Of a Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

He preferred to divine an event through his senses—since he was as nearsighted as he was vain, he tended to sniff out the center of a situation from a distance. So his mind often stayed out of contact with the workings of his brain for days at a time. When it was time, lo and behold, he seemed to have comprehended the event.

if this thesis is correct, if we honor or fear the presence of odors because they are a root to the past and an indication of the future, are indeed our very marriage to time and mortality, why then it is no accident that the Wasps were, in the view of Aquarius, the most Faustian, barbaric, draconian, progress-oriented, and root-destroying people on earth. They had divorced themselves from odor in order to dominate time, and thereby see if they were able to deliver themselves from death! No less!

if the great brain of NASA were attached to any particular sense, it was the eye. The eye was the collector of incontrovertible facts (which at MSC they called data-points).

Yes, real Americans always spoke in code. They encapsulated themselves into technological clans. Codes were like bloodlines. So they could be friendly and helpful and polite but they quietly separated themselves when their codes did not flourish. Aquarius was obliged to recognize that if the machine seemed a functional object to the artist, an instrument whose significance was that it was there to be used—as a typewriter was used for typing a manuscript—so to the engineer it was the communication itself which was functional. The machine was the art.

(all imaginative novelists, by this logic, are detectives)

he hardly knew whether the Space Program was the noblest expression of the Twentieth Century or the quintessential statement of our fundamental insanity. It was after all the mark of insanity that its mode of operation was distinguished by its logic—insanity was often more logical than sanity when it came to attacking a problem.

he was a life given over to good physical condition, a form of grace, since the agony of the lungs when straining is not alien to the agony of the soul.

Even as the Nazis and the Communists had used to speak of mass murder as liquidation, so the astronauts spoke of possible personal disasters as “contingency.” The heart of astronaut talk, like the heart of all bureaucratic talk, was a jargon which could be easily converted to computer programming, a language like Fortran or Cobol or Algol. Anti-dread formulations were the center of it, as if words like pills were there to suppress emotional symptoms.

Perversely, it became his most impressive quality, as if what was best in the man was most removed from the surface, so valuable that it must be protected by a hundred reservations, a thousand cautions, as if finally he had such huge respect for words that they were like tangible omens and portents, zephyrs and beasts of psychic presence, as if finally something deep, delicate and primitive would restrain him from uttering a single word of fear for fear of materializing his dread. So, once, men had been afraid to utter the name of the Lord, or even to write it in such a way as to suggest the sound, for that might be enough to summon some genie of God’s displeasure at so disrupting the heavens.

Aldrin, the formalist, had said just previously, “I think the most critical portion of the EVA will be our ability to anticipate and to interpret things that appear not to be as we expected them to be, because if we don’t interpret them correctly then they will become difficult.” It was the credo of the rationalist. Phenomena are only possessed of menace when they do not accommodate themselves to language-controls. Or, better, to initial-controls. EVA stood for Extravehicular Activity, that is for action taken outside their vehicle, the Lem. EVA therefore referred to their walk on the moon; but the sound of the letters E, V, A might inspire less perturbation than the frank admission that men would now dare to walk on an ancient and alien terrain where no life breathed and beneath the ground no bodies were dead.

The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.

Yet all the signs leading to the Vehicle Assembly Building said VAB. VAB—it could be the name of a drink or a deodorant, or it could be suds for the washer. But it was not a name for this warehouse of the gods. The great churches of a religious age had names: the Alhambra, Santa Sophia, Mont-Saint-Michel, Chartres, Westminster Abbey, Notre Dame. Now: VAB. Nothing fit anything any longer. The art of communication had become the mechanical function, and the machine was the work of art.

a mind without ego he was discovering is kin to a body without gravity.

There were new industries in America these years. After five decades of suspense movies, and movies of the Wild West, after the adventures of several generations of men in two world wars and Korea and Vietnam, after sixteen years of Playboy and American iconization of the gravity-defying breast and the sun-ripened buttock, after ten years of the greatest professional football, after a hundred years and more of a tradition that the frontier was open and would never close, and after twenty more perplexing technological years when prosperity came to nearly every White pocket, and technology put out its plastic, its superhighways, its supermarkets, its appliances, its suburbs, its smog, and its intimation that the frontier was damn shut, shut like a boulder on a rabbit burrow, America had erupted from this pressure between its love of adventure and its fear that adventure was not completely shut down; America had spewed out on the road.

