Rocket Men

In retrospect, the daring, wasteful, silly moonshot of the mid-twentieth century becomes stranger and stranger. It did not result in many major innovations, and cost around $35 billions. It protected some of the most murderous German slave masters and enemies of humanity of the 1940s, and was funded and conceived out of a military effort to lob bombs in a faster way. 'I dream of the Stars' Wernher Von Braun wrote of himself...'but sometimes you hit London', his NASA colleagues added.

And yet, and yet..it has a romance about it. The dreams of travel and development around the solar system of the twentieth century were almost realised before economic disenchantment and spending on preparation for war took over again.

I've been reading Gerard DeGroot's Dark Side of the Moon, which is a scales-from-the-eyes history of the moon programme which I prefer to Andrew Smith's Moondust. The latter is different in degree, but not kind.

DeGroot's book is full of gems from page one. How many people know that the first rocket flight, for instance, took place in 1623? There are good, clear accounts of the flight of Lagari Hasan Celebi, who, for the edification of Sultan Murad IV on the occasion of his daughter's birth, packed a seven-winged rocket with 25 kilogrammes of gunpowder, got into a metal cage on top, and lit it. He praised the Prophet Jesus, as he put it, before the escapade, and came down on parachutes.

Da Vinci, of course, only dreamed of doing that sort of thing and we celebrate him. I thought vaguely of him a few weeks ago when Arthur C Clarke died. Clarke is widely lauded as the inventor of satellites, but really, he wrote a scientific paper on it. Actually, American religious Utopians in 1869 associated with Edward Everett Hale imagined a space station, which they termed a 'brick moon'. Ulysses Grant, whom I admire for emotional reasons of my own, called the idea, with his characteristic humour, 'the biggest thing since Creation, apart from Bourbon Whisky and the Havana cigar'. Hale's brother gave the longer, and at the time more celebrated, speech at Gettysburg.

Hale, supergun style, wanted to roll his brick moon down a mountain and then accelerate it with gigantic flywheels, hence the picture at the top of this post. That's not the most romantic image of flight though. The honour, I think, goes to Cyrano de Bergerac, who would be lifted by evaporating dew.

The fanciful things people will believe. It's possibly the Celt in me, but I'd have the wild swans of Francis Godwin, even if I was thinking of Leda, over the shabbiness of a silly post-Calvinist orgone box any day of the week.

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By his dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
How can anybody, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins, engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.

Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Ah Yeats. That's what Monkey gland injections will do for you. It's not lost on me, given that I've just quoted that from memory, that my blog references on google now encompass poultry-bothering.

I was also very struck by how keen Charles Lindbergh was on Goddard's idea of a space rocket. A certain sort of American man always has been, and it's no wonder that the man Norman Mailer identified as a part-clone of Lindbergh--JFK--was so keen on rockets. DeGroot doesn't mention it, but the conspiracists of nineteenth century America used to imagine airships under secret abolitionist race-mixing control flying out to the desert.

I vividly remember reading a tale of Henry Wilson, an abolitionist from Massachussetts, and Grant's second Vice-President after the amazing election of 1872, among other things. He was alleged to have a secret airship, (the link is to tales of sightings after he was dead that built in the memory of his name) and I liked him all the more for it. Then again, you don't need Charles Bartlett around to tell you what strange things reconstructive memory will do at this time of night to your head.

One funny Nixon story is attached to Henry Wilson. President Nixon was a Woodrow Wilson fan, and asked for Wilson's desk, which is why he alway's pictured at Henry's. No one thought to check, or later, to inform him. No luck with people with that name, which is why he was always muttering it, obviously....

What I'm thinking of doing is establishing a counter factual blog and then exploring all these turns not taken--you know, the Scottish Empire that succeeded in 1700, the Stuarts who didn't run away, the bullet that Kennedy dodged and FDR didn't and so on. It's great fun, and has a tendency to shake one out of complacency about the course of some things, but the immutability of others. Would we always have wasted every single resource? Need things have been the way they were?

Sophia McDougall, whom I've mentioned before, explored this idea with a Rome that never fell in Romanitas. I liked that book a lot, though haven't had time to get through the sequel.

In a slightly similar vein, has anyone read through Alan Moore's Extraordinary Gentlemen series of comics? They're much better than contemporary Marvel or DC, and deserve far more plaudits than, say, Joe Sacco's Palestine or Art Spiegelman's moving but depressing Maus. There's a real snobbery about what has to call itself 'graphic writing'--comics--to get noticed, and an inverted snobbery that holds that it has to be depressing to be serious.

It's much akin to the curious British literary establishment view that science fiction is silly but silly magic realism, especially if childish or anti religious, is excellent. Try reading the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, or Middlesex, or Baudolino, and then categorize them before you tell me that again.

Nonsense. Enjoy yourself, that's what I think, especially since I have been immersed in law books profitably but exhaustively all day. Law is a demanding and enticing mistress, practical enough to be fun and potentially mad enough not to mess about, and really very magnificent and energetic and beautiful. And blindfolded, which means I'm in with a chance!

But I do need a break sometimes, and the Abelard and Heloise love story I had stored up isn't quite doing it, especially with the awful trauma of his castration by her sneaky thug relatives. So, counterfactuals, moon tales, and comics it is.

Ah well, duty calls me back. Forgive the personal blog, I'm back off to wander the by-ways of the work I have piled up around me.