Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s of a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind’s ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through.

We send out the Voyager probes into interstellar space in a big-hearted fanciful spasm of hope.

There in his chest is a heart that tilts and pitches. He can keep its beats slow and smooth, quell its habits of fear or panic or impulse, stop it yearning too much for home, curb its unhelpful states of abandon. Calm and steady, calm and steady. Metronome pacing out the breath. Yet still at times it tilts and pitches. It wants what it wants and hopes what it hopes and needs what it needs and loves what it loves. So strenuously unrobotic is the astronaut’s heart that it leaves the earth’s atmosphere and it presses out – gravity stops pressing in and the counterweight of the heart starts pressing out, as if suddenly aware it is part of an animal, alive and feeling. An animal that does not just bear witness, but loves what it witnesses.

In the galley Pietro eats his lunch of macaroni cheese. Well, they call it macaroni and they call it cheese. Before he left earth his teenage daughter had asked him: do you think progress is beautiful? Yes, yes, he’d said, not having to think. So beautiful, my God. But what about the atom bomb and what is it, these fake stars they’re going to put into space in the shape of company logos, and the buildings they’re going to print on the moon, out of its surface dust? Do we want buildings on the moon? she said. I love the moon as it is, she said. Yes, yes, he’d answered, me too, but all those things are beautiful, because their beauty doesn’t come from their goodness, you didn’t ask if progress is good, and a person is not beautiful because they’re good, they’re beautiful because they’re alive, like a child. Alive and curious and restless. Never mind good. They’re beautiful because there’s a light in their eyes. Sometimes destructive, sometimes hurtful, sometimes selfish, but beautiful because alive. And progress is like that, by its nature alive. All well and fine, but he hadn’t been thinking then of the space-specification ready-to-eat macaroni cheese, which is neither good nor beautiful, nor made of anything that could ever possibly have had the will to live.

you might regard in wonder these men walking on the moon but you must never forget the price humanity pays for its moments of glory, because humanity doesn’t know when to stop, it doesn’t know when to call it a day, so be wary is what I mean though I say nothing, be wary.

There are people like him (so he says) who complicate their inner lives by feeling too much all at once, by living in knots, and who therefore need outer things to be simple. A house, a field, some sheep for example. And there are those who manage somehow, by some miracle of being, to simplify their inner lives so that outer things can be ambitious and limitless. Those people can swap out a house for a spaceship, a field for a universe. And though he’d give his leg to be the latter, it’s not the kind of thing you can trade a leg for – in any case who’d want his leg if they already had limitlessness?