If he had started nervously, there was an exchange where he encountered his opposition. A correspondent from East Berlin asked him in German to answer a question. There had been a silence. For an instant Von Braun had not known exactly what to do, had in fact stolen a look at Mueller. NASA was sensitive about origins. Two of the three directors in the center of the Manned Spacecraft Program were, after all, German. And there was no joy in emphasizing this, since those few liberal congressmen who were sympathetic to the needs of the space budget would only find their way harder if Von Braun and Debus were too prominent. Von Braun fielded the difficulty as follows: He translated the question into English. Then he gave a long detailed answer in English (which succeeded in boring the Press). Then, taking an equally long time, he translated his answer back to German. Finally, he took a nimble step away from this now somnolent situation by remarking, “I must warn the hundred and thirty-four Japanese correspondents here at Cape Kennedy that I cannot do the same in Japanese.”

If patriotism is the ability to improve a nation’s morale, then Von Braun was a patriot.

History often used the best of men for the worst of purposes and discarded them when the machines of new intent were ready. As often History had used the worst of men to convert an unhealthy era to a new clime.

how loyal could evil be to people so poor?

The voice was clear only if one forced oneself to listen to it.

But he knew now why he was so irritated with everything and why he could not feel a thing. It was simple masculine envy. He too wanted to go up in the bird.

Why is this “masculine”? Envy is envy, and as a woman I’ve desired space flight most of my life.

few faces are more beautiful than the dedicated when their deepest hour is in, when the plan utters its first word aloud, and the word is “yes.”

A middle-class White man, living on the rise of Nineteenth Century technology, was able to feel his society as an eminence from which he could make expeditions, if he wished, into the depths. He would know all the while that his security was still up on the surface, a ship—if you will—to which he was attached by a line. In the Twentieth Century, the White man had suddenly learned what the Black man might have told him—that there was no ship unless it was a slave ship. There was no security. Everybody was underwater, and even the good sons of the middle class could panic in those depths, for if there were no surface, there was no guide. Anyone could lose his soul. That recognition offered a sensation best described as bottomless. So the Twentieth Century was a century which looked to explain the psychology of the dream, and instead entered the topography of the dream. The real had become more fantastic than the imagined. And might yet possess more of the nightmare.

Because the computer was the essence of narcissism (the computer could not conceive of its inability to correct its own mistakes) a view of the Seventies suggested a technological narcissism so great that freak newspeak was its only cure—only the threat of a murderous society without could keep computer society from withering within.

his sense of irony once aroused, his sense of apocalypse could never be far behind. He was, after all, quick to hunt for reason in absurdity.

In the study of literature, much usually depends on direct confrontation with a work. Who would dare to approach A Farewell to Arms by a synopsis? It is only natural to distrust a literary experience if we have been guided too carefully through it, for the act of reading must provide by itself that literary experience upon which our senses will later work.

To cope with that large variety of daily experiences which were not easy to anticipate or to comprehend, yet were not terrifying so much as confusing, Aquarius now added to the Navigator the services of a Novelist. It seemed to him that everybody, literate and illiterate alike, had in the privacy of their unconscious worked out a vast social novel by which they could make sense of society. Obviously, each novel was different. Obviously, some were better than others. But whether each unwritten novel was a comprehensive work of art, or an unhappy one, the psychic fact was that as life presented new evidence, the book was altered in its details. When such large events as births, deaths, marriages, divorces, successes, failures, social cataclysms and social revelations were sufficiently unexpected to indicate the conception one had of society—that conception so often forged by inferior art and entertainment—was faulty, then the outlines of the novel would be drastically revised; in effect the Novelist was forever drawing up new social charts upon which the Navigator could make his calculations.

