Every day at Esrange Space Center I thought, now I’ll sit down and write about this incredible thing that just happened. And then something else would happen. And now I’m back in Brooklyn and the revelations I experienced while there are, while not faded, absorbed into the mass of “experience” the way maple syrup disappears into a hot bowl of oatmeal.
Speaking of oatmeal. I did eat a lot of it at the space center. In part because there were a number of all-nighters that needed to take place, but also because the cafeteria food was, to a certain extent, and despite exuberant effort on the part of the chef, lacking.
Some context: I spent a week from 18-24 September at the Esrange Space Center in Kiruna, Sweden, at the invitation of the Swedish Space Corporation, specifically Armelle Frenea-Schmidt, rocket engineer and former REXUS/BEXUS Program Manager at SSC. The week was dedicated to launching two groups of student science projects on two separate stratospheric balloons. The program that this is part of is called BEXUS. And if you want to get the result without experiencing the rest of this essay, you can click here.
Nights at the “Dome” were amazing. The young scientists had gone back to the space center hotel. As I may have mentioned in a previous post, there were so many people that there was no room at the hotel. I rented a small cabin on a lake for a couple of nights but as it was about a 40 minute drive from the space center I found it easier to sneak around and find places to sleep there. Mostly in the dome. Plus with the balloon launches you have to be up and at the launch area in the middle of the night so it didn’t make sense to drive all the way back to Kiruna and then back to the space center.
At night it was so quiet. The experiments left on the tables, the gondola, a steel cube loaded up with experiments sitting on a large dolly, in front of the massive blue rolling doors like a parade float waiting for its day in the sun. I filmed longer and longer shots of the gondola sitting and waiting, of the landscape, the impassive lake at a distance, one day visible, the next day shrouded in fog, a day after that, dampened by snow. At night I was alone in this enormous hangar filled with the things of science. A lot of tape, wires, styrofoam, foil emergency blankets, cables. New drawings appeared on whiteboards every day. Some were math formulas, some doodles.
When I wasn’t filming extreme long takes of landscape or object, I was filming the young scientists at work. Always in groups, a group from Rome, one from Warsaw, one from Madrid, one from Porto, from Dresden, from Geneva, from Munich. Each group worked amoebically, the engineer was one arm (I guess it’s called a “pseudopod”) reaching around to complete one task, the scientist absorbing other parts, programmer, yet another. They were never alone. They used a lot of tape. I filmed them taping tons of things. the Germans had fancy UV-warding-off tape, others used electrical tape, some used packing tape. I hovered around them asking about the tape and what was inside the boxes they were taping so carefully.
The team from Porto had never experienced snow, and their complex experiment sending low frequencies from earth to the stratosphere involved planning to set up six massive speakers on “Radar Hill” near the space station on the night of the launch. The day before, to mark the exact locations where the speakers would be placed, the team put stone markers on the ground. Like you would do in a place with no snow. Like Portugal. After the unexpected and huge snowfall, they couldn’t find where they had marked the spots. So we all went up there together and they dug in the snow for their stones and had a snowball fight.
Everything reminded me of sculpture. Andy Goldsworthy, Susan Philipsz, Sol Lewitt, Sarah Sze, Brancusi. When I talked with the scientists about art some of them wanted to talk about representation of beauty and couldn’t understand why I saw what they did as artistic. But others got it and more. The aesthetics of a math formula, of physics, of the way a lens might image the earth from space, of audio waves. They spoke of their experiments as their creations. And the launch as a sending the being they had created out into the world. But most important was the homecoming.
When I got to Esrange I was immediately drawn to or directed towards a young “recently baked” PhD (his words) named Tomasz. He was part of the team from Warsaw, whose acronym for their experiment was Totoro (like the Miyazaki film). They brought a stuffed Totoro around with them everywhere and made sure it was in all the photos. Each team’s name was an acronym of some kind. There seemed to have been a protocol for the various teams, and it seems to be something that continues throughout the sciences, at least the balloon and rocket sciences. They all create a complex title for their experiment that adds up to a very clever acronym. They also make stickers with logos and they usually make jackets, tshirts, or sweatshirts with their logo and acronym.
ROMULUS, HERCCULES (sic), TOTORO, HERMES, SPACIS, CASTOR, STAR, and then there was SBGA which was both the most diverse group (from Munich) and the ones who did not have a word-acronym or make a sticker or a sweatshirt.
