer would write in Of a Fire on
the Moon, confessing (characteristically in third person) similar Space Age doubts,
"whether the Space Program was the noblest expression of the 20th century or the
quintessential statement of our fundamental insanity. It was after all the mark of insanity
that its mode of operation was distinguished by its logic--insanity was often more logical
than sanity when it came to attacking a problem" (20). It may well be that even god
cannot decide.
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PROBE: The Anti-Gnosticism of E. M. Cioran
From denial to denial, his existence is diminished: vaguer and more unreal
than a syllogism of sighs, how could he still be a creature of flesh and blood?
Anemic, he rivals the Idea itself; he has abstracted himself from his
ancestors, from his friends, from every soul and himself; in his veins, once
turbulent, rests a light from another world. Liberated from what he has lived,
unconcerned by what he will live; he demolishes the signposts on all his
roads, and wrests himself from the dials of all time. "I shall never meet
myself again," he decides, happy to turn his last hatred against himself,
happier still to annihilate--in his forgiveness--all beings, all things.
E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay
Not everyone in the world of "Surface Tension," please recall, was a True Believer in
cosmic conquest. The story has as well its conscientious objectors: the crew member on
board the original seed ship who dares to suggest that the effort to colonize the universe
is prideful enough to bring down the wrath of the gods; the youth of the microscopic
human world who oppose space exploration's wastefulness; the mechanic on Lavon's
expedition who believes his kind has no place in the new realm beyond the sky. And not
all those in the Space Age who have thought deeply about the extraterrestrial imperative
see it in as favorable a light as those who have spoken above.
Some who have heard us talk are more than ready to insist that the emperor wears no
clothes. Though the Hudson Institute would no doubt dismiss their criticisms as sure "to
produce apathy and decay on a planet-wide scale" because of their skeptical view of
technological progress, no one can deny that their ideas, however "inhumanist" they may
sound, are likewise in the air and must be heeded. It may well be that those who now
question the motives of our growing infinite presumption speak for what once was
thought to be the highest wisdom.
Though he has been described as a Gnostic (by Jacques Lacarriere), the Romanian born
essayist and aphorist E. M. Cioran should more properly be thought of as an analyst of
the human tendency toward Gnosticism, the most skeptical, most inhumanist critic in any
language of humankind's unquenchable longing. In books like The Trouble with Being
Born, A Short History of Decay, The Fall Into Time, The Temptation to Exist, and Drawn
and Quartered, Cioran offers, in the face of what he believes to be the dire need "to rein
in the expansion of a flawed animal" (Drawn and Quartered 34), a psychohistory of our
species' failure to adapt itself to life on Earth.
Cioran does, it is true, speak in Gnostic fashion of a "maleficent genius," a "suspect
providence" governing history (Drawn and Quartered 37). He does insist that "nothing
could persuade me that this world is not the fruit of a dark god whose shadow I extend,
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and that it is incumbent upon me to exhaust the consequences of the curse hanging over
him and his creation" (New Gods 89). And he speaks admiringly of Basilides the Gnostic
because he knew "that humanity, if it wants to be saved, must return within its natural
limits by a return to ignorance, true sign of redemption" (New Gods 97). But his
thoroughly skeptical solution to humankind's extreme alienation is not abandonment of
the world; he seeks no transcendence. He counsels humiliation: he seeks a return to, a
sinking back into, the earthly. We are autochthons of this world, if we would only realize
it.
Cioran is an "epicure of post-history," celebrating the possibility of "no more events," a
Gibbon meditating "at the end of not one cycle but all," but a victim still of "the very
human fear of being human" (Drawn and Quartered 34, 45, 72). ("The proof that man
loathes man?" Cioran writes in a characteristic passage: "Enough to be in a crowd, in
order to feel that you side with all the dead planets" [Drawn and Quartered 122].)
Cioran's reflections on human nature and destiny begin with the Fall. History, he writes,
is a "desertion forward" (Drawn and Quartered 41). Humankind fell into time because it
could not abide the peace and tranquility of a life in nature, because it could not endure
paradise.
Infatuated by his gifts, ["man"] flouts nature, breaks out of its stagnation, creating
a chaos alternately vile and tragic that becomes strictly (and naturally) untenable.
That he should clear out as soon as possible is surely nature's wish, and one that
man, if he wanted to, could gratify on the spot. Hence nature would be rid of these
seditious creatures whose every smile is subversive, of this anti-life force she
shelters by force, of this usurper who has stolen her secrets, in order to subjugate
and dishonor her. (Drawn and Quartered 50)
Though he admits that "we shall never know exactly what was broken" in us, Cioran
insists that "there is a break, it is there. It was there in the beginning" (Drawn and
Quartered 41). Considered against the backdrop of the "harmony of nature," humanity
thus "appears . . . as an episode, a digression, a heresy, as a killjoy, a wastrel, a
miscreant . . . a weakling, seduced by the vast, exposed to fatality which would
intimidate a god" (Fall Into Time 40). "Man," Cioran writes in an ambiguous but revealing
phrase, "is unacceptable" (Drawn and Quartered 181).
A certain "faculty of noncoincidence" thus drives our species forward: "What flings us into
action is the nonbeing in ourselves, our debility and our inadaptability." Man, Cioran
writes, "bears within and upon himself something unreal, something unearthly, which is
revealed in the pauses of his febrility. By dint of the vague, the equivocal, he is of this
world, and he is not of this world." Indeed, we are "indenture[d] himself to
elsewhere" (Fall Into Time 46, 47).
Modernity has not changed the essential nature of human being. Today's human is only a
"euphoric infection of the original disease, of that false innocence which awakened in
Adam desire for the new," but we have now "exhausted all the virtues of [our]
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failure" (Fall Into Time 52, 53). We are spreading the infection; now our "temptation to
Titanism" threatens the Earth: "Our contortions, visible or secret, we communicate to the
planet; already it trembles even as we do, it suffers the contagion of our crises and, as
this grand mal spreads, it vomits us forth, cursing us the while" (Drawn and Quartered
57-58).
But our desertion continues. "Cut off from every root, unfit, moreover to mix with dust or
mud, we have achieved the feat of breaking not only with the depth of things, but their
very surface" ("Civilized Man" 92)--even the surface of the Earth. "The greatest of all
follies," he writes in Drawn and Quartered, "is to believe that we walk on solid
ground" (80).
Nowhere does Cioran write directly about space exploration--except for his suggestion (in
A Fall Into Time) that "useless science" seeks to appease our alienation by "bestowing
other planets as a reward" ("Civilized Man" 94). But from hints scattered throughout his
writings it is not difficult to reconstruct his understanding of its motives. In A Short
History of Decay, for example, an examination of our tendency toward irrationality ends
by suggesting where such irrationality might lead. "What life is left him robs him of what
reason is left him. Trifles or scourges--the passing of a fly or the cramps of the planet-horrify him equally. With his nerves on fire, he would like the Earth to be made of glass,
to shatter it to smithereens; and with what thirst would fling himself toward the stars to
reduce them to powder, one by one (Short History 176). In the twentieth century, Cioran
writes, mankind's "ills fill sidereal space; his griefs make the poles tremble," and they
"[wring] from him a cry which compromises the music of the spheres and the movement
of the stars" (Short History 176; my emphasis).
For Cioran, our infinite presumption begins in the womb; our otherwordliness is genetic.
In one of the "Stabs at Bewilderment" in Drawn and Quartered, Cioran offers the
following reflection on a human infant: "This little blind creature, only a few days old,
turning its head every which way in search of something or other, this naked skull, this
initial blankness, this tiny monkey that has sojourned for months in a latrine and that
soon, forgetting its origins, will spit on the galaxies" (92; my emphasis)
To hear us talk, to listen to the rhetoric of the Space Age, as we have done in this
chapter, suggests that Cioran's words are no mere metaphors but rather psychologically
candid accounts of motives normally hidden behind scientific and technocratic language.
Always "indenture[d] to elsewhere," elsewhere has now become, for a puerile creature
both "of this world, and . . . not of this world," space: we are being bestowed other
planets as a reward.
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PROBE: "Body's Earth": H. E. Francis's
"Ballad of the Engineer Carl Feldmann"
Not only does technological man want to make his own babies, but he wants to do
so without the hormones and flesh, without lust and arousal, and his most heroic
representatives, the astronauts, embody this distrust of women, of the biological,
and of the irrational dependencies of the flesh.
Vivian Sobchack, "The Virginity of Astronauts"
If the sea was a symbol of the unconscious, was space perhaps an image of
unfettered time, and the inability to penetrate it a tragic exile to one of the limbos
of eternity, a symbolic death in life?
J.G. Ballard, "A Question of Re-Entry"
In "Ballad of the Engineer Carl Feldmann," a disturbing short story, part prose and part
poetry, H. E. Francis dissects the life and dreams of a NASA space engineer and in so
doing offers a telling portrait of infinite presumption. Though not science fiction, it could
stand, like "A Letter to God" and "Surface Tension," as a foundational tale of the Space
Age.
At the story's inception, Feldmann, we learn, is unemployed, laid off by the space agency
because of cut-backs in the aftermath of the Apollo missions. Unable any longer to bear
the frustations of his dead-ended career and the suffering of a marriage that even in its
better days had played second fiddle to his all-consuming work ("a three-shift life leaves
you no time not a minute for sitting and talking and touching and maybe even a nap in
each other's arms or the girls sitting on your lap and all of us eating ice cream together
somewhere and watching ducks, swimming" [246]), his wife Clara has deserted him. Her
departure has left him with the responsibility of caring for their two daughters, Elaine and
Gretta. As Feldmann, poverty-ridden and in despair, makes his daily rounds from home
to school and the unemployment office, Francis gradually discloses, in stream-ofconsciousness style and largely through the use of flashbacks, his thoughts, fears,
memories, and growing insanity.
In the prose portions of the story we are plunged into his past and present struggle with
the quotidian, a struggle, eventually tragic, which his otherwordliness has made him
incapable of enduring. And in interwoven poetic interludes, we learn of his recruitment by
Wernher von Braun and his conversion to NASA True Believing. Prior to joining the space
agency, seems Feldmann had been a man without vision, without direction, but von
Braun--"The heart in that great presence in the Hilton tower" (during his initial job
interview)--changed all that by demanding allegiance to his extraterrestrial values.
Von Braun said stars. a city in the sky, man lifted up and up.
--Carl Feldmann, I want your head.
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He infuses his vision of the extraterrestrial imperative into his recruits. They become, in
fact, extensions of the "Great Man," a human demiurge, and the mission he offers them
is more than scientific.
His gaze,
galactic, multiplied the suns, universe on universe,
made every man his astronaut.--Join us, he said.
We're a family here.
--I never had a family.
High in the Hilton tower, Carl bowed before
that August head. When he left, he carried stars. (247)
Working with joy ("He wanted--when a check came--to tear it up" [254]) at his own
particular task, the development of "new electronic sensitive feelers on the fingers,
detectors that would revolutionize the process of collection and transmission of data," he
comes to routinely think of his individual mind as at the service of the species-mind.
Inspired by von Braun, Feldmann recognizes his place in a great human project:
one life to live, take up the gauntlet,
each for all future life. . . .
....................
The mind must make
a perfect part that fit the perfect part
the minds of others made--or no deeds come.
--Between Earth and moon a city must grow
visible.
The various NASA cities in which he and his family must live--Huntsville, Alabama;
Houston, Texas; Sunnyvale, California; Cape Canaveral--are proto-New Jerusalems for
humankind,
cities within cities created
to execute the dream, hierarchies so communal
no monastery dedicated to save God's world,
no artisan raising their four-hundred-years
Burgos stone by stone felt such a medieval urge
to build cathedrals in the sky. 247)
And Cape Canaveral, he knows, is nothing less than this project's --this "invisible
pyramid's"--launching pad:
All flesh
gathered at the breeding point, Canaveral,
where earth sallied into that mysterious dark
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to spawn worlds and press back medieval night. (247-48)
Though he recognizes the hazards of his--and humanity's--aspiration, he believes it
absolutely essential to human destiny: without the goal of space, we will acquiesce to
mortality, will accept death. Without extraterrestrial ambitions, there will be no life of the
mind:
The way to it is dark, dark, perilous,
the landscape infinite. Only mind and all man's heart
can outreach this world's death. Or why
mind? Why passions to execute the mind's say? (247)
Feldmann thus comes to possess a timeless understanding of NASA's accomplishments
and his own contribution to them.
Carl watched Earth penetrate sky. Electronics
carried mankind the beginning of the way--out, up.
On screens flesh soared with theirs, landed, explored,
nearly exhausting exhaustion, till lunar liftoff
bolted into the current home. (252)
For Feldmann, the eyes of the astronauts, as they move "one planet closer to the edge of
things," are really the eyes of the species. And in spite of all the technical and personnel
difficulties NASA encounters, Feldmann is convinced that humankind cannot turn back:
Carl saw
man had to purge the mind of all thought which turned
him back to Earth, fix one pure unflinching
gaze on that invisible end, black holes that might
begin another universe. (252)
But in his heart of hearts, Feldmann's vision is driven by motives that are more mystical
than scientific.
William Carlos Williams once insisted that behind all man's exploits stands a woman.
Even in the powerful presence of Von Braun, Feldmann senses the even more powerful
aura of
a woman in the room,
deep-shadowed there
in light
beyond where sun
burned a crown into the great man's hair.
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A figure of light, this woman represents for Feldmann a light so pure
he could not turn his eyes. She beckoned. He rose
and followed. She made a path of light through galaxies,
voids, darks, chaos, all gravities, admonishing
to keep the path straight in his eyes
or die
without her.
Her voice calls to him, draws him on in his work, summoning him to a city higher than
the New Jerusalem, inspiring a longing greater than even von Braun had instilled:
--Listen. It is a word of love:
there is a city beyond the city that you build
halfway to the moon, one after,
one after that and one after that, until beyond beyond
you'll find the city all blood dreams of, you'll find
me there, fair for you to house in, and take
me into you again,
and dream no more, but be,
both one. All rivers then will flow, all light
burn, all earths take life from us. We will become
the song we long to hear. (248)
But this cosmic Circe exacts a high price for her gift. She demands of Feldmann that he
first journey into hell: "But one thing only, love:/You must, before you get to me, go
darkest down" (248). Francis's story chronicles this descent.
Feldmann finds himself increasingly incapable of dealing with his domestic life. With his
wife gone, his immersion in the "ceaseless narrow round" (254) of household chores-shopping, cooking, cleaning, caring for his daughters, dressing them each morning,
combing their hair--makes him "feel like a woman," and yet he knows--and his daughters
know--that he does not possess the "special equipment . . . a sense which keeps a keel"
of women. His mind is elsewhere. ("Know where I was? Out/so far I knew everything was
possible. I had/a feeling infinite of stars" [256].) In her dramatic dialogue between the
sexes "Duel," feminist Robin Morgan has her spokeswoman for the feminine insist that
"it's not to see myself in everything I want, but to find everything at home in me."
Feldmann demands the former.)
"Voids opened in the Earth. He staggered." Because they carry "the world's face," his
daughters, despite his obvious love for them, come to oppress him.
Two creatures played on the lawn. It surprised:
how they come and go--Elaine? Gretta?-whose faces sometimes rose abrupt as monsters
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in a lair and would not let him pass, bodies
so suddenly transformed to innocence
he'd not have dreamed he must cut at those faces
turned Medusa heads. (257)
In everything he does for them, they find him wanting compared to their vanished
mother. When Elaine becomes ill and must be taken to the hospital, she rebels: "She
struck and kicked, cried Ma, Momma? I don't want you, I hate you, I want my
mother" (259).
Encouraged by news of a new position at NASA for which he is qualified, Feldmann's
hopes are temporarily restored, but the job goes to someone else, and Feldmann's world
comes apart at the seams. "In all directions waste, void infinite, forever,/No path leads
off from it, no green grows, no man moves,/no lady beckons, no city stands" (261).
Everything earthly becomes repellent:
A thing happened in the spring: cold came into him: at strange times --at sight of a
new rose budding, a crawling caterpillar dazzling with black and orange, even in
the sun ice touched him, it ran up his leg, pierced his heart, he shivered when he
heard laughter. (262)
He is trapped in an alien world: "His head yearns after/unremembered memory. His feet
can find no way./Dark fills with seething tides that throb his bones" 258).
And one spring day his madness, his unearthliness, reaches a fever pitch. All that is left
of his world is negation.
He sat on the back steps staring at the earth. He had his garden spouting green.
What is it--in the spring--breaks? It hurts the ground, and blood. You almost
cannot hold the pain of wanting to break out of you. Blood wants to go. Flesh keeps
it from space. Cells want to know time. What is it? is it out there? . . . The
neighbors' cat preens on the fence, white with black spots, black suns. It meows at
the girls. The sound hurts his head. Gretta laughs. Elaine does not. Not. (263; my
emphasis)
His daughters, figures of Earth, become the focus of his hallucinations: "The girls' heads
make two golden suns in the garden, moving and shimmering. Hairs quiver like a spider's
web in the moonlight. Such beauty--where will it go? They dig and plant" (263). Like
Virginia Woolf's Septimus Smith (in Mrs. Dalloway), he is overcome with a noumenal
sense of the secret life inherent in things--a life he cannot identify with and must destroy.
Something is throbbing in the ground, his feet beat with it, it moves and moves,
the cold is going, his hands flex. Hands must do. Do. . . . He grips hard the post. It
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thumps with the moving dark. Air thumps with it, sky, his hands. (263)
In his otherworldliness, Carl Feldmann takes this force as a manifestation of the vertical
tendency that drives all living things:
What is it holds your eyes to Earth? Tear them loose--he wants--he can't-- He
stares: it breaks and breeds: all pushes up, up, to sun and after, against all down.
So many million years in his blood drive up and still look down? Gravity hold down,
legs want the Earth to suck you down, but not the head, not. (263-64)
His girls are of the Earth; to Feldmann they are Earth. "The girls' heads fall in gold. Little
suns. But body's Earth. He stares at them: two earths. To breed" (264; my emphasis).
This he cannot bear.
Their earthiness, their inextricable involvement in the worldly and the contingent, negate
his values.
Work is dignity. Dream is dignity. The Earth is dark. His eyes go into it. No dignity's
a hole. The hole's in me, suck me down into it like Earth's own gravity, a star's, the
universe's. All eats itself. God eats his own body, eats time and space, hereafter.
(264)
As he feels the Earth beat in him, he longs to be free of what has been called "the cosmic
food chain" (Thompson, Passages 101). Plagued by the "old thing in the blood that wants
and wants" (264), he looks into Elaine's eyes and feels her rejection, her need for her
real mother. He strangles her and then, simply and methodically, her sister as well.
In the character of Carl Feldmann, in his vertical obsession, his distrust of the earthly, his
puerile failure of accommodation to the everyday, his Space Age dream of a New
Jerusalem, a city "beyond beyond," a city "all blood dreams of," his spaciness, we
recognize the stigmata of the modern, New Gnostic. Such a mentality does not, of
course, require the murder of one's children, but commitment to the extraterrestrial
imperative, the aspiration to "purge the mind of all thought which turned/ . . . back to
Earth," does exact unrivaled sacrifices from its infinitely presumptuous hosts, asking
nothing less than abandonment of our place on Earth and the excarnation of the human.
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4. The Simulator
I
We live in the world where we arose, completely suited by God, evolution, or both,
to its conditions. Unless we abuse it terribly, it keeps us alive even if we forget
about it or ignore it. When our created systems malfunction, as they always do
sooner or later, the Earth is still there to hold us and keep us while we tinker with
our broken creations. In space, when the rockets misfire, when the O rings and
backup O rings fail, when the captain loses his mind, or when the waste- purifying
algae develop a disease, as they all must sooner or later, then the story is over. If
we could create a truly complete life support system to sustain us in space, then
we would have created the Earth.
David Ehrenfeld, "The Lesson of the Tower"
In Charlotte Zolotow's children's book The Sky Was Blue, a mother and daughter sit
looking through a photo album. The little girl is filled with wonder at pictures of her
mother as a little girl the same age as her daughter. "Is this you?" she asks in
amazement. "What funny clothes," she comments, revealing herself to be a thoroughly
modern child for whom the past has been reduced to an "outmoded style of
consumption." Her mother explains that for her they were not odd at all, since they were
all she had ever known. "I wore a dress like this," she tells her daughter. "I had a doll
like this. We had a car like this. And I lived in a house like this." And the book's illustrator
shows each of these things in turn, just as her daughter sees them.
But the little girl's curiosity is still not satisfied. She wants to know about more than her
mother's material culture. "What was it like," she asks. "How did you feel?" "Oh," her
mother replies, poignantly.
I felt the way you feel. Important things will always be the same. The Sky Was
Blue, grass was green, snow was white and cold, the sun was warm and yellow,
just as they all are now. When I went to bed, I wanted my mother to hug me
before she turned off the light. And when I lay in bed, the room was dark, the
clocks ticked, the grown-ups talked downstairs, and I could hear the wind in the
trees outside, just as you do now.
As she turns the pages of the photo album, the little girl journeys even further back into
the past, into the worlds of her grandmother and great-grandmother, and each time we
see their dresses, their dolls, their forms of transformation, their houses --each changing
with the fashion of the time. Each time she again asks her mother, "What was it like?
How did she feel?" And each time her mother replies that, unlike these transient material
possessions, the "important things" have never changed and will never change.
Returning from their time travels, the little girl and her mother look toward the future;
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they imagine together a time when the daughter will be the mother, showing pictures to
her offspring in a future world in which "the sky will always be blue. Grass will always be
green. Snow will always be white and cold. The sun will always be warm and yellow."
The Sky Was Blue was published two years after Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Almost
three decades later, after more than a quarter-century of ecological consciousness and
more than thirty years into the Space Age, it no longer seems certain that the "important
things" will never change. And it is not just the threat of ecological catastrophe or nuclear
winter that endangers their existence. The modern Western episteme, as it now reaches
its culmination in Space Age dreams of total artifice, of rebuilding the support system of
the planet beyond the Earth, has placed in peril even the changeless.
II
As humans have moved into totally artificial environments, our direct contact with
and knowledge of the planet has been snapped. Disconnected, like astronauts
floating in space, we cannot know up from down or truth from fiction. Conditions
are appropriate for the implantation of arbitrary realities.
Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
In the intense and systematic training of astronauts for life and work in space,
simulators--various earthbound training apparatus that approximate actual conditions
and activities: intense pressure during lift-off, weightlessness on board an orbiting craft,
an EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity)--have played an essential role since the early years of
the space program. Prominent examples include the centrifuge, airborne and underwater
weightlessness chambers, and mock-ups of the Apollo capsule and space shuttle.
