Grumpiness
(and Outer Space)
Space sure is having a moment. One is tempted to seek explanations hinging on escape: a mass compulsion to flee our noxious maelstrom of Horrible News, to escape the fell gravity of our flaws…except that the drivers of the Horrible News are braided into the Outer Space weave too.
One is tempted then to understand the Outer Space stuff as diversionary. Anything to keep us from looking at the maelstrom.
Trump vows to beat China to the moon—never mind we’ve been there already. No no, that’s a great look. Carry on.
Trump vows to make Pluto a planet again. That’ll show ‘em!
Artemis is in flight, an event in which in times of only standard awfulness presidential administrations of ordinary incompetence would bask, would clear the schedule for. He’s too punchy for those details. Has to hurry on to making the next mess.
I heard an Outer Space academic on NPR. The author of the term dwarf planet. He regretted the decision of whatever scientific body handles these things to demote little Pluto. His gripe was that they’d done it by vote, and Science has no business associating with elections. Doing so could give the impression that it has as much to do with the prejudices of squalid mortals as it does with repeatable experiments and falsifiable findings.
I do sympathize though with the desire of taxonomizing bodies to streamline their systems of organization. Taxonomy isn’t science, it’s decluttering—a domain in which why the hell not take a vote now and then? If Pluto is a planet, hundreds of other remote but stable satellites smaller than Rhode Island will be presently streaming into My Very Elegant Mother’s neighborhood.
Does anyone really think a freshly 17-year-old person is jurisprudentially more mature in sexual decision-making than a 16-years-and-364-days-old person? My point being: in civilized society, someone has to draw lines, and calling those people assholes is our right.
I used to fantasize that the same group who stripped Pluto of its planetness—its taste for blood whetted—would go on to abolish the word itself. (“‘Pluto’s’ too small to be a word!”)
There’s a funny NIMBY/YIMBY argument to make about Pluto’s status. But the decisions of smartypants in athleisure convening in hotel conference rooms change not one fact about its existence. Even Oscar Wilde’s student sweating all day over the deletion and subsequent reinsertion of a comma from a line of poetry made a larger splash in our world.
It’s been on my backburner for some time to write a Substack exploring the question of who invented space. From whom did we receive our general and specific aesthetic notions of it? I fancied there might have been an artist, an iconic, engendering image, a comic or cartoon, a sci-fi TV show backdrop designer, whatever. I was tickled by the idea that in actuality we have no idea what Outer Space looks like. Virtually none of us have ever been there, after all. But I suppose the truth is more interesting: we literally look straight into it every night, and have done since the beginning. Plus photography. Plus photography from space. The picture with everyone in it but the photographer, etc. If anything, as our species has aged our eyesight’s collapsed, degraded by light pollution and pollution pollution. We don glasses in the form of the Hubble, the James Webb, acquiring far-sightedness as our reach and power grow and the dead gather at our feet.
Now I like thinking about how every picture in space is a picture of space: the void frame, the not. Any nebula’s a stunner, but for chills that really ice the spine consider the enveloping nothingness holding that nebula in place. (Not that anything is held. Not that anything anywhere isn’t careering at unthinkable speeds.)
Newton pooh-pooh’d Descartes, who couldn’t accept the idea of vacuum, insisting rather that the cosmos were set into a plenum (a space full of something) across which were transmitted jiggly waves of influence. Newton was pooh-pooh’d in turn for declaring that bodies in space infuenced each other over abyssal distances for reasons we knew not why but in ways mathemetically predictable. A miracle, Leibniz scoffed. My silly English rival stoops to miracles to explain what is plainly the work of God!
Laugh all you want, but no one yet’s come up with a better theory. Even Einstein didn’t dare approach the territory of why his folds of gravity and time worked. The careful cartographer does not anticipate his map’s end.
I…turned my head to face the other direction, to stare into space. I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. Stars exploding years ago, their light traveling to us years later; black holes absorbing energy; satellites showing us entire galaxies in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely… all of that has thrilled me for years… but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death.
I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.
—William Shatner, 90, a guest of Bezos’s into orbit
Then you have our asshole rich, these parasites without decency or shame, and their sermons of endless consumption. Books keep getting written that take their derangement seriously, informing the dialogue, repeating their self-enriching sureties without critique. They go like this:
The only feasible exit from the crisis precipitated by our mounting energy use is the massively expanded energy use of the richest people and grossest abusers on our one ill planet. They must use more, more, as much as they can, so that we might escape (and never mind defining that conveniently floating “we”) our burning house, and set the galaxy ablaze with our patents.
They dress the scenario up with grandiose visions of sucking stars dry for the further enrichment of a conjectured sprawling, spacefaring humanity. A Cambridge ethicist in their pocket actually described this future as “[making] the cosmos worthy of our awe.”
