space-image-being
Half-theses toward nothing but space and opportunity
i.
Half-theses toward nothing but space and opportunity
A Sun-Ra listener gets the impression there is a location out-of-this-world, perpetually burgeoning, he and his party look forward to being in. With each refrain the record feels like a long daily commute, a bumpy bike ride to the market, a cruise, a hot balloon ride. Worthwhile journeys. A bit exasperating. Promising destination, nonetheless. Arriving, hypothetically, would mean cessation; there is no more imminent travel, and there will be time to rest. Space is constantly expanding; gravity and a handful of other physics laws prove it so. There might be enough room for everyone. The distance between stars yawns with possibility. Earthly voices insist, in unison and harmony, that the black void surrounding our home planet is the place to be. The place to be used to be the state above. North the Mason-Dixie. Up the Mississippi. The Ohio. Up to Canada. Up. Up. Up.
To get to space, one must produce enough force to defy gravitational pull and leave Earth’s atmosphere. Currently, this is solely done by all manners of calculation and combustion. In Virgina Hamilton’s The People Could Fly, she writes of people who, after their time on a plantation, slowly forget how to step into the sky. They remember in time to escape an overseer. She describes their ascent at the end of the fable as a series of steps into the heavens.
ii.
In 2003, my mother and I watched a street painter make a solar system using spray paint, various circular container caps as masking, and a sharp stylus he used to etch into the surface of the drying paint. Nine planets crowded together on the surface of a page no larger than 18x24”. A well of bright red smack-dab in the middle of an cloudy peach circle for Jupiter. Saturn’s rings in incomplete ellipses. Blue Neptune. Little Pluto. The “picture” is less a picture than it is a distillation of memetic knowledge of what humans have known about the local star system for millennia. Generations of looking up. We know red spot. Rings. Blue. Scale.
In order the local system goes rock, cute, marble, orange, giant, ring, blue, blue, then little pre-2006. Rock, love, lucky, war, gas, ring, blue, then blue after 2006. All making their revolutions around the great, middle fireball. Perhaps a solar system mobile has nine painted, polished spheres hanging like ornaments. Perhaps it has eight.
iii.
Etienne Leopold Trouvelot[1] was a poor entomologist—he was a much more attentive illustrator by light years. After observing the aurora borealis in his telescope, he began making astronomical drawings. Historians estimate he made over 7000 astronomical drawings over the course of his life. “The equatorial belt has always appeared to me to be slightly tinged with a delicate carmine red, very much like the equatorial belt of Jupiter; only the pink color of the former is much fainter. In no instance could I compare the color of this band to ‘brick red,’ as it is commonly described.” Note the absolutes: always, very, only, no instance. Consider the exacting modifiers: slightly, fainter. Two-minded in a way when one is trying to describe something the other simply had to be there for. The equatorial belt, in Trouvelot’s esteem, is too unique a faint-red, too particular a cochineal tin, a crimson lake. How many words would it take to describe the color of your favorite person’s eyes? Tiny reticles to achieve correctness and a lifetime spent peering up through lenses stacked within a tube—how could his gaze be characterized as anything but loving?
iv.
In New Mexico, on October 24,1946, a 35mm film camera, attached to a V-2 missile, focused on the curvature of the Earth. The shutter closed. The image, taken 65 miles from Earth’s atmosphere, is a partial one of the planet, a scant 1,600,000 square miles of the Earth’s surface.
v.
In the Trouvelot Astromical Drawings Manual, the man wrote in the introduction, “Although photography renders valuable assistance to the astronomer in the case of the Sun and Moon, as proved by the fine photographs of these objects taken by M. Janssen and Mr. Rutherfurd; yet, for other subjects, its products are in general so blurred and indistinct that no details of any great value can be secured. A well-trained eye alone is capable of seizing the delicate details of structure and of configuration of the heavenly bodies, which are liable to be affected, and even rendered invisible, by the slightest changes in our atmosphere.”
vi.
Harrison Schmitt took The Blue Marble in 1972[2]. The image has been reproduced globally, though other images of Earth had been captured by satellites prior. A color image of Earth, situated in space, in its whole roundness had not been taken by a human before; the US was the first to publish one. The first man on the moon. The first.[3]
vi.
NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990. It orbits Earth from 332 miles away—a round trip from Pittsburgh to Columbus—and is set to make images of space constantly and perpetually until its orbital decay in the 2030s. One of its two successors, Webb, launched in 2021. The other, Roman, will launch in 2027 barring any complications.
Hubble is a thing, and it is dying. Its surviving gyroscope is one among five others which no longer function. Its last service mission was in 2009. It was only slightly premature for a satellite, and it launched with a flawed ground mirror. All components required to address the flaw were not added to the satellite until 2002. As a result, many of its images flatten into indistinct pixels, grainy and blurred, beautiful in their imprecision, for the celestial body whose light winks from light-years forward or behind or otherwise away, the moment catalogued and recorded in service of soft power organizations looking away rather than around.
vii.
Looking is an action. Observation might be a more active action. Surveillance might be even more active, especially in alien, costly galactic conditions, necessitates observation, analysis, adjustments for subjects, and maintenance.
viii.
A list of queries:
From which fold of the intestine does the urge to look up come from?
Why do people look away?
The lover and its sorors: if one of this order makes an image of space, how might their frank and true regard for the subject influence their formal choices?
The state and its limbs: if it makes an image of space, what is the goal?
Could a space satellite be directed to make a passion picture?
Is space the place for real?
[1] The moon, Trouvelot, was named in memory of him.
[2] This has been claimed by several astronauts, but most others who were on this expedition are no longer with us. Schmitt, a former senator of New Mexico and former member of the Planetary Society, is the surviving crew member of Apollo 17.
[3] The Sputnik of it all!