In preparation for the monumental leap into the total artifice of life in space that
Spacekind envisions as imperative to our continuation as a viable species, we have also
witnessed the development of numerous Space Age spin-offs, from robot arms to Velcro
to foods like Tang and astronaut ice cream. (We read in the New York Times [Browne] of
all the fantastic by-products we will enjoy as a result of SDI research: computer modeling
programs for long-term weather forecasting, new, incredibly detailed maps of the ocean
floor; advances in computer pattern recognition advances resulting in advanced robots
capable of being household servants; lasers which can eliminate malignant tumors at any
point in the body with incredible precision; thousandfold increases in computer speed,
etc.)
It has now become common to advertise a product as "Space Age"--the term having
become synonymous with "state of the art." To call something "Space Age," however, is
to risk bringing to mind another less welcome connotation. For those whose image of life
in space has been forever shaped by Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1967),
with its scenes of astronauts eatingfourcourse TV dinners of different-colored,
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a simulation of the real thing. (Russian cosmonauts aboard the Salyut space station
drank coffee made from their own reconstituted perspiration.)
Consider freeze-dried astronaut ice cream, for example. Its texture is very similar to
cardboard, its color like a washed-out imitation, its smell virtually nonexistent. And its
taste--the only flavor ordinarily available seems to be Neapolitan--can only be described
as a deduction. Eating real ice cream is ordinarily a sensual experience: the cold of the
ice cream itself, the rich taste of the chips, the refreshing flavor of the mint make a
Carbon Chauvinist glad to have a body to stuff such delightful matter into. But NASA ice
cream is disembodied stuff, capable of being enjoyed only as a deduction is enjoyed. As
you break off a piece (no spoons needed, no mess, no fuss) and place it in your mouth, it
takes a moment for you to realize that it does not taste like cardboard. And then,
gradually--mentally--it dawns on you what the object in your mouth tastes like. If this
were ice cream, you think it would be Neapolitan. You have not so much eaten ice cream
as remembered eating ice cream. Freeze-dried ice cream is a tip-of-the-tongue
phenomenon. It is ice cream for idealists--simulated ice cream. So, too, in space we will
not experience life as we have known it on Earth; we will deduce it, or at best remember
it.
But it is not only NASA that has undertaken the modeling of a future life in space: much
of the postmodern can best be understood as a kind of cultural simulator for a presumed
extraterrestrial destiny, a simulator in which both Earthkind and Spacekind, waiting for
their divorce to become final, currently dwell together in an uneasy peace, yet coerced
into living the otherworldly life-style of the one who has chosen to sever the relationship,
the one about to depart. Already we have begun to be, in James Hillman's phrase,
"anesthetized to things."1 Already we live in a world that can best be described as
bearing only a striking resemblance to life on Earth.
In the Space Age, as urban civilization has become more and more a twenty-four-hour-aday venture, the difference between night and day has been largely obliterated, an
abstract distinction merely. In the United States, Jean Baudrillard observes, night--indeed
any period of rest--is simply unacceptable. Americans cannot "bear to see the
technological process halted. Everything has to be working all the time, there has to be
no let-up in man's artiHficial power, and the intermittent character of natural cycles . . .
has to be replaced by a functional continuum that is sometimes absurd" (50).2 (On a
Gerald K. O'Neill space colony, of coure, no let-up will even be possible. ("Once on
board," Steve Baer has commented, "in my mind's eye, I don't see the landscape of
Carmel by the Sea as Gerald O'Neill suggests. . . . Instead I see acres of airconditioned
Greyhound bus interior, glinting, slightly greasy railings, old rivet heads needing paint--I
don't hear the surf at Carmel and smell the ocean. I hear piped in music and smell
chewing gum. I anticipate a continuous, vague, low-key 'airplane fear'" [quoted in Brand,
Space Colonies 40].)
In the Space Age, acoustician R. Murray Schafer shows in The Tuning of the World that
despite an obsessesion with "high fidelity" in sound reproduction, we live, in the midst of
our simulations, in perhaps the lowest fidelity soundscape in human history (41). Against
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the perpetual background noise of both indoor and outdoor environments, the perpetual
hum and drone of generators, motors, air-conditioning, flowing electricity, "Moozak" (the
"audio analgesia of earthly boredom" as Schafer calls it, radio and television, individual,
"discrete" sounds have lost virtually all definition.
In the Space Age, we can tune it all out and tune in instead to National Public Radio's
New Age "Music from the Hearts of Space," a program--produced by San Franciscan
Steven Hill--offering (as the show's promotional literature explains) "rhythmic or tonal
movements" created in order to "animate the experience of flying, cruising, gliding, or
hovering," taking listeners--"audio- isplated" individuals--"out of . . . their body or at
least out of their normal sound environment" and thereby enabling them to express
"criticism of the environment by effectively removing themselves from it
sonically." (Russian cosmonauts aboard the Salyut space station play recordings of Earth
sounds--thunder, rain, bird song--in order to drown out the monotonous hum of
mechanical noise emanating from fans, computers, and vents. "We never grew tired of
them," one notes in his diary. "They were like meetings with Earth" [quoted in Oberg and
Oberg 10].)
In the Space Age, a television critic dissecting the growing prominence of simulation in
television (from wrestling, to lip-syncing--"simulation's primal scene"--to news
"dramatization" of unfilmed actual events) finds it of a piece with the postmodernist
celebration of the "ersatz, the logic of the supermarket, its shelves lined with 'natural'
foods compounded of petrochemicals." Dedicated to a "radical agenda of destablization,"
simulation, he concludes, "establishes the tenacious problematic of Memorex (is it real or
is it . . . ) as a useful, binding constant" (Sorkin 163, 171-72).
In the Space Age, virtual reality systems are given a number of practical applications:
in the development of automobiles, the planning of mass transit systems, the layout of
assemblage procedures; the creation of molecules for new medicines; the training of
surgeons (allowing a physician to move around inside a "virtual body" in preparation for a
difficult operation); and for "telecommuting" (in which individuals can, using a modem,
share their virtual worlds over the telephone). NASA, of course, is quick to see the
usefulness of the VRS, enabling, for example, a technician on Earth to fix a virtual
satellite, so that a robot in space--programmed to imitate his or her every move--may
repair the real one.3
Jeron Lenier, the CEO of the JPL Corporation and a key developer of VRS technology, is
insistent, however, that the device is not only practical. Interviewed on "All Things
Considered" on National Public Radio, Lenier, sounding a bit like a Carbon Chauvinist,
insists that all previous technology was inherently masculine; a manipulation of palpable
tools to control and alter objective existence and a rejection of the "wetness" of things: of
the reality of the "decaying" and "dying" body. The VRS, on the other hand, validates
subjective experience and evokes the make-believe world of childhood. The alternative
worlds introduced by a VRS, Lenier claims, showing his true colors, are no mere
simulations but "shared, waking, intentional dreams," as real as physical reality.
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In the Space Age, caught up in the fervor of the information revolution, we have been
seized, in Jeremy Rifkin's phrase, by "the vision of simulated worlds." "With information,"
Rifkin writes in Time Wars, "we can turn chaos into order, darkness into light. We can
design new worlds of our making. These new worlds flow directly from the psyche. They
are simulations born of pure thought. . . . We now have it in our power to reduce matter
to energy and energy to information" (Time Wars 148-63). In the Space Age, many are
ready to accept the contention (first formulated in the famous Turing test) that "a perfect
simulation of intelligence is intelligence."
In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick offers his dark yet completely
credible vision of a San Franciso of the near future after a terrible nuclear war ("World
War Terminus"). The population of the Earth, we learn, has decreased to less than a
million; those who did not die from bomb blasts or from the prodigious radioactive dust
produced in the holocaust have fled "off world" to start a new life in space. ("The U.N.,"
Dick explains, "had made it easy to emigrate, difficult if not impossible to stay."
"Emigrate or degenerate," government-sponsored advertisements insist.) The book's
hero is a bounty hunter whose special task is the "retirement" of renegade, nearlyperfect
replicants, engineered for service on space colonies, who have returned to Earth,
infiltrating the human population, anxious to become completely human.
Virtually all that remains of the civilization of Dick's version of Earthkind is a simulation.
Only a battery of complex "empathy" tests can tell the androids from actual human
beings. Humans are incapable of experiencing emotion without the aid of their "Mood
Organs," which can be programmed to place their possessors in the right frame of mind
for everything from "self-accusatory depression" to sex to the "desire to watch TV no
matter what's on it." And since almost no living animals still exist, city residents, feeling
the nostalgic need for some kind of link to the "natural" world, are willing to spend large
sums of money and lavish great care on extremely lifelike simulated animals,which they
keep as pets while trying all the time to keep the artificiality of their "electric sheep"
secret from the neighbors, thus elevating their own high status as the owners of
something real.
Only science fiction, of course (though robotic pets are indeed already in the works), yet
to hear us talk, simulation is in fact modernity's special, pet, historical project and its
enactment--prior to mass emigration in our case--only a matter of time.
In the Space Age, an Australian historian of consciousness and radical feminist
contemplating American science fiction culture in an essay entitled "Exterminating
Fetuses: Abortion, Disarmament, and the Sexo-Semiotics of Extraterrestrialism," argues
that the real purpose of our current "simulations of extraterrestrialism" is to mask earthly
injustice through "distancing devices [telecommunication systems to skycrapers to
nukespeak] which provide the illusion of escape from the moral implications and physical
effects of the techno-reproductive choices we make" (Sofia 58-59).
III
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We have not ended rainfall or sunlight; in fact, rainfall and sunlight may become
more important forces in our lives. . . . But the meaning of the wind, the sun, the
rain--of nature--has already changed. yes, the wind still blows,--but no longer from
some other sphere, some inhuman place.
Bill McKibben, The End of Nature
To a discerning eye, of course, the handwriting was on the wall as early as 1925. In that
year, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, seeking to explain his Duino Elegies in a letter to their
Polish translator, could already recognize that decay of the real:
Now, from America, empty, indifferent things are pouring across, sham things,
dummy life. . . . A house, in the American sense, an American apple or a grapevine
over there, has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which
went the hopes and reflections of our forefathers. . . . Live things, things lived and
conscient of us, are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the
last still to have known such things. (Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 374-75; Rilke's
emphasis)
Writing in 1946, the British author Charles Morgan would record the further progress of
the oblivion of Being in the following dialogue between a wise old man and a young girl in
"The Constant Things."
"The alarming thing is," he said, "that this time it isn't only the changeable things
that are changing, but the unchangeable as well. Anyhow, that's the danger--even
for me. Not only dress and manners and bank balances and the social order, but
the sea and the sky--and Westminster Abbey."
"Westminster Abbey?" the girl repeated.
"The sea, the sky," he answered, "not only the sky and the sea are in question. The
songs of birds, firelight and sunlight, the woods, the turn of the seasons, the Earth
itself and the smell of it, the whole natural magic going on behind our little journey
from the cradle to the grave. Well," he said, "you have to choose. What are they?
Are they still what they have always been: the perspective of our mortality and for
some of us, an emblem, or at least an analogy, of our immortality? Or have they
become, as it were, infected by our impermanence? Are they little more than a
stage-setting to our personal and social drama? . . . Are we related to them at all,
as mankind has always been? Is this Earth that we touch a part of ourselves, or
has it become just a thing we walk on, like a pavement? Are we becoming, in our
consciousness, separated from the stars, as indifferent to them as we are to the
electric chandeliers in the lounge of an hotel? Are we being driven, or driving
ourselves, into exile from the unity of nature?" (quoted in Berg 235-36)
By the 1970s the perceptive had realized the time had come to bid farewell to the
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constant things, as Susan Sontag admits in the following elliptical exchange from a piece
entitled "Unguided Tour" in her I, Etcetera.
I took a trip to see the beautiful things. Change of scenery. Change of heart. And
do you know?
What?
They're still there.
Ah, but they won't be there for long.
I know. That's why I went. To say goodbye. Whenever I travel, it's always to say
goodbye. (233)
By the 1980s, Marxist critic Fredric Jameson could detect the progress of "a mutation in
built space itself," the creation of a "a society of the image or the simulacrum," a
"hyperspace" that induces us to "grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our
body to some new, as yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible,
dimensions" (87). And Jean Baudrillard would find even Disneyland an ominous
presentiment of the demise of the real.
Disneyland [Baudrillard writes] is presented as imaginary in order to make us
believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America
surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of
simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology),
but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the
reality principle. (Selected Writings 172)
And now that we have made the world over in our own image, converting the immanently
real into a mere simulation of the transcendent, swapping the horizontal for the vertical,
when even our buildings mimic rockets on launching pads, our indefatagible "progress" is
about to take us, still Cartesian, to the stars. Since Sputnik, as Marshall McLuhan has
noted, there is no nature (177-78).
IV
Nobody so far has succeeded in living in a world that does not manifest itself of its
own accord.
Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind
We already live, Martin Heidegger has argued, in the age of the "oblivion of Being," a
mentality for which simulation comes as second nature. Our current stance vis-a '-vis the
world, our dominating and "commandeering" manipulation of nature and its powers for
our own ends, our "current posture of lord of the Earth," is, as Heidegger's ontology
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demonstrates, the final, logical culmination of the foundational metaphysics of the
Western world. (An astonishing Ingersoll-Rand Corporation advertisement--astonishing in
its candor about human motives--offers a precise representation of our mind-set. It
shows half the planet impaled on an orange-juice squeezer, natural resources--coal, oil,
water, minerals--flowing out into the bowl below. "Squeeze a little harder" the copy
reads: both an imperative from "Homo collossus" [Catton 82] to the Earth itself and a
reminder of corporate responsibility. [See Hawken].) We have, according to Heidegger,
lost all sense of wonder, all "openness to the mystery," because, hell-bent on harnessing
the fruits of Being, we have forgotten all about Being itself.
The "unconcealed" no longer exists for us. Only "beings" matter; only objects, known,
useful, exploitable things, concern us. We have transmuted what the Greeks called physis
into nature; we have converted "the mystery" into what Heidegger calls "the Stored
Away": "a tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The Earth now
reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that the
peasant formerly cultivated and set in order appears differently than it did when to set in
order still meant to take care of and to maintain" (Question 14-15).
If, as Marx thought, it has been characteristic of our time that "all that is solid melts into
air," if everything of value has become ephemeral, if our work has been degraded, if we
have become alienated from nature, from ourselves and others, the true cause lies,
according to Heidegger's more radical analysis, not just in the disintegrative economics of
capitalism but in our "dasein," our manner of "being-in-the-world." Or, as we should
perhaps put it now that, in the Space Age, we have become "due back on the planet
Earth," our way of "not-being-in-the-world."
"In this 'oblivion' that blocks the self-manifesting of being," Heidegger concludes, lies
humankind's greatest danger. "The danger is real that every other way of revealing will
be driven out and that man will lose his true relation to himself and to all else. Language,
the primal mode through which man may experience and think and know whatever is, in
its Being, may be bereft of its power, to become only a mere instrument of information.
And man may be divested of his true essence and become one who "manufactures
himself" (Question 26-27). In a time of the oblivion of Being, "the impression comes to
prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct." And
from this "illusion" springs "one final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and
always encounters only himself."
All that we take to be modern--our obsessive objectivity, our domineering humanism, our
indifference to and ignorance of the past, the ever-burgeoning cult of progress--may
represent anything but an advance for the human spirit. These characteristics, Arendt
has argued in "The Vita Activa and the Modern Age" (Chapter 6 of The Human Condition),
should rather be understood as symptoms of a compulsive fixation with a past mistake.
Just as an individual human being may spend the rest of his or her life trying to
compensate for an earlier indiscretion (avoiding deep commitment to another person, for
example, because of once being badly "burned" in a love affair), so, too, modernity,
Arendt is telling us, has constructed a psyche, a world, a philosophy, and a science all in
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order to make amends for the error of understanding finally discovered with the
Copernican revolution.
A creature that does not take kindly to criticism, that dreams absurdly of infallibility, we
have not in four centuries lived down the shame of being mistaken about such a basic
"truth": we had believed--and constructed a psyche, religions, a world, a philosophy, and
a science to match this belief--that the Earth and humanity itself were the center of the
cosmos, only to discover that we had been slightly mistaken about the centrality of the
planet and ourselves. Reeling from the blow, we set out to make certain that we wouldn't
be fooled again. Protected by a Cartesian methodology, we transformed ourselves into
Homo faber.
The Cartesian method [Arendt observes] of securing certainty against universal
doubt corresponded most precisely to the most obvious conclusion to be drawn
from the new physical science: though one cannot know truth as something given
and disclosed, man can at least know what he makes himself. This, indeed, became
the most general and most generally accepted attitude of the modern age, and it is
this conviction, rather than the doubt underlying it, that propelled one generation
after another for more than three hundred years into an ever-quickening pace of
discovery and development. (Human Condition 283-84)
Intended originally to guarantee the stability of a new, humanistic reality, all that we call
modern thought--including the culture that it has generated in its wake--has instead
tasted of unreality. Pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps, we nevertheless set
about constructing a dis-qualified world where no Evil Genius could ever again deceive
us, for the "Battle-Star Galactica" world (as Erazim Kohak's designation) we first
abstractly dreamed and then set about realizing would contain nothing natural, but only
simulations, things of our own devising, from artificial environments, to artificial organs,
to artificial Truth.
V
At the bottom of this whole [space] effort lies a purpose that animates the
entiremegamachine, indeed, figures as its only viable consummation: to reduce the
human organism itself, its habitat, and its mode of existence, and its life-purpose
to just those minimal dimensions that will bring it under total external control.
Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power
In America in particular, this spacious and spacy land, the simulation would seem to be
very far advanced, greatly accelerated by what has been deemed the "abstract
materialism" and "transcendental acquisition" of contemporary narcissism. As the de
Tocqueville of the Space Age, French critic Jean Baudrillard, has taught us to see,
America, "the original version of modernity" (America 76), is itself the "hyper-realized"
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site of this simulation. Victims of a "nostalgia for the future," dedicated to the incessant
simulation of its historical project, the "literal transcription of dreams into reality" ("After
Utopia" 52-53), our only roots now exist in that which is not yet.
And America has for some time now been exporting--like the pods of the Body
Snatchers--the mentality, tools, and techniques of simulation across the face of the
globe, compelling recruits for a future monoculture in a phase of cultural diffusion and
planetary evolution which William Irwin Thompson deems "the Los Angelization of planet
Earth" (At the Edge 3-27), which Baudrillard calls "the satellization of the
real" (Simulations 149), and which Loren Eiseley would describe as the spread of the
World Eaters. (The Japanese may make all the TV sets, German filmmaker Wim Wenders
notes in the film Tokyo-Ga, but America--master of cultural hegemony--makes the
images that go on them.)
The "commonly accepted notion that Americans are materialists," Alan Watts insists in
Does It Matter? "is pure bunk." Since--as Watts correctly observes--a materialist is,
strictly speaking, "one who loves material, a person devoted to the enjoyment of the
physical and immediate present," Americans can only be described as "abstractionists":
"They hate material, and convert it as swiftly as possible into mountains of junk and
clouds of poisonous gas. As a people, our ideal is to have a future, and so long as this is
true we shall never have a present" (29).
In a recent "Cathy" comic strip--Cathy Guisewite's ruthlessly perceptive daily chronicle of
modern spaciness--we find Watts' insight convincingly demonstrated. Cathy and her
boyfriend Irving introduce us, in a Sunday comic show-and-tell, to all the new material
possessions in their repertoire, all of which are "state of the art" and none of which is
ever used: an "anodized aluminum multi-lens three-beam mini excavation spotlight that
live its life in the junk drawer with dead batteries"; a "high-tech, epoxy-finished, heavygauge steel grid hanging unit for home repair tools that required two carpenters to install
and is now used as a scarf rack"; "safari clothes that will never be near a jungle";
"aerobic footgear that will never set foot in an aerobics class"; a "deep-sea dive watch
that will never get damp"; "architectural magazines we don't read filled with pictures of
furniture we don't like"; "financial strategy software keyed to a checkbook that's lost
somewhere under a computer no one knows how to work"; an "art poster from an exhibit
we never went to of an artist we never heard of." Guisewite brilliantly labels this post Me
Decade conspicuous consumption, "abstract materialism": materialism about as "realistic"
or representational as a Jackson Pollock canvas. "We've moved past the things we want
and need and are buying those things that have nothing to do with our lives," Cathy
herself tells us in the cartoon's final frame. In the 1980s, the age of the yuppie, we
perfected the art of what Time magazine has called "transcendental acquisition."
As one futurist notes, "America is striving to win power over the sum total of things,
complete and absolute mastery of nature in all its aspects." Our real motive, our
"ultimate objective," according to Robert Jungk, is "to occupy God's place, to repeat his
deeds, to recreate and organize a man-made cosmos according to man-made laws of
reason, foresight and efficiency. . . . It destroys whatever is primitive, whatever grows in
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disordered profusion or evolved through patient mutation" (quoted by Passmore 18).
With its deep and now irrevocable political and social linkage to modern technocracy, the
coming of the Space Age has only fed this dream of usurpation, and though the
simulation is still far from complete, its signs are everywhere.
In the Space Age, a growth regulator called daminozide (brand name Alar) has enabled
owners of orchards to demand fruits and vegetables to ripen at carefully regulated and
apportioned times throughout the year so that demanding supermarket shoppers may,
without regard to geographical limitations or time of year, enjoy "commandeered" apples,
pears, broccoli, grapes, and the likeperpetually "in season." In 1989, a national panic
resulted from media reports that Daminozide was carcinogenic, and the Environmental
Protection Agency "asked" growers to stop using it.
In the Space Age, much of the meat we eat in this country is produced on factory farms,
carefully designed to obtain optimum yields from pigs, chickens, and other livestock at
very low costs. On such farms, animals are kept in cages only slightly larger than their
bodies (thus greatly restricting their movement), housed by the thousands in massproduction lines, and fed special diets (including growth hormones) to increase their
weight very rapidly. Such practices have rightly outraged animal rights groups for many
years.
In this age of simulation, however, it seems we have not made the process streamlined
enough. We now dream of creating, through genetic engineering, even more productive,
more quantified, more purely Cartesian animals by eliminating altogether the body parts
of livestock that are of no use to man. "It may very soon be possible," we are informed
by Brian Stableford, "to exercise much more power over the bodies of our domestic
animals than we can at present." The res extensa of the chicken of the future is not likely
to bear much resemblance to the creature nature created:
A hen which is being bred only for its meat has no need of feathers and no need of
wings, and we might decide to stop such structures ever forming. We might leave
its eyes and its beak so that it could remain active enough to pick up its own food,
fed to it along a chute, but it might even become more convenient simply to pump
the food directly into its throat and dispense with most of the head too. A chicken
bred to be eaten would not need sexual organs, so perhaps they too could be
instructed not to develop. The perfect pig designed for the ultimate factory farm
might well be instructed to develop without feet, without teeth, without eyes, and
perhaps without anything much in the way of a brain. It would be, in effect, not a
pig but a pork-making biological machine. (55-56)
Accompanying this prophecy is a quite horrifying artist's rendering of a plug-in chicken.
