Remembrances of Things Future

Proust lay in his cork-lined room and shuttled his mind back through the tapestry of life spent, gone and never to be touched again.

Some few of us writers walk out at Cape Kennedy amidst blueprints of 70-story-tall gantries yet to be built and remember the future as best we can.

Lucky Proust. With the past safely over, he could indifferently sprawl abed and puzzle its bits together.

But our future rushes upon us. It panics us to see it loom, threatening us with fire across the sky. To read the symbols it writes on space with some prescience is our everlasting, frightening and exhilarating job.

So let us stand on the Cape together and watch those new star constellations that will not hold still, the rockets of earthmen writing fresh Columbian history upon tideless seas.

And watching, consider that our time is the time of the three searches.

The search for national purpose.

The search for peace

The search for a new image of God.

We ask ourselves what we are and do not know.

We wish for peace and it darts ahead, eluding us in a confused chase.

Our churches feel hollowness in their bones. Their naves echo to an emptiness of people. The pews gather a filtering down of dust.

It is indeed our year of dis-ease. Put mildly, we are troubled.

The years between now and the end of the century seem long. We wonder if space can somehow give them meaning.

I believe that space will give us new purpose, destroy war and reshape God.

Each of the three searches could be a book. Each cannot be considered separate from the others. For what is national purpose relates to war and peace which in turn relates or disrelates us to our Creator.

But at the outset let us consider each in turn and fuse them, finally, in our summation.

First let us realize that we stand on the verge of a billion-year period of new history. Our greatest age yet lies ahead. We will come from it transmuted, transformed, forever different than we are at this moment and this hour.

It is hard, therefore, to see the permutations of possible mankind. Walking along the shore of space we have as yet to pick up the shards and nerve endings of our new selves. We have only begun to test the nightmares and the torments which will be grander and more terrifying than any others in memory. Still ahead lie the wonders that will bloom for us in the gardens of space and reaffirm our excitements about life and living itself.

Nowhere is the prospect more exciting and revivifying than in the unceasing pursuit of God Himself.

That pursuit must end in our time.

Man must be put back at the center of the universe, where he once began, and from which he fell away at the beginnings of knowledge, and to which he must return with the new knowledges of space at hand.

We cannot put him at the center of things by traveling reversewise in time or thought, no. But we can put him back where he belongs with the greatest step in thinking we (continued on page 102) Remembrances(continued from page 99) can gift ourselves with. And the gift is this:

Light is good. Dark is evil. Life is good. Death is evil. Man, representing this good of light and life, moves against death and universal darkness.

The chemical universe is dead and uncaring.

Only man knows, only man cares.

The universe is the dead God whose limbs, blindly colliding, light beam with mineral flesh, exploded forth awareness and started this blind struggle for survival a billion years ago.

It follows then that the living God is not out there. He is here. God did not create us. The blind rotation of dead Creator flint, in bombardment of radiation, in downfall of strange rain, seeded earth and from that birthed a living God child-man who lurked in seas and shrank in caves, wild and insanely afraid of a universe he must someday test and own.

Man, living too close to himself, could not see that he was the Godhead, that he was the Lord and himself Christ, and all the other glorious and glorified names of saints and leaders under whatever name, in whatever age, who filled the skies with fire and the souls with holy dread.

But now very late in the scroll of earth, phoenix man, who lives by burning, a true furnace of energy, stoking himself with chemistries, must stand as God.

Not represent Him, not pretend to be Him, not deny Him, but simply, nobly, and frighteningly be Him.

This is what space means. Here lies the greatest challenge to our thinking and doing since before the pyramids lay uncut in the numb and patient hills below Jerusalem.

I speak of no errant usurpation from the Deity. I speak of no paranoiac illusion of mythology which would supremacize man to the detriment of the Supreme Being. I seek only to meld the two. I seek to fuse them in religious fervor until they cleave, entwine, are bound so feverish tight no light can be seen between them: they are the light.

For it is not enough, is it, to have a dead God, a blind universe unknowing and uncaring and unseeking? To what effect a billion billion stars? What purpose nebulae and comets that pass like pale brides trailing their ghastly veils on their way to cosmic weddings, if all goes unseen?

A universe without a living flame of people warming themselves and passing on the fiery seed is indeed absurd and unthinkable.

