EDITORIAL May a rising wind lift Mir and our capacity for
wonder
At press time Mir, though protesting and sputtering, was still
aloft. Television pictures showed the old spacecraft as a battered carcass. The
U.S. media -- including NCR -- has poked constant fun, in cartoons and
elsewhere, at this hobbling symbol of faltering Russian power and prestige.
Whatever happened to wonder?
There is a poem that begins:
Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, And danced the
skies on laughter-silvered wings. Sunward I've climbed and joined the
tumbling mirth Of sunlit clouds, and done a hundred things You have not
dreamed of. ...
We resort to poetry when wonder gets the better of us. Or tragedy.
Ronald Reagan recited from this poem on the day of the Challenger disaster,
expressing the dreams of the newly-dead heroes:
...And while, with silent, lifting mind I've trod That high,
untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand and touched the face Of
God.
Up there on Mir, two Russians and an American wrestle with cables
and worry where tomorrow's oxygen will come from. Together with their craft
they are more than the sum of all their parts. More than a Jay Leno joke. Ten
years ago, their countries were hell-bent on annihilating each other. It seems
like yesterday all those nuclear weapons were aimed at each other. There are
still a lot of bombs to be destroyed, but in 10 years huge new trust has been
built. And cooperation. That's progress in this imperfect world.
Mir does seem to suffer from an Edsel syndrome. A space-age lemon.
But an enormous, complicated lemon nonetheless. So big and heavy, so many
cables and backup systems, such speed so far up there in the air. Millennia
came and went when humans could only wonder at birds, envy them. Then, in our
century, we slipped the surly bonds of earth, and in our own days we went
beyond that into space. It's something to wonder at.
The Russians are struggling down home on earth. In many ways a
forlorn land, maltreated by czars, nearly a century of communist thuggishness
and now beset by corruption and other hardships, it yet put that permanent
space vehicle into orbit. Not totally permanent, as we are finding, yet no one
else did even that, including the great United States. It's a lemon to be proud
of. And a handsome metaphor for Russia itself, battered but unbowed.
I know that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the clouds
above. ... W.B. Yeats, too, was captivated by the infinite spaces, though
the death he foresaw for his imaginary airman would be inflicted from earth
rather than from the heavens. We make movies about exotic threats from space,
but to date the real dangers are more homely.
The three men on Mir worry about a leaking glove, ill-fitting
space suits, electricity supplies. On a more homespun level, they change
underwear every two weeks, a TV commentator said. We hope they suffer neither
claustrophobia nor vertigo. Only a numbed imagination could fail to be affected
by both the magnificence and the danger. There are no atheists in foxholes, the
saying goes. One would expect the same in space vehicles, though Yuri Gagarin,
the first Soviet cosmonaut, said he could find no God up yonder.
At least no God who keeps space vehicles aloft with signs and
wonders. There is no interfering God, no God with a pliers and laptop computer
to bail anybody out. In that fragile craft the humans must do it themselves.
Must overcome all the barriers of language and culture and old suspicions and
the everyday fears of being so vulnerable so far from home.
We wish Mir Godspeed. May the wind be at its
back.
National Catholic Reporter, September 5,
1997
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