The photo above was taken some time between my first and second birthday. That would make it most likely 1969. I like to imagine that I have been left all alone while the rest of my family has gone to watch the moon landing on the tele.
A few toys scattered around. Some pathetic beads on the inaccurately named play pen. The magnificent desolation of the family home. My sad eyes betray the truth of the situation, imprisoned behind a stockade that I learn to push around as I gain in strength. The literal prison that I gradually internalise and push around for the rest of my life.
I don’t remember the moon landings—and yet I do. Not from when they happened, but shortly thereafter. In the 1970s I became childishly obsessed with Project Apollo. I awoke to it not long after it ended—perhaps as it ended. My first clear memories of the space race are in its immediate wake: Skylab in 1973 and 1974. Puzzled and amazed by the few pictures appearing in the newspapers, a desultory epilogue with none of the fanfare of its earlier, grander cousin.
To my child’s mind, thirsty for sensation and experience amidst an ocean of naivety, Apollo quickly came to represent the apex of human achievement. The great adventure beyond the atmosphere, the first step on the road to the stars. Surely this was the old dream become fact of the science fiction I had already begun to consume; paperbacks passed down from my siblings on high: Robert Silverberg, Arthur C. Clarke, C. S. Lewis, Robert Heinlein, Ursula K. Le Guin, Frank Herbert, Philip Jose Farmer. And so on—all the begats in a newfound materialist pantheon.
The 1970s passed. And the inexplicable monotony and random violence of school became as familiar as the weather, as my growing awareness, awash with the confabulated fancies of just so stories of space and time, became fitfully aware of the adult world of work, economics and other miseries.
When did I lose the desire, that pressing need to be an astronaut just like Colonel Steven Austin? That perverse longing to be simultaneously less fictional and more fantastical. Would it be possible, in my onrushing adult life, to juggle the struggle with fembots and bigfoot while furthering Neil Armstrong’s mundane triumph?
The never-ending delays to the launch of the first Space Shuttle played a role in my creeping disillusion, as age and a changing world alerted me to how far we had fallen from the dizzy heights of the all too brief space age. To have missed it, even though I was born a full 18 months before the first human set foot upon the moon, was surely the greatest misery in my life before my eleventh year.
When the 50th anniversary of the moon landings rolled around back in 2019, before the pandemic came to remind us that life is far more fragile than the jokers who rule us would have us believe, I tried to reconnect with my first love. I bought Lego. I bought more Lego. I built the kits and tried to feel connected to my past—real and imagined. I even framed an old, National Geographic moon map from February 1969, replete with “proposed Apollo landing sites” dutifully marked out on this map of my future life in space. But I felt little other than the cloying taste of nostalgia, overripe for demographic targeting and other lamentable scams and marketing opportunities. Indeed, I made a fake ad in the style of the 1960s that attempted to summarise my critical anxiety and fascination with July 1969.
The space race failed as surely as the so-called struggle between the East and West: one shitty system masquerading as communism, the other disguised as freedom. Both miserable mirrors of each other’s spectacular claim for human apotheosis.
Meanwhile, in the veritable ruins of the last century and more we wonder more about the unbearably hot days soon to come upon this Earth. Other viruses have invaded our collective imaginaries, none quite so bright or as faintly ridiculous as the childish wish to live out there among the stars. Still, for those of us unfortunate enough to have been struck by the bug, the fever dreams of space exploration and extra-terrestrial colonies that never came continue to haunt the bleak future that did arrive. And the paltry visions of the current hucksters of commercial space exploration does nothing to mollify this, only rendering more starkly what we have lost in all its aching, dayglow imagery.
For more information regarding the image, “When will all these shadows of god cease to darken our minds?”, see here.
the sinister science 