Space is the Place ...

The history of jazz -- indeed, the history of music -- has never seen anyone quite like Le Sony'r Ra, better known as Sun Ra, and his variously-subtitled Arkestra. Although his earthy incarnation was born to humble circumstances as Herman Poole Blount in Alabama in 1914, Ra always insisted that he was actually from the planet Saturn. As he wrote in his essay "Fallen Angel," 

I'm not a human.  I never called anybody mother.  The woman who's supposed to be my mother I call other momma. I never call nobody mother. I never call nobody father.  I never felt that way. You have to realize this planet is not only inhabited by humans, it's inhabited by aliens too. They got the books say they fell from heaven with Satan. So, in mixed up among humans you have angels. The danger spot is the United States. You have more angels in the country than anywhere else. You see, it was planned.

However that may be, his otherworldly qualities were evident from his first recording, 1948's "I am an Instrument," backed with "I am Strange." He one near-hit single was about his favorite planet, "Journey to Saturn" in 1973; by that time, he and the Arkestra had taken up communal residence in a big house in Philadelphia; the band lived upstairs and had their record label and pressing plant in the basement. Fresh stock was delivered to local record shops by means of a Radio-Flyer hand-pulled wagon. In 1974, he produced a feature-length film, Space is the Place, which opens with a pair of animal horns floating through space, as the Arkestra chants "It's after the end of the world ... don't you know that yet?" The film has since become a touchstone of a larger artistic and critical movement known as Afrofuturism, located (as Ra says) on "the other side of time."

I saw the Arkestra perform only once, at the Blue Grotto in New Haven, CT in 1986. When the curtain rose, Ra was already on stage; the Arkestra came in as a sort of procession, their enormous twisty horns sticking up like something out of Dr. Seuss, all of them festooned with jingling bells. The opening tunes were a sort of 'greatest hits' of the band, including "If I Told You I Am from Outer Space,"  "Discipline 27-II," and "We Travel the Spaceways." In the middle of their two sets, the Arkestra left the stage, and Ra played a couple of old jazz classics -- "Yeah, Man!" and "Beautiful Love" -- as instrumentals on his Hammond organ. 

Since Ra's death in 1993 -- or, some say, his return to Saturn -- the Arkestra has continued to perform around the world. Oh, and there's one more very local connection: Deval Patrick is the son of Pat Patrick, for four decades a pivotal member of the Arkestra.

Note: No response required this week, though comments are welcome!

Pale Blue Dot

To anyone who was around in the 1980's, Carl Sagan was an almost ubiquitous presence; somehow, he managed to combine being incredibly nerdy with being incredibly cool. Parodied by SNL and Johnny Carson, he took it all in stride, even titling his final book Billions and Billions -- a catchphrase from Carson's parody that Dr. Sagan himself didn't actually utter.

Over his career, who wrote seventeen books and countless scientific papers, but it was his television series, Cosmos, that cemented his place in the pop-cultural science universe. Airing over thirteen weeks from September to December of 1980, it became the highest-rated show in the history of public television. For its time, the show's production values were remarkable, giving Sagan the seeming ability to walk through a giant solar system (actually, the planets were quite small models), and featuring appropriately "spacey" music from Vangelis.

One might say that his timing was also perfect; just a decade after the Moon landing and at a time before the space shuttle program experienced its first failures, it was a time of increasing optimism about space and space travel; the kids who had drunk their Tang and eaten their Space Food Sticks in the 1960's were now young adults, primed for a curious, celebratory, and slightly speculative journey into the outer reaches of the universe.

There was a tie-in book, which of course became a best-seller; Sagan followed it with others. In one curious twist, his fictional narrative, Contact -- originally a screenplay, which Sagan decided to turn into a novel when he wasn't able to get it made into a movie -- did get made into a movie a few years later, starring Jodie Foster (Sagan, alas, didn't live to see it.) Pale Blue Dot is, to my mind, the best of the later books; it's the most philosophical, and connects best with our overall theme of exploration. Sagan was closely involved in the two Voyager space probes, and lamented that Nasa decided to set aside plans for further exploration of space after the Apollo program ended. At the same time, he knew -- and emphasizes in the book -- the practical truth that there's no home away from home for us earthlings -- at least "not yet."

NB: Be sure to check out the "Planetary Update" I've just added!

The First Men in the Moon

H.G. Wells' First Men in the Moon surprises from its title onward: the peculiar preposition "in" hints of what's to come. Appearing originally in serial form in the Strand magazine (also home to the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle), it may be the first modern science fiction novel -- but it's far from the earliest account of a voyage to the moon. 

The Greek satirist Lucian of Samosata wrote one of the earliest accounts in his The True History; its centerpiece is a great war between the Sunites and the Lunites, the latter of whom ride atop enormous three-headed vultures and throw spears that look like giant stalks of asparagus. Terry Gilliam's Adventures of Baron Munchausen reprises this, with Robin Williams as the King of the Moon! 