Such fantasies, it goes without saying, are clearly Cartesian in conception and execution.
I can still recall the day when it finally dawned on my daughter--a city girl who has never
visited a natural farm, let alone a factory one, and who believed that food, whether
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animal or vegetable, grew in the grocery store--that the chicken she ate for dinner was
not made by chickens (as chickens make eggs, or apple trees apples) but was chicken. A
century from now a five-year-old may well believe instead--a mistake not to be corrected
by experience--that chickens (and mountains and oceans and trees and stars . . .) are
made by humans. And not even a Carbon Chauvinist father may be able to persuade her
she is wrong. "A world of made," e. e. cummings sought to remind us, "is not a world of
born" (89), but there may very well come a day when future generations will be unable
to tell the difference or even comprehend the distinction.
Now, in the Space Age, science writer Bill McKibben's careful ecological contemplation
concludes that the most significant effect of pollution (i.e., the hole in the ozone layer,
acid rain, possible global warming) is in fact philosophical. These developments are
important, according to McKibben, not because of their (much-debated) meteorological
ramifications but because they mark the coming of the "postnatural world" (60). We have
domesticated the planet, The End of Nature argues, extinguished, perhaps forever, the
existence of the inhuman. "We have changed the atmosphere, and thus we are changing
the weather. By changing the weather, we make every spot on Earth man-made and
artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning.
Nature's independence is its meaning; with it there is nothing but us" (58).
VI
For here is the mall. . . . Every facet of its operation, including the air that
everyone breathes, is controlled, as if outside its walls there were only a fatal
eternity. It could be anywhere, or nowhere; it could even be moving about. If you
stand in the right place . . . the vibrations of people walking and the low hum of the
mall's comfort control machinery can offer the illusion of movement, through the
air, or through . . . space. The fantasy is explicit in the video arcade, but out here it
is still curiously valid: a limited cybernetic excitement, in a safe, enclosed structure
with room to walk around in. . . . Give it a warp drive and a five-year mission and
you've got this . . . starship.
William Kowinski, The Malling of America
In the late Italian fabulist Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities--a wondrous collection of
imaginary traveler's tales set in medival Asia (they are supposedly told by Marco Polo to
Kublai Khan) and yet postmodernist in design and implication--we find the following
account of the strange city of Baucis:
After a seven days' march through woodland the traveler directed toward Baucis
cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the
ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support
the city. You climb them with ladders. On the ground the inhabitants rarely show
themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come
down. Nothing of the city touches the Earth except those long flamingo legs on
which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls
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on the foliage.
There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the
Earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it
was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they
never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating
with fascination their own absence. (77)
As Polo tells of his travels, thereby postponing, in the fashion of a Scheherazade, his own
fate at the hands of the khan, he seldom pretends to understand the meaning of the
wonders he has seen. But we who live in the Space Age are not so ignorant. We
recognize clearly, as in a mirror, this account of Baucis. For Baucis, we can see now is the
model community, the Space Age, postmodernist Levittown, in which we increasingly
aspire to live. For those who find earthly existence already beneath them, it already
seems like home.
Though neither Calvino nor Marco Polo has provided for us a map on which Baucis may
actually be found, it is often possible these days to discover oneself within its precincts.
The expatriate Romanian poet and essayist Andrei Codrescu, for example, unexpectedly
found himself in the midst of Baucis at a weekend sojourn in a hotel in Indianapolis,
where he had journeyed to read from his work. "I went to the Hyatt House in
Indianapolis recently," Codrescu relates, "and I have come back to report that it can
support human life indefinitely." The hotel's "perfectly ordered world," as self-contained
and automated as that of an O'Neill space colony, Codrescu observes, "very much
resembles that of the Earth."
Codrescu is most impressed by the Hyatt's "supportive nutritive system": "On several
floors discrete little feeding stations functioned smoothly. All of them produced several
varieties of nachos, Bloody Marys, and fried zucchini. The ones on the lower floors also
stacked large slabs of recently killed meat so that, I became convinced, an advanced
system of communication existed between the Hyatt and the outside world." The
building's climate control also attracts his attention: "The air is neither too thin nor too
thick and is slightly scented by the thousands of bodies scrubbed with hotel soap that
stumble out of its showers every morning. The creators of the Hyatt have contrived to
take a perfect late summer day on Earth and are able to play it over and over, no matter
what season or time is experienced on the outside" (my emphasis).
With "everything they need up there," the denizens of the Hyatt have little use for the
external world, yet within this ordered world, Codrescu's poetic eye is nevertheless
distracted from the artificial; he feels the old-fashioned, atavistic lure of the "natural."
Looking out the "cold, crisp, and turbulent" extramural weather from within his perfectly
comfortable room, Codrescu contemplates going out for a walk, but quickly "suppresse[s]
that nostalgic impulse." "Thanks to modern art which isolates the eyes from all the other
senses," Codrescu explains, justifying his alienation in a parody of the modern aesthetic,
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"I could safely view the world without actually mucking about in it." True Baucins, after
all, take great delight in "contemplating with fascination their own absence."
William Kowinski, traveling all over America in conducting first hand research for The
Malling of America, again and again found himself in Baucis as he visited our largest and
most modern indoor shopping malls.
In the book's final chapter--"The Mallenium Factors"-- Kowinski explicitly compares the
contemporary mall to future colonies in space. "Our most efficient enclosed and
controlled environment that keeps people entertained," the typical large enclosed
American shopping mall "already harbors a potential starship life-style--the psychological
as well as physical adaptations have already been made" (397). In its "habitat tailoring,"
food-service efficiency, "information minimalization," and compact recreation and cultural
possibilities, the mall, Kowinski contends, is the perfect simulator: "Give it a warp drive
and a five-year mission and you've got this . . . starship" (395). The shopping mall, a
logical emanation, as Kowinski notes, of the placelessness of suburbia (400), is of a piece
with the culture that produced it. And now it prepares us for "ultimate placelessness" in
the High Frontier: "It may therefore be this culture's destiny and its most trenchant
challenge to create the ultimate Disney World and hang it gleaming in the blackness
beyond the mortal air and threadbare Earth" (401).
Thanks to Codrescu's and Kowinski's descriptive accounts of Baucis, we can begin to
comprehend the rationale behind our current obsession with simulating the
extraterrestrial. Both Codrescu's Hyatt House and Kowinski's malls are designed and built
for those who have willingly sought to live in the oblivion of Being, for those who wish to
disengage themselves from the seasonal round, from the cycle of day and night, from the
radical vicissitudes of earthly weather: for those who seek the nunc stans of "a perfect
late summer day" played over and over on Earth as it will have to be in heaven. The
Hyatt's stationery, Codrescu notes by way of conclusion, proclaims at the top: "Hyatt, the
Perfect World."
Among the travel literature concerning Baucis, we must also include Jean Baudrillard's
America. Beginning with the assumption (no doubt correct) that Americans themselves
are largely incapable of recognizing their culture as a simulation (28-29), Baudrillard's
travelogue, the latest in a European tradition going back to Democracy in America, sets
out to explain us to ourselves. He asks something in return, it is true, but his demands
are modest. "I ask of Americans," Baudrillard writes, "only that they be Americans. I do
not ask them to be intelligent, sensible, original. I ask them only to populate a space
incommensurate with my own, to be for me the highest astral point, the finest orbital
space" (27-28).
Again and again, Baudrillard finds "astral" America "weightless" and extraterrestrial. In
Salt Lake City, for example, at the heart of the Mormon empire, he discovers "all the
requisite gadgetry for a minimalist, extraterrestrial comfort": the city as a whole exhibits
"the transperancy and supernatural otherworldly cleanness of a thing from outer space. A
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symmetrical, luminous, overpowering abstraction" (America 2).
Contemplating the Salk Institute--a biomedical think tank--on the California coast, where
"all the Nobel prizewinners for biology" devise "all the future biological commandments,"
he discovers it to be typical of a number of "extraordinary sites, capitals of fiction become
reality," to be found across the continent: "sublime, transpolitical sites of
extraterritoriality, combining as they do the earth's undamaged geological grandeur with
a sophisticated, nuclear, orbital, computer technology. (America 4).
Elsewhere in California--the "world center of the inauthentic" ("After Utopia" 53)-Baudrillard likewise detects the presence of the unearthly. Mulholland Drive, for example,
with its famous afterdark view of Los Angeles, is for Baudrillard "an extraterrestrial's
vantage point on earth, or conversely, an earth-dweller's vantage-point on the Galactic
metropolis" (America 52).
Even in the nation's capital signs of simulation are ever-present: "the vast panorama that
stretches from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol is made up of a series of museums
encapsulating our entire universe from Stone Age to Space Age. This gives the whole
thing a science-fiction feel, as if an attempt had been made to gather all the marks of
earthly endeavour and culture together for the benefit of a visitor from outer
space" (America 51).
Not surprisingly, when Baudrillard contemplates the literal "conquest of space," he finds it
likely to be of a piece with postmodernist America. When and if our actual
extraterrestrialization occurs, such a development will constitute "an irreversible
threshold of the earthly referential . . . the hemorrhage of reality as internal coherence of
a limited universe when its limits retreat infinitely." But such a severence in fact
represents only an extension of the confusion of realms--of idea and matter, imagination
and reality, conscious and unconscious--prominently displayed in the hyperreality of
simulation on Earth (Simulations 158).
It is not necessary, however, to go on a journey to visit Baucis. For now it is possible to
tour Calvino's imaginal city in the comfort of your home; in the video store we may rent a
travelogue--Godfrey Reggio's 1983 film Koyaanisqatsi--a documentary record of its
wonders.
VII
According to one Hindu legend, Shiva, at a particular moment, will begin to dance,
at first slowly, then faster and faster, and will not stop before having imposed upon
the world a frenzied cadence, in every respect opposed to that of Creation.
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This legend includes no commentary, history having assumed the task of
illustrating its obvious truth.
E.M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered
A wordless documentary film, sometimes described as a cinematic tone-poem,
Koyaanisqatsi is the collaborative creation of Godfrey Reggio, a former Catholic monk
(once a member of the Christian Brotherhood), cinematographer Ron Fricke, and
minimalist composer Philip Glass. Originally Reggio's brainchild, the film was twenty
years in the making and was finally released only after Francis Ford Coppola lent it his
financial support. Since its release it has gone on to attain cult status and Reggio has
continued work on a trilogy of documentaries about the modern world.
The film's title comes from the language of the Hopi Indians of the American Southwest,
perhaps the most visionary of all Native American tribes, whose ancient prophecies
foresaw the coming of the United States, the creation of space stations, and the eventual
demise of white civilization. As we are informed at the movie's close, Koyaanisqatsi
means: "1. crazy life, 2. life in turmoil, 3. life out of balance, 4. life disintegrating, 5. a
state of life that calls for another way of living."
And the film is best understood as an extended description of this insanity.16 In the
meditative opening sequence of Koyaanisqatsi, the eye of the camera opens on an Earth
without humanity. Although as viewers we are aware of the artifice (conscious of the
helicopter in which the camera rides, of the use of slow motion and time-lapse
photography, and the special filters), still the images of clouds, caves, light, flowing
water, steam, sand, and geological wonders haunt us--we who have convinced ourselves
in the modern age that the world would be devoid of all quality if it were not for man's
consciousness. They offer us the opportunity to imagine the Earth as it might have been
before we emerged from it, or after we have been extinquished, or departed.
If, as Lewis Thomas's conception of the Earth as a single cell and J. E. Lovelock's "Gaia
hypothesis" suggest, the Earth itself is a kind of giant organism, with its own metabolism,
respiration, and atmosphere, Koyaanisqatsi's first sequence offers us a portrait of this
being in all its wonders. A geo-logic, not a human logos, governs this world. We see a
river (the Colorado) meander through a chasm (the Grand Canyon) that it has itself cut.
We explore a deep cave out of which birds and bats move at random. We watch the sun
glisten across the waves of the ocean. We witness cloud banks mounting up in such
density and turbulence that the very sky seems an ungovernable ocean. We peer down
over a waterfall as it plummets to the depths below. We are present as night and day
move rapidly--captured in time-lapse photography--across the face of an immense cliff.
Mesmerized, we look on as sand undulates in timeless patterning. And none of these
comings and goings, toings and froings--the "sensitive chaos," as Theodore Schwenk has
described it--of the being called Gaia need us in the least for their enactment; none take
place in a time we would recognize as human. This is physis we watch, not nature.
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Then, beginning with images of explosions and then, in rapid montage, shots of an earth
mover, a long pipeline, electric lines, a power station, a huge dam, an immense crane, oil
rigs, a tank farm, a mushroom cloud, and finally, women and children sunbathing in the
shadow of a nuclear power plant, Koyaanisqatsi moves abruptly into the realm of the
stored-away. The remainder of the film memorably portrays this new "setting to order" of
things.
If Koyaanisqatsi's first sequence captures a world without man, the remainder--especially
a key central sequence known on the Glass soundtrack as "The Grid"--depicts a world
filled to overflowing with humans and their things, a modern city-world. Exploding
buildings; the South Bronx in decay; immense glass skyscrapers that mirror the sky
above; the ground reduced to "the traffic-flow support nexus" for the vertical;
boulevards, malls, bowling alleys overrun with human beings; impossible intersections,
criss-crossed by thousands and thousands of cars and people choreographed by some
invisible hand; interlocking freeways which, shot from above and in time-lapse
photography, appear to be some kind of circulatory system for the city; human beings by
the thousands crossing Grand Central Station and entering and exiting escalators with
the determination of ants, and hot dogs, automobiles, televisions, computers, jeans, and
Twinkies in counter-pointed, match-cut mass production. The world of Koyaanisqatsi is
clearly one in which "all that is solid melts into air."
Underlying our conquest of the American continent, Frederick W. Turner has reminded us
in Beyond Geography, were not only "the ancient fears and divisions that we brought to
the New World" but also the "primitive precusors of the technology that would assist in
transforming the continent." The combination produced frightening power. "Haunted by
these fears, driven by our divisions, we slashed and hacked at the wilderness we saw so
that within three centuries of Cortes's penetration of the mainland a world millions of
years in the making vanished into the voracious, insatiable maw of an alien civilization."
"Musing on this time scale," Turner adds, "one begins to sense the enormity of what we
brought to our entrance here." And we come to understand as well that "it was here in
America that Western man became loosed into a strange, ungovernable freedom so that
what we now live amidst is the culminating artifact of the civilization of the West" (25556). Now we live as well in a simulation of that civilization's next evolutionary step, as it
heeds not a manifest destiny but an extraterrestrial imperative.
Another closely related imperative, again typically American, may likewise be at work.
According to Arthur C. Clarke, it is, after all, the increasing pace of civilization that
necessitates our departure from this planet. From the beginning of history, Clarke
argues, humankind has been busily engaged in moving both itself and its possessions.
Tremendous amounts of energy have been expended in this task, and over the centuries
mankind has increased the speed with which transportation takes place. At first, and for
thousands of years, we could move only at two or three miles an hour, on foot. Then we
accelerated to ten miles an hour thanks to the harnessing of horsepower. Later, with the
invention of the locomotive and internal combustion engines, our speed surpassed one
hundred miles an hour. However, the creation of jet and rocket engines, and the
subsequent conquering of the sound barrier, have forced us off the planet; the Earth is
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now far too small to contain our speed (Clarke, Profiles 61-69). This "velocity
imperative"--so prominent a theme in Koyaanisqatsi--has thus mandated the search for
larger fields in which to accelerate. That America has played a prominent role, alternately
cause and effect, in all the later phases of this "progress" goes without saying.19 ("It
may well be," the poet X. J. Kennedy remarked presciently in 1969, "that when I rev my
car/And let it overtake and pass my thinking,/It's space I crave" [Phillips 161].)
Near the end of Koyaanisqatsi, as a transition to its last somber sequence, we find
ourselves, after a jump cut, looking down on a city from above. Experienced air travelers
immediately recognize the image. In another cut, the camera moves to an even higher
altitude, and it takes the viewer but a moment to discern exactly what he or she is
seeing. The world of urban sprawl, eight-lane highways, grid lock, and skyscrapers to
which the early scenes had so accustomeed us becomes momentarily disorienting, seen
from this high perspective, but some recognizable forms are still apparent: highways,
bodies of water, parks, stadia. But then, in fairly rapid montage (a dozen shots), this
extreme aerial long shot view is match-cut with extreme close-ups of what appear to be
computer circuit boards and the intricate weave of Hopi blankets.
This montage culimnates a theme that has run throughout. For much of the film, we have
looked down on the world. In the early natural scenes, such a point of view had
expanded our vision of the immensity of the world, of its geological and meteorological
sweep. But these aerial views of cityscapes offer us an Archimedean perspective on
human affairs, a perspective that, as Arendt foresaw, actually belittles human
achievement. As she wrote in "Man's Conquest of Space," "If we look down from this
point [of Einstein's 'observer freely poised in space'] at what is going on on Earth and
upon the various activities of men, that is, if we apply the Archimedean point to
ourselves, then these activities will indeed appear to ourselves as no more than 'overt
behavior,' which we can study with the same methods we use to study the behavior of
rats" (539).20
"Seen from a sufficient distance," Arendt writes, "the cars in which we travel and which
we know we built ourselves . . . look as though they were, as Heisenberg once put it, 'as
inescapable a part of ourselves as the snail's shell is to its occupant.'" Consequently,
Arendt insists, "the overview effect" decreases human stature: "All our pride in what we
can do . . . disappears into some kind of mutation of the human race; the whole of
technology, seen from this point, in fact no longer appears as the result of a conscious
human effort to extend man's material power, but rather as a large-scale biological
process" ("Man's Conquest" 540). From such a perspective, simulation seems inevitable,
seems almost to be God's will.
From such a perspective, it is possible in the Space Age for Freeman Dyson to hallucinate
today's purely technological spacecraft transformed, less than three decades hence, into
a living creature able to explore the cosmos. "It is reasonable to think of the microspacecraft of the year 2010," Dyson claims in his Gifford Lectures (Infinite in All
Directions), "not as a structure of metal and glass and silicon, but as a living creature,
fed on Earth like a caterpillar, launched into space like a chrysalis, riding a laser beam
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into orbit, and metamorphosing in space like a butterfly" (178-79).
From such a Space Age perspective, the highly unorthodox MIT computer scientist
Edward Fridkin, ensorcelled by his own metaphoric internalization, can theorize that the
cosmos is itself a kind of giant program being used by a higher intelligence/god/
computer--as unknowable to its creation as any hardware is to its software--to check the
efficacy of a cosmic master program through the only means available: the creation of
the simulation we know as the physical universe. (See Wright, part 1.)
Much of Koyaanisqatsi is shot from the Archimedean point. As we watch the
transformation of rivers into pipelines, sheer cliffs into skyscrapers, river canyons into the
valley boulevards between New York's mammoth buildings, superhighways into the
circulatory system of the megalopolis, Indian blankets into cities, and cities into circuit
boards, we recognize that we are witness to a profound metamorphosis in the conception
of human destiny enacted by the adoption of an Archimedean perspective.
But in the end the film does not sanction the Archimedean perspective. Its closing shot is
of a missile launch, the same missile we had witnessed during the film's title sequence as
it slowly lifted off from its pad. As it soars skyward, it explodes in mid air, and for more
than two minutes we watch a large piece of its hull fall slowly, slowly back to Earth before
the final credits remind us of the Hopi prophecy of white civilization's inevitable collapse.
Koyaanisqatsi was supposedly filmed in Los Angeles and New York, but readers of Calvino
know better: the city that Reggio's images and Glass's music have revealed for us is none
other than Baucis.
VIII
In a "Calvin and Hobbes" comic strip published on the eve of 1990, a very demanding
young boy harangues his stuffed tiger with thoughts on the last ten years of the century
and his great disappointment with technological escalation and the progress of the
oblivion of Being.
"A new decade is coming up," Hobbes notes. "Yeah," Calvin replies in disgust, "big deal!
Hmph." Reality, it seems, does not come close to matching his science fiction inspired
anticipation."Where are the flying cars? [Calvin asks] Where are the moon colonies?
Where are the personal robots and the zero gravity boots, huh? You call this a new
decade?! You call this the future?? Ha! Where are the rocket packs? Where are the
disintegration rays? Where are the floating cities?" As usual, Hobbes offers wise counsel
to balance Calvin's pique. "Frankly, I'm not sure people have the brains to manage the
technology they've got." And as usual, Calvin fails to listen. He continues to rave: "I
mean look at this! We still have weather!! Give me a break!"
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While Susan Sontag's atavistic, nostalgic sensibility seeks to "say goodbye" to things as
old, dear friends, Calvin's 1990s' impatience cannot be rid of them fast enough. As the
use of the slang expression "Give me a break" captures perfectly, weather is for him
simply a nuisance--like an annoying parent demanding that he clean up his room or eat
his vegetables.
It is true, however, as Calvin laments, that the fin de siecle outward appearance of things
is not very futuristic. We do, after all, still have weather. But such impatience is quite
childish. Simulation on a planetary scale takes time. The Space Age, after all, is still quite
young. The sky will not always be blue.
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PROBE: Space Boosters:
The Marketing of Unearthliness
The Pythia of Delphi has now been replaced by a computer which hovers over
panels and punch cards. The hexameters of the oracle have given way to
sixteen-bit codes of instruction. Man the helmsman has turned the power
over to the cybernetic machine. The ultimate machine emerges to direct our
destinies. Children phantasize flying their spacecrafts away from a
crepuscular Earth.
Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society
. . . the emphasis on surface; the blankness of the protagonist; his striving toward
self-sufficiency, to the point of displacement from the recognizable world. . . . Does
the icy quality of an artificial outer space, the self-conscious displacement and
blankness of car commercials, MTV, and "Miami Vice," correspond to a glacial inner
space?
Todd Gitlin, "We Build Excitement"
In a late 1980s issue of Marketing Week, a columnist laments the post-Jetsons lack of
real Space Age advertising and calls for campaigns more in keeping with an era of Star
Wars and SDI (Myers 12).
Surely he cannot read magazines or watch television. Advertisements could not be
spacier than they are now. Never slow to capitalize on the tacit tendencies of the cultural
psyche, advertisements, "soak . . . up certain ideals in circulation at the moment, and
squeeze . . . a version of them back at us." According to Todd Gitlin, ads present "the
incarnation of a popular ideal--or rather, the ideas of that ideal held by the marketer." An
advertisement is thus, in a sense, a "tiny utopia." The commercial "conveys what we are
supposed to think is the magic of things; those things which, if we buy them, are
supposed to work miraculous transformations in our lives" ("We Build Excitement" 141).
