{"id":9959,"date":"2025-01-31T14:23:42","date_gmt":"2025-01-31T18:23:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/how-to-see-with-an-astronauts-eyes-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-01-31T14:23:42","modified_gmt":"2025-01-31T18:23:42","slug":"how-to-see-with-an-astronauts-eyes-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/how-to-see-with-an-astronauts-eyes-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"How to See with an Astronaut\u2019s Eyes \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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When the first hot air balloonists ascended into the skies of the eighteenth century, they saw rivers crossing borders and clouds passing peacefully over battlefields. They saw the planet not as a patchwork of plots and kingdoms but as a vast living organism veined with valleys and furred with forests. They had to leave the Earth to see it whole, torchbearers of that rude paradox of the human condition: often, we have to lose our footing to find perspective; often, it is only from a distance that we come to feel the pull of the precious most intimately and most urgently. <\/p>\n

Two centuries later, Apollo<\/em> astronauts would capture the magnificent and humbling view of Earth rising over the Moon. The photograph, now known as Earthrise<\/em><\/a>, would awaken the modern environmental conscience with that same sudden sense of indivisibility felt where the spirit meets the bone.<\/p>\n

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Earthrise<\/em>. (December 24, 1968.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Most of us may not be able to leave our planet physically \u2014 only .0000000598290598% of our species ever have \u2014 but we can lift off in imagination, that fulcrum of evolution<\/a> by which we rose from the ocean to write poems and postulates, to compose the Benedictus<\/em> and to build the bomb<\/a>. If we can imagine what it is like to see the Earth whole, then maybe \u2014 just maybe \u2014 we can feel its wholeness, we can feel our own, we can grasp not in the mind but in the marrow of being what Willard Gibbs so hauntingly articulated while laying the foundation of the thermodynamics without which space flight would not be possible: that the whole is simpler than its parts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Such a perspective is what Samantha Harvey invites in her breathtaking novel Orbital<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 the imagistic chronicle of the sixteen sunrises and sunsets seen and felt by the six astronauts suspended between the creaturely and the cosmic aboard the International Space Station as they \u201cshift across longitudes in this great metal albatross,\u201d existing \u201cin all time zones and none at all,\u201d beholding \u201cthe naked startling earth.\u201d What emerges is a lyrical invitation to imagine yourself there, as one of them, in order to more fully inhabit the here and now of this one and only life on this one and only planet.<\/p>\n

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Ella Harding Baker\u2019s solar system quilt as teaching tool<\/a>, 1883.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Harvey writes:<\/p>\n

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The seconds dissolve and mean less and less. Time shrinks to a dot on a field of blank white, specific and senseless, then bloats without edges and loses its shape.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

At the brink of a continent the light is fading. The sea is flat and copper with reflected sun and the shadows of the clouds are long on the water. Asia come and gone. Australia a dark featureless shape against this last breath of light, which has now turned platinum. Everything is dimming. The earth\u2019s horizon, which cracked open with light at so recent a dawn, is being erased. Darkness eats at the sharpness of its line as if the earth is dissolving and the planet turns purple and appears to blur, a watercolour washing away.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps, down here on Earth, we so readily lose perspective because we spend our days on myriad distractions keeping us from feeling the blade of time press against our lives with the urgency of living. Nothing sharpens that blade like seeing the edge between day and night, the beautiful and brutal turning edge, as the planet rotates:<\/p>\n

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Dusk steals upon you and the earth is a bruising of azure and purple and green, and you remove your sun visor and turn on your light and darkness brings out the stars and Asia passes by bejewelled and you work in your light-pool until the sun comes up once more behind you and burnishes an ocean you can\u2019t identify. Daylight spills blue on a snowy landmass moving into view and, against the black, the rim of the earth is a light bright mauve that brings a pain of elation to the gut. What might be the Gobi Desert rolls out beneath you\u2026 The solar arrays drink the sun until dusk comes back\u2026 and night creeps from the underside of the earth and engulfs it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In a passage evocative of the final line in Tracy K. Smith\u2019s staggering poem \u201cMy God, It\u2019s Full of Stars,\u201d<\/a> Harvey adds:<\/p>\n

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It is hard to believe the quality of blackness that is the entirety of space around a day-lit earth, where the earth absorbs all the light \u2014 yet hard to believe in anything but that blackness, which is alive, and breathing and beckoning.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Art by Sophie Blackall from If You Come to Earth<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And yet \u2014 because we are the universe looking at itself, because vision and consciousness co-evolved in the light<\/a> \u2014 we have lit up the blackness with our zest for life. A generation after Holocaust survivor Primo Levi reflected on the unifying power of space exploration<\/a>, insisting that it can make us more aware of being \u201ca single people\u201d so that we may progress with less difficulty toward justice and peace, Harvey writes:<\/p>\n

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There\u2019s something so crisp and clear and purposeful about the earth by night, its thick embroidered urban tapestries\u2026 The spread of life. The way the planet proclaims to the abyss: there is something and someone here. And how, for all that, a sense of friendliness and peace prevails, since even at night there\u2019s only one man-made border in the whole of the world; a long trail of lights between Pakistan and India. That\u2019s all civilisation has to show for its divisions, and by day even that has gone.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The day-lit Earth offers its own assurance of cohesive aliveness:<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s the humanless simplicity of land and sea. The way the planet seems to breathe, an animal unto itself. It\u2019s the planet\u2019s indifferent turning in indifferent space and the perfection of the sphere which transcends all language. It\u2019s the black hole of the Pacific becoming a field of gold or French Polynesia dotted below, the islands like cell samples, the atolls opal lozenges; then the spindle of Central America which drops away beneath them now to bring to view the Bahamas and Florida and the arc of smoking volcanoes on the Caribbean Plate. It\u2019s Uzbekistan in an expanse of ochre and brown, the snowy mountainous beauty of Kyrgyzstan. The clean and brilliant Indian Ocean of blues untold. The apricot desert of Takla Makan traced about with the faint confluencing and parting lines of creek beds. It\u2019s the diagonal beating path of the galaxy, an invitation in the shunning void.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Cloud vortices off the north-west coast of Africa captured by astronauts repairing the Hubble Space Telescope in 2010. (Photograph via Paul Morris \/ Cloud Appreciation Society<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And still, Harvey observes, the hand of politics is \u201cutterly manifest in every detail of the view,\u201d a force as mighty in shaping the planet as gravity. But to see the Earth whole \u2014 to glide the wonder-smitten eye from \u201cthe rich fresh brown of the Tibetan Plateau, glacial, river-run and studded with sapphire frozen lakes\u201d to Alaska\u2019s \u201cliquid swirl of ice floe and cloud\u201d \u2014 is to shed that false sense of there being an other side at all, the central myth upon which the whole of politics is built. Harvey transports you to that small metal window framing the vantage of an indivisible totality:<\/p>\n

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Continents and countries come one after the other and the earth feels \u2014 not small, but almost endlessly connected, an epic poem of flowing verses. It holds no possibility of opposition. And even when the oceans come, and come and come and come in a seamless reel, and there\u2019s no sense of land or anything but polished blue, and every country you\u2019ve ever heard of seems to have slid into the cavern of space, even then there\u2019s no waiting for anything else. There is nothing else and never was.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Complement Orbital<\/em><\/strong><\/a> with planetary scientist Sarah Stewart Johnson\u2019s love letter to Earth lensed through Mars and our search for meaning<\/a>, then revisit Marie Howe\u2019s beckoning poem \u201cSingularity\u201d<\/a> \u2014 a timeless ode to our cosmic destiny and the truest meaning of home. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
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