2019-07-26

WWSotM: Cassini explains perspective

And so we come to the end of micro collection, and we step back for a moment...







Cassini explains perspective

Everything you know;
everyone you know, have known, will ever know;

everywhere you've been;
everywhere you've never been;

everywhere you could be,
including even, if NASA would only play along,
the Moon;

every song that sticks in your head
all through some rainy afternoon;
every balloon, released accidentally
by any toddler;

every toddler;
every teen;

every thought you ever think;
every meme, you cut and paste on Facebook;

every face;
every book;

every member of the appropriate sex,
who has that certain styleall in

        In the sixteen hundreds, Cassini explained --
        for those travelling a long way --
        how to measure longitude with two clocks,
        the Sun, and careful observations
        of eclipsing Jovian moons.

        Cassini also observed
        the gap in Saturn's rings
        through which we today fling
        a careful dart and have it, looking back,
        photograph

that one pixel : this island Earth.

So I say: stuff your rather pointless election campaign,
pour your new recipe hair conditioner down the drain,
smoke or do not smoke, if you keep it away from me
because none of that matters
let me tell you about perspective.





2019-07-25

WWSotM: Earth-like planets...

It's bloody hot, so I'm just going to query whether we actually need the word "exoplanet" and get on with the poem (which I recorded on a far cooler day...)








Earth-like planets...

...where the hanging moment of morning
finds cloud unbound and the song moves on.
Where she sang that song, the one that rhymes
"heart" with "card" and where...

Here's another one!  Jake looks up from the machine.
it's like the universe is stuffed with the damn things--
and another, this one's pinkish...
 which means
if the Universe is filled with places of this sort,

then life cannot be killed... will always have
another place to go.
  He looks around.  She's gone again.
He feels he is in love, but that it will not work.
He'd like to buy her a drink later

except she never is about.  Never mind,
he calls, in case she is still there.  Meanwhile,
at the other end of the telescope, she spreads
her blanket on the ground, just beyond the pale

pink shadow of the untrees, opens the picnic basket
and sits down...




2019-07-24

WWSotM: Fast woman

And so we come to relativity, relativity and a woman.

The title of this seems less than feminist, fortunately (or rather by design) the title doesn't mean what it seems.

In relativity, there's a place called "the elsewhere" it's the bits of spacetime which are far enough from us in space and too close in time for light to make the journey.  There isn't enough time.  Nothing is faster than light, so the elsewhere is out of reach.  No possible information can travel from there to here, so we can't see it; or from here to there, so we can't affect it either.

Note, however, that spacetime is four dimensional.  So this doesn't mean there are 3D places that we cannot access.  We can see their past and affect their future; it's just an area around the present that's gone missing...

...rather like self-contained woman in this poem.  She was here, but now she's off about her own business; maybe she'll be back tomorrow.









Fast woman


Einstein-like, she chooses curves
for living space and all of her free-time;
meanders through the gallery,
coffee in hand, pursues the light. Behind
the paintings shade to infrared;
they glow with ultraviolet light ahead

while all I see is the faintest blur,
a fragile shock-wave in rebounding air
from where she spent a millisecond
staring at Matisse: the dancing one

imagine:
the daisy-chaining figures spin
faster,
their flesh transformed
to something rich and more robust
to keep breasts rounded
and hands clasped
under stress
of cosmological significance;
picture fauvism
conceding to relativity
a reference frame dragged slowly
to a closed curve
where all there ever was
all there every will be
is the dance

she leaves a hint of perfume;
a dent that appears
then recoils as suddenly to flatness:
an institutional bench cushion at rest.




2019-07-23

WWSotM: Golden age reasoning

A lot of contemporary politics insists on harking back to one or other golden age.

Q. Was there ever a golden age?

A. Of course there was not.

Except in Science Fiction.  The Golden Age of Science Fiction is well documented as running from from 1938 to 1946 and is superior to all other golden ages in three important respects:
  1. it actually happened
  2. it was limited, mostly, to the production of pulp novels and magazines; so we didn't overreach
  3. when it was over, we didn't go into decline, we started right in on the Silver Age
Another plausible candidate for a Golden Age might be the space race, an age of great promise and progress... however with my hardest engineer head on, I am going to call that a fools-golden age, because.
  1. it was politically motivated, there's not actually so much reason to go to the moon
  2. although a lot of useful technology spun off from the space race, it wasn't enough to completely enable a further phase: the technology that got us to the Moon does not scale to getting us to Mars
  3. we never went back
So, although eventually the Moon might be useful as a staging point on the way to other places (although Earth orbit is handier) I wouldn't say that getting there in 1969 was fundamental...

Unlike I, Robot which is fundamental, because, if I recall correctly, it contains the short story which finally addresses the question What is a human? (which matters because Asimov's laws forbid: harming a human, or through inaction allowing a human to come to harm...) and reaches the conclusion, that, to paraphrase another famous Sci-Fi author:

Any sufficiently advanced robot is indistinguishable from a human being.