In the Space Age, it seems, the advertising industry has realized that virtually anything
can now be sold to us through appeals to our otherworldliness.
In their 1953 novel The Space Merchants, Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth imagined a
Madison Avenue advertising agency given the task of convincing the human race that it
should migrate to an uninhabitable Venus. In Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner, we
see an early twenty first century Los Angeles cityscape in which huge, floating video
billboards beam promises that "a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies." Neither of
these science fiction prophecies has come true (though Sony has now developed
multistory video billboards), but they now hardly seem fantastic to us, for though we are
not yet being sold Venusian real estate, we are being sold unearthliness.
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In 1981, I lived and taught in Shanghai, People's Republic of China. When I left with my
family on a long Pan Am flight to an alien world, the space shuttle Columbia, then on its
maiden voyage, orbited the Earth. It touched down soon after our arrival in Asia. In the
Far East edition of Time, I read that the successful mission had given post-Vietnam, postWatergate America a "mighty lift"; and President Reagan, convalescing from an
assassination attempt, waxed eloquently to the Columbia's heroes, telling them (I
learned), "Through you, we feel as giants once again."
On my return to the United States later that summer, badly culture-shocked from my
time in the People's Republic, I struggled to acclimate myself again to the frenetic, spacy
American way of life. More than ordinarily attuned to its peculiarities and absurdities, I
began to notice a new kind of advertisement appearing with surprising frequency on
television (and, I might note, I watched television with open-eyed wonder after months
without it in Shanghai). The image of space was, throughout the decade, everywhere.
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I saw Space Age microphotography--designed, we are told, to view the Earth from
space--reveal the epidermis of a woman's skin in order to convince us of the
positive effects of an anti-aging cream.
I saw the three-ply lamination of Glad garbage bags fuse together, set against the
backdrop of interstellar space.
I saw Maybelline Dial-a-Lash tubes shoot off from launching pads.
I saw a fashion model, standing on the lunar surface, wear Revlon lipstick said to
exhibit "out-of-this-world colors."
I saw a Technics turntable orbit the Earth.
I saw the Cincinnati Bell logo transformed into a space station.
I saw a ready-to-assemble "wall system"--labeled, of course, as a "Space Age"
product--offer "new heights in organization" and "infinite" possibilities for
creativity, solving storage needs by allowing the owner to "fill unlimited space."
I saw a United Negro College Fund appeal, showing African-American scholars in
graduation robes and mortar boards set against yet another cosmic backdrop. (For,
after all, this solicitation for contributions informs us that the mind is as "vast as
space.")
I saw Taster's Choice--like Tang before it--offered to us as the choice of astronauts
(the shuttle astronauts in this case).
I saw a spot for Home Box Office show a family in its living room flying through
space, watching HBO.
I saw an insurance company's famous "piece of the rock" appear in a cosmic
landscape resting on an Earth seemingly without atmosphere (the moon appears
only miles away), orbited by a ranch-style, two-stall garage home, a sports car
approaching on a highway through space, and a floating sailboat followed by
frolicking dolphins--all in keeping with the
advertisement's promise that "With the Prudential, the sky's the limit."
I saw cartoon children carried into space by Bubblicious balloon bubbles. ("It tastes
so unreal it'll blow you away.")
I saw, during a decade in which (inspired by Reagan-era deregulation) it became
increasingly difficult to distinguish Saturday morning television programming from
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its advertising, "kidvid" become more and more spacy. (A television critic notes
that producers--under the influence of both George Lucas's and Ronald Reagan's
"Star Wars"--came to agree that "outer space, high tech and faraway enemies in a
distant future are a safer, tidier, less complicated way" to capture an audience
(Engelhardt 1986, 88-89).
I saw a vacuous blonde, female astronaut in a lunar lander proclaim to her
companions, "Go ahead without me. I've got a run!" ("She would have been the
first woman on the moon if only she'd worn Sheer Business Panty Hose.")
I saw Timex watches link together to form Star Wars-type spacefighters,
accompanied by a montage of images of a man and a woman in space suits on an
alien world, while a voice-over tells us that "Timex performs with all the accuracy
and beauty of the cosmos."
I saw a special new antiplaque electric tooth-brush ("Interplak"), bearing a striking
resemblence to the starship Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey, majestically dock
into its recharger on a bathroom sink --choreographed to a Strauss waltz.
I saw woofers and tweeters of a Delco-GM Sound System become a formation of
flying saucers beckoning us to "Ride into the Sound Set."
I saw a youth, dressed in Levi's jeans, launched toward distant skies while a voice
explains that in the famous jeans "the mind knows no limits."
I saw an ad for a Chevrolet pickup truck instruct us not to "leave Earth without it"
and insist that a new model has "brakes so good they're almost extraterrestrial."
I saw two female astronauts extol the benefits of a new roll-on deodorant called
"Real": "We have seen the future and it is Real."
I saw a man, traveling through a magically real yet alien landscape (Earth visible
on the horizon), have a "vision of the future," not, we are told, of "space travel" or
"time machines," but of the financial welfare of his family (through the assistance
of Equitable Insurance). Upon his arrival home, he then witnesses his garage door
open--like the entrance to the mother ship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind-to disclose a blaze of white light out of which emerges a figure we take to be an
alien but which turns out in fact to be his daughter, excitedly pronouncing, "Daddy!"
I saw "Almost Home" chocolate-chip cookies float in space in order to optimally
display their "almost out of this world" taste.
I saw a man in a cumbersome space suit EVA into the cockpit of a new Toyota
compact and then--so impressed is he with the car--leap in ecstasy out of the
frame, beyond the limits of gravity, never to come down. ("Oh what a feeling!")
I saw the new Hyundai Sonata, introduced to us as a "space vehicle," soar off into
the cosmos at the commercial's close.
I saw an image of a patch of lawn, complete with a house, shade trees, and two
family dogs, floating in outer space, evidently removed from the Earth by cutting
along a still visible dotted line surrounding the property, advertising the Invisible
Fence "dog containment system."
I saw a solicitation for new members of the National Space Society illustrate its
motives and goals through two paintings: The Ultimate Sandbox (by Michael
Whelan) showing a little girl in a "Miss Piggy" space suit building a sand castle on
the moon; and Leonardo's Finale (by David Brian), in which the great Renaissance
man, sitting in his study surrounded by drawings and plans for future discovery,
holds a prototype model of the space shuttle in his hands.
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I saw three former Apollo astronauts ("Schirra, Apollo 7," "Bean, Apollo 12,"
"Gordon, Apollo 12"), looking for all the world like has-been athletes, testify--in
extreme, unflattering close-ups--that Actifed relieved their snuffy noses in spaces.
I saw an Always Ultra-Thin Panty Liner become an unidentified flying object.
I saw a small, evidently sick young girl lying in bed, a thermometer in her mouth,
securely wrapped in sheets with a sky and cloud pattern (which, because they fill
the frame of the advertisement, make her appear to be floating), reassuringly
touch a space helmet--all beneath a headline that reads: "When your little space
traveler has a fever . . ."
I saw both Motorcraft spark plugs and oil filters blast off, as if from launching pad,
from the hoods of Ford automobiles toward distant skies.
I saw the Chevrolet Astro minivan circle in orbit about the Earth and yet (we are
promised) still remain small enough to "fit right in your garage!"
I saw--in yet another image plagiarized from Close Encounters of the Third Kind
(promoting McDonald's "Spaceship Happy Meals")--children look up at the sky with
true cosmic yearning (fantasizing, no doubt, about "flying their spaceships away
from a crepuscular Earth").
I saw a poster in a McDonald's restaurant (advertising a "Space Age Calendar")
instruct parents to "help your child into outer space."
I saw the traditional Jewish child's toy top, the dreidel, no longer satisfactory,
undergo a Space Age sea change into an "Outer Space Dreidel" (made in Taiwan)-a battery-powered model that not only lights up but "makes outer space sounds!"
I saw, prior to the feature presentation, a short subject, sponsored by theater
owners and intended to discourage littering, depict an interstellar cloud of snack
bar-debris--popcorn, Raisinettes, straws, nachos, Milk Duds--out of which an
exemplary soft-drink cup/rocket speeds toward the brightly lit landing dock of a
trash receptacle/space station.
I saw a Canon Typestar typewriter blast into orbit ("A new Typestar lifts off"), its
"lift-off" correction key in turn lifting off from it, like a communications satellite out
of the cargo bay of the space shuttle.
I saw a cartoon Albert Einstein plug the "genius" of Betamax while ensconced in an
armchair in a living room floating in the cosmos.
I saw the "baby of today" in the "diaper of the future" (actually old-fashioned 100
percent cotton!) orbit about the Earth in the arms of a New Age father whose legs-evidently his means of cosmic propulsion--dissolve into beams of light.
I saw Concept Custom Length electric guitar strings ("The Final Frontier" in guitar
strings) advertised by an image of a spaceman strolling the lunar landscape, an
American flag planted in the moon to his left, the Earth visible in the background;
and I saw Kahler guitar strings, in comparable "far-out" imagery, become in effect
the orbital path of a space vehicle made of tuning pegs.
I saw the Nady Systems Lightning Guitar and Thunder Bass--instruments with "the
right stuff"--billed as the first electronic guitars of the Space Age and advertised in
copy divided into sections entitled "Countdown," "Liftoff," "All Systems Go,"
"Ground Control," and "Link Up" and in the usual "product in orbit" imagery; and I
saw the Carvin V220 guitar blast off from Earth in an ad whose headline proclaims
the instrument to be "One Step Beyond."
I saw an ad for a Kenwood stereo satellite receiver announce the company's proud
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claim that "after conquering Earth, we headed into space." (An image from the
Japanese science fiction film The Mysterians [1959] appears at the top.) "We've
been a force in home and car audio on this planet for over 25 years. But now we're
aiming even higher." "Get on board now," we are warned in a class Space Age
threat. "Or get left behind."
I saw a space colonist, showered by the spores of a huge, menacing flower on an
alien planet, plagued by allergies ("No matter where you go, there's going to be
pollen"), at least until he uses Contac.
I saw us encourged to give to the college of our choice through an image of a
young boy in a Day the Earth Stood Still space suit and his dog standing beside a
space capsule/doghouse accompanied by the following text:
Today he's off exploring the back yard. Tomorrow, he may be off exploring
new galaxies.
But before kids of today can conquer the frontiers of outerspace, they'll have
to conquer the complexities of mathematics, physics and chemistry. That's
where you come in. For only with your help can they be assured of the firstrate college education they'll need. . . .
So please invest in the future. Give generously to the college of your choice.
You'll be helping launch America to a successful future.
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"Help him get America's future off the ground," the public service advertisement's
headline pleads.
I saw a woman, once "in the dark about blinds," open her Levelors --blinds
"enlightened by Space Age technology"--to watch, as if from the Archimedean
point, an Earthrise.
I saw a woman in Sheer Energy slippers blast off from the Earth's surface--finally
able, with their support, to overcome the harsh demands gravity has placed on her
feet and distance herself from its draining effect on her energy.
I saw a new breakfast cereal from Ralston-Purina called Freakies--marketed as
"multigrain . . . crunchy honey-tasting spaceships with marshmallow"--offer "out of
this world fun with earthly nutrition."
I saw the legendary Barbie herself enter into space. "Barbie's on the Moon,"
proclaimed the cover of an issue of Barbie magazine, and there she was, in her
"Astronaut Barbie" manifestation. (Later, in the "Barbie Drama" section, I learned
that being the first woman on the moon was all a dream, though a spacy date with
Ken at the "Lunar Lounge" made it all come true!)
I saw in a Space Age toy store a new line of dolls called the Shimmerons, a species
of alien Barbie clones. "Lacy-Spacy--Out of this World . . . Space Cadets" with
spindly bodies and sparkling wardrobes, they have come to Earth--according to
their back-of-the package mythology --because our planet offers not only the
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cosmos' best shopping but also the most awesome parties! ("What on Earth are
they doing here? Well the Shimmerons wanted to discover why the Planet Earth is
number one for teenage fun, and show you how fun is done on the Planet
Shimmeron." "Here on Earth, the Shimmerons are discovering skateboards, hot
dogs, rock music, and shopping malls!")
I saw us encouraged to "Expect the World of ABC News," for, as their
advertisement--showing the Earth from space, coupled with a cosmic telephoto
lens and an extraterrestrial Peter Jennings--made clear, the network evidently
covers the planet from the Archimedean point.
And I saw that entrepeneurial plans are afoot (I cite but three examples) (1) to
bury people in space (several companies have marketed such schemes, one of
which involves a three-hundred-pound spacecraft containing no fewer than fifteen
thousand "cremains" launched into polar orbit ["Ashes of the Stars"]); (2) to offer
extraterrestrial vacations (Davies; "Orbital Jaunts" 32-33); and (3) to develop
robotic "space pets" (Liversidge).
Space has, no doubt, been sold to us along with our meat and potatoes for some time
now. As early as the 1960s, space ads--like those represented here--exhibited most of
the ascensionistic clichés we find in later ones.22 Nor is the cosmic exaggeration of such
advertising really new. It can be understood as an extension of what Daniel Boorstin
describes as "Booster Talk: The Language of Anticipation," a way of speaking about
things in which "what may be is contemplated as though it were in actual
existence" (Boorstin is quoting an early nineteenth-century British observer of American
ways). Booster Talk is not misrepresentation--or at least it does not seem that way to
Americans--but rather a kind of clairvoyance, "not exaggerating but only anticipating-describing things which had not yet 'gone through the formality of taking
place'" (Americans 296-98). But why, in the decade of the space shuttle, did the pace
and intensity of the pitch increase so prominently?
Interestingly enough, in 1965 the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci found the possibility
that space might be marketable beyond belief. In If the Sun Dies 135-37), she
contemplated the possibility that the astronauts might be commercialized but is told by a
NASA spokesman that the idea is ludicrous: "Can you imagine a billboard in Times
Square with a photograph of [Gordon] Cooper [one of the original Apollo 7 astronauts]
smoking a certain brand of cigarette? The cigarette of space! Up in space Gordon Cooper
smokes only . . . Inconceivable! None of them. . . ." This was, of course, years before an
astronaut became head of a major airline, and famed test-pilot (and hero of Tom Wolfe's
The Right Stuff) Chuck Yeager lent his image in support of his favorite spark plugs.
Even as she wrote, Fallaci herself was already helping to advertise space. She confesses,
"When I returned to Milan I stuck up in my study a huge map of the moon that had been
sent to me by the advertising office of Nestle's Powdered Milk. On the Mare Copernicum
was printed: Feed Your Babies on Nestle's Powdered Milk, but it looked beautiful to me."
Only two years later Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey demonstrated conclusively, with
its open display of brand names in extraterrestrial settings, that "space was finally going
to be conquered by Coca-Cola and AT & T."2 And by 1970, when Norman Mailer
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published Of a Fire on the Moon, it had already become apparent that "a new kind of
commercial was being evolved. NASA was vending space" (45).
But only in the 1980s did the vending become blatant: a prominent feature of our cultural
landscape. (As Andre' Marchand's Advertising the American Dream shows, advertising
"paved the way" for all that we think of as modern; now it paves the way for the
postmodernism of the extraterrestrial.) "The master fantasy of the Reagan era," which
informs the "little utopias" of the Space Age advertising chronicled here, may now be, as
Todd Gitlin suggests, "the fantasy of thrusting, self-sufficient man, cutting loose, free of
gravity, free of attachments" ("We Build Excitement" 143).
Implicit in most advertising, according to John Berger, is the following hidden
transaction: "The spectator-buyer is meant to envy the person he will become if he buys
the product. He is meant to imagine himself transformed by the product into an object of
envy for others, an envy which will then justify his loving himself." Thus, Berger
concludes, the "publicity image" of an advertisement "steals love of oneself as one is, and
offers it back for the price of the product" (134). Is it too much to say that the Space Age
advertisements catalogued here--which sell, in a package deal, not just mascara, or a
Betamax, or Big Macs, but a hyperreal longing for space-steal--or seek to steal, not just
our love of ourselves, but our very earthliness? But it does not, as in the normal
marketing dialectic, then offer it back. In a "bait and switch" duplicity, it would rob us of
it permanently.
And we seem so ready and willing to have it stolen. As Boorstin observed (in The Image:
A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America) at the very beginning of the Space Age, Americans
are ruled by a powerful will-to-illusion.
When we pick up our newspaper at breakfast, we expect--we even demand--that it
bring us momentous events since the night before. We turn on our car radio as we
drive to work and expect "news" to have occurred since the morning paper went to
press. Returning in the evening, we expect our house not only to shelter us, to
keep us warm in the winter and cool in the summer, but to relax us, to dignify us,
to encompass us with soft music and interesting hobbies, to be a playground, a
theater, and a bar. We expect our two week vacation to be romantic, exotic, cheap,
and effortless. We expect a faraway atmosphere if we go to a nearby place; and we
expect everything to be relaxing, sanitary, and Americanized if we go to a faraway
place. We expect new heroes every month, a new literary masterpiece every week,
a rare sensation every night. . . .
We expect everything and anything. We expect the contradictory and the
impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are
economical. . . . We expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and
ever more neighborly . . . to revere God and to be God.
Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a
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people been more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so
much more than the world could possibly offer. (3-4; my emphasis)
When Boorstin wrote these words in the early 1960s, he thought he was speaking
figuratively.
In 1983, I went to see E.T.: The Extraterrestrial in a movie theater in Huntsville,
Alabama (a city which, because it is home to NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, takes
pride in its nickname: "The Rocket City"). At this, my second viewing of Steven
Spielberg's touching story of the triumph of the values of the heart, I watched with
interest a preliminary commercial for Atari (screened before the film, I surmised, because
producers and distributors had convinced the game company the demographics of a
typical E.T. audience indicated openness to such a sales pitch). In the ad--which
exhibited special effects not unlike Tron's--a young man sits, back to the camera,
dreaming up ideas for video games, and the games he invents miraculously materialize
around him, filling the screen. As his dreams become wilder and wilder, as he imagines
"Asteroids" and "Space Invaders," he finds himself floating--as does the audience--in
interstellar space.
The image is a common one now, of course; I'd seen it all before. But it struck me that
day in that context that it presented an ironic counterpoint to the evocative tale of
homesickness I was about to watch. Here, during a single Space Age afternoon's
entertainment, I was being asked to imagine myself as unearthly, and then to feel the
pathos of a poor alien creature trapped far from home. I suspect that, against its own
better wisdom, E.T. has promoted in many of its viewers not that supreme value which E.
T. himself cannot live without--the need for a place, for a home--but rather
extraterrestrial urges. The desire to become precisely that which tortures E.T., robbing
him eventually of his very life (at least momentarily), extinguishing his heart-light, the
longing to become homeless and displaced ourselves, is so prominent now, so much an
everyday search image, that it would not surprise me if many viewers of the film--if they
could trade places with Elliott--might reply affirmatively to E.T.'s petition at the movie's
close to "Come."
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5. The Abandoned Earth
I
There is no uncannier notion than that of the abandoned Earth, abandoned by
human beings. People tend to think they emigrate, if for no other reason than to
take along their memory of the Earth. They could never be as well off as here. Far
reaching instruments would have to enable them to observe the world but without
recognizing what they have lost, an inexhaustible homeland, and the false religion
to which they have to ascribe this loss would already have been traded in, far too
late, for another. One can assume that this new religion would be the right one;
had it come in time, it would have saved the Earth for mankind.
Elias Canetti, The Human Province
While engaged in the exhaustive research for his masterful Crowds and Power, Elias
Canetti, winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for literature, kept a journal in which he recorded
his incidental thoughts and observations. These thirty years (1942-72) of notes and
aphorisms were later published as The Human Province.
In the journal's first year, in the middle of World War II and fifteen years before the
advent of the Space Age, Canetti recorded the astonishing observation that serves as the
epigraph to this chapter. Unmistakably identifying their author as an Earthling, as one
who wishes to remain in his "inexhaustible homeland" rather than emigrate into the
beyond, Canetti's words nevertheless take very seriously the haunting prospect of an
"abandoned Earth" long before the Gnostic, "false religion" of Spacekind would formally,
insistently, and routinely promote the cosmic prodigality of the extraterrestrial
imperative. Canetti sought instead to envision the true religion here and now: a religion
of the Earth. To find such a salvation was, in a sense, his life's work. He sought it as
Einstein sought a unified field theory, and like Einstein he failed.
But such a quest, perpetuated in these pages, remains a noble one, worthy of the
imaginal reflection this chapter offers in an attempt to conceive, in all its manifestations,
the uncanny notion of an abandoned Earth.
II
Erasure of the Human
A swishing wind does not outlast the morning; pelting rain does not outlast the
day. Who makes these things but heaven and Earth? If heaven and Earth cannot
maintain them for long, how can man?
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
"We stand at a crossroads in the history of our species," writes the Norwegian deep
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ecologist Rolf Edberg (142). This turning point is in many respects
comparable to that . . . at which the primate stood when he was compelled to leave
his tree existence. And yet it is also quite unlike any previous experience of the
species. While the creature who had been driven from his home in the trees had
millions of years in which to adjust to new and danger-filled surroundings, we have
been thrown by violently accelerated technological development into a situation in
which we must make our choice with the utmost quickness and must choose
deliberately, not haphazardly as always before. It was during the last generation
that our civilization reached the critical threshold. We may have but a single
generation in which to gain control over our collective conduct and to keep our
world from becoming one of those whose evolution tested the possibilities of mind-and failed. (142)
What humankind calls history, Edberg seems to imply, is in fact our audition: "a
planetary test" to determine whether we deserve to have the leading role on Earth.
Once, there seemed to be no question of our preeminence, Had not Genesis told us that
"the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the Earth, and upon
every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the Earth and upon all the fishes of the
sea: into your hands are they delivered"? Had we not then gone on to develop the kind of
psyche that would make these words seem like a self-fulfilling prophecy? Had not our
exalted and self-congratulatory humanism in its obsessed modern form come to convince
humankind into "thinking that we are actually learning how to steer the planet in its
orbit" (Ehrenfeld, Arrogance 16)?
And has not such thinking now encouraged us to think that our Space Age destiny might
well be to "steer straight off after something into space"? But now that our audition has
reached what seems to be its final stages, our role, our vocation, as master of the Earth
is in doubt, grievous doubt. Indeed, that we will even have a future on Earth is
problematic.
In After Man: A Zoology of the Future, Dougal Dixon presents a taxonomy, written as if
by a scientific emissary to the future, of the fauna of a "post-homic," abandoned Earth.
