Dead Astronauts Part 3

Neil Armstrong is dead. That brings the already small number of our species who have walked on another world down even lower. There have been 12, now there are 8 left. One day in the not-too-distant future our children might look at the moon like some kind of fairy tale, a pipe dream from an antiquated and unrealistic past. Like the opulent cars of the 1930's, when certain economic events rendered them laughable, bizarre artifacts of a world that no longer exists. Children will look up at the moon and say "There were men up there once." (I already do this)

It's because we're too busy dealing with the dirt-centric problems in our world to look up anymore. Not even the important issues like how we can generate the energy (nuclear, damn you) required by our numbers and technology and yearning for discovery. Not how we can make ourselves last longer (transhumanism, damn you) so that we aren't lost to our mortality at the pinnacle of our knowledge. No, petty things. We worry about if someone will point a gun at us and take what we have, so maybe we'd better make sure we have a bigger gun first. We worry about which member of our respective nations (damn you) will get to wear the shiny hat and tell us all what to do for the next period of time. We bury ourselves in little made-up worlds that are small enough to keep us from feeling insignificant. (I'm guilty too, I know, stop looking at me like that)

I read a quote from Charles Bukowski the other day. He's most well known for being an accomplished poet and a jerk (See Bukowski by Modest Mouse). He said "We're all going to die. All of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing." He's right, you know. 

Very recently a man named Felix Baumgartner rode a helium balloon to the top of our world. He opened the door, looked around, and jumped back down to the ground. It took him three hours to get up and four minutes to fall back down. He broke the sound barrier on his way. He travelled up to 833 miles per hour. He travelled 24 miles, one way. That man is a hero to me, not because of his world records, but because for the first time in a while, he gave us a reason to look up again. (His small step actually was a giant leap)

An energy drink company put a man in space during a time when the most powerful nations on earth believe that pursuit to no longer be worth paying for, and they did it just so he could jump back down. Maybe they figured we've been wandering around and staring at and fighting over the same rock for as long as we've existed, maybe it's time we started walking around the block. Or maybe they wanted to be rich and famous, I don't know. The truth is if we could just love each other a little bit, then we could all be astronauts, and save them from extinction.

We're all so broken down here, give me a way to rise. Please.

There you have it, post number twenty-two. (approach with trepidation)

I'm gonna go see Deftones play now. Have a good night.

Dead Astronauts Part 2

Let's admit it: space is scary. We live in a tiny bubble in a very hostile reality. If you were instantly transported out of our bubble and anywhere else in the entire universe, you would die in seconds. Every time. It's too hot or too cold, there's radiation and solid objects moving very quickly. Things are blowing up and coalescing. Maybe, just maybe, there's something...someone out there too, watching or perhaps plotting.

That being said, I want to explore all of these frightening and dangerous things. I want to stand on the solar-wind swept surface of a lifeless rock, looking into the blue-hot face of a star that takes up my entire field of view. I want to feel heat and cold unlike anything experienced on my home planet. I want to shake hands (or membranes, or tentacles or pseudopods) with the natives of these strange new places. I want to stand on the surface of a titanic planet, and gaze on a mountain the size of the continent I was born on.

Obviously, I can't. I'll die. Even if I wouldn't, these places are impossibly far away. Our closest neighbor star (proxima centauri, the nearest centaur) is 4.24 light years away. If I was born today on a state-of-the-art spacecraft travelling towards it at maximum velocity, I would die of old age before we arrived. So the best I can do is chew up scientific journals like travel brochures of the most far off and exotic places that will ever be. They might as well be fiction, they're so impossible to reach. And if they're fiction, I might as well create a few of my own.

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Dead Astronauts

silent
sleepless
star sailors
visors down
so your face becomes theirs
too close to death
to reach the next port
even when they were born
stepping aboard
celestial schooners
sacrificing their minds
and bodies
for a scant chance 
at being a corpse
washed up on strange shores
exposed to blackness
beyond the backdrop
of the stars that scar our ceilings
while the rest of us slowly circle
staring at our hunters and swans
crabs and bulls
lighthouses
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There you have it, post number sixteen. (approach with trepidation)

Nebula quickwrite

This is just a few words I wrote from the point of view of a deep-space explorer seeing a star system out the window of his ship. I've been playing around with sections of prose awash in decadent detail. I'm not sure I succeeded, but it's a start.


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Even a dead star can light up your sky. This one did so with vision; little white dwarf. The tendrils of purple gas clouds curled tenderly around their mother. From one angle they wrapped her remains in the folds of a burial shroud, thankful. From another angle, horrid tentacles gripped to drag her to an unmarked grave. And she hummed her nebulous children to sleep. What a song! The low rumble like an earthquake under lilting cries and warbles. It reminded me of whale song. Had I heard whale song? Perhaps in my childhood, but those creatures paled, anemic, in the face of this violet sepulcher in front of me. There were times in my journey when I was faced with such majesty that I thought of finally stopping. My eyes would flick to the airlock. It wouldn’t take much to just open the windows on my little ship. I could float out without regret and make this system my home. Space is funny like that. Nothing ever really dies. This system was both dying and just being born. From different angles, you could say. My own heart is just an engine made from the remnants of a dying star. I’d just be going home. Home...


