Astronauts and the Otherworldliness of Poetry

I just tweeted to an astronaut.

He probably won't tweet back, since he's busy getting ready to return to earth tonight (which I plan to watch). But I had to thank him for pioneering the use of poetry in space. He has done the first-ever zero-G music video -- aptly performing David Bowie's "Space Oddity":

This is fascinating on many levels, but let me say a few words about how this represents a minor triumph for poetry -- something more than a mere publicity stunt. Let's think for a minute about how poetry itself has always been otherworldly.

Like an astronaut "sitting in a tin can far above the world" as Bowie pens it, poetry has always been about other planes of being. Or it appeals directly to the spiritual, or it simply fashions vicarious types of existence through powerful images that remove us from here and invite us somewhere out there.

Poetry has also been otherworldly in terms of being disconnected from everyday life. It is not prose, nor prosaic. It is intended language, eloquent language, language detached from the mundane (which means "worldly"). Poetry often uses elevated language, language of a higher linguistic register, of a more lofty style than our day-to-day speech. Poetry also lives distantly from the cold rationalism of science. That is one reason that a singing astronaut is such a curiosity. Shouldn't he be reviewing procedures and not strumming a guitar?

Actually, Commander Hadfield was just reviewing procedures (as his Twitter feed tells me, just one hour ago). But more recently, only a few minutes ago, he took time from his pre-flight protocols to snap and share this beautiful picture of dawn from space.

When an astronaut takes time out of his final day in space to take and post photos of a cosmic sunrise, you have an astronaut with a poet's soul. He is sensitive to the aesthetic, not dividing this from the serious technical work of his job. That's true whether you like his David Bowie cover or not.

Of course, space has been the backdrop for all kinds of literature. Science fiction, sci-fi movies -- pulp fiction and popular movies have used space as a staple for many years. Just as the ocean proved for our ancestors, or the open prairie for the early pioneers, space has been a frontier which has been romanticized (for better and worse) as a location of possibility and transformation. Here is the famed opening of Star Trek, with Captain Kirk uttering the famous "final frontier" speech:

(Interestingly, William Shatner interacted with Hadfield over Twitter during Hadfield's five months orbiting Earth. I found this connection of fictional and actual space commanders odd and yet enjoyable.)

"To boldly go where no man has gone before" is more than just a pop culture trope; it is pretty much archetypal and goes back to the epic poetry of Homer. It was Odysseus who in the Odyssey boldly adventured for a decade across foreign lands. 

It is not coincidental that Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick's novel and film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, invokes that tradition of bold exploration into the unknown. This is literature and space intersecting at the point of romantic longing for the other, the distant, the transcendence of the alien, the future, or the foreign. From this 1968 movie poster advertising Kubrick's now famous film, you can see the beholding face of astronaut David Bowman. I find it interesting that we find his face so interesting. The beholder, not the beheld, can rivet our attention. We crave to have these moments of wonder, and that is something that both space and poetry can provide.

The protagonist of 2001, David Bowman, is the Odysseus figure for the space age. Tennyson in the Victorian period captured the point of view of Odysseus / Ulysses in his poem, "Ulysses." Here are its final lines:

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew 

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Poetry records bold deeds and ambitions. And it inspires those deeds, especially when poetry is lyrical in nature -- put to music and then sung before others, either around a campfire or from inside a circling space station.

Here is another singer-in-space. Sarah Brightman:

Brightman's music has often been described as ethereal and otherworldly, has created this music video (prefaced with several passages of poetry, and full of space imagery), as part of the preparation for her own upcoming trip to space. That's right. She paid around $35 million for a 10-day trip to the International Space Station in 2015. (You can too, via Space Adventures. I'm not joking. This is the actual form to fill out for reserving your spot. I'm thinking about the Circumlunar Spaceflight myself, and am accepting donations.)

I found this video interesting because it blended together four kinds of otherworldly: poetry, music, space, and India. (That's right, India. At least for us Westerners, India has long represented the exotic other, as exemplified in Forster's A Passage to India But anyway, here is part of what Brightman said in an interview about both her space voyage and her new album:

I was totally inspired to put together an album of songs that are very expansive in their feel, all the wonderful emotions that we all have in the idea of what the universe is, what it may hold in the future, all the things we're discovering through the Hubble, through all the forms that we're getting back now. It's very inspiring to somebody who's creative, because the universe is created.

The expansiveness about which she speaks is something that is relevant to both to poetry and to religion. "Poetry" literally means something that is fashioned or created. Poets are makers, and as such imitate or complement divine making (see Sir Philip Sidney's Defense of Poesie for more on this).

What I am seeing and what I am saying is the importance of connecting the vital and transcendent world of poetry with the everyday. Poetry blasts us away from the quotidian, but then, if done properly, it remains artfully tethered, connected to where we are and who we are at present. That's what Commander Hadfield did with the poetry he sang in space. 

We are more able to be both launched away and tethered down by poetry today, especially as music is so much more accessible to us, importing poetry into every aspect of our lives. But we are also able to create and to share our creations more readily, too. The rise of the new media parallels the rise of creativity and of creators -- those who fashion, the Makers. We find joy in constructing and sharing our artistic endeavors. That was something apparent in Commander Hadfield's music video. He has an obvious love for what he is doing -- both his astronaut vocation and his singing avocation. He joined them for us, so very nicely.

Within my own faith tradition, we Latter-day Saints make explicit our nature as children of a Creator. To me, this gives me a license and a mandate to be a poet, to craft and to create. Here is a brief video from one of our church leaders on this topic. "The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul," he begins:

Space has inspired my own writing. A couple of years ago I wrote a sonnet about another astronaut aboard the International Space Station when I came across this thoughtful image taken by a fellow astronaut. Click the image to see the photo and the poem.

I reviewed my poems to which I had given the label "cosmos" and came across quite a few. It was enjoyable for me to reread how much space and poetry had intersected for me -- which also often intersected with my religious beliefs and with my personal learning (I've been reading biographies of Enlightenment thinkers and astronomers). 

You can sample my "cosmos" and space-themed poetry if you wish. But I encourage you to sample others' poetry just long enough to translate that into your own creativity. Get into that zone, and you will find yourself in the company of other poets, singers, creators, astronauts, and general Travelers to the Beyond. I'll see you there.