The human species, we discover, is gone, and so, too, are nearly all those creatures
weakened by excessive contact with humankind in the present day. The future Earth's
dominant animals have evolved out of what are now only peripheral creatures: rats, bats,
and rabbits. Rats, for example, have become fierce predators the size of large dogs; bats
have taken many new forms, including the book's most fearsome monster, the Night
Stalker, a five-foot-tall, blind, extremely vicious carnivore that runs on its hind feet; and
rabbits have become Rabbucks, deerlike creatures almost seven feet tall at the shoulder.
This future world's zoology should not surprise us, Dixon remarks. After all, mammals,
today's dominant animals, waited in the wings for nearly one hundred million years
before rising to prominence.
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Dixon's vision is no mere whimsy; it is meticulously thought out and based on scientific
projections from current ecological, geological, and genetic knowledge. Yet the real future
will no doubt prove far stranger, as Dixon readily admits, for he has not attempted to
create anything radically new, nor could he. In his crystal ball his fancy has merely seen
the tremendous variety of present life forms, inventions, and adaptations radically
rearranged; the real future, of course, will have no such limitation. (Truth, as Mark
Twain, once quipped, is always stranger than fiction, for fiction is obliged to stick to
possibilities, while truth is not.)
Interestingly, Dixon's bestiary for an Earth fifty million years from now does not really
explain the disappearance of the world's present dominant species. Humankind's
extinction is taken for granted by Dixon and attributed to our overdevelopment, the
exhaustion of natural resources, and a reluctance to stay within the bounds of natural
evolution--for example, our extended, unnatural life expectancy. But Dixon does not even
bother to provide an obituary, let alone a eulogy, for his own kind. There is nothing really
uncanny about his version of an abandoned Earth.
Reading After Man, however, I could not help thinking about the peculiar creatures we
are: beings capable of imagining, as an intellectual exercise, a thought experiment, a
world that has passed us by; able to dream of our own extinction and then to
communicate this dream with supreme objectivity in a beautifully illustrated $14.95
coffee-table volume! Perhaps, I thought, After Man represents the appearance of a new
eschatological genre for the human imagination. Have we not already imagined, or
endeavored to imagine, the world before we emerged? It seems only natural, then, that
the human mind has begun to colonize--in the imagination--a post-homic Earth.
But After Man's insouciance about our fate, we must remind ourselves, actually
represents a newly acquired, contemporary capacity of the species mind. Once
unimaginable, the eradication of the human race now haunts us. More and more it has
come to capture our imaginations.
Facing the possibility of death, the individual goes through five distinct stages--as
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross has taught us--from initial denial of the possibility of such a fate, to
eventual acceptance of the inevitable. What is true for the person would seem to be true
for the species as well. Once we could not admit that we would ever die; but now we
have begun to accept the unavoidable; we contemplate with real seriousness an Earth
abandoned through eradication of the human.
Before the discovery of evolution, humankind's right to "multiply and subdue the Earth"
was largely unquestioned and uncontested--at least in the modern period. Mythological
and religious conceptions of eschatology, it is true, had once reminded us there might be
an end to time (the Norse myth of Ragnarok, for example, in which the death of the gods
brings about the end of all life on Midgard as well--though it is eventually reborn into a
golden age). But after the Renaissance our preeminence over nature hardened into a
conservative and self-congratulatory anthropocentricism that occluded any real glimpse
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of the end.
The possibility that we might become extinct was virtually unthinkable through the
eighteenth century. In fact, in the pre-Darwinian scheme of things--Lovejoy's "great
chain of being"--no individual being, let alone human beings, could disappear from the
scala naturae. Since each was believed to be a manifestation, an overflow, an aspect of
God's perfection governed by the "principle of plenitude," the idea of extinction was
tantamount to blasphemy: how could a perfect deity create a transient, failed form of
life? Under this paradigm, it simply made no sense to speak of extinction.
The unthinkableness of extinction was governed by psychological factors as well as
theological ones. Only a century and a half ago, as Loren Eiseley explains in "How Death
Became Natural" in The Firmament of Time, "The hint of extinction in the geological past
was like a cold wind out of a dark cellar. It chilled men's souls." It was humiliating. "It
brought with it doubts of the rational world men had envisaged on the basis of their own
mind. It brought suspicions as to the nature of the cozy best-of-all-possible worlds which
had been created especially for men" (37).
After a period of intellectual struggle, the realization that species did in fact become
extinct, as the fossil record confirmed, finally gained credence. Even after this realization,
some thinkers, anxious to maintain our preeminence, resorted to a last form of
rationalization, arguing that time's arrow still pointed toward humankind as its logical
culmination, even if the field was littered with the bodies of the unsuccessful dead.
However, against the pulverizing assault of the all-consuming modern quest for
objectivity--even about our own insignificance--this form of cognitive dissonance could
not and did not long endure, though contemporary creationists have again sought to
revive it.
Displaced, dethroned, diminished, it is not surprising that the human mind, despite our
faith in science, now finds little comfort in the new worldview that French Nobel laureate
Jacques Monod offers in his Chance and Necessity as both the logical conclusion to be
drawn from the study of evolution and as the prerequisite to all future scientific progress
(which he takes to be equal to human progress).
Man must at last wake out of his millenary dream; and in doing so, wake to his
total solitude, his fundamental isolation. Now does he at last realize that, like a
gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world. A world that is deaf to his music,
just as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his suffering or his crimes.
The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the
universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. (172-73,
180)
A distinctly contemporary voice, Monod is asking us to be realistic about our
meaninglessness--a simple request! Jean-Paul Sartre, Monod's contemporary Jean-Paul
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Sartre concludes his Being and Nothingness with the realization that "man is a useless
passion" (784), and Monod agrees, lending scientific credibility to the philosopher's
conjecture. And if Homo sapiens happened on the scene by chance, we may very well
pass away with no great consternation and without any just cause--except evolution's
necessity. After all, no "ancient covenant" can protect us.
Actually, the theory of evolution was a natural outgrowth of the quest for the
Archimedean point; the diminution of the human from the "centre of the world" to a
"gypsy" living on "the boundary of an alien world" which followed in its wake was an
Archimdean side-effect. Only from such a perspective, outside the "booming, buzzing
confusion" of earthly life, beyond the presently human-dominated planet, do our
evolutionary achievements become a matter of relativity. The Psalmist might ask of God,
"When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which
thou hast ordained;/What is man, that thou art mindful of him?" and still feel real wonder
at the phenomenon of mankind. The chorus in Antigone could exclaim in awe: "Many are
the marvelous things; but none that can be/More of a marvel than man!" But having
himself attained an Archimedean, semi-divine point of view since the Copernican
revolution and the rise of modern science, God becomes not so mindful of us, not so full
of wonder or admiration. From the Olympian perspective of the Archimedean point, in
fact, the mind can not only accept mankind's extinction but can even envision value-free
accounts of a post-homic Earth. After Man is a message from the Archimedean point.
The evolutionary Weltanschauung thus awoke mankind from what Michel Foucault calls
the "anthropological sleep" of Western culture, opening our eyes to our own contingency.
Humankind could no longer take its existence for granted; our destiny could no longer be
assumed to be equal to the world's. By 1873, Nietzsche (by his own admission a
"posthumous man" but also a "post-homic" one), writing "On Truth and Lie in an ExtraMoral Sense," felt certain enough about the nature and destiny of the human to conclude,
with definitive Archimedean realism, that we have greatly exaggerated our own
importance:
In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar
systems there was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the
haughtiest and most mendacious minute of "world history"--yet only a minute. After
nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.
One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how
wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect
appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is
done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission
that would lead beyond human life. It is human rather, and only its owner and
producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it. (42; my
emphasis)
By the twentieth century it had become even more routine to think the previously
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unthinkable. In George Bernard Shaw's Back to Methuselah, for example, we find a
statement like the following from its Lamarckian author: "The power that produced Man
when the monkey was not up to the mark, can produce a higher creature than Man if
Man is not up to the mark" (xvii). The stoic acceptance of evolutionary logic in Shaw's
"Metabiological Pentateuch" identifies him as distinctly contemporary, though born in the
middle of the Victorian era.
Yet even Nietzsche's and Shaw's refusal to accept the "descent of man" as evolution's
telos seems positive, even optimistic, compared with the meditations of younger
contemporaries like the poets Sara Teasdale and Robinson Jeffers, who in their
"inhumanist" verse pictured the end of humankind and well-nigh celebrated the
resumption of the Earth's natural evolutionary order without the human.
Teasdale's "There Will Come Soft Rains" (a poem that inspired a memorable science
fiction tale of the same name in Bradbury's Martian Chronicles) describes with great
beauty a "silent spring"--silent because humans and not the birds have disappeared-after an ultimate war. Teasdale's vision is remarkable in its peacefulness, a kind of
wishful thinking in which the nonhuman world could care less about our passing. And the
iconoclast and radical misanthrope Jeffers--who castigated his species from his stone
tower at Big Sur, who thought of us as "the contagion of consciousness that infects this
corner of space" and predicted that "a day will come when the Earth will scratch herself
and smile and rub off humanity"--imagined (in poems like "The Truce and the
Peace" [1918]) the Earth without us attaining a tranquility that is hers by right, though
our presence has temporarily blighted and obscured it.
Shaw's, Teasdale's, and Jeffers's imaginings of a post-homic Earth were all affected,
directly or indirectly, by the same post World War I loss of faith in a human future that
produced the Lost Generation and Dadaism, but the subsequent history of this century,
terrorized by yet another world war and the contemporary twin threats of nuclear
holocaust and ecological catastrophe, has guaranteed successors to this essentially
inhumanist tradition and to fuller Space Age imagining of, even theorizing about, the
eradication of humankind.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. has suggested that writers are "specialized cells in the social
organism," "evolutionary cells" that function as alarm systems, as a kind of distant early
warning system alerting us to perils which lie ahead (238). In the meditations of later
twentieth-century thinkers and writers, it would seem, the species has now begun fully to
imagine--in a time when the question of extinction has become exponentially more real
to us--its own end, as if its sustaining faith lay in the resolution (espoused by Thomas
Hardy) that "if a way to the better there be, it lies in taking a full look at the worst." In
these imaginations of disaster, mankind contemplates--with great seriousness and,
strangely, real objectivity--an abandoned Earth, abandoned because of its own demise,
and imagines it so fully, in fact, that the old chestnut once pondered by philosophical
idealism--"If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, will it make a
noise?"--has become instead the humiliating question: "If we fall, will the Earth hear
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us?"
In a modern-day creation myth, "A Woman as Great as the World," anthropologist
Jacquetta Hawkes offers a reverse-angle version of Watson's "Letter from God" that
attempts to account fully for the evolution of the Earth and humanity's place within it-but this time from from the Earth's point of view. For the woman as great as the world in
Hawkes's modern myth is the world; she is the Earth--what the ancient Greeks once
called Gaea.
Hawkes tells how in the beginning this woman was "of placid disposition, and, knowing
everything, had no cares." Complete in herself, unconscious of her meaning, she is, like
Watson's god, unaware of her own finest qualities, until disturbed by the masculine Wind
(a kind of Hegelian Spirit, consciousness) that begins to visit her, eventually inspiring her
own evolution. The presence of the Wind causes the mind of the woman to "be filled . . .
with images of herself which hung before her and seemed by their presence to demand
an explanation."
Sometimes, the fable explains, the wind demands that the woman yield to his sexual
desire for her. Impregnated by him, she brings forth a plethora of creatures which,
though they reveal "in every part the endless inventiveness, the immeasurably powerful
imagination of the generating Wind," nevertheless also fulfill the woman, "increasing her
beauty like a fine garment." But then one day the Wind, after having been away for a
long time, returns and, without her invitation, assaults the woman. Pregnant again with
new life from this rape, the woman feels stirring within her a new kind of awareness; she
finds herself closer than ever before to comprehending her own secret life, her own
significance. Her progeny, however, which she had expected to be the most splendid
creatures yet born from her womb, disappoint her: for the product of the Wind's rape of
Earth is our species.
And yet the "ugly little mommets who walk clumsily on two legs" surprise the woman at
first. Humans, she finds, are the Wind in miniature; as they move about her surface she
feels through them a "new disturbing thing, a persistent self-consciousness as though the
Wind were always with her, as though he were present among the tissues of her
body." (We are reminded of the newfound egotistical awareness of god in Watson's
"Letter.") Thinking with a new clarity, Earth even dreams of rivaling the Wind in
cleverness and imagination. She begins to challenge the Wind's authority, combating him
with logic.
The woman becomes jealous, however, when she discovers that the Wind speaks
privately with the new creatures behind her back and treats them as special children. The
mommets begin to trouble her, to irritate her physical being: "They tormented her skin
and flesh in a hundred ways by their restless activity; they were spoiling her physical
beauty even while they were destroying her age-long peace of mind." Deciding with
feminist conviction that "her body was her own and hers the completeness of being," she
expunges the mommets from her and returns to a state of quiescence; "knowing
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everything and caring not at all," she rests content, satisfied even if the Wind should
never return, even if she should never again be self-conscious.
Hawkes's fable is of course a wonderful capsule history of human/Earth coevolution; but
it is also a prediction. Humankind brings to the woman, to Earth, a masculine, yang-like
completeness in which she somehow incorporates the earlier processes of her own
becoming and the fruits of the awareness the Wind and the mommets have given her
into a higher unconsciousness and self-sufficient being. Her visitants, this fable's harsh
truth is telling us, are instrumental to her self-perfection. Yet they are at the same time a
pest, an infestation, and once her metamorphosis is complete, she simply does not need
them.
Hawkes's vision is not, of course, unique. Such a conception of our place on Earth was, in
fact, something of a romantic commonplace, as can be seen in the German poet Novalis's
vatic pronouncement, "Man is the messiah of nature." And it owes much as well to
Teilhard de Chardin's idea of the "hominization" of Earth. But while acknowledging that
humankind may be for a time the planet's means of seeing itself, of raising its
consciousness, Hawkes does not agree that the Woman as Great as the World will always
need her eyes. Nor does Hawkes see the mommets escaping their earthly doom through
the escape hatch of outer space. To accept Hawkes's message requires us to view the
destruction of the species as merely a phase in an evolution vaster than we can
comprehend, in which we may well be denied actual participation. And her voice is only
one in a swelling contemporary chorus.
"It's only us that wants us to survive," the late Gregory Bateson remarked in a 1978
interview. "No doubt the rest of the world would give a sigh of relief to see us go. A few
tapeworms might say, 'Oh, my God, what will we do now?' But the rest of the world
would settle into a new equilibrium" ("Breaking Out" 47). According to Bateson's
understanding of the "ecology of mind," the Earth, and Earth's natural "mind" (which
Bateson calls "Creatura"), may require such a peace as a stage in a natural, an ecological
process. Like Freud in his conception of the "death instinct" in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, Bateson, perhaps the first full-fledged theoretician of human extinction, sees
life, and the consciousness that periodically emerges from it, forever pulled back toward
the "quiescence of the inorganic world" as part of the housekeeping of the Woman as
Great as the World housekeeping, the ecologically governed "self-healing" drift toward
stability (or "tautology," as Bateson calls it [Mind and Nature 208]), in which "ugly little
mommets" will be erased and the Earth can again repose in all the "completeness of
being," with true peace of mind.
And certainly if humankind dies, Bateson insists, we cannot say that we have not asked
for it, that we have not brought it on ourselves. The attitudes and assumptions that will
bring about our doom, as Steps to an Ecology of Mind shows, have been with us at least
since the beginning of Western history:
If you put God outside and and set him vis-a-vis his creation and if you have the
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idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself
as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to
yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled
to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit.
Your survival unit will be you and your conspecifics against the environment of
other social units, other races and the brutes and vegetables.
If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced
technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die
either of the toxic by-products of your own own hate, or, simply, of overpopulation
and overgrazing. The raw materials of the world are finite. (462)
In Bateson's voice we hear the kind of acceptance Kubler-Ross counsels us to seek as we
come to see death as "the final stage of growth." And it is interesting to note that in the
interview from which I have quoted, which was conducted soon before Bateson's own
death from cancer, he expressly draws analogies between personal death (which he
compares to erasing an overfilled blackboard) and the ecologically natural wiping out of
the human.
In the closing lines of The Order of Things, Michel Foucault offers a structuralist vision of
the erasure of mankind.
If those arrangements [which allowed the figure of "man" to emerge in the modern
age] were to disappear as they appeared, if some vent which we can at the
moment do no more than sense the possibility--without knowing either what its
form will be or what it promises--were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of
Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly
wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.
(387)
By erasure--this passage makes clear--the French archaeologist of knowledge does not
have in mind physical extinction, though he does not rule out the possibility. His sobering
reflections on the fate of the human stem, rather, from a growing conviction, held by
other significant modern thinkers (including Heidegger and Levi-Strauss), that the
tradition of thought known as humanism is a historical aberration and overvaluation that
has served as the wellspring of much of the madness of the modern age, and that with
its now likely exit from the stage of history, humankind as we know it will be erased.
To Foucault, human elevation to the rank of "tyrant of Being" (the phrase is Heidegger's),
our self-proclaimed omnipotency over the "discourse" of the world (or, as Bateson would
say, our arrogation of all mind to ourselves), ushered in an age not just of the death of
God--as Nietzsche announced--but an age that "heralds . . . the end of his murderer":
"the explosion of man's face in laughter, and the return of masks; . . . the scattering of
the profound stream of time by which he felt himself carried along and whose presence
he suspected in the very being of things . . . the identity of the Return of the Same with
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the absolute dispersion of man" (385; my emphasis).
Though Foucault arrives at the "Return of the Same" via typically French, turgid, almost
tortured thought, after profound and yet recondite excursions into the origin of the
modern "episteme" in philosophy, sociology, linguistics, and indeed the whole
"archeology of the human sciences," in the end we are delivered over to the same world
the visions of Dixon, Teasdale, Hawkes, and Bateson offer us: a world without us, devoid
any longer of our identity, a world we cannot know, except in zoologies of the future,
except through the imagination.
Eschatological prophecies now appear in quite unexpected situations. In Louis Malle's film
My Dinner with Andre (1981), for example, a playwright (Wallace Shawn) and an
experimental theater director (Andre' Gregory) speak of the end of humankind during an
evening of fabulous conversation in an elegant New York restaurant. Over after-dinner
drinks, Gregory, whose talk has blended total despair with the search for a visionary new
order, gives voice to his darkest fear.
It seems to me quite possible that the nineteen-sixties represented the last burst of
the human being before he was extinguished. And that this is the beginning of the
rest of the future, now, and that from now on there will simply be all these robots
running around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. And there will be nothing left
almost to remind them there was a species called a human being, with feelings and
thoughts. And that history and memory are right now being erased, and soon no
one will remember that life existed on the planet. (Shawn and Gregory 93-94)
Wally, Sancho Panza to Andre's apocalyptic Don Quixote, replies to this not-veryconducive-to-the-digestion monologue with a dumb-founded "Uh-huh." Later he
confesses that he doesn't really know what his friend is talking about. Taking refuge in
simple pleasures--his reading of Charlton Heston's autobiography, a cup of cold coffee
waiting for him in the morning with no cockroach in it--Wally has no desire to learn to
live with extinction, while Andre's more encompassing mind, taking a "full look at the
worst," in some strange fashion draws inspiration from it.
We can today even hear New Wave rock and roll versions of our doom. In a song called
"Walking in Your Footsteps" by the Police, in the early 1980s one of the world's most
popular groups, we find a paean to the dinosaur--in particular the Brontosaurus ("built
three stories high/They say you would not hurt a fly")--in which the lead singer, Sting,
speaking in direct address to another former ruling animal, identifies with its role:
Fifty million years ago
You walked upon the planet so,
Lord of all that you could see
just a little bit like me.
Walking in your footsteps.
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Thus he finds its ironic end instructive, containing a "lesson for us": "You were God's
favorite creature/But you didn't have a future." Who, the song asks, will be seen as the
stupider being, the dinosaur or the human, should the latter destroy itself in a nuclear
war? At a Police concert, thousands of fans might be seen enthralled by such a song,
mesmerized by the music, perhaps singing the words along with sex-symbol Sting-singing of our extinction! Imagine, if you will, pre-Darwinians brought in a time machine
to attend such a performance. What would theh make of the prospect, if indeed they
could comprehend it at all?
We also find angry and eloquent minority voices contemplating, with a certain
righteousness, humankind's eradication--or at least the eradication of Western, white,
male civilization. I will cite but two examples.
In "Nuclear Exorcism: Beyond Cursing the Day We Were Born," Alice Walker expresses
shame for her species with unequaled vituperation and passion. In the context of a
consideration of a terrible "curse-prayer" collected by Zora Neale Hurston in the 1920s, a
plea to "the Man God" to bring to the speaker's enemies absolute havoc--blindness,
barrenness, disease, poverty, crop failure, starvation, exposure to the elements, failure
of their language, pestilence, death, and more--Walker, certain that the curse's speaker
is a woman and inclined to imagine her to be a colored woman, thinks "with
astonishment, that the curse-prayer of this colored woman--starved, enslaved,
humiliated, and carelessly trampled to death over centuries, is coming to pass. Indeed,
like ancient peoples of color the world over, who have tried to tell the white man of the
destruction that would inevitably follow from the uranium mining plunder of their sacred
lands, this woman--along with millions and billions of obliterated sisters, brothers, and
children--seems to have put such enormous energy into her hope for revenge, that her
curse seems close to bringing it about. Bringing it about, that is, not for her specific
enemies, but for the human species."
And Walker finds herself sorely tempted to shout the curse with her predecessor, to pray
it in unison:
When I have considered the enormity of the white man's crimes against humanity.
Against women. Against every living person of color. Against the poor. Against my
mother and my father. Against me. . . . When I consider that he is, they are, a real
and present threat to my life and the life of my daughter, my people, I think--in
perfect harmony with my sister of long ago: Let the Earth marinate in poisons. Let
the bombs cover the ground like rain. For nothing short of total destruction will
ever teach them anything. (341)
She contemplates as well the possibility that "it would be good, perhaps, to put an end to
the species in any case, rather than let white men continue to subjugate it and continue
their lust to dominate, exploit and despoil not just our planet but the rest of the
universe." And she offers, as a proposition that "requires serious thought from every one
of us," the dire prospect that "fatally irradiating ourselves may in fact be the only way to
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save others from what Earth has already become."
Walker, it is true, does go on to qualify her bitterness and to partially annul her curse
because of the realization that "accepting our demise as a planet as a simple and just
preventative medicine administered to the universe" would bring doom to "the godly and
the ungodly alike," and so the "thought of extinction purely for the assumed satisfaction
of--from the grave--achieved revenge" cannot long be entertained. That she
contemplates it at all must stand, however, as a distinct landmark in the developing
imagination of extinction and the abandoned Earth.