The centuries since are strewn with tales of trips to the moon, from Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone (1638) to Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (1865); even Poe weighed in (so to speak) with a tale of his own, "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall." What all these tales had in common, though, was that the method of reaching the moon was fantastical -- riding in a balloon, being drawn by vast team of trained geese, or shot out of a cannon -- which were, in point of fact, unrelated to the actual challenge of reaching their destinations. Verne's cannon, with the astronauts strapped into a giant artillery shell, proved enormously popular, despite its two disadvantages: 1) The initial firing of the cannon would have killed everyone inside the shell; and 2) Because of inertial decay, it's impossible for any object to escape the earth's gravity without some additional form of propulsion.

And, though Wells's moon in many ways his moon is just as fantastical as his predecessors, came up with a fictional -- but scientifically plausible -- method of reaching this goal. His "Mr. Cavor" is a scientist, working to develop a kind of material that will block the force of gravity. Cavor reasons, sensibly enough, that we have materials that block light, block x-rays, and block radio waves -- why not a material that could block gravity? (all this before the long post-Einsteinian debate over a unified theory of force that could include gravity).

The rest follows, scientifically consistent with its premise; Wells also realize that the passengers in a sphere coated with this material -- which its inventor dubs "Cavorite" -- would lead to weightlessness, and offers the first description of it in fiction:

It was the strangest sensation conceivable, floating thus loosely in space, at first indeed horribly strange, and when the horror passed, not disagreeable at all, exceeding restful; indeed, the nearest thing in earthly experience to it that I know is lying on a very thick, soft feather bed. But the quality of utter detachment and independence! I had not reckoned on things like this. I had expected a violent jerk at starting, a giddy sense of speed. Instead I felt – as if I were disembodied. It was not like the beginning of a journey; it was like the beginning of a dream.

What happens once Cavor and his partner, Mr. Bedford, actually arrive on the moon quickly accelerates from the plausible to the purely fantastical, a pattern that later science fiction often follows, taking (for instance) the rational and scientific crew of the starship Enterprise from one fantastical world to another.

The 1964 film version is remarkably faithful to the original, though -- being a Hollywood film -- it has to add a love interest. Lionel Jeffries is brilliant as Cavor, as is Edward Judd at Mr. Bedford. The selenites -- "moon creatures" -- are brilliantly rendered by Ray Harryhausen. The frame story of a more modern moon landing is brilliantly used, and lead to an ending far more poignant than that imagined by Wells.

Backgrounds on Space Exploration

It's not that long ago -- well within living memory, as I can attest from my own childhood -- that space truly was seen as "the final frontier," with all the problematic baggage that the word implies. Westerns were sure-fire TV ratings gold; the future of space dramas was a lot less certain. When Gene Roddenberry first pitched Star Trek to the networks, his tagline was that it was basically a "Wagon Train to the Stars." Kids like myself grew up building models of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space capsules, ate Space Food Sticks and washed down our breakfast with Tang; to grow up to be an astronaut was way cooler than being president. On July 20, 1969, I stayed up with my parents, glued to the fuzzy video of Neil Armstrong stepping out onto on the surface of the Moon.

But what would we do in space? Why, if we really did "come in peace," was the whole concept of the "space race" built around besting the Soviets? Would we build space stations? Moon colonies? How about Mars? And, even then, there was a vague awareness that, although our appetite for space exploration was vast, the funding and public support it depended on was far from infinite. It was not entirely a surprise, then, when after the first few Moon landings, public support began to dwindle; the Apollo 13 astronauts famously didn't even merit a live TV feed, at least until their mission turned potentially tragic. The Space Shuttle program, though less ambitious in exploratory scope, continued to capture the American imagination, despite (or perhaps in part because of) the loss of Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. Yet with costs rising and mission goals elusive, its days were numbered, and the last shuttle, Atlantis, landed at the Kennedy Space Center in 2011.

NASA has certainly achieved some remarkable benchmarks since then -- their New Horizons probe made it all the way to Pluto, and took dramatic images of that no-longer-quite-a-planet and its moon (one might even say it wasn't entirely an unmanned probe, as it contained 30 grams of the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930). But with budgets in question, the future of human space travel -- one might not deem it properly "exploration" -- is now largely in the hands of private concerns such as SpaceX.

The Library of Ice

With Nancy Campbell's The Library of Ice, we finally move into a contemporary moment, and the kind of complex connections which characterize our existence today. Campbell, an artist/poet and expert in rare manuscripts, opens her story in "real time" -- as she tells a colleague that she's decided she needs a break: "I'm going to the Arctic," she tells him. 