Which gives us a different possible future for future space exploration.  We happily drop increasingly advanced robots on various heavenly bodies.  If the robots get more and more sophisticated, and if, at the same time, the people become more and more robotic (c.f. 'cyborg'), then we could arrive at people on Mars by a strange and unexpected back door:

Q. Is there life on Mars?

A. First let's define 'life'.

There was a point to this discussion but it is a bloody hot day and I have derailed my train of thought...  have a poem instead.









Golden age reasoning


Golden Age reasoning knows aliens
in the fabric of the air.  The tiny hints
of Chlorine breath are there for those who sniff
and have not bleached their washing recently.

Golden Age reasoning has to believe
that there's a real behind this real and you
can get there if you have that kind of mind
of course the trip back can be more complex...

although Golden Age reasoning does not
sweat the details: how does your aircar stay up?
Why do the robots rebel?  And hell, if I
know why the Fleed have got it in for us.

The Golden Age, a precious, dangerous
and brightly coloured place, but turn to face
it now and check the charge in your ray-gun
the seals on your power suit, the gleam in your eye.




2019-07-22

WWSotM: Space

"Space, is big..." says The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and then it goes on to give some stunningly bad advice about holding a lungful of air in order to survive in a vacuum.  DO NOT DO THIS...

If you ever find yourself needing to walk out an airlock without a spacesuit then you must let all the air out, no matter where in your body it is: lungs, ears or digestive tract.  Otherwise parts of you may burst.

Then, also, just try to (a) be quick and (b) have a bit of cloth or something for grabbing the metal handle of the other airlock; and you may be fine...  If you grab metal in space with unprotected fingers then you may freeze or burn them, depending whether the metal is facing the Sun or not.

Anyway, that is that, and this is a poem about a coffee table.









Space


Between my two raised hands
I show just how much width
the coffee table takes
and that is space

not a huge amount of it
something approaching three foot six
but the same stuff
that separates us from the Moon.


You're on the far side
of the coffee table now;
no matter how I manoeuvre
I can't bring you close...

...you say you need more space;
beyond you is the window,
kites flying in the park,
and beyond that, the Sun.




2019-07-21

WWSotM: The Red Planet Blues

David Bowie never toured Mars [citation needed]...

Edgar Rice Burroughs sent John Carter to Mars several times, but due to time-skew John landed on a fictionalized planet where the women were strangely attractive...

Curiosity landed on the real Mars, or rather Curiosity landed on a Mars that is inhabited only by machines.  This Mars will cease to exist the moment a human sets foot on it.

However, to this day, no human has ever set foot on Mars.  There are good reasons for that.  One is that that human would probably not be coming back, another is that even getting there alive is really hard [citation needed].

It would also be very expensive, and you might say we have better things to spend our money on...  However, as long as we are limited only to Earth, we're vulnerable.  One decent sized rock falling out of the the sky and it is all over.

We're not quite ready to colonise Mars yet.

We really should be working on it more.









The Red Planet Blues


Ziggy played guitar,
     jammin' good with Weird and Gilly...


There are no spiders
on Mars, spinning
in bone-cold canyons
to trap unwary space cadets.
There are no great domed cities, shining
pale in the brave red sunset. There are no get
of Edgar Rice Burroughs;
no green, six-limbed warriors
riding thoats or laying eggs
in odd moments
out there in the rusty desert. No Martians for the chronicler
to document their steady decline
after the Earthmen came.

Earthmen must come.
It is necessary.
Pick up the pickaxe.
Start digging a canal.




2019-07-20

WWSotM: That's no moon...

So in 1969 it was a moon.  I'm fairly certain...

If the astronauts had landed on a science fiction moon, I think we would have heard about it almost immediately...







That's no moon...



...that's a science fiction moon.

A science fiction moon is when there is
the tiniest sliver: a line of light,
a curving scar, where someone took
a razor to the sky.

A science fiction moon is when there is
three quarters: an asymmetric lenticulate,
a lens to view much stranger stars
and made by what knows who.

A science fiction moon is when there is
a big bite out of it.

A science fiction moon is precisely half
a moon, a thing that's clearly real and there,
yet also clearly not and gone.

The science fiction moon hangs easy
in my sky tonight, a circle, perfect, full,
impressively large, romantically dead...

...the science fiction moon is ours,
close enough to reach out with one hand and-



We Were So on the Moon

We Were So on the Moon in 1969 and everybody, but everybody, is producing documentaries, video game patches, t-shirts and "special edition" coffee flavours.

I had no plan to join in.

But I was paging through my old poems, looking for something good I hadn't shared recently, and the first thing I found was a moon poem.

Well who am I to oppose the workings of fate.

So please consider this the title page for a specially assembled micro-collection.

This is going to be seven poems over seven days, starting today, and focused on, not so much of the moon landings themselves, but more the areas around that: space exploration in general; our changing attitude to it; what, if anything, we might have learned in the last fifty years.



We Were So on the Moon

Contents:
  1. That's No Moon
  2. The Red Planet Blues
  3. Space
  4. Golden Age Reasoning
  5. Fast Woman
  6. Earth-like Planets
  7. Cassini Explains Perspective




Page one follows shortly: 10, 9, 8...