Space X: or, memories of the Cold War

Last night I went outside to watch the launch of the latest Space X rocket. My expectations were extremely low. In my experience, skywatching almost invariably leads to disappointment. Blood moons, blue moons, lunar eclipses, solar eclipses, such-and-such comet, the perihelion of Mars -- somehow whatever it is, it never meets my expectations, and I figured that if nature couldn't raise my jaded eyebrows, what chance did a man-made rocket have?

As it turned out, I was wrong, wrong by a very wide margin. What unfolded before my I eyes last night was spectacularly beautiful. First we saw the rocket blasting upward into the heavens, a huge orange-red fireball rising on a column of smoke. Then it seemed to disappear, only to emerge Phoenix-like a few moments later amid a huge, slowly expanding corona of blue-gray gas. I am not exaggerating when I say that it was like watching the universe being created -- a nebula of light that slowly filled the lower quadrant of the sky like a newly-born cosmos. And through this, the fiery ascent continued, doubled when the rocket separated into its two sections, effectively doubling the spectacle.

As I've said, the whole process was breathtaking to witness. But beneath the feeling of awe and silly happiness which overcomes me every time I see anything awe-inspiring, came a completely unexpected sensation of animal terror. At first I couldn't understand why I was experiencing it, and indeed, it took a few minutes to puzzle out why such a rewarding and rare sight would trigger the fear-centers of my brain. Then, as the rocket's decidedly red glare dwindled to a pinpoint, it hit me: I had stumbled into one of those abandoned, forgotten, deeply entombed memory-vaults which all of us carry somewhere in the center of our brains. And this particular vault, which more resembled a mausoleum than anything else, read COLD WAR CHILDHOOD - DO NOT OPEN.

When I first saw daylight in 1972, the Cold War was already a quarter century old and showed every sign of either lasting forever or ending with a tremendous bang. Neither outcome was particularly attractive. Endless continuation meant endless tension, endless fear, and, perhaps worst of all, an endless sensation of futility. When you think the world may blow itself to bits at any moment, the idea of long-term planning vis-à-vis your own life seems pointless. Indeed, though I was by no means part of the punk movement, the attitude I had during my later childhood and early teenage years was essentially a punk attitude -- apathetic, nihilistic, angry. It was best summed up by the lyrics of Mayhem's 1982 song "Choke":

I don't know why you're trying – give up
You know you're gonna die – give up
It's all a stupid joke – give up
I want to see you choke, choke, choke
Mushroom cloud in the sky
Pass the bottles, see the city fry
Load the gun, aim it at your head
Pull a trigger, you're better off dead!

As you can see, there's an inherent contradiction in being placed between these two millstones -- on the one side, waiting for something you don't want to happen but which feels so inevitable you just wish they'd push the button and get it over with, and on the other, hoping like hell you never woke up to see "the mushroom cloud in the sky" since it would not only mean your own destruction, but that of everyone you knew, and indeed, of the entire world itself.

In his minor masterpiece Coming Up For Air, George Orwell's protagonist George Bowling tells the reader that the unique feature of growing up during the late-Victorian/early-Edwardian era was the belief people had back then that their society would last forever. They themselves would die, but British society would not. It took the "bloody balls-up" of the First World War to shake that belief, but even then, the idea that Britain might be physically destroyed, wiped out annihilated, was beyond them, for no weapons existed or even could be imagined that would achieve this. Having been born decades after the fictitious Bowling, I did not have that luxury. I knew even as a child that there were something like 13,000 nuclear missiles sitting in silos all over the planet, primed, ready and waiting to do its part into turning the green and verdant planet upon which I resided into a radioactive cinder hanging in space. There was literally no escape from the knowledge. It was everywhere -- in magazines, in newspapers, on television, in film, in the table-talk of my parents, even in comic books. It was for the most part background music to our daily lives, but the music never switched off, and every now and again some incident would ratchet up the tension still further and make me wonder if the day hadn't arrived at last that I'd go outside and see rocket contrails streaking across the Maryland sky.