Anyway, Tomasz had brought with him from Warsaw a metal teacup with a variety of trains on it and often drank tea out of a flowered teapot he poured into this train teacup. He was obsessed with balloons. And antennas. And from the way he reacted when I set up my camera I could tell he did not want to be filmed. He would shrink out of every frame. I respect that, because I do the same.
So I asked Tomasz to sit for an audio-only interview with me. And what he told me was so perfect for my work and so articulate and pristine and rich that I realized I wanted to just present it as either a sound piece or to transcribe it into a book. It is incredible.
I won’t go into too many details here but what struck me the most was the idea of homecoming. In all my efforts at launching and getting off this earth in a balloon (or in life), I had not taken into account that the scientific experiment is incomplete until the experiment has come back to earth and been retrieved. If it just goes up, it’s not the experiment. It has to come home.
Tomasz told me a poignant story from his childhood about going into Warsaw with his grandmother and coming home again. He used this story to describe how the balloon science needs to happen. That the coming back is as necessary as the floating away. Otherwise lifting off has no meaning. It means nothing unless you come back.
So homecoming. Arriving back, having sent data, being unpacked, describing what you’ve experienced, knowing it is only bits, only partial, maybe the signal got blocked somewhere, maybe parts got damaged at impact or from the snow or rain. Maybe one of the camera-eyes didn’t function.
This provided me with a new outlook on my anchor texts for this project, E.A. Poe’s 1835 The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfall and Poe’s last text that was a public lecture he insisted was a prose poem, the 1848 Eureka.
In brief, Hans Pfall makes it all the way to the moon in his homemade balloon. He escapes the authorities who are coming after him because he’s murdered his creditors. Pfall makes it through the airless empty cold and hot layers around the earth. He calculates the trajectory and gets to the moon. He makes it. But he wants to come home.
The entire story is in the form of a letter delivered by a “moon-man” who has come to Earth on a different balloon to deliver it. But before the burghers of Rotterdam can offer Pfall a pardon, the messenger gets spooked and flies away back to the moon. There is no homecoming. There is only the letter, the bits of incomplete data describing a one-way journey.
And Poe’s Eureka, a scientific-philosophical-poetic dare I say “performance-lecture” which Poe felt was the greatest thing he had ever written, the culmination of his entire life’s work, a lecture he gave to a packed audience, a last hurrah, so to speak, looks outward. It strives to encompass the formation of the universe. It projects the nebular theory (which I won’t get into here) that hardly anyone believed in at the time, that was then “completely disproven” and then, 100 years after Poe’s death, was proven to in fact be true. The lecture, the poem, the desire to comprehend and communicate lands on audience ears as bits, scraps, fragments. It doesn’t make it home. Except after.
Poe’s preface to Eureka is so moving. Thinking of him as an orphan later cut off by his adoptive father, kicked out of University of Virginia, penniless, prone to bouts of alcohol-induced delirium so intense he was described as unrecognizable by friends and colleagues, Poe as a wickedly good literary critic, no holding back, Poe as doing money jobs like writing scientific catalogues of shells, Poe as losing everything again and again, his wife (who was his cousin, which is already weird enough) and any sense of place, moving up and down the Eastern seaboard throughout his short life. Boston, Philadelphia, West Point, New York, Charlottesville, Baltimore. And in Baltimore the gondola crashes and Poe dies, broken, sending out data in the form of rumor. Did he cry out in his delirium “Reynolds! Reynolds!” who could have been any one of a number of Reynolds’, or did he not? No device recorded. Data undetectable, irretrievable.
Here’s the preface to Poe’s last text, Eureka. I have written it in this newsletter so many times. But I come back to it and to these texts when I want to rotate around them again, me, the asteroid taking on and sending out dusts in my elliptical-as-ever orbit. Now is time for me to do what these young scientists are doing, looking over, unpacking, assessing, transposing what their taped-up boxes tried to tell them.
PREFACE
To the few who love me and whom I love -- to those who feel rather than to those who think -- to the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities -- I offer this Book of Truths, not in its character of Truth-Teller, but for the Beauty that abounds in its Truth; constituting it true. To these I present the composition as an Art-Product alone:- let us say as a Romance; or, if I be not urging too lofty a claim, as a Poem.
What I here propound is true:- * therefore it cannot die:- or if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will "rise again to the Life Everlasting."
Nevertheless it is as a Poem only that I wish this work to be judged after I am dead.
Thanks for reading.
P.S. I sent up some actual boxes to the stratosphere too. More on those next week.
BUNKER can be streamed on Amazon and on Projectr.tv