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There you have it, post number fourteen. (approach with trepidation)

Godspeed

My mind has been stuck in space. I think I'll be writing about it a lot in the coming weeks. I just finished collaborating (my first time doing so) with a DeviantArt friend of mine on a poem about space. I'm really pleased with how it turned out and I'd like to share it with you.

If you have the time, I encourage you to check out her gallery. Her name is Baylee, but she goes by hhesitate. She's quite the prolific artist/writer. You may find her gallery here: http://hhesitate.deviantart.com/ Please do not stalk her. (seriously)

Poem.

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Godspeed

sometimes i pretend i'm a dragonfly -

skimming across a pond 

at midnight, 

seeing things

all as a reflection,

and i'm not alone between the stars

deluded

prying open my consoles

convinced

if i can eat all the wires

i'll become a machine and not need air

and open all the windows

of my little ship to purge the oxygen

from my skin, a quiet and 

translucent burden

i swear,

if i see one more

violent,

violet,

haunting-my-dreams

nebula

i'll open all the windows

and float on home:

(after all

my heart

is just an engine

made from the remnants

of a dying star)

sometimes

when i know no one

is watching, i'll turn on the speakers

spewing static and subsonic waves,

and interpret solar radiation

as sound, surrounding everything 

with the voices of old gods

the billions and billions

of old gods

which is silly, because i'm the only soul out here, after all

give my apologies to the engineer

who built my little ship;

i'm afraid he won't want it when i return

as i've drawn all over it, you see,

images leaking from my head 

where the cosmos have bent away

refracted dust and starlight

creeping from the windows

like curling frost

or cracks, chasing one another, 

godspeed 

i think the astronauts have

made a mistake: it's more lively up here 

than any average day on the sun-soaked earth,

even if the craters and comets aren't alive, anyway:

if dust fades to dust, and if dust 

is what was and what will be, 

i've fallen further for it than anything else

(even if i am miles and miles and light years high)

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There you have it, post number eight. (approach with trepidation)

Dead Astronauts

The word "Astronaut" won't really mean anything for very much longer. In a world where people can take a commercial flight into space or even an elevator ride to an orbital station, what does an astronaut become? The etymology of the word means "Star Sailor." Is then an astronaut someone who travels to or through outer space professionally? Surely we will come up with a better words for it than that. The word "astronaut" will no longer be useful. It will die.

Dead words are very sad things. There are surely Latin words that haven't been spoken aloud for many many years. Imagine they had a specific word for...I dunno...the person who comes to the public baths intoxicated.. This word is now dead. In fact, it's dead twice-over. It dies first when public baths were no longer available or fashionable, so a word for a drunkard there would be useless. It dies again with the Latin language. Granted, Latin isn't precisely dead, but this particular word has no place in our world, and how would we translate it?

This will happen to the astronauts. The first courageous souls to step beyond our own world won't have a title in the distant future, because they will have many words for those who travel in space, and our primitive word for the beginning of that era just won't fit. It's sad, not just because the word will die, but the romance associated with it.

Yes, romance. There's something romantic about being isolated out in the unknown with little chance for survival or return. That's what makes David Bowie's "Space Oddity" so touching. This romance bleeds from the situation and permeates other things associated with astronauts, like the ridiculous suits and helmets. They're like cowboys. Cowboy hats became romantic symbols because they were associated with the figures who wore them. That domed reflective visor that astronauts wear is the same way, it's associated with the space pioneers who wore them. You can see out at everything around you, but nothing can see in, adding another layer to the isolation of space.

Here's a poem about space:

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I Saw Your Ship

I saw your ship

heading so far away;

your beautifully crafted bones

protecting a beautifully crafted heart

among Orion's remains.

Why so far away?

Are the stars here so boring,

so lacking in their lustre,

that you must seek new horizons?

I know how you feel.

The same thing brought me here,

so long ago.

Olympus Mons is long-since stale

and none care for Ceres since Chisme came,

crashed

and made craters of her caves.

I thought things would be better here,

in the innards of so great a hunter,

but you can't see the colors

for all the dust in the air.

So cold since Betelgeuse burned out.

I'm going to sleep now,

until the stars look foreign again.

I'll dream of you, in your

sleek stellar schooner;

so splendorous I'm unworthy.

Hope my last power cell lasts the trip.

Perhaps we'll meet again

  once you've found the

    light you're looking for

             out there

                 in all this

                               Black.

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Here's another one about space, and cowboys too:

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Shoulda been a Space Cowboy

I should have been a cowboy

But that frontier is gone

The only unknown places left

Lie beyond the light of our sun

Now I can be a space cowboy

With the solar wind dancing in my hair

Letting the stars sing me to sleep

And find my peace out there

I look at my own reflection

It's not all I want to be

There's as many stars as there are people

So there's somewhere out there for me

I'll find some far-off pulsar

Live 'neath its radioactive dome

And if I point my satellites just right

I can hear the music back home

When the time comes for me

To lay down and die

I'll float into a supernova

And my dust will be a star, by and by

Don't take the blame upon yourself

I know you tried to make me stay

There's so little left here for me

The world's a pound and I'm a stray

If you love me like you say you do

Tell all the world that you won't miss them

Take my hand in the deep-space prairie

And be my binary system

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There you have it, post number seven. (approach with trepidation)