The Blue Marble

It has been claimed that the image on the left, known as "The Blue Marble," is the most widely disseminated photograph in history, and I can understand why. Certainly, it has had a powerful hold on my own imagination since childhood, when I was utterly swept up by the high romance of the Apollo missions. But it hadn't quite been taken yet when I headed off to first grade in 1970, with an Apollo astronaut lunchbox to hold my bologna sandwich (Oscar Mayer of course), apple, and Tastycake. "The Blue Marble" picture was snapped in 1972, taken by the crew of Apollo 17 at a distance of about 28,000 miles from earth as they traveled toward the moon. The picture at right, "Earthrise," came first, with the Apollo 8 flight in 1968. I was four years old and nobody in the history of mankind had ever seen anything like it. To me it seemed like the most normal thing in the world--of course we can go to the moon! What I didn't know was that this view, this perspective, had given us the ability to see ourselves, our world, as we had never actually seen it before, as the tiny piece of the cosmos that it is. On the Apollo 8 mission the astronauts had been startled by the breathtaking "earthrise" phenomenon. They hadn't even been thinking about earth, since all their efforts were focused on getting out there (they were the first people ever to leave Earth orbit), when suddenly, there it was. I tried once (many years later, of course) to capture at least a piece of the moment in a poem (the flight occurred at Christmas):

apollo 8: earthrise

not a thought for
Earth (weightless, thoughtless)
leaving (the getaway)

technique, politics, routine
"a massive infusion
of technological strength"

Christ mass
in space, nostalgia for a
whole (planet)

Earthrise (looking back) floating
ornamental, fragile
"so very finite"

Earthrise, caught us all
by surprise

and there was a scramble
for the cameras



Almost despite ourselves we got, by virtue the massive technological enterprise of the Apollo missions, a profound moment of self-reflection. I think it changed us; I only wish it had changed us more.

***

Here's what Carl Sagan had to say under the inspiration of the later Pale Blue Dot image, taken from a far greater distance (more than four billion miles!) by Voyager I, in 1990:

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

Avifauna and the LEGO-VAC

Lots of robins pecking around in the back yard these days. So the Word of the Day is: Avifauna

a·vi·fau·na (v-fôn, v-)
n.
The birds of a specific region or period.
[Latin avis, bird; see awi- in Indo-European roots + fauna.]

[The defnition above is taken from here.]


***

And my Invention of the Day is the LEGO-VAC ©. Inspired by my latest (and approximately zillionth) effort to clean up a well dispersed quantity of my three year old son Nicholas's tiny Lego blocks from all over the living room floor. In my vision, it's like a SHOP-VAC but the Legos are sucked into a storage area with a clear plastic display. Just take the top off when you're ready to use the blocks again! I really think this is an idea whose time has come. But then again, I think that about all my "inventions"...

Renoir's Rules?

I've had a mini Renoirfest from Netflix recently, seeing Rules of the Game, The French Can Can, and Elena and Her Men. The latter two are enjoyable but fairly slight entertainments, but the first lives up to its status as one of the great movies. To be honest, though, it took me a while to get to that response, and I went through a pretty odd viewing arc over the course of the film (which is already receding in memory, since I saw it a couple of weeks ago). The movie is a skillfully constructed farce centering on a weekend house party at an aristocratic country estate (Altman's Gosford Park owes a lot to it), but I found it difficult to get invested in the characters and the "screwball" comic elements often seemed merely frenetic and zany rather than actually funny. So for part of the movie I found myself thinking that a good Cary Grant film, say with Irene Dunne by his side, could do the same thing better--that is, with more warmth and genuine humor . But Renoir was more interested in giving a serious, even scathing, portrait of "class" than most Hollywood directors have been, and this is where the film develops its real power. And like lots of viewers before me I found its famous hunting scene to be especially intense and moving. I had heard or read the term "beaters" before, but to see a line of men moving forward through the fields and woods beating the ground, the trees, and the bushes with sticks, driving all the animal life before them, so that the waiting aristocrats can blast these animals to bits with shotguns is to be presented with a striking scene of terror, both utterly realistic and highly symbolic (of this society's barely veiled violence). What makes the scene so staggering, and keeps it from coming across as too schematic or propagandistic? That sort of alchemy is one of art's great mysteries, a subtle and unpredictable mix of inspiration and technique, and the way it works here is a sign of Renoir's tremendous talent. To be able to say anything more, I'd have to go back, watch again, and think more about how this is actually achieved. All I can say now is that the scene sneaks up on you, so that you suddenly find yourself in the middle of a massacre, wishing you were not seeing what is before you even as you can't take your eyes away from the screen. I said the film was already receding in memory, but this is one of those scenes that stays with you for a lifetime. And for bonus points, this same scene pays off all over again at the end of the film, so that the death by shotgun of the film's aviator "hero" comes at us with a kind of terrible objectivity.

The Margarita at the End of the Universe

I got a kick out of the couple who came yesterday morning to hook up the icemaker and water dispenser on our new fridge. For starters, it's unusual to see a husband/wife or boyfriend/girlfriend team doing this sort of thing. They were both sort of scruffy, with the raspy voices of heavy smokers, and though they weren't tanned or conspicuously "beachy" they somehow had the air of long-time coastal partiers who had seen their share of margarita-soaked sunsets. This led me to joke that I had been told that they could hook up the "water" dispenser so it would actually produce perfect frozen margaritas right out of the fridge. He said, "If you figure that one out, let us know, and we'll be right over." After they were done their work, before they left, we came back to the dream of the fridge-based dispenser of perfect margaritas. I said I would work on the invention and let them beta-test the result when I had something. All in all, it was a slightly offbeat and funny way to start the morning and I found this couple lingering in my imagination for the rest of the day, taking up habitation in the bare, partial structure of a kind of never-to-be-actually written short story that I mentally sketched in odd moments. I wonder how many people walk around every day "working on," or playing with, little fragments like this.

Oh, and concerning the title of this blog, here are two consecutive entries from the Online Etymological Dictionary.

lacuna
1663, "blank or missing portion in a manuscript," from L. lacuna "hole, pit," dim. of lacus "pond, lake" (see lake (1)).
lagoon
1612, from Fr. lagune, from It. laguna "pond, lake," from L. lacuna "pond, hole," from lacus "pond" (see lake). Originally in ref. to the region of Venice; applied 1769 to the lake-like stretch of water enclosed in a South Seas atoll.

I started out with the idea of a "lacuna" as a gap or missing piece (and of course the term was made popular by pomo French theory) because of my sense that this blog could be a kind of hole down which certain things might fall, things that would heretofore have disappeared without a trace. I added "laguna" for the sound play and because I like the water, and living near it, but I was unaware that both words have the same root, going back to "lacus" for lake or pond. So the lacuna was already watery right from the start, and the laguna was already just a kind of hole.

For more on lacunae and memories gone missing, see Michel Gondry's intriguing film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and this humanitarian venture, Lacuna, Inc. As for the title of this entry, I blame Douglas Adams's trilogy Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and specifically the second book, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The location mentioned in the title seems like it would be a very good place to drink a perfect frozen margarita.