Space Poets
“It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was.”
―Patti Smith, Just Kids
Our fiction abounds with space soldiers, space pirates, and space cowboys, we got the space action heroes in the bag but we seem to be under representing the space creative types. Where are all the space painters, space musicians and space beat poets. The blue space opera singer in The Fifth Element is a rare example of a science fiction artist, and one of the more memorable characters of an already overwhelming visual potpourri. Space captivates us, for millennia we’ve stared up at the sky and been at an absolute loss to express what we feel. Maybe if we include artists in our depictions of space, those fictional artists could help us to express what has been so hard to express about space. I bet zero G statues would be fantastic to witness, and visual art without an up or down might reveal new perspectives.
Astronauts experience a unique shift in their emotional perspective when they experience the visual perspective that is available only to those in their profession. The view of our world from above has such a profound psychological impact on everyone who has seen it has sparked a study of the phenomenon and NASA now has incorporated it into their training and mission profiles. That’s right, an astronauts first trip into space now includes scheduled time to have an existential crisis and to fall back on their training on what to do when you cry inside your space helmet. Go watch “Hubble” in IMAX and you might know how reliable of a problem that could be.
The work of poets, songwriters and painters can help to make our feelings more accessible to us. It’s ironic that the people with the most access to space are a cohort not known for their artistic expression. The engineers, test pilots, mathematicians and rocket scientists who live and breath everything space do their admirable best at bringing their passion to us, but their enthusiasm, not their poetry, is shouldering most of the burden of expression. David Bowie wrote Space Oddity about living and working in space, and then astronaut Chris Hadfield played that song for us while actually living and working in space…and it was amazing. Now let’s take a moment and imagine what kind of music would be made if we had put David Bowie in space. Buzz Aldrin has spent decades telling us about what it was like to walk on the moon, but Buzz is maybe more pilot than poet.
People have ruminated before about bringing a diversity of talents into space, artists of some stripe usually find their way onto those lip-service lists, but here’s a new idea. When we colonize mars, we send a few engineer minded people to get the station up and running and who can fix things when they break, then the very next spaceship out there is artists. Imagine the bohemian collective, not in some dingy apartment in Haight-Ashberry or the lower east side, but in a titanium tube in space for five months on the way to Mars. No need to worry about a day job or making rent, just tons of LSD and endless starscape. Then a truly lonely life with only their art to comfort them while they are stranded literally millions of miles away. Just imagine the richness of music that humanity could enjoy if we condemned just a few dozen songwriters to subterranean domes on inhospitable alien planets. Just imagine how dense with imagery the surrealist paintings would be if we didn’t label which freeze dried ice cream packets were laced with psychedelics on the space station full of painters. Just imagine how deep the void in their soul would feel when the poets float just a few inches away from the glass separating them from the actual void, those poems would really have a sting to them to read. All I’m suggesting is that the people we’ve sent into space have been all together too well prepared for space, and too poorly prepared to express the experience, and for the good of humanity we need to send some emotional wrecks who really have a knack for sharing what they feel.