With the rage of the oppressed, the Native American militant Russell Means likewise
warns "European man" that "humans do not have the right to degrade Mother Earth,"
and, reminding us, like Bateson, of the ecological truism that all creatures "must be in
harmony with all relations or the relations will eventually eliminate the disharmony," he
offers a prophecy of the inevitable destruction of the mommets (whom he identifies as
solely the product of a European civilization that, in its arrogance, behaves as though it
"were beyond the nature of all related things"): "Mother Earth has been abused, the
powers have been abused, and this cannot go on forever. The natural order will win out
and the offenders will die back, the way deer die when they offend the harmony by
overpopulating a given region. There is no need for a revolutionary theory to bring this
about, it's beyond human control" (23).
And apocalyptic imaginings are, of course, also a staple of science fiction. In "Cataclysms
and Dooms," J. G. Ballard, the British master of the disaster novel, has even gone so far
as to claim that the genre is "itself no more than a minor offshoot of the cataclysmic
tale," the history of which stretches back as far as Gilgamesh (130). Though it would be
possible to cite hundreds of short stories and novels (including Ballard's own) concerned
with the extinction or near extinction of mankind in science fiction, I will limit myself here
to two short stories by James Tiptree, Jr. (the pseudonym of Dr. Alice Sheldon).
In Tiptree's "Screwfly Solution," the human race is literally exterminated by an alien race
interested in acquiring the Earth as a new piece of real estate. Using a complex, shifting
point of view and making use of letters and reports as part of her narrative, Tiptree tells
of a worldwide epidemic of sexual violence against women that is rapidly destroying the
reproductive capability of Homo sapiens. "A potential difficulty for our species," a scientist
in the story explains, "had always been implicit in the close linkage between the
behavioral expressions of aggression/predation and sexual reproduction in the
male" (69).
In Tiptree's short story, this difficulty becomes fatal to our ongoing existence. Male
sexual aggression is transformed into homicide, rationalized by a world religion that
teaches that males must give up the old way of perpetuating their kind in preparation for
a new revelation. "Man must purify and show God a clean world. . . . as long as man
depends on the old filthy animal way God won't help him. When man gets rid of his
animal part which is woman, this is the signal God is awaiting. Then God will reveal the
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new true clean way, maybe angels will come bringing new souls, or maybe we will live
forever, but it is not our place to speculate, only to obey" (59). Angels of a sort do arrive,
but only Dr. Anne Alstein, possibly the last woman in the world, hiding out in the wilds of
Canada disguised as a boy, perceives the irony of their annunciation. For the "angel" she
comes on in the woods near Hudson Bay is, in fact, not an angel at all but a "real estate
agent."
I think they've done whatever it is to us [Dr. Alstein realizes]. Made us kill
ourselves off.
Why? Well, it is a nice place, if it wasn't for the people. How do you get rid of
people? Bombs, death rays--all very primitive. Leave a big mess. Destroy
everything, craters, radioactivity, ruin the place.
This way there's no muss, no fuss. Just like what we did to the screwfly. Pinpoint
the weak link, wait a bit, while we do it for them. Only a few bones around; make
good fertilizer. (75)
As in the first of the Star Trek films, in which humankind appears to be only a "carbonbased infestation" of Earth, so our species seems to this higher race not a creature made
in the image of God but a mere annoying pest, capable of, and deserving, destruction
through manipulation of breeding practices. "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,"
Gloucester insists in King Lear. "They kill us for their sport." In "The Screwfly Solution",
such a surmise becomes quite a bit more than a simile.
In another Tiptree tale, "The Last Flight of Doctor Ain," we find a human being seeking to
help the Earth rub off humanity. Tiptree imagines a world-renowned scientist who seeks
to commit speciescide by introducing into the biosphere a genetically redesigned,
incredibly lethal leukemia virus, one that is unstoppable because it utilizes the human
body's immune system as part of its own life cycle, and although we are never explicitly
told what his motives are, we do learn than Doctor Ain has enacted his fiendish plan on
the behalf of a woman, a "wounded, dying woman," with whom he is obsessed, even on
his own deathbed. After arrest for his act, Ain talks to himself of his love and actions on
her behalf, and we finally begin to grasp the nature of his sacrifice.
Blue, blue green until you see the wound. Oh my girl, Oh beautiful, you won't die. I
won't let you die. I tell you girl, it's over. . . . Lustrous eyes, look at me, let me see
you alive! Great queen, my sweet body, my girl, have I saved you? . . . Oh terrible
to know, and noble, Chaos' child greenrobed in blue and golden light . . . the
thrown and spinning ball of life alone in space. . . . Have I saved you? (67)
In his further musing Ain reveals his beloved's name: "Gaea Gloriatrix . . . Gaea girl,
queen. . . ." He asks questions of the woman as great as the world, partly as a lover
might, partly as a curious scientist, "What did you do about the dinosaurs? . . . Did they
annoy you? How did you fix them?" And with the "light clear voice of a lover planning a
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summer picnic," he suggests before he himself dies that in her next evolutionary
experiment she might try using bears as her vehicle for the further development of
consciousness (68).
Ain's assistance in his species' eradication is, to his own eyes at least, necessary, as the
story makes clear. Left to our own pace, our self-destruction, Ain believes, would have
taken Gaea down along with the human race. It is thus essential that he interfere: "Our
death would have been your death too," he insists. "No need for that, no need" (68).
Dixon, Hawkes, Bateson, Tiptree, and the rest see humankind accepting the failure of its
audition with equanimity. But we may not choose to do so. Up to this point in history we
have certainly not behaved as though the Earth would one day not be ours. Rather, as
Edgar Quinet observes in La Creation, in the course of its evolution Homo sapiens has
managed to convince itself that it "had so thoroughly taken possession of the Earth, that
it could now belong only to him." Thus we have come to envision the Earth without us as
meaningless, an "orphaned . . . sepulchre . . . in perpetual mourning for vanished man."
And this conviction, Quinet stresses, cannot be easily erased. A creature with infinite
presumption, we are not and never will be "one of those kings who survive their
dethronement"; we will never accept a secondary role, will never accept a successor to
the throne; will not be an understudy (quoted in Rostand 94-95). Like the "insupportable
infante gate" we are (the phrase is Levi-Strauss's; see Huckle 388), we may respond to
the inability to have our way with the Earth by trying to ensure that there will be no play
at all if we cannot have the lead. If humanity must go down in defeat, Quinet implies, we
may well decide to take the Earth down with us.
Or perhaps our species's brush with death will serve only to make it that much more of a
fanatic (fanatics being, as Santayana explained, those who redouble their efforts when
they have forgotten their goal). And, even with one foot in the grave, there remains
another form of deliverance for our kind: the dream of flight.
"The Broken Balance," Robinson Jeffers's contemplation of human erasure, both
"mourns" ecological disruption--"the hopeless prostration of the Earth/Under men's hands
and their minds,/The beautiful places killed like rabbits to make a city,/The spreading
fungus, the slime threads/And spores; my own coast's obscene future"--and prophecies
about "the farther future": "I remember . . . the last man dying/Without succession under
the confident eyes of the stars" (260). Jeffers' pre-Space Age assurance (the poem was
written in the late 1920s) now seems premature, almost naive. Even in the face of our
erasure, real or imagined, Homo sapiens, a would-be illegal alien, is planning its escape.
The stars have no reason to feel secure.
III
Escape from Earth
The eyes of all the ages are upon us now. . . . The impartial agents of our destiny
stand on their launching pads, awaiting our commands. They can take us to that
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greater Renaissance whose signs and portents we can already see, or they can
make us one with the dinosaurs.
Arthur C. Clarke, "Space Flight and the Spirit of Man"
The prospect of extinction does not sit well with a creature of infinite presumptions, and
so we fantasize, too, about our escape; we contemplate abandoning the Earth before the
Woman as Great as the World erases us. And such a planned emigration becomes, in a
circular argument, a major premise in the extraterrestrial imperative. "We could already
be off the planet," Carnegie-Mellon robotics expert Hans Moravec laments, "and I think
it's inexcusable that we're not. If we stay here, we are going to get wiped out sooner or
later. And what's more, we'll deserve it" (Fjermedal 250). A recent coffee-table volume of
space advocacy (Hartmann, Miller, and Lee, Out of the Cradle) insists as a basic premise
in the book's whole argument that not to expand into outer space is to risk the "three
dangers" of (1) nuclear war, (2) Malthusian disaster, and (3) ecological disaster (37-42).
And such thinking, a prime example of what Christopher Lasch has called "apocalyptic
survivalism," is now monotonously routine.
A young, brilliant, eccentric, and righteously anti-Soviet scientist tells an investigative
reporter that the real motives behind his research on the Strategic Defense Initiative are
hislock step fear of human eradication and a longing for space: "What I want more than
anything is essentially to get the human race into space. It's the future. If you stay down
here some disaster is going to strike and you're going to be wiped out. If you get into
space and spread out there's just no chance of the human race disappearing" (quoted by
Broad 130).
A Canaan, Maine, junior-high-school teacher, Bob Dunbar, becomes convinced that NASA
is not carrying out its true mission: to train ordinary people to fly rockets. Humanity, he
is convinced, must prepare itself to evacuate the planet at a time of global crisis. "We
could have gone to Mars," he insists. "We could have lived there." He takes on the task
himself. Using an old water tank and an abandoned fire tower, he constructs an Apollo
rocket simulator in his own backyard, complete with a furnace and loudspeakers at its
base, which create the sound effects of an actual lift-off, and a working "Mission Control"
in an adjoining barn (Curran 107).
A fictional scientist, Dr. Lal in Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet, argues that space is
the logical solution to worldly problems:
There is a universe into which we can overflow. Obviously we cannot manage with
one single planet. . . . Not to accept the opportunity would make this Earth seem
more and more a prison. If we could soar out and did not, we would condemn
ourselves. We would be more than ever irritated with life. As it is, the species is
eating itself up. And now Kingdom Come is directly over us and waiting to receive
the fragments of a final explosion. Much better the moon. (222)
A Stanford University graduate student, contemplating the disastrous consequences of a
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possible nuclear holocaust, proclaims, "We have to get off this damn planet. You don't
put all your eggs in one basket" (Fjermedal 248-50).
A renowned science fiction writer tells us that not to pursue our destiny in space is to risk
becoming "one with the dinosaurs."
And the poet Frederick Turner argues that, in the face of extinction, we have a cosmic
mandate to carry Earth's life beyond this planet. "If we are alone"--if Earth is the only
planet in the cosmos that supports life (as the anthropic principle implies)--then,
according to Turner, "we carry a gigantic responsibility. We are the custodians of life in
the universe and the only plausible vector by which life may propagate itself to other
worlds and thus escape the risk that some minor cosmic accident--the impact of a stray
asteroid, or a disturbance of the sun's activity--should snuff forever out the first shoots of
life" ("Field Guide," 55).
Not all of those contemplating Space Age apocalypse are so confident about the success
of our escape plans. In her dark tale "A Momentary Taste of Being," for example, James
Tiptree, Jr., envisions the scout ship Centaur, looking for a new, habitable planet to
relieve horrible overcrowding on Earth. A psychiatrist (the novella's narrator) dreams on
the outward voyage that his home world is "a planet-testicle pushing a monster penis
toward the stars" (65), and then finds his dream ironically come true when the crew is
taken over one by one by alien beings who have lured the human race into space as a
kind of sperm in their own reproductive cycle. But most find the linkage of extinction and
departure quite natural.
"Now is the time to take large strides," John F. Kennedy sought to convince us in the
early 1960s, "time for a great new American enterprise--time for this nation to take a
clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways holds the key to our
future on Earth." To help motivate his country's urge for the extraterrestrial, President
Kennedy liked to tell a story he had garnered from the Irish writer Frank O'Connor: we
should approach space, Kennedy suggested, with the same spirit of adventure O'Connor
and his friends showed in their childhood rambles across the Irish countryside. When
they encountered a seemingly unclimbable wall, O'Connor recalled, they would throw
their belongings over the wall, thus irretrievably committing themselves to accomplishing
the climb (cited in Fallaci 131). If we are to take this metaphor seriously, in this time in
which our end has become a palpable reality, the belongings mankind, not a young Irish
boy, must throw over the wall into the void amount to nothing less than the Earth itself.
The whole modern age has been, as Norbert Wiener observes in The Human Use of
Human Beings (64-65), one prolonged Mad Tea Party on a planetary scale. Since the
discovery of the New World and the concomitant obliteration of the limited, preRenaissance closed universe, humankind has behaved as if we could always "move down"
to the next available open space at the world's table after exhausting all the natural
resources at its previous location. "When Alice inquired what would happen when they
came around to their original positions again," Wiener notes, "the March hare changed
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the subject." And now to "move down" can only mean to "move up," to obey the
extraterrestrial imperative.
"The immediate cause of World War III," the great sociologist C. Wright Mills once
observed, "is the preparation for it." And the immediate cause of Spacekind's departure
from the Earth--whether in strict obedience to the supposed dictates of the
extraterrestrial imperative or in order to flee a worldly apocalypse--may well be, in a
similar self-fulfilling prophecy, our destruction of the planet and our own feared
extinction. The species, it seems, has long been preparing a contingency plan with which
to counter the potential humiliation of the "worst-case scenarios" described in the
preceding pages. For even before we could bear to speak aloud of our possible extinction,
we were already at work imagining an extraterrestrial escape from failed audition. (In
"Whitey's on the Moon Now," a Native American, seeking to give space exploration a
historical context, sarcastically describes Apollo 11 as the achievement of
White wild men
Savages
With blue eyes
Pinks asses
And guns
[Who] erected Royal Crown Cola signs,
Massacred the Indians,
Shit in the creek,
Left for the moon
Without so much as a
Thank you for the use of this
Planet.
"When the white man arrived/Here," he concludes, "the white man had already
departed" (Eastlake 82).
To hear us talk we are ready to "quit this sphere" and "rush into the skies." To listen to
what our fictions are saying to us-- as I will do in this section--our thinking is increasingly
escapist, increasingly reluctant to undergo the initiation that, according to Kubler-Ross,
death requires of us.
In the vision of human history that unfolds in the classic science fiction novel A Canticle
for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr., humankind rises again from the ashes of a nuclear
holocaust to escape to the stars. Set in a future "dark age" after war has destroyed a
large part of the human species and caused widespread and horrible mutations in the
race, Canticle shows us evolving again to the level of civilization, again developing
nuclear weapons, and--ignorant of the past and thus doomed to repeat it--destroying
ourselves again in a second nuclear war, one even more devastating than the first.
At the novel's close, a group of monks along with a few others board a rocketship and
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depart from Earth as the horizon begins to glow with a light "brighter than ten thousand
suns." Before the hatch is closed, these Spores look back for the last time at Earth to
witness the planet conquered at last by the Prince of Darkness, the Earth's true ruler,
who has finally revealed himself in his true form: "The visage of Lucifer mushroomed into
hideousness above the cloudbank, rising slowly like some titan climbing to its feet after
ages of imprisonment in the Earth" (277).
Fleeing from this nuclear apocalypse--which Miller evidently intended us to understand as
a true, though unexpected, fulfillment of biblical prophecy--the monks enter the ship,
carefully stripping off their sandals and shaking the dirt from them, lest they carry into
the seed ship any trace of the pedestrian, any earthliness, and one of them murmurs the
planet's epitaph: "Sic transit mundus" ("And so passes the world").
Then all that remains is an Earth on fire, an Earth devoid of the human, described with
powerful simplicity in the novel's closing lines.
There came a blur, a glare of light, a high thin whining sounds, and the starship
thrust itself heavenward.
The breakers beat monotonously at the shores, casting up driftwood. An
abandoned seaplane floated beyond the breakers. After a while the breakers
caught the seaplane and threw it on the shore with the driftwood. It tilted and
fractured a wing. There were shrimp carousing in the breakers, and the whiting
that fed on the shrimp, and the shark that munched the whiting and found them
admirable, in the sportive brutality of the sea.
A wind came from across the ocean, sweeping with it a pall of fine white ash. The
ash fell into the sea and into the breakers. The breakers washed dead shrimp
ashore with the driftwood. Then they washed up the whiting. The shark swam out
to his deepest waters and brooded in the cold clean currents. He was very hungry
that season. (277-78)
In Carol Carrick's children's book What Happened to Patrick's Dinosaurs? a small boy
becomes perplexed by questions about the extinction of Earth's once ruling creatures.
Like so many children in the dinosaur-obsessed 1980s, Patrick admires the vanished
creatures and mourns their absence. In an earlier book, Patrick's Dinosaurs, he had
found them to be, in the root meaning of the word, "awe-ful." Yet they became, in all
their terror, the imaginal rulers of his daily life, walking the city's streets, doing battle in
the field near his house, looking into his bedroom window. And even now, with his fear
behind him, transformed into a kind of nostalgia; even now, when they no longer pose
even an imagined threat, he continues to see their shapes in everything, so that the
gestalts of clouds, for example, become a parade of dinosaurs.
His older brother, who had earlier taught Patrick all he knows about dinosaurs, tries to
explain to him the possible scientific theories concerning their demise: that, for example,
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the Earth became too cold when the impact of an asteroid filled the atmosphere with
dust. Patrick, however, intent on creating his own mythological explanation, is unwilling
to believe anything so prosaic.
"Once upon a time," Patrick hypothesizes with innocent certainty, "dinosaurs and people
were friends," and dinosaurs, it seems, did everything for their weaker fellow creatures.
They built them homes, invented cars, made airplanes, and laid down roads. More than
willing to share their vast knowledge and expertise, dinosaurs, Patrick imagines, "wanted
to teach people how everything works." But human beings, easily susceptible to
boredom, "were only interested in recess and lunch." Anxious to please, dinosaurs put on
circus like entertainments for their childish human friends, sometimes even teaching the
smarter ones to do tricks.
Not surprisingly, Patrick explains, dinosaurs soon "got tired of doing all the work." So
they constructed an immense spaceship and left the Earth behind. At the book's close,
Patrick's brother asks, "You really think dinosaurs are out there?" Looking up at the night
sky, Patrick replies, "But they miss us. . . . And every so often they check to see how
we're doing." The book's last page shows the dinosaurs' spacecraft heading for the
cosmos amidst constellations of stars shaped like Triceratops, Stegosaurus, and
Tyrannosauros rex--stars that have come to tell their story.
Researchers have discovered that the ever-present possibility of nuclear holocaust has
had profound effects on the modern psyche; that in our daily worries and concerns, not
to mention our nightmares, we experience anxiety and "psychic numbing" (the term is
Robert Jay Lifton's) at the inconceivable prospect of the destruction of our world and
everything we know and love. Children, we are told, are particularly susceptible to such
foreboding, which has contributed immeasurably to what Neil Postman has described as
"the disappearance of childhood" in our time. What Happened to Patrick's Dinosaurs?
should be understood as a mirror of such apprehension.
In a psychohistorical sense, it is revealing that Patrick develops an obsessive curiosity
about an extinct species, a curiosity he of course shares with many children today, hence
the book's wide appeal. And is it not insightful that he imagines dinosaurs to be creative,
technologically adept, and farsighted, Reptilicus faber, if you will, and hence capable of
escaping their fate? Clearly, it is his own species' possible extinction that troubles Patrick,
and it is our end he seeks to explain away with his "escapist," whistling-in-a-cemetery
fantasy.
In Robert Silverberg's short story "The Wind, the Rain," an expedition of humans returns
to Earth after having fled thousands of years before from a dying planet on which they
did not care to be marooned, As the story progresses, we learn that the beings we had at
first taken to be aliens are actually descendants of present-day Earthlings (one in the
party, for example, is of Japanese ancestry).
Having returned to their ancestral home, they exhibit, predictably enough, occasional
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space cadet characteristics. The story's narrator, for example, finds even Earth's
destruction something he can groove on--a real "mind-blower," not a tragedy.
Even devastation can be an art form, can it not? Perhaps it is one of the greatest of
all art-forms, since an art of destruction consumes its medium, it devours its own
epistemological foundations, and in this sublimely nullifying doubling back upon its
origins it far exceeds in moral complexity those forms which are merely
productive. . . . We envy those who collaborated to create these extraordinary
conditions. We know ourselves to be small-souled folk of a minor latter-day epoch;
we lack the dynamic grandeur of energy that enabled our ancestors to create those
extraordinary conditions. (288)
The narrator's nihilism, masquerading as aesthetic sensibility (a disease he must have
caught from his twentieth-century ancestry, is not, however, his last word. For his return
educates him and his cohorts, humbles them, and brings their "far-out" sensibilities back
to Earth.
As the explorers work at their mission of refurbishing the planet--evidently in preparation
for future tourism--the group feels at first a part of this great work of art: "By restoring
this world, the mother-world of mankind, we are in a sense participating in the original
process of its destruction. I mean in the sense that the resolution of a dissonant chord
participates in the dissonance of that chord" (288). Yet as their investigation progresses,
as they discover the sources of earlier ecological catastrophes and work at tasks like
prying up the asphalt that nearly covers the Earth's surface (asphalt being, as Garrett
Hardin once remarked, the Earth's last crop), they become convinced of their own
redundancy, their "fundamental irrelevance": "The healing process is a natural and
inevitable one. With us or without us, the planet cleanses itself. The wind, the rain, the
tides. We merely help things along" (286).
They remain puzzled, however, by key, recurrent questions that confuse their abstract,
smug sensibilities: What was humankind for? Why did God make such a creature?
Without an answer to these questions, the dissonance they feel cannot be resolved into
any harmony. The answers the story itself offers, however, are only more questions: for
these latter-day human youth have discovered, by returning almost innocently back
along humanity's evolutionary past to its "nursery planet," that until they make sense of
our species' place on Earth, they will never make sense of their own destiny. "Why [they
begin to ask] did He go to so much trouble to bring Earth into Being, if it was His
intention merely to have it rendered uninhabitable? Did He create mankind especially for
this purpose, or did they exercise free will in doing what they did here? Was mankind
God's way of taking vengeance against His own creation?" (293). Those who have
abandoned the Earth, Canetti believed, would need to construct "far reaching
instruments . . . to enable them to observe the world without recognizing what they have
lost, an inexhaustible homeland' (Human Province 9). Silverberg's science fiction is, of
course, just such an instrument, but one in which, take note, his imagined emigrants
cannot help recognizing what they have lost.
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In the science fiction of the 1950s, Earth was regularly visited by spiritually advanced
alien beings on missions to enforce the quarantine that, according to C. S. Lewis, God
himself has imposed on the human race, Robert Wise's 1951 film The Day the Earth
Stood Still and Arthur C. Clarke's 1953 novel Childhood's End being only the two most
prominent examples. Humankind must not move outward into the universe, these
messengers inform our kind until we have matured, until we have put our own house in
order and are not likely to dump the evil by-products of our own self-deception
throughout the galaxy.
