Space Series #2: How will we love each other in space?

I saw Interstellar 10 years after everyone else, Katy Perry, the fires, the future

Thank you to my amazing editor extraordinaire

Eleanor Stern

for helping me get my thoughts together!

I saw my first Waymo in December while the Franklin Fire tore through Malibu. I thought I was going crazy when I realized there was no driver in the car next to me, just a woman in the passenger seat frowning at her phone. Behind it, a Tesla Cybertruck announced itself, the dull gold of a dollar store trophy. Obstinate ugliness while thousands of small animals were incinerated.

I was thinking about these stupid vehicles and the charred remains of squirrels and impending collapse when I saw Interstellar for the first time in December. My friend called me a car to a late showing at the IMAX theater in Alhambra, and an elderly man drove me from the tippy-top of City Terrace down into the valley. The driver’s obvious frailty made me wince every time he labored to hit the gas.The night smelled like jasmine and smoke, and the cold, hard lights of the city blinked through their own rainbow penumbra. I wondered if maybe a self-driving car would have saved the elderly man an hour of his life, or just stolen his paycheck.

Interstellar made me cry from my belly. The thought that this could be the love–a love necessarily rooted in difference, the very opposite circumstances of fatherhood and daughterhood–that saves everything. The nauseating roundness of the planets, all the twinkling silence brought a familiar feeling to the surface. A feeling of having imbibed all that vacuity, a wonder/dread that feels both cervical in origin and contained in the throat.

Afterwards I felt half-ashamed and half-superior that I personally would not abandon my family to save humanity. The thought of everyone getting obliterated by dust quickly enough was actually kind of soothing, though an asteroid would be a best case scenario. What an equitable turn of events. Besides, I would miss my little planet too much. No flowers, no fruit, no cold water or hot days, no birds. No skin on skin without the layers of a space suit. The frictionless simulacrum of the new society in Interstellar doesn’t interest me.

Later that week at dinner in a neighborhood that would soon be ash, another friend pointed out how blindingly White Interstellar is. And indeed, the New World on the new planet looks like a Ford commercial, like a Christian colonizing mission. It reminded me of that Ray Bradbury story “All Summer In A Day”, about a little girl on Venus who gets locked in a closet by her classmates on the one day they will all see the sun, which only appears for an hour every seven years. Humans will probably live in space, but which humans? To be part of the select few with the resources to escape Earth suggests a certain degree of sociopathy.

What will be the culture of space? Children can be cruel anywhere, but the children in All Summer In A Day are the children of people who could afford to leave. Like in the case of the bellicose British schoolboys of Lord of the Flies, one has to wonder about the universal ugliness of human nature versus the acculturating violence of social domination. Considering the material reality of space travel makes it feel ugly, clunky, Machiavellian. The ultimate vacation for the 0.1%. But at the same time, space is gorgeous, cosmic, lush, and venturing there is the ultimate romance with the unknown. It remains that way when space is considered as a possibility rather than an asset, when it’s looked up at from below.

Back on the East Coast, I walked my dog through the woods behind my house and wondered if the trees were dying. Everything seemed in order, but what did I know about their root systems, the microplastics in the soil? While walking, I listened to Krista Tippet’s “On Being” episode with the then-recently-deceased Nikki Giovanni, wherein Giovanni describes herself as a “space freak.”

Giovanni imagines space as the stage of a more hopeful future, one where Pluto is a planet where “Black kids learn to ski.” On the subject of Black futures in space, Giovanni says, “It goes back to Middle Passage, because if you can survive that journey from west coast of Africa to the east coast of the United States and be sane when you get here…that’s what we haven’t looked at.” In her poem “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We’re Going to Mars)” she imagines Black Americans as experts in space travel, having journeyed through the unthinkable and stayed whole.

At one point, Giovanni surprises Tippet by asking, “Can you imagine sex in space?” How we will remain human, and connected to pleasure? How will we touch in space, drifting away from each other, aging years in minutes?

In January, my two aforementioned friends lost their homes due to severe damage from the wildfire. Those days like hell on earth: the jaundiced sky, the rush of smoke, the smoldering mountains.

A few months after the fires, SpaceX launched the first female mission to space. Four minutes of weightlessness, four hundred photoshoots. I think if I went up there I would also be annoying about it. Katy Perry promoted her album. What a vision of the future: the technology produced through years of devotion and perseverance and ingenuity used as a flying Spotify ad. The legacy of the martyred heliocentrists of the past. Katy Perry returned to Earth jubilantly, orgasmically. She said, “I feel my message that I’m getting is you never know the amount of love that you have inside of you until the day you launch.”

But I think the problem with space is that ideally, you already know about that love. You go there thinking about wine and sex and the legacy of slavery, of colonialism, and Black children learning to ski, and the bloodsoaked voyages that precede your own. You have to be mourning who you can’t take with you. And I wonder if the people who make it up there will do the mourning properly. How will we love each other in space? What will the children learn?

When the vessel landed, Jeff Bezos fell flat on his face while running to greet his fiance Lauren Sanchez. This gave me some hope. At least for now, the most Martian among us are still embarrassed by gravity.