In its turn, the dream provided another sort of information for the Navigator. It ran simulations. Perhaps they were not unlike the simulations put into the computers in Mission Control at the Manned Spacecraft Center. Indeed Aquarius began to think the dream might be some psychic equivalent of those equations of celestial mechanics which find it impossible to plot the trajectory of a moving rocket precisely because there are too many unknowns.

the century is so full of dread at the godlike proportions man has assumed, that the only cure for dread is to extirpate every taboo and see which explosions fail to come. Yet all the while we root out the taboos, everything primitive in us which still gives credence to the taboo, all the unspoken and conceivably tribal experience in the ducts of our dream rush up primitive, even primeval findings into our profoundest simulations. So the century feels a profound anxiety.

Like a capitalist who risks all the moral future of his soul on the gamble that God believes in capitalism and wants each man to seek to enrich himself as part of God’s design, so the engineers at NASA lived in that ice-chamber of the moral heart where they could not know if their actions were divinely approved or abhorred, but dread showed in the chill dank air of air-conditioning and human relations at the Manned Spacecraft Center south of Houston.

Interface! Perhaps it was the biggest word at NASA.

The corporation had replaced the old existential gambles of the small-town capitalist and the lonely tycoon with the security of the organization. The corporation substituted cooperation for competition, and reason for struggle, but because its activities were usually at once immense and petty, like the manufacture of toothpaste, immense and noxious, like the production of cigarettes or poisons for war, or immense and depressing, like the shoddy production of slovenly functioning automobiles, or even immense and scandalizing, like the ways in which aviation contracts were garnered, the corporation not only gave security but engendered loneliness and woe, that same heart-heavy death-heavy stone-guilty woe.

Armstrong’s wife would recollect that in early June after weeks and months of working ten, twelve and fourteen hours a day in simulators, “Neil used to come home with his face drawn white, and I was worried about him. I was worried about all of them. Their morale was down. They were worried about whether there was time enough for them to learn the things they had to learn, to do the things they had to do, if this mission was to work.” It gives a hint of how killing is the work in the simulators. To use all of one’s best energy hour after hour, working day after working day in order to keep up with a machine whose brain is more rapid if not more brilliant than one’s own, plunking all of one’s ambition, avarice, charity, pluck, discipline, and education into an electrical set of brains which will give back nothing but firm answers, can hardly improve the human brain at anything but the cruelest expense to the body. No wonder their morale revived when the flight date was made certain on June 17—the work till then must have been privately unendurable, a feat next to taking IQ tests for twelve hours every day in front of a six-hundred-fold instrument panel of blinkers, switches, alarm lights and warning bells—food for psychosis in rats! yes, it must have been so unendurable that the thought one might yet pursue this huge effort to no purpose—for one’s participation could always be washed out—was a way to lay the groundwork for the worst of diseases, the leaching out of one’s so...

Every Square is aware of his own devil—that is why he chooses to be Square.

This endless preciosity of specification was necessary. In relation to their equipment, the trip was not unique, but merely another store of information in the continuing line of missions from the past which would lead toward expeditions in the future. So everything was important—the malfunctions in the oxygen transducer, and the glare from the foil wrappings of the Lem, the time it took the waste-water cloud to disperse, and the hours they slept, the unexpected reactions of the computer. Everything was important.

Embarked on a heroic vault and subjected to a monotonous round of monitoring and mechanical housekeeping in relation to objects they could never comprehend sufficiently well, they existed in capsule like the real embodiments they were of technological man, forever engaged in activities whose controls he wields until he controls them no more, powerful, expert, philosophically naïve, jargon-ridden, and resolutely divorced from any language with grandeur to match the proportions of his endeavor.

the ubiquitous use of the word “great” for anything that works as well as it was designed to work, great, great, great, the television show was great, and the last waste-water dump, the Saturn performance and the Service Propulsion Motor performance, the burps and the bursts of the thrusters. It was the small-town reaction to the grim miracles of the modern world, everything was great, a bite of steak, a chocolate bar, a movie which made you laugh, a high focus on a television screen—great, great, great, great. The famine of American life was in the sound of the word.

But the measure was not to be found in formal properties. It was rather that the astronauts were the core of some magnetic human force called Americanism, patriotism, or Waspitude,

The rush to extermination or apocalypse was being accelerated by every computer on earth.