Such admonitions are still heard, though not from on high. Now one culture decries the
motives of the other. Now an earthly, Carbon Chauvinist voice proclaims that we are
about to witness the departure of the Body Snatchers. Now an angry, Black feminist can
insist that "If we have any true love for the stars, planets, the rest of creation, we must
do everything we can to keep white men away from them. They who have appointed
themselves our representatives to the rest of the universe. They who have never met any
new creature without exploiting, abusing or destroying it. They who say we poor and
colored and female and elderly blight neighborhoods, while they blight worlds. What they
have done to the Old, they will do to the New. Under the white man every star would
become a South Africa, every planet a Vietnam" (Walker 341). Now a great naturalist
compares our achievements in space to the spore bearing of a slime mold colony. And a
noted science writer (Nigel Calder) contemplates the possibility that our capacity to fulfill
"the reproductive requirements for peopling the universe" may lead only to the dubious
achievement of "recreat[ing] Calcutta across the entire sky" (25).
Now, in Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, a radical feminist revaluation of the
Western intellectual tradition, the poet Susan Griffin suggests that infinite presumption is
a manifestation of male escapism. Provocatively juxtaposing a description of the activities
of a Martian space probe with a more earthly and less noble search, Griffin brings the
former down to Earth, making overt with imaginative reductionism what she takes to be
its true psychohistorical etiology. (I quote the passage, from a section entitled
"Exploration" [55] in full.)
It is said that in his old age (Automatically, at their command the shovel extends)
he fears he is losing his powers (and extracts a sample) that the aging of his body
(of soil) makes him frantic (which is placed) and thus frantically (in an incubation
chamber) he searches (aboard the spacecraft) for a young woman. (The soil is
kept) Some say (perfectly dry) being close to youth (and is incubated) makes him
younger (for five days at 50 degrees) or at least he feels younger (under an arc
lamp that simulates Martian sunlight). Others say (A quartz window) that proving
he can still (filtered out ultraviolet light) attract a young woman (that might have
caused) restores him (spurious signals). And still others point out (on radioed
commands from Earth) that in capturing (the test chamber was filled) a young,
even virginal woman (with Martian atmosphere) he has proven his prowess (Then
the experimenters) once again. (sent up a radio command) But in all cases (that
added a whiff of radioactive carbon) he must (dioxide and carbon monoxide) be
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free of his wife (to act as tracers in the experiment) at least temporarily (On Earth,
green plants) for her age (take in carbon dioxide) reminds him of his age (and if
there were life on Mars) and of his limitations (vapor in the chamber would contain)
his encroaching weakness (traces of carbon) and death. (55)
The extraterrestrial imperative, Griffin's poetic fusion of narratives suggests, is really a
rationalization of male menopause, a kind of midlife philandering, unfaithful to the Earth
in precisely similar fashion to a rogue husband who strays on his wife of many years.
At least two decades before the Space Age began, C. S. Lewis had already offered a
diagnosis of the true motive behind space exploration in Out of the Silent Planet (1937).
On Malacandra (Mars), where Lewis's mad scientist Weston has journeyed with exploitive
intentions, he engages in dialogue with Oyarsa, the planet's ruling angel, answering his
questions about why he has ventured into space. Weston, who takes the higher being to
be his primitive, intellectual inferior, replies that his motives are very simple.
"Tell me [asks Oyarsa], Thick One, why did you come here?"
"Me tell you [Weston responds]. Make man live all the time."
When Oyarsa replies that to come to Malacandra, a planet that will soon die, in search of
immortality was a foolish mistake, Weston has a ready response. "We know all that
plenty. This only first try. Soon they go on another world." When Oyarsa reminds that "all
worlds die," Weston replies that people like him are willing to commit the species to
perpetual world-eating and never-ending migration: "Men go jump off each before it
deads--on and on, see?" (138-40). "I have wondered," Lewis wrote in "God in Space,"
"whether the vast astronomical distances may not be God's quarantine precautions," a
way of preventing "the spiritual infection of a fallen species from spreading" (277).
Teilhard de Chardin has criticized our faith in a cosmic future, which he designates as the
"Space argument"--because it does no more than "palliate . . . our fears" by seeking to
convince us that "the end of Mankind may be deferred sine die," for the ability of the
species to "drag on and spread itself indefinitely" would only mean "that it would run
down more and more" (Future 314-15). Endless, we would have no end, no destiny.
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PROBE: The Revolution of the Earth
Die
into what the Earth requires of you.
Wendell Berry, "Song in a Year of Catastrophe"
Is it not possible to imagine humanity surviving its brush with death as a less tyrannical,
less colossal, less destructive creature? Might not such an encounter inspire a re-vocation
in which our supremacy is revoked but transformed without the need of escapism?
The proverbial wisdom of Chinese Taoism teaches that when an ordinary man attains selfknowledge, he becomes a sage, but when a sage acquires enlightenment, he becomes an
ordinary man. Can there be an evolutionary equivalent to this circular progression, but in
the mind and heart of a species? Is it possible that human beings, after having developed
in the course of our emergence from the natural world a powerful, masterful, almost
unnatural, out-of-this-world intelligence, might surmount it not through the further
acceleration of intelligence, not through our pursuit of distant suns, but from a wise
submission--a humiliation, as I like to call it--to the natural and the earthly?
In other twentieth century imaginations of disaster, the end of humankind guides us
toward this desolation, toward a life in death in which we can endure, ironically
succeeding in our audition, only as an adapted being, accommodated at last to
creatureliness, our vulnerability and finiteness, to our place on Earth. In these versions,
the abandoned Earth signifies adaptation, the end of longing, our acceptance of its ways
with us.
MIT's Edward Fredkin, a visionary and unorthodox computer scientist, has speculated in
an interview about the possible benefits of a new vocation for the species--speculations
grounded in technological faith and yet certainly not to be confused with infinite
presumption. "Humans are okay," Fredkin explains, "but they're only human" and,
naturally enough, they resent the prospect of supercomputers surpassing them in
intelligence and capacity. Such distrust is not, however, in our species' best interest. "The
mere idea," Fredkin insists, "that we have to be the best in the universe is kind of farfetched. . . . The fact is, I think we'll be enormously happier once our niche has limits to
it. We won't have to worry about carrying the burden of the universe on our shoulders as
we do today. We can enjoy life as human beings without worrying about it. And I think
that will be a great thing." And advances in artificial intelligence may actually be
instrumental to this process of adaptation. Though the development of slightly-betterthan-human artificial intelligence, Fredkin admits, would threaten humankind and
probably bring about our extinction, the far more likely advent of a wholly different,
categorically superior AI will leave Earthkind "our niche." Coexisting with this new,
higher, intelligent species, Fredkin consoles, "We'll still be the best creatures at being
human on the whole planet. And you know what? We might enjoy it" (quoted in Turkle
262-63).
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In Brian Wildsmith's children's book, Professor Noah's Spaceship, a peaceable kingdom, a
huge, pre-lapsarian forest, is ravaged by the effects of environmental damage caused by
offstage environmental destruction. What might have been a paradise is afflicted by
pollution. Fruit tastes bitter. Birds' eggs won't hatch properly. Its animal denizens
become plagued by sadness as they realize their threatened state. "Our very lives are in
peril," Lion realizes, seeking to convince his fellow animals of the danger they face.
The animals seek help. Under the advice of Owl, they learn of "a huge and wondrous
object" being constructed nearby. Its builder, they conclude, "must be very clever," and
so they go to him, like Dorothy and her traveling companions in search of the Wizard of
Oz, in the hope this mysterious stranger can somehow save them. They journey to meet
Professor Noah. They discover that the "huge and wondrous object" is, in fact, a
spaceship and, after telling him of their fears, they learn what his motives are: "My
friends . . . it is because of what you tell me that I am building this spaceship. . . . It is
going to fly to another planet, another world where the forests will be different. But they
will be as beautiful as our forest once was before it was spoiled by pollution." Professor
Noah invites them to come with him, and they readily agree, helping him and his robots
to complete the building of the starship.
Inspired by the news that the forest itself has caught fire, they hurriedly finish the project
and blastoff in search of a new world. In transit, however, they discover that their time
guidance is damaged (it is necessary for them to travel through time to reach their new
planet) and must be repaired. After forty days and nights, their sadness increases as
they become more and more homesick for their beautiful home planet.
They reach their destination, and Professor Noah sends down a dove to bring back a leaf.
Chemically analyzing it, he discovers that, due to a failing of the ship's technology, they
in fact have arrived back on Earth, but prior to the coming of the World Eaters, "many
hundreds of years ago, before it was polluted." Lion asks, "Does this mean we have come
back to Earth as it was in the beginning?" And Noah replies, "Yes . . . It is a wonderful
world, and we must keep it that way."
Arriving where they started, the crew of Professor Noah's starship would seem at last to
be ready to "know the place for the first time" and to discover the "last of Earth": "that
which was the beginning." A dream of escape has been transformed into a vision of
return and reunion, of atonement.
The very title of Wendell Berry's "Song in a Year of Catastrophe" (Collected Poems 11718; written in 1968) announces its relevance for any consideration of the audition of
mankind. But the title also raises an immediate question: how can a poet make a song
out of catastrophe? He can do so only if the apocalypse he confronts is (in the root
meaning of the word) at the same time a revelation about his own soul's path and the
human journey for which he stands as spokesman. Berry's song is indeed such a
revelation.
Haunted by an ominous voice, the poet learns--is forewarned-- that "It can't last" and
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since Berry, as we have seen, has long been one of modernity's most searching and
eloquent critics, we have no doubt what his seemingly vague pronoun refers to: he is
thinking of the reckless, careless, Archimedean, "let them eat the future" (Unsettling 59)
style of modern life and the arrogance of a species for which shame is "the responsibility
of an honest person." The voice warns Berry that he must "harden" himself against the
coming end, that he must prepare to lose all that he thought he loved, advising that he
must begin to "live close to the ground" and to "learn the darkness." For the future of
which it warns will require, it seems, the refinement of earthiness and dark, intuitive,
nonrational, yin-like powers, not the abstraction, rationality, lucidity, and Faustian
activity so cherished by the world about to die; it will require the powers of the Woman
as Great as the World, not those of the Wind.
The poet obeys, and with nearly miraculous results. Immersed in the Earth and in the
leaves which cover it in this "autumn of catastrophe," he discovers other voices, not like
the portentous one that begins his transformation, but earthly presences that, he tells us,
"had been dead/in my tongue years before my birth": dead, that is, in his language itself
which, in an age of science and objectivity, cannot easily give expression to the sense of
mystery at the heart of our being-in-the-world and his relation to the world's simple,
autochthonous things. These voices, once heeded in our audition, again have their say in
the poet's hearing.
But the voice of warning still plagues him, mocks him that he has "not yet come close
enough," not yet truly accepted the Earth for which it serves as spokesman. It offers to
him models for behavior in the woodcock and the quail and the mole--creatures almost
indistinguishable in their feathers and coats from their surroundings. It suggests that he,
too, blend in with his world--that he no longer concern himself with standing out. It
instructs him to make his very life a mimicry of the place in which he lives.
For the farmer shall wear
the greenery and the furrows
of his fields, and bear
the long standing of the woods.
Such a role has seldom appealed to us, of course; atonement with the Earth, cessation of
perpetual activity, an end to our perpetual longing, have always seemed a humiliating
prospect, equivalent, in fact, to death--as the poet recognizes: "And I asked, 'You mean
death then?'"10 But it is a victorious death, bringing with it the promise of a rebirth, as
the voice declares, instructing the poet to "Die/into what the Earth requires of you."
Letting "go all holds," his being and the Earth's coincide; his will, finally adapted,
becomes its will as he sinks into its sheltering whole "like a hopeless swimmer," in full
possession now, for the first time, of his true humanity, feeling himself come "fully into
the ease/and the joy of that place,/all my lost ones returning."
Only in defeat, only in humiliation, Berry's "Song" proclaims, does his audition become
acute enough to alert him to the possibility of a new vocation. For with the longed-for
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role as Earth's master revoked, we can, it seems, accept revocation, becoming a creature
who views itself not as lord of all it surveys but (in George Steiner's words, paraphrasing
Martin Heidegger) as "a privileged listener and respondent to existence" in "a relation
of audition" to the Earth, "a relation of extreme responsibility, custodianship to and
for" (31-32).
In January 1912, Rainer Maria Rilke, sojourning at Duino Castle near Trieste on the
Adriatic, walked out onto the castle's bastions into a howling wind and bright sunlight.
Mentally fatigued from agonizing over an unfinished letter, he would not seem to have
been in the proper mood for inspiration, and yet as he stood looking out at the sea he
heard a voice speaking to him the words that would later become the first line of the
Duino Elegies: "Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angels'/Hierarchies?" (21).
Other verses followed, though not at Rilke's bidding, and he wrote them down, but then
the voices stopped. Convinced that the dictated lines were fragments of a longer series of
poems, perhaps a song cycle, Rilke waited patiently for the voices' return, working
sporadically and with limited success toward their forced completion until, nearly ten
years later, at Chateau de Muzot in Switzerland in February 1922, the voices began to
speak again, dictating over a period of a few days in a "nameless storm, a hurricance in
the spirit," the remainder of the poems that were to become the Duino Elegies and then,
as a "forestorm" and an "after-birth," the bulk of The Sonnets to Orpheus. Rilke would
later refer to these days--during which, he explained, "eating was not to be thought of,
God knows who fed me"--as the "most enigmatic dictation I have ever held through and
achieved" and "a single breathless act of obedience" (Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke
290-91; von Salis 128-51).
It had been "like a mutilation of [his] heart that the Elegies were not--here," Rilke wrote
to his confidante Lou-Andreas Salome ' soon after the outburst. But thanks to this
"irresistible act of creation which convulsed [him]," the sequence finally stood complete.
"It was not mine ever," he wrote to Fra Wunderly. "I was never more humble, never
more on my knees: oh infinitely!" (Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 292; von Salis 142).
Rilke's foremost English translator, Stephen Mitchell, has characterized this episode as
"surely the most astonishing burst of inspiration in the history of literature" (Mitchell 8).
At the end of the Ninth Elegy, in the climactic lines of the sequence, Rilke poses to the
Earth a great question. In his days of vision at Muzot, Rilke had come to sense that he
had discovered the planet's secret plan for humankind, and it was in this discovery that
he found the resolution to his ten year creative ordeal. He talks to Gaea as a child might
to a respected mother (or the way Tiptree's Dr. Ain speaks to her). He asks her to
confirm his suspicion of her true motives in our destiny: "Earth, is it not just this that
you want: to arise/invisibly in us? Is not your dream/to be one day invisible? Earth!
Invisible! (77). Like much of the Elegies, this question appears at first glance a vatic
utterance, but seen in the context of Rilke's poetic thinking it is perfectly intelligible.
In Rilke's ontology, the Earth is "visible" in the first place only
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the Earth's spectator; we alone behold what is; we alone understand the being of
things.11 While animals live in what Rilke calls "The Open"--remaining within the womb
of things and sheltered by the sway of natural and instinctual processes--we endure our
existence--a word that means, literally, to "stand outside." For this is our destiny, Rilke
explains in the Eighth Elegy, "being opposite,/and nothing else, and always opposite";
human beings are "spectators always, everywhere,/looking at never out of
everything" (71). They are, in the words of another Rilke poem, "adventurous more
sometimes than life itself is" (quoted in Heidegger Poetry 99).
The human mind, Rilke was convinced, is seldom on the Earth. "Everything deeply and
profoundly of this world," he wrote, organized religion has "embezzled for the Beyond."
In a passage that might well stand as an abstract for the argument put forth in these
pages, Rilke denounces humanity's infinite presumption. Humans, he wrote in a letter,
fall over themselves in their eagerness to make this world, which we should trust
and delight in, evil and worthless--and so they deliver the Earth more and more
into the hands of those who are prepared to wring at least a quick profit out of
it. . . . The increasing exploitation of life today, is it not due to a continuous
disparagement of this world, begun centuries ago? What madness to divert our
thoughts to a beyond, when we are surrounded here by tasks and expectations and
futures! What a swindle to steal pictures of earthly bliss in order to sell them to
heaven behind our backs! Oh, it is high time that the impoverished Earth got back
all those loans from its happiness with which men have endowed the hereafter. . . .
And, there being no such thing as a vacuum, is not the place of everything
removed from here taken by a counterfeit--is that why our cities are so full of ugly
artificial light and noise, because we have surrendered the true brightness and
song to a Jerusalem which we hope to move into presently? (Quoted in von Salis
146)
In opposition to such unearthly thinking, which in its Space Age manifestation would
bring in its wake Body Snatching and the oblivion of being, Rilke sought instead "a purely
earthly, deeply earthly, blissfully earthly consciousness" by means of which it might be
possible to "introduce what is here seen and touched into the wider, into the widest orbit.
Not into a beyond whose shadow darkens the Earth, but into a whole, into the whole."
The "urgent command" of the Earth, Rilke understood, is, and always has been,
"transformation"; our presence on Earth, our entire destiny, are a part of what the poet
thought of as the Earth's "Great Transformation," as he explained in a 1925 letter to
Witold von Hulewicz, the Polish translator of the Elegies.
Nature, the things of our intercourse and use, are provisional and perishable; but
they are, as long as we are here, our property and our friendship, co-knowers of
our distress and gladness, as they have already been the familiars of our forebears.
So it is important not only not to run down and degrade all that is here, but just
because of its provisionalness, which it shares with us, these phenomena and
things should be understood and transformed by us in a most fervent sense.
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Transformed? Yes, for it is our task to imprint this provisional, perishable Earth so
deeply, so patiently and passionately in ourselves that its reality shall arise in us
again "invisibly." (Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 374)
Human beings are, Rilke liked to think,
the bees of the invisible. Nous butinons eperdument le miel du visible, pour
l'accumuler dans la grande ruche d'or de l'Invisible. ["We gather wild the honey of
the visible, in order to accumulate it within the great richness of the invisible."] The
Elegies show us at this work, at the work of these continual conversions of the
beloved visible and tangible into the invisible vibrations and excitation of our own
nature, which introduces new vibration-frequencies into the vibration-spheres of
the universe. (Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 374; Rilke's emphasis)
The Earth, Rilke believed, thus "has no way out other than to become invisible: in us who
with a part of our natures partake of the invisible, have (at least) stock in it, and can
increase our holdings in the invisible during our sojourn here,--in us alone can be
consummated this intimate and lasting conversion. . . ."
At the end of the Ninth Elegy, when Rilke turns to the Earth itself in poetic direct address,
he knows at last what to say to her. After ten years of looking for the right words for
himself, after the long centuries of human audition for which he stands as spokesman, he
finds a way to explain himself and his species to the Woman as Great as the World, a
being at once both lover and mother. He finds a way of saying yes to the world, of
accepting at last the Earth's wooing of her prodigal son to return:
Earth, you darling, I will! Oh, believe me, you need
your springs no longer to win me: a single one,
just one, is already more than my blood can endure.
I've now been unspeakably yours for ages and ages. (74)
And, as an Earthling, he, and those for whom he speaks, will continue to be hers for
centuries to come, autochthons and trustees of Earth. In his audition he has found his,
and humankind's, vocation. "We are set down in life," Rilke once observed in a letter, "as
in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through
thousands of years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we
are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds
us" (Letters to a Young Poet 69). For the members of the other culture, the other
species, for those who, immune to her seduction, have never been hers, who know
nothing of holding still, for those who are late for the sky, these words are nothing less
than the confession of a traitor.
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Conclusion: Dreaming Nothing
I
It's not to see myself in everything I want, but to find everything at home in me.
Robin Morgan, "The Duel"
We are one. From the blind worm in the depths of the ocean to the endless arena
of the Galaxy, only one person struggles and is imperiled: You. And within your
small and earthen breast only one thing struggles and is imperiled: the Universe.
Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God
As its title suggests, H. E. Francis's acclaimed short story "Two Lives" depicts the two
cultures in conflict. Unlike the sharp contrast between Earthkind and Spacekind so
apparent in George and Freeman Dyson, or Wendell Berry and Stewart Brand, "Two
Lives" provides, in its juxtaposed, first-person confessions of a disturbed American
astronaut, recently returned from the moon and Saint John of the Cross (1542-91), the
Spanish mystic and poet, a fascinating study of two kinds of otherworldliness.
Like several of the real astronauts (in particular Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin), Francis's imaginary
one has difficulty coming "back to Earth."1 As "Two Lives" begins, he has gone to visit his
parents at their New York farm, but his mind is still on space. Prone to vertigo, he must
keep his eyes fixed on the ground, lest they wander off into the blue and get lost there:
"I find myself staring unblinking at the Earth," he explains, "stubble dead, brown twigs,
hard clumps, the pines, Mill Pond, not daring to raise my eyes to the cliffs and the Sound,
the sky, and beyond--too far." But things of Earth do not satisfy: "The near sight of
things is the only way I can hold them; but the minute I close my eyes, my head is
emptied of them" (116).
For space has become his controlling metaphor. A gray and cloudy day becomes for him
a "day for instruments" (119). In his parents' big farmhouse, he still feels himself
"encapsulated" (123). And he thinks of his aging parents as "running down, like planets
that will stop," and admits that he can only see them "as objects" (115).
The Archimedean point has become his permanent perspective: "I feel a distance. . . . I
see across an infinite ravine, but I can't cross it. . . . I've discovered space, . . . and new
time. I feel outside them. I know I'm not, but I can't move through, connect. . . .
Somehow I'm always there: standing here I'm there" 115, 120).
"I am no longer an earthbound creature," he concludes. "I can't stop traveling" (120-21).
And later: "I look down at Earth as if I had created it, wandered among them as one, and
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then discovered I belonged on the moon, apart from my creations" (127). He has even
internalized the moon's geography: "Moon lives under my lids: Cape Venus and Bear
Mountain, Boot Hill, Pickering, all the rills and scars make a permanent landscape in my
head--and I can't break moon's gravity" (131). In horrifying dreams, he imagines himself
"doomed to circle everlastingly" after missing the proper "angle of re-entry into Earth's
atmosphere" (129),
"I know I'm the smallest step toward something," he recognizes, but he suffers from his
personal inability to realize it: "the horror is I can't wait." "Men can't know," he laments,
"what it means to be one of the only men not of Earth. Something has been born that
can't rest, wants to be fulfilled--something in me that uses me and will leave me
behind . . . not take me with it" (131).
At the story's close, unable to reconcile the conflicting demands of Earth and sky, he
drowns himself in the ocean, which he has come to identify with space itself. ("I'm always
at the bottom of the sea" [134].)