Every life has contains a pattern of awareness. In what we call "normal, well-adjusted" people, the harsh realities of life are at first vaguely suspected, then slowly understood, and then finally accepted. This process is gradual and, in a prosperous country like America, often takes several decades, with the very toughest lessons reserved for middle age. In my particular case, this awareness was accelerated, partially by unhappy school experiences beginning around the age of ten, but perhaps just as much by the overall atmosphere that came with living next to Washington, D.C. at the height of the Cold War. While still a young boy who did not grasp much, I understood most intimately the meaning of Yeats' infamous poem, "Second Coming:"

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

For those who think I may be indulging in some pretentious melodrama, it's important to remember just how intense the rivalry between the West and the East was during the Reagan era -- especially the period 1981 - 1987, and how many times we seemed on the brink of world war and self-annihilation. By the time I was in fifth grade I took it as an article of faith, as did every one of my friends, that we would almost certainly never live to adulthood, and I have a vivid memory of expressing gratitude that we resided so close to the White House and the Pentagon: I knew none of us would suffer when the war began. How could we, when literally hundreds of Soviet warheads were trained on our very households? A loud rumble, a flash of light -- and then nothingness. That was how the War -- and my own existence -- would end. It seemed immensely preferable to the sort of tormented half-life the survivors would have to endure, wandering amongst the rubble -- possibly for years -- before radiation sickness or starvation or a follow-up barrage of nuclear missiles finally finished them off.

I can't swear to this, but I believe it to be a normal state of affairs in most societies that children begin their lives with an unwavering faith in the wisdom and probity of their parents and leaders and then only gradually -- and in some cases never -- lose this faith. In my case, that naivete never really existed. I knew while still in the single digits the world was a terrifying place, bristling with doomsday armaments, awash in corruption and pollution, planned and organized by lunatics and run by fools. I knew as well that it might cease to exist at any moment. It was, as the saying went, only the push of a button away. This knowledge did not discount the existence of such things as love, friendship, pleasure or happiness, but it did make them harder to come by, and, once acquired, difficult to keep. And it heightened my awareness of my own mortality. When your life depends on the whims and caprices of world leaders who are only dubiously sane, one does not view time as an inexhaustible commodity. Life, too, falls apart, and the more effort expended to make it permanent and safe, the higher and narrower the pedestal upon which it sits seems to become...and the more violent its inevitable crash. So I believed, anyway, when I was a child. Perhaps it was not a coincidence that this period is when I first picked up a pen and began to explore the world around me through fiction. For me, then as now, writing was not merely a way to vent creativity or exercise control, but to come to terms with a universe governed by the one-way flow of time. What is time, after all, but entropy -- and what is entropy but things falling apart?

For my part, I watched the rocket fall apart, and then went back inside. I was still bewitched by the beauty of what I'd seen, and still trembly from having unwittingly opened a vault of old childhood fears. Sitting down in front of my laptop, I thought about the apocalyptic nature of the stories I've been writing lately. In a sense they are an acknowledgement that the world is a place where chaos and ruin are easier to come by than order and stability; but in another sense they are a middle finger extended at time and its hatchetman, entropy. Because, you see, just because things fall apart, doesn't mean I want them to. Like everyone else I'd rather the goddamned center stayed where it was. I don't want the button pushed, I don't want the ice caps to melt, I don't want the rain forests shaved flat or the oceans poisoned, but I feel helpless to do anything about any of it. I'm one man, not a terribly significant one and certainly not one with any financial power. Much of the punk attitude which I formed as a twelve year-old has returned to me against my will and, until I saw the rocket, without my knowledge. I realize I'm angry and seized by a sense of futility, yet at the same time helpless, fatalistic. But I'm not nihilistic anymore, and neither am I totally apathetic. If you read my work, you'll find occasionally -- just occasionally mind you, but often enough that you can't take it for granted otherwise - that the center does hold. Things fall apart. But sometimes they stick together. If only in a story.

Carl Sagan once questioned, not rhetorically, if self-destruction was the inevitable end of every sentient species in the universe. Human beings certainly do have a propensity for cutting things down and blowing them up. The Cold War was a symptom an illness, and the present war we're fighting against our own planet -- a slow-motion war, measured in hurricanes, floods, droughts, extinctions and rising tides -- is also a symptom. The disease is us. But -- and here is where I think I have actually progressed as a person in thirty-odd years -- I believe the disease has a cure. Watching a rocket whose purpose was not annihilation and mass murder, but the betterment of mankind (at least in theory) reminded me that we are not only capable of greatness as well as villainy, we're also capable of change.

Not a bad night's work.