But this is no mere escape -- it's more of a pilgrimage, a quest, a hejira -- only not of a religious kind, and not with any particular grail in mind. When told that she can have her artistic residency in Upernavik either in the summer or the endless night of winter, Campbell immediately chooses winter -- for the challenge, yes, but also for the beauty and strangeness of it all.

Some of which is unexpected -- the museum seems to be half-empty, and there's no sign of the director who encouraged Nancy to spend a winter there -- when she asks the locals, they just smile and change the subject. What is it she's supposed to do here? The people who came before have left curious traces: a jar of apple spread, a book of Andersen's fairy tales, and a packet of herbal tea. Campbell finds herself at once explorer and searcher, finder and loser -- with ice as her one recurring companion and theme.

As my friend P.J. Capelotti remarked in his review of this book, "No detail is lost or forgotten.  It is, one could argue, the first great literature of the Anthropocene.  If you don’t believe this, go to page 33, where a sentence concludes: “if humans are lucky, there may be more decades ahead.”  Decades.  If we are lucky.  Thus chastened, we embark on a journey around the Radcliffe Camera to the Bodleian to uncover Robert Boyle’s History of Cold.  One imagines John Thaw’s Inspector Morse drinking at The White Horse across the street—a crazy thought until, sure enough, Morse code makes an appearance later in the book.  One searches for the many prophecies in this book just as when listening to the music in Morse, where the composer of the soundtrack, Barrington Pheloung, would telegraph the name of the murderer in code in each episode."

In the shadow of the failed Glasgow climate conference, we perhaps should tremble -- but Campbell, I think, would want us still to stand in wonder. We can tremble later.

A Woman in the Polar Night

In his introduction to A Woman in the Polar Night, Lawrence Millman notes that is author, Christiane Ritter, had no interest in any of the "Arctic Grails" that drove most northern explorers -- the northwest passage, the pole, or the discovery and naming of some unknown spot. And yet, he notes, she could appreciate the Arctic in ways that those "great explorers," with their "Grail-oriented blinders," could not. Hers was an exploration, not of lands to be named or passages to be navigated, but of the inner nature of life and consciousness in a world in which everything that she -- along with most people of her class and background -- took for granted as much as the air they breathed. It's an exercise in long subtraction: the subtraction, at first, of creature-comforts and little things, then of greater ones, such as predictable food, predictable weather, or the ability to just go get another something when something important breaks or is lost, and at last the subtraction of human company itself.

It's notable that her journey begins in relative luxury, aboard a German cruise-ship with its deck-chairs, its "illuminated coffee lounge," and snug, comfortable beds -- just the sort of cruise ship that presently navigates these regions, though now they are even larger and more luxurious. It's a perfect contrast to the life that awaits her in the little hut with its felt roof, ancient broken stove, and puttied-shut windows. Her sojourn begins in endless day, continues through seemingly endless night, and becomes for her an almost cosmic sort of rebirth, a witnessing of life's great circuit that forever changes her perspective on civilization. Indeed, as Millman notes, not long after her return home, after her family estate catches fire and burns to the ground, Christiane is not perturbed or mournful, but secretly grateful. For the fire had done what ice did: reduced her life to its essentials. 

An African in Greenland

Tété-Michel Kpomassie

It's one of the greatest tales of exploration, adventure, and friendship ever written, and yet its author, Tété-Michel Kpomassie, was never a member of an "expedition" as such. In some ways, he's closer to Charles Francis Hall, who hitched a ride to the Arctic on a whaler -- and yet, unlike Hall, his dream was of self-exploration rather than the divinely-sanctioned rescue of others. And most unlike Hall, he worked his way north, arriving not as some sort of elevated figure, but as a common man in search of the company of ordinary people, along with the sights of a place he had been dreaming of visiting since he was a boy. An African in Greenland is his story.

Kpomassie begins with an arresting account of his own childhood in Togo, where he lived in a community that still observed many of the traditional customs of its indigenous people; his account of being attacked by a python, which has to be addressed by a purification ceremony performed by a priestess of the Python cult, is harrowing. In a curious way, though, the depth of his own roots in his native culture were part of how and why he was able to relate to the Inuit people of Greenland. Both peoples had an ancient shamanistic tradition, and though both had encountered the western world of beliefs, still had to abide by what one Inuit shaman called "numerous and irksome taboos." Colonialism had touched but not yet despoiled Kopmassie's native land, but in Greenland, the Danes had been at work since the eighteenth century, and Greenlanders lived in a more throughly hybridized culture. Still, the situational awareness is similar: let's call it living on the edge.

What's most refreshing about Kpomassie's narrative, though, is that he writes as a person with complete confidence in his own perspective and culture; for him, Europeans are just another group of people in another place, whose customs are as curious and strange as his own might seem to them. He climbs, as it were, up the tree of these intertwined cultural and colonial histories, finding at the top the coconuts of understanding. He is both self-secure and unassuming, and the spirit of his curiosity is a welcome calling-card in every place in which he lands.