It is the first cliché of tense activity. We do not breathe, as if we are afraid to alter the benevolent dispositions of the universe by the evil emanations of our heart. Or is it rather the thought of freezing one’s existence at the instant so that everything good in the heart can be deposited to the credit of the protagonist we watch?

Was the voyage of Apollo 11 the noblest expression of a technological age, or the best evidence of its utter insanity?

Armstrong and Aldrin were to do an EVA that night. EVA stood for Extravehicular Activity, and that was presumably a way to describe the most curious steps ever taken. It is one thing to murder the language of Shakespeare—another to be unaware how rich was the victim. Future murders stood in the shadow of the acronyms. It was as if on the largest stage ever created, before an audience of half the earth, a man of modest appearance would walk to the center, smile tentatively at the footlights, and read a page from a data card.

One-sixth of earth gravity was agreeable, it was attractive, it was, said Aldrin, “less lonesome” than weightlessness. He had, at last, “a distinct feeling of being somewhere.”

The hint is faint enough, but the hint exists—something was conceivably interfering with their sense of order. Could it have been the lunar gravity? Clock-time was a measure which derived from pendulums and spiral springs, clock-time was anchored right into the tooth of earth gravity—so a time might yet be coming when psychologists, not geologists, would be conducting experiments on the moon. Did lunar gravity have power like a drug to shift the sense of time?

One of Armstrong’s rare confessions of uneasiness is focused later on this moment. “I don’t recall any particular emotion or feeling other than a little caution, a desire to be sure it was safe to put my weight on that surface outside Eagle’s footpad.” Did his foot tingle in the heavy lunar overshoe? “I’m going to step off the Lem now.” Did something in him shudder at the touch of the new ground? Or did he draw a sweet strength from the balls of his feet? Nobody was necessarily ever going to know. “That’s one small step for a man,” said Armstrong, “one giant leap for mankind.” He had joined the ranks of the forever quoted. Patrick Henry, Henry Stanley and Admiral Dewey moved over for him.

All light was pure. No haze was present, not even the invisible haze of the finest day—therefore objects did not go out of focus as they receded into the distance. If one’s eyes were good enough, an object at a hundred yards was as distinct as a rock at a few feet. And their eyes were good enough.

Afterward, Armstrong found himself describing again and again the mysterious properties of color on the moon. The terrain, by his description, was tan if one looked along it in the direction of the sun; it was the same tan if one turned completely around and stared at the land beyond one’s shadow. But to right and left, at either side, the colors were darker, not tan but brown. Directly beneath one’s feet, or looking at soil in one’s hand, the color was dark gray, sometimes even black.

Aldrin's color observations

Then there were other phenomena. One is mentioned by Armstrong only once. He looks at his shadow on the ground and … “Down-sun through a very, very light gray, light gray color, a halo around my own shadow, around the shadow of my helmet.” Yes, immediately after they had landed, they had spoken of how interesting were the colors. Twenty minutes later, immersed in routine, the colors were matter-of-factly described as tan and gray. Yet later there are halos, and color has become a function of the vector along which one looks.

More color notes

By any logical or practical measure those odds had to be 100 to 1 or 1000 to 1 in favor of a good ascent; yet in those unspoken fears where wonder resides about the real nature of the universe, the unspoken odds were nearer to even.

He was used to writing in moods so bad he could assume he was passing through a swamp at midnight—some of his best work had come out of periods worse than this, and some of his worst efforts had emerged from hours which had been too pleasant. It was almost as if he had to suffer while working in order to come closer to exercising some more ultimate faculty of judgment. It was a terror to write if one wished to speak of important matters and did not know if one was qualified—sometimes the depressions helped to give sanction to the verdicts taken. It was not so unreasonable. The question is whether it is better to trust a judge who travels through his own desolations before passing sentence, or a jurist who has a good meal, a romp with his mistress, a fine night of sleep, and a penalty of death in the morning for the highwayman. To write was to judge, and Aquarius may never have tried a subject which tormented him so.

They were far and away the noisiest house on the street.