The sections of "Two Lives" told from Saint John's perspective likewise present a portrait
of a man breaking away from the things of his Earth, but in a very different fashion. "My
body is heavy with this world, it dies" (116), he insists in the opening pages. But unlike
the Gnostic astronaut, unlike the lepers whose eyes haunt John ("those orbs, each one,
held infinite deeps, perilous and beautiful, tiny islands as still and strange as the
archipelagoes the cartographers have set down on the maps they call the New
World" [116-17]), each "on his own journey," John is under no illusion that he can simply
leap beyond the world. The world must be transformed: "May the soul that first startled
me . . . over twenty years ago," he prays, "flower sweet from this putrid flesh and
ascend" (116). "Pain," he knows, "kept me close to You, as now closer this rotting body
does, my God" (119).
Imprisoned for his beliefs, he finds his state symbolic: "Prisoner! As if in this flesh I had
not always been" (121). "I came to love my prison," he confesses (122). But in his cell,
he nevertheless undertakes "the secret journey" (123), not a voyage to the moon, but
rather what R. D. Laing calls the "journey out and back": the descent into self, the
acceptance of finitude, and the growing faith in something beyond oneself.2
He discovers the means to free himself, physically and spiritually, from his cell, as he
explains in what is really an extended metaphor: "So at Toledo day after day I worked
unscrewing the great lock on my cell door, silently in dark all night working--my aim that
one window high in the hall gallery, the only hope of escape. I measured out the strips
torn carefully--my surcoat and two blankets--and bound them each to each and that
night stole past the two bodies sleeping there--God help me!--and gained that window,
looked out, and saw. . . ." And what he sees from this window is his own pre-Copernican
perspective: "Your sky- -O God, how my soul soared!--the Earth below" (125). In
moments of enlightenment, all the world's religions teach, the individual recognizes that
his or her enemies are, in reality friends; that the presumed forces of evil are actually
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beneficent deities; and so, too, John comes to recognize that "Enemies drive me closer to
Thee. Each test is Thine. Through them You work your wondrous way, I know. You never
do betray as man betrays" (126).
As recent scholarship in comparative religion has shown, the idea (discussed below in
Departure of the Body Snatchers) of true individuation as the patient, step-by-step
elevation of human bodily and earthly capacities toward the cerebral and spiritual was
not solely the possession of the Orient. Similar ideas--as Francis's depiction of John's
quest suggests--were known to esoteric, mystical Christianity. Francis's astronaut,
however, knows nothing of such a growth process. He does not first seek "rootedness in
the body." Plunged into the universal via the shortcut of space technology, he is forced
into seeking, in New Gnostic fashion, a shortcut literalization of the Buddha's metaphor
(of "untying the knots"). ("While the poor astronaut begins his disjuncture when he sees
Earth from outside," Francis explains in a letter, "John always could.") Though both
"otherworldly," these "two lives" belong to different cultures.
II
It does not surprise me that in the final analysis, at the point where our dreams
vanish over the rim of our own round of sleep, we meet matter receding fast over
the horizon of the most powerful electronic microscope, and in the process
behaving less like solid, predictable, inanimate material but more and more as of
the swift-changing texture of living thought. We pass from one to the other, . . . to
find with both mind and matter within that the objective mystery which faces us
macrocosmically in the night skies above confronts us microcosmically in reverse.
Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of Our Time
As a child, between the ages of five and ten, I was terrorized by a recurrent, strangely
nightmarish dream, one I never spoke about to anyone at the time--for I knew not how-and which I have only recently reclaimed from the dark cellar of repression: I dreamed of
nothing.
I was aware that I was dreaming, that my visual field was the screen of unconscious
mind and not the result of my open eyes, and I experienced myself experiencing the
dream. (A metadream, I might call it today.) But my mind's screen was utterly blank,
dark, and abysmal; no light shone on it from any source. Only one sensation penetrated
through the nonbeing of which my dream was composed, a nothingness like that Georges
Poulet has described as the image of that "purity of which the universe and myself are
only a flaw--a non-being, however, which, in a certain manner and by virtue of its very
perfection, exists, and exists more than I" (280). A sound, a monotonous, droning hum,
emanated from the very center of that void and filled me with inexplicable terror.
Awakening from this persistent torment, as I always managed to do, I never called out to
my mother for her usual succor. After other nightmares (for example, the recurrent one
in which a Tyrannosaurus rex stuck its huge jaws into my bedroom window while passing
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through our yard), I counted heavily on her to banish my fears and to bring light into my
darkness, to arch, as Rilke so beautifully portrays it, "over those new eyes/the friendly
world,/ averting the one that was strange," as if she "had long known when the floor
would behave itself thus" (Duino Elegies 37). But there was no dispelling the darkness of
that nightmare, which was itself a dream of ultimate darkness, and so I did not call out
for her. And I did not attempt to explain my dream, for how could I explain nothing? I
feared I would be laughed at
I waited instead for its next manifestation and I waited with dread, a dread that made my
bedroom floor behave itself most strangely, that brought me emotional vertigo and
numbed every inch of my body in a way I have never again experienced, a dread only
surpassed by the state in which I always found myself after the next dream of nothing
had again dissipated. Eventually the dream stopped plaguing me; by the time I was a
teenager, its visitations had ceased entirely. Only the return of the repressed has since
brought the dream to mind.
Many years later my buried memory of the dream surfaced as the result of my reading of
a short story, "The Music of Erich Zann" by H. P. Lovecraft, the American writer of
fantasy and horror fiction. Lovecraft's tale is narrated by a "student of metaphysics"
living in an old boardinghouse in a French city, who becomes enraptured with the bizarre
and haunting music created by an old, mute German viola player who lives in the house's
attic room. Zann's unearthly music first attracts the narrator only at night and only when
he plays alone, but after a time he allows the young student into his room to listen. With
an audience present, however, he never plays with the same weird intensity that seems
to possess him when alone at night in his room.
Zann, the student observes, appears to be lost "in some far cosmos of the imagination,"
and he is excessively protective of his privacy, eventually pleading with his listener to
move to a lower floor so he will not hear his fantastic nachtmusik. More significantly, he
becomes incensed when the narrator innocently attempts to draw aside the curtains of
Zann's window in order to view the panorama of the rue d'Auseil outside--a view
obtainable, due to the bizarre architecture of the street, only from Zann's fifth-floor
window. Like Hawthorne's mysterious minis-ter with his veil, Zann will allow no one to
look beyond. It is nevertheless clear to the narrator that the secret to Zann's uncanny
music, its inspiration, lies beyond the always curtained window. (Zann explains his
thoughts and desires to the narrator only by means of insanely scrawled notes and
through his music.)
One night that music, having become a "chaotic babel of sound; a pandemonium which
would have led me to doubt my own shaking sanity . . . the awful, inarticulate cry which
only a mute can utter" (78-9) rings the narrator hurriedly to Zann's room out of fear for
the old man's well-being. In a state of panic, Zann asks him to be seated while he writes
out "a full account in German of all the marvels and terrors which beset him" (79). But
his discourse is soon interrupted by an "exquisitely low and infinitely distant musical
note" (80) coming from beyond the curtained window; the music summons Zann back to
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his viola and inspires his wildest playing ever.
Looking on for the first time as Zann actually plays his weird notes (previously he had
listened only from outside the door), the narrator realizes their secret motive: "He was
trying to make a noise; to ward something off or drown something out." And he hears
again a summons from without, "a shriller, steadier note that was not from the viol; a
calm, deliberate, purposeful mocking note from far away in the west" At this point a
harsh wind, "which had sprung up outside as if in answer to the mad playing within" (80)
breaks open the shutters of Zann's window, smashes the glass to the floor, and blows
Zann's manuscript away into the void. With Zann totally lost in the "orgy" of his music,
the narrator rushes to the window to look outside. Expecting to see the city by night
spread out beneath him, he finds instead "only the blackness of space illimitable;
unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance of anything of
Earth" (81).
It was at this point in Lovecraft's narrative that I remembered, after almost fifteen years,
my own dream of nothing. The frame of Zann's window, and of Lovecraft's imagination, I
suspected had evidently opened synchronously on the same scene captured in the frame
of my dream. We even shared the common element of the background noise emanating
like a summons from the void. I understood intuitively Zann's terror and envied his mad
attempts to respond with art. I had been, in the muteness of childhood, more mute than
he. Like the story's narrator, I longed as well to recover those lost sheets on which Zann
scrawled the explanation of his music. I suspected that they might also contain fragments
of my own autobiography. And in a sense I did find them, after long searching and some
intellectual detective work, although they were widely scattered and in the possession of
various other thinkers, musicians, poets, and scientists.
A few years later, for example, I heard something like the music of Erich Zann: Karlheinz
Stockhausen's Ylem. Based on the Oriental conception of an oscillating universe that
"explodes, unfolds, and draws together again" every eighty billion years in a periodic
breath called an ylem, Stockhausen's music, best performed, he explains, through
"telepathic communication" between the nineteen performers and the conductor, begins
with the original moment of an ylem--what contemporary cosmologists call the "Big
Bang"--and then goes on to record, by various intuitive and often discordant modulations
of sound, the intervening eighty billion years. In the last quarter of the piece, the next
explosion of energy begins to mount with slow but gradually increasing intensity and
climaxes in an overpowering crescendo, another Big Bang. (See the album cover of StopYlem.) In the final minutes of the piece--its denouement--a return to normalcy is evident,
as the pace slackens to a slow, methodical drone of noise--a sound like that which had
haunted my dream, and perhaps akin to that to which the music of Erich Zann was the
reply.
When I first listened to Ylem, I was, at its close, nearly unable to move: the music
seemed almost to have disintegrated my ordinary molecular structure, replacing it with
its own aleatory form, and I needed to wait a few moments before I attempted to move,
as if I felt the need to reassemble my body. Yet the experience seemed to me a kind of
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deja vu, and I soon realized that the physical sensation I experienced was almost
identical to that which I had felt repeatedly on awakening from my childhood dream of
nothing.
In his interviews with Jonathan Cott, Stockhausen seeks to explain the structure of his
music, especially the relationship of one particular sound to the next--what he calls
"moment form"--by an analogy. "Imagine," he suggests, "a man sitting alone in a dark
prison cell who hears a door slam; then a year later another door. The first sound would
last a year" (31). Such is "moment form" in Stockhausen's music: "a moment lasts not
just an instant--it can last forever if it isn't changed." Such moment form shapes the
musical space of Ylem: it is music made out of nothing, one of Stockhausen's most
effective attempts to create a "sequence of silences."
Given its subject, the "breath of the universe," such a form for Ylem, the strangest piece
of program music ever composed, seems only fitting. As the marvelous "cosmic calendar"
in Carl Sagan's Dragons of Eden shows, the history of the universe is shot through and
through with nothingness, a void rivaled in magnitude only by that within the atom itself
in its cathedral-like interior (14-17). If all time until the present is graphed onto a single
calendar year, with the Big Bang coming on January 1 and the present moment falling in
the first second of the ensuing new year, it is necessary to wait until 1 May for the origin
of the Milky Way, or one-third of the estimated fifteen billion years of the universe's
entire existence. After another four months of waiting, on 9 September, our own solar
system appears. This means that for more two-thirds of its history, the universe has
been a virtual nothing, without events, at least as we understand them: a vast sleep of
space and time. Was it not a glimpse of this nothingness that brought Paul Valery to pen
the line, "In the beginning there will be sleep" (quoted in Poulet 280). This nothingness
provides the basis for Stockhausen's moment form in Ylem: a modern music of the
spheres. Or, to put it more exactly, it is what ancient Hindu thought called a Nadam, the
"orchestration of all sounds, of every electron in its orbit and every planet in its
orb" (Thompson, Passages 100).
The composer John Cage discovered this Nadam within himself a number of years ago, as
he explains in Silence. Asked to test the effectiveness of an anechoic chamber at
Harvard--a room especially designed to block out all echoes and all sounds--Cage found
that he continued to be aware of two persistent sounds, which the chief engineer
informed him were actually his nervous system and blood circulation in operation. "Until I
die," Cage concludes, "there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death.
One need not fear about the future of music" (8).
At about the same time I first listened to the music of Stockhausen, I discovered as well
an astounding collection of short stories by Italo Calvino entitled Cosmicomics.
Considered as a whole, Calvino's cosmological tales, narrated by an entity called "Qfwfq,"
present a capsule history of the universe from the Big Bang through the evolution of life,
to modern Italy. Though usually classified as science fiction, Cosmicomics actually has a
strangely homespun quality about it, as if Qfwfq's accounts--of the creation of matter,
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the origin of the Earth, a mollusk's Lamarckian development of the desire to be seen-were being told from a rocking chair by a participant-observer whose past is, in fact,
coextensive with time itself.
Again and again Qfwfq metamorphoses into strange new entities. In "All at One Point,"
for example, he becomes an unimaginable part of the original point in space from which
the Big Bang exploded, living there, as if in a crowded pensione, with his family and a
menagerie of other bizarre beings, including Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0, a wonderful, quintessentially
Italian, Earth mother whose overwhelming desire to cook for the household ("Oh, if I only
had some room, how I'd like to make some noodles for you boys!" [55]) sunders the
point's infinite compression and bursts it outward, giving birth to the cosmos.
Or he becomes a gaseous being, just prior to the creation of planets, who looks in horror
as his introverted and creative (she is, we are told, the first ever to invent "an outside
with an inside in it" [29]) sister G'd(w)n is sucked into the center of the molten Earth.
"Then she was seen no more," Qfwfq laments. Seen no more in her present form, that is;
for like her brother she undergoes a sea change, as he recalls with cosmic
understatement in a passage that has to stand as one of the great leaps the human
imagination has ever taken: "My sister had remained in there, and I never found out
whether she had stayed buried in those depths or whether she had reached safety on the
other side until I met her, much later, at Canberra in 1912, married to a certain Sullivan,
a railroad man, so changed I hardly recognized her" (34). In "The Aquatic Uncle," Qfwfq
evolves into one of the first aquatic creatures to venture out on to the land, though in the
process he loses his girlfriend to a reprobate, reactionary relative who, scornful of an
evolutionary project he takes to be pure folly, returns with his young bride to his
existence in the water.
In other tales Qfwfq becomes (1) a paranoid cosmic being that, troubled by a sign in
space light years away which declares "I saw what you did," becomes embroiled in a
semiotic repartee across the galaxies (in "A Sign in Space"); (2) one of a pair of premolecular friends--the other's name is Dean (k)yK--who pass their idle centuries betting
on the probable outcome (Qfwfq for, Dean (k)yK--devoid of imagination--against their
ever occurring) of future cosmic developments, from the creation of atoms and the
advent of bismuth isotopes to the invasion of Mesopotamia by the Assyrians and the
outcome of a soccer match in modern Rome ("How Much Shall We Bet?"); (3) a mollusk
attached to the underside of a rock who, having fallen in love with a mollusk of the
opposite sex who refuses even to notice him, secrets a shell to attract her attention, in
the process "foresees" all future vision, from that of a "far-sighted" zoologist to the
technological eye of his Rolleiflex ("The Spiral").
In Calvino's radically anthropomorphic accounts, mind is omnipresent, But these "inside"
stories of the universe are no mere work of artifice; their personification is not just a
literary device. They taught me a new respect for imagination, its true, its cosmic roots.
Later, a final piece of the puzzle, a final page of Zann's missing manuscript if you will, fell
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into my hands. I learned of research in the 1960s by Arno A. Penzias and Robert W.
Wilson, two Bell Telephone Laboratory radio astronomers, into the inexplicable, excessive
noise they recurrently found as they studied radio waves emitted from the Milky Way
galaxy. Their Nobel Prize winning detective work--beautifully retold in Steven Weinberg's
The First Three Minutes--eventually discovered that the source of the noise (which they
initially suspected was caused by faulty equipment) was in fact the "background
radiation" left over from the original Big Bang (39-70). A low droning sound, always
present . . . like that outside Erich Zann's window. Like that in my own dream of nothing.
In his Tuning of the World, musicologist R. Murray Schafer explains that "all the sounds
we hear are imperfect. For a sound to be totally free of onset distortion, it would have to
have been initiated before our lifetime." And such a sound, if "it were also continued after
our death so we knew no interruption in it," we could "comprehend . . . as being perfect."
Yet just such a sound, beginning before birth and continuing unchanging beyond our
death, "would be perceived by us as . . . silence" (262). This silence, Schafer explains,
India also has a name for: Anahata, the "unstruck sound," or silence heard. Such silence
heard was evidently the buzz in Penzias and Wilson's radio telescope: background
radiation, captured by technological means, becomes Anahata.
Or, to put it another way, Anahata is the Nadam at large made accessible to the human
moment. Several twentieth-century thinkers have suggested that the whole history of life
on our planet should perhaps be understood as Earth talking to herself and that, as a
result, human consciousness is, in the poet Rilke's words, merely a momentary
interruption of the Earth's monologue:
O fountain-mouth, o giving, o mouth that speaks
exhaustlessly one single, one pure thing,-................
So that she's only talking
with herself. If a pitcher slips between,
it seems to her that you were interrupting.
(Sonnets to Orpheus [1942] 99)
Now it appears that the universe, too, is talking to itself. But such "pitchers" as a radio
telescope, or my dream, although they are more common than anyone perhaps realizes,
pour forth their contents only rarely, and so the secret has been kept; the Nadam has
gone largely unheard.
It may be--as Melville suggests in Moby-Dick (in the words of his narrator Ishmael in "A
Bower in the Arsacides" that only "outside the material factory" can we eavesdrop on the
creation.
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The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no
mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened;
and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through
it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken words that are inaudible
among the flying spindles; those same words are plainly heard without the walls,
bursting from the opened casements. (413-14)
But like Captain Ahab (with whose quest he initially identifies), Ishmael falls too easily
prey to typical Western dualistic biases. It may not be necessary to leap up or to stand
outside in order to hear the "thousand voices" of the Earth or the one voice of the
universe.
In dreams, the Buddhist Surangama Sutra teaches, it is possible, thanks to what is called
"intrinsic hearing," to step momentarily outside the material factory in consciousness
while still an embodied being. As the Sutra puts it, "Even in dreams when all thinking has
become quiescent, the hearing nature is alert." And in this "mirror of enlightenment,"
transcending ordinary distinctions between body and mind, "the doctrine of intrinsic,
Transcendental Sound may be spread," though "sentient beings as a class remain
ignorant and indifferent to their own intrinsic hearing" (quoted in Cott 60-61).
After all, John Cage, with the aid of Western science, heard such Transcendental Sound
within himself as part of his very metabolism, and in my own dream, I like now to think,
intrinsic hearing awakened in a small boy in Oil City, Pennsylvania. My dream of nothing,
my detective work has led me to conclude, was in reality an ancestral memory contained
within my body, so changed I did not at first recognize it. Thus its terrors and its wonders
were experienced there and still manifest themselves in its tacit awareness. Yet the
anahata reverberating in my dream, which once brought me dread, has been assimilated
into my body's silence. It causes me no terror now; rather, it glorifies my genealogy.
That I do not dream it any more, that my window on its spectacle has closed, need not
be thought of--as the Sutra would have us believe--as ignorance. I have made the
unconscious conscious, raised it into the light, and to do so constitutes an evolutionary
adaptation--accommodation--to the widest of environments and the most primordial of
influences.
Intentionally Ptolemaic, decisively anti-Archimedean, of my own choice Earthbound, I can
say now with John Donne: "Our creatures are our thoughts, creatures that are borne
Gyants. . . . My thoughts reach all, comprehend all. Inexplicable mystery: I their Creator
am in a close prison, in a sick bed, anywhere, and any one of my Creatures is with the
Sunne and beyond the Sunne, overtakes the Sunne, and overgoes the Sunne in one
pace, one steppe, everywhere" (quoted in Eiseley, Invisible Pyramid 49). Nor can such a
position be labeled as reactionary. It is, rather, perfectly in step with current
epistemology.
III
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We are the children of this beautiful planet that we have lately seen photographed
from the moon. We were not delivered into it by some god, but have come forth
from it. We are its eyes and ears, its seeing and its thinking. . . . we are the mind,
ultimately of space. No wonder then, if its laws and ours are the same! Likewise,
our depths are the depths of space.
. . . Our mythology now, therefore, is to be of infinite space and its light, which is
without as well as within. Like moths, we are caught in the spell of its allure, flying
to it outward, to the moon and beyond, and flying to it, also, inward.
Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By
In all our reflections on the nature of reality, it is impossible, writes British mathematician
G. Spencer-Brown, to circumvent the "amazing" realization--second nature to a Qfwfq-that "the world we know is constructed in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to
see itself." How is it, Spencer-Brown asks in the famous notes to his Laws of Form (105106), that we can experience anything? (It is not what we see, he notes, that is
"fantastic" but rather the "original mystery" that we "can see at all.") The answer seems
clear: "evidently [the world] must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees,
and at least one other state which is seen." In the "severed and mutilated condition" that
results--a condition in which all sentient life finds itself--the phenomenal world remains
"only partially itself" (Spencer-Brown's emphasis).
Although, Laws of Form acknowledges, "the world undoubtedly is itself," "it will always
partially elude itself": "in any attempt to see itself as an object, it must, equally
undoubtedly act so as to make itself distinct from, and therefore false to, itself."
All processes of knowledge, Spencer-Brown explains, that seek to record "universal law"
as explicitly as possible are thus oroboric: "And so on, and so on you will eventually
construct the universe, in every detail and potentiality, as you know it now; but then,
again, what you will construct will not be all, for by the time you will have reached what
now is, the universe will have expanded into a new order to contain what will then be."
Entrapped in this self-reflexive process, final knowledge infinitely recedes: "In this sense,
in respect of its own information, the universe must expand to escape the telescopes
through which we, who are it, are trying to capture it, which is us. The snake eats itself,
the dog chases it tail" (Spencer-Brown's emphasis).
The "space" into which Jules Verne's rockets flew was Newtonian, absolute and definable.
Though NASA in its epistemological naivete seems singularly unaware of the realization-like Sherlock Holmes in his ignorance of the Copernican revolution, it can see nothing
practical to be gained by such a reversal--Space Age space is now oroboric, as
participatory as matter itself under the rule of indeterminancy.
We have begun to believe that the human mind is the "ultimate stage in the awakening
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of the world" (Polanyi, Personal Knowledge 405), to grasp that it is, in fact, "the mind,
ultimately of space" (Campbell, Myths 274), that we have come out of the universe and
not into it (Watts, The Book 8). We have glimpsed that the universe's "laws and ours are
the same" (Polanyi); that "our depths are the depths of space" (Campbell). Within "our
small and earthen breast"--even that of a young, dreaming, frightened boy--"only one
thing struggles and is imperiled: the Universe."
If Space Age mythology is to be, as Joseph Campbell has suggested, of "infinite space
and its light," if we must with infinite presumption continue to envision the Departure of
the Body Snatchers, let it remain mythology. Why is it not enough to fly to the moon and
beyond in an inward journey? Must we literally step outside the material factory, must we
abandon the Earth, to answer a cosmic calling? Have we no other vocation?
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