Space, Awe, Diary Comics
I lived in Huntsville, Alabama for my elementary school years, which meant childhood field trips were either a) deep in fields picking cotton on plantations and cranking cotton gins, or b) heading down the highway past the botanical gardens to NASA. The US Space & Rocket Center had rockets, shuttles, Gemini simulators, lunar rovers, the actual Apollo 16 capsule, and a giant tank of water where you could see people in astronaut suits walking along the bottom. I learned just now, looking up details to corroborate my memory, that this is a ticketed experience like Space Camp (neither of which my family could afford even if I’d been bold enough to ask to go), but in my child’s mind I was watching actual astronauts practicing in their suits. Spiders that had been in space were right there, behind glass! Astronaut ice cream! I loved everything about it.
There were a few years in late elementary school where I wanted to be a cosmologist. I traded my dragon posters and maps of Middle-earth for posters of the Pillars of Creation and the Hourglass Nebula, but this interest in space was more poetic than scientific. I read a lot, learned as much as my attention could make stick, but eventually my eyes would drift off the page. I was mostly interested in sitting with the feelings of awe that the books and pictures inspired; I loved feeling the scale of my life get so small that it didn’t matter. Our home was full of love but it was also often very hard, but what did that loneliness or fear matter if we are just a tiny spec floating in space? What would it feel like to be that far from everything I have ever known? Would it be cold? What if it were soft?
I have never been a person of faith but, as Tom says, I hear the song. He is the same way (his PhD is in sociology of religion), which is a deep part of our connection—we are both unquestioningly secular, and also easily moved by the beauty of life, by calls to service, by the power of ritual, by quietly seeking big questions of meaning. Looking at those unimaginably far and vast dust clouds plucked the same string as singing my mom’s old-time Texas hymns at bedtime. Ye who are weary, come home. Look at the vastness.
All of this is to say: this has been a big week for my little heart! Did you SEE the gravitational lensing in that first James Webb Space Telescope picture of galaxy clusters? When I say I wept I am not exaggerating for dramatic effect. There was snot. I am again 9 years old, awkward in my body and full of wonder.
Other Things & Recommendations:
This twitter thread was helpful for thinking through the ways that these seemingly objective images of space are co-created by culture, priming us to have feelings of awe, by how colors are selected to represent different kinds of data & how the images are selected/composed/framed.
Speaking of space, I am about halfway through the first season of “For All Mankind” and I feel ambivalent so far but also I want to watch all of it right now? It’s an alternative history, telling a story if the USSR had landed on the moon first, prompting a re-energized and ongoing space race. There are immediate leaps in gender parity (if not equal access to power) because the second cosmonaut on the moon was a woman. The story is melodramatic and sometimes slow, and the women and few people of color feel like they were written by white men to Make A Statement About Gender Or Race, but also goddamnit if I’m not sucked in! An astronaut goes abseiling into the perpetual darkness of the Shackleton Crater! ACK!
(Speaking of Shackleton, Endurance by Alfred Lansing is one of my favorite summer re-reads, accounting Ernest Shackleton and crew’s remarkable survival of a failed attempt to reach the South Pole. I’ve read it maybe 5 times? Make some popcorn, it’s wild.)
Also, have you read Tracy K. Smith’s collection of poetry Life On Mars? This is a very cold take, but it’s great—it won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize, and it’s a beautiful, very approachable collection even if you aren’t usually a reader of poetry. Many of the poems are about grief and the loss of the Smith’s father, an engineer who worked on the Hubble Telescope. Her poem “My God, It’s Full of Stars” gets posted on poetry twitter/instagram a lot so you might have stumbled upon it, but the whole collection is beautiful, insightful, and deeply moving.
Writing, writing the new book continues slowly. (Maybe because I’m on twitter crying about galaxies? Shhh.) I’m beginning to question my “write the full script first” strategy. Chunks of the second act still need to be mapped out in more detail, but I know how much of my thinking happens on the page. If you’re reading this and you’ve made a long form comic, did you write the full script first? I feel perpetually out of my depth, and also committed to this project and I want to do it justice. I think it’s really good, which is intimidating.
Summer still has its claws in me and I am loving every second of it. Summer 2022 is about friend connections & sensory pleasures & being alive! I feel like I’m making up for lost time, drinking water after years of dehydration. It’s not just full-family-vaccine-access liberation, it’s also having my first summer in SEVEN YEARS where I am neither pregnant nor navigating baby nap schedules. (3 kids? Absolutely delightful. 3 rounds of back-to-back pregnancy/postpartum recovery/baby years? Punishing.) Covid is still haunting us and I’m always aware of its specter, but adventures in nature and patio lunches are easy for now and delightful. Let’s do it while we can! My consecutive summer road trips begin next week, so this might be my last letter until August. Be gentle to yourselves!
Diary Comics
Xoxox m