Making it worthy of our awe. By zoning it industrial to fuel our heedless slurping up. Can you imagine?
I no longer feel confident saying things like “You’d have to be crazy to believe it” because crazy implies a consensus baseline of understanding our parasite rich have happily scuttled, but you would have to be a dick to believe it, or damaged and unimaginative in an essentially psychopathic mode.
Anyway we decided to hate-watch Project Hail Mary so I could write about it. About, specifically, the you’re the only person who can save us plot, a supreme contrivance inevitably landing on the heads of Goldblums and Cruises and Dicaprios and Willises. In this case on a Gosling.
We attended on a Saturday a delightful, relaxed, silly, and eclectic theater/bar/restaurant called the Lyric.
It’s callous and self-defeating to hate-watch and not in our style and luckily the movie was impossible to hate. Gosling is just too charming. (May he never turn Goose.) Instead of easy scorn I sat steeping in a volatile tea.
On the one hand bothered by Andy Weir’s success—which is a dumb waste of time but what are you gonna do.
On the other pleased I guess that if we are going to bestow status in creative arts to STEM nerds at least they seem to be getting better at it. (PHM a significant improvement on The Martian.)
On the other hand weary and ashamed of my own snobbery. (This a bass line on a loop.)
On the other fearful for a culture apparently more than satisfied with the psycho-emotional range of a borderline autistic nerd.
On the other hand drawn in by the story and having fun in it, and what’s so wrong with just having fun, for fuck’s sake?
On the other this guy makes Nolan look like Shakespeare and Interstellar, Hamlet.
On the other hand how bleak must things be if such ephemeral articles—these 3-hour ditties years in the making, medium-hopping constructs involving gazillions of monies and whirlpools of human talent that no one will remember two years hence—how bleak must be the state of culture that these antics are what we have to criticize now if we want not to lose touch entirely with the whole project?
On the other who the fuck am I and what do I know? Nothing. “Nothing” is the answer. You want to garrotte the inner voice from time to time and just be in a crowded theater stocked row to row with people audibly enjoying the hell out of themselves without drowning in bile.
On the other hand this is the culture at the wheel when the bad shit started going down and no personal squeamishness should justify a failure to object, to tinily insist in your itty bitty voice on a raising of expectations overall and a hostility toward middlebrow entertainments at the very least. The goodness of our one ill Earth is being converted into this stuff. The power of our one moment’s attention directed into it. Scarce, unrepeating passages of scarce, unrepeating lives…
Around this point in the cycle I’d reset to the bit about STEM nerds doing art—which I understand we’re calling STEAM now, which is apt because it comes from boiling, and when the boiling’s done the water’s gone.
It feels right to me that it’s hard to avoid grumpiness. You spend the first half of your life growing accustomed to a world you spend the second half watching burn. Evolutionarily speaking, male grumpiness must serve some purpose, otherwise we’d be a much chippier lot. Men at middle age and beyond are still relevant, fortunately or unfortunately, in purely material terms. They’re still passing on genes. So ostensibly must be the guardianship they assume of prevailing and embattled customs. Conservatism, etc. (A word we should deploy better.)
I realize now I’m autopsying grumpiness as though it were exclusively the province of males. Which is obviously wrong. People in middle age, if they’ve the luxury to, might tip into grumpiness. How should we think about it?
I used to be sunny. And I still find life so odd and pretty and random and fun that I think a native sunniness yet rays forth, mostly. Like a light bulb mysteriously lambent within a paper bag full of dog shit left on your porch by some kid otherwise busy laying waste to your culture.
Clearly grumpiness stems arises from an instinct to preserve the healthful garden beds what sprung us from the unflagging erosive power of this vale of tears. I understand conservatism. I’d like in fact to wrest the word from the party of vandals, nihilists, and ignoramuses who’ve too long patrolled the brand. Even those of us sans children feel threatened and demoralized by the prospect of future generations cultivated in parched soils. Or trademarked.
Before the movie, outside the theater in its sort of magically empty and sun-hot playground of furnitures and statuary, we shared an hour and acre of spacetime with a by all appearances perfectly healthy young four-or-five-strong nuclear family. They breastfed. They spoke to a calling grandmother. They played—son and dad—with a kind of enormous hula hoop. They inquired as to what it was exactly one of them had in their mouth. And everytime I glanced up from the page, one adult at least was phoneward.
I thought, how is this all going to play out, when every child, even in the beautiful burning house of their innocence, looks up constantly to see an adult staring at their hand?
The feelings make you feel bad, then you feel bad for having had them.
A reasonable person would just keep it all pent-up. But look where reasonable’s gotten us.
I'm not alone in my grumpiness!