It falls to us, then, in our sublime frailty and ignorance, to assume this mantle which we have pushed away or shrugged off as too burdensome, century following upon century.

But why put off what can be glorious?

If we are, finally and irrevocably and responsibly, God Himself incarnate, is this not exciting, is this not terrifying, and does it not fill one with a paradox of awful and yet humbling prides?

For is it not worth considering that the flesh of man contains the very soul of God, the exquisite ghost machinery, inexplicable, forever mysterious, which unifies, animates and proceeds man forth on his quest for himself, or rather Himself?

Consider for a moment, then, man as God.

God fleshing Himself in sentience.

God building Himself an eye with which to view His dumb and bright-waiting universe of stars.

God building hands whereby to touch yet untouched mute textures of universal dark and light.

God making ears with which to summon in the sounds of brute miracle grinding against miracle.

God in need of a tongue with which to taste the wine of this world, and to speak of that wild taste to His multitudinous Self, His three billion cells, weighted with gravity, but elated at the sound of His words spoken out in the long night of history.

God inhaling through the nostrils of man to smell the sweet wind of life transcendent among so much death.

God is not out there. He is not an anthropomorphic extension of our desire to know and believe in the midst of tyrant nightmares.

God is here.

If He sees He sees only through us. If He hears He hears with our ears. His hand stretches out only as we stretch forth our hand, His fingers touch only where we touch.

Without us God would be dead another billion years or forever.

This is no blasphemous observation, surely.

It is a triumphant, a joyous, a saving, an invigorating discovery, or rediscovery, as you wish.

And God does not intend to risk His sentience, His awareness. His chance for eternity, by allowing Himself to remain upon one lonely planet earth.

He skins Himself now in metals, propels Himself with fires, and prepares to journey across space.

We see man playing with his toy rockets, but with double vision, must look again and again, and see God as man lifted in those rockets to survive forever.

Until the religions of the world comprehend this, reassess this, know this and preach this, they will continue hollow, and their followers fall away or at least wander within the churches wondering why they, too, feel hollow.

We are good and the universe is evil.

We are good because we are alive.

It is evil because it is dead.

We are good because we care.

It is evil because it does not care.

We cannot help but compare the living God of ourselves to the dead God of the universe.

Yet there is a darkness in us that makes us, at times, tired and in torment, not want to be good, not want to care, not want to live.

This we must fight with all the will and power in us, all the light and the warmth.

Which leads us to our second search, the search away from war toward peace.

Since men started parting themselves off from the beasts and wished for the name of man, which we have yet to earn, man has suffered as much from himself as from his environment.

Yet we go on testing our tribal muscles, yodeling war cries of our manhood, riding the self-made machine-avalanche of destruction down the mountain to bury ourselves.

What hope does space offer us here?

Well, war exists for more reasons than can be run through a computer in our lifetime. But basically we guess it stays with us because it excites men, tests their virility, exercises their vanity, stimulates their imaginations; because of nation states, power inequalities, the natural aggrandizements built into the nervous systems of men, mental illness ... finish out the list yourself.

Certainly war exists because the enemy is unknown to us. Known quantities are seldom frightening. Mystery panics us. The more mysterious Russia, the more panicked we. Thus it often happens both countries neglect to pass on information about each other, so as not to lessen the mystery. So the combination of power and unknowingness runs the world amuck.

What substitute can we find for war? We have searched since Cain slew Abel for some final channeling of our violence into creativity, for some peace as powerful, as inebriating, as soul-satisfying at times, as war.

Is space at long last our peaceful substitute for Armageddon?

I think it is.

Let us, in this century, find a proper enemy.

Let us find one worth attacking, doing battle with, worth destroying.

The proper enemy of mankind is not mankind.

His proper enemy is the vastness of space, the lifelessness of the universe, the unseeing void, the great graveyard of beyond: infinity all blind, raw, dumb and uncaring.

This brute mineral and light-year beast must be subdued.

Would man be excited all over again?

Space challenges him with excitements. (concluded on page 191)Remembrances (continued from page 102) Does he wish to be tested for strength and courage? Space will test and grow him hard and pull him tall. Does he doubt his virility? He need doubt no more: space will see to that. Does he wish to be destroyed in a just cause? Space is that cause, which will annihilate many men so that the race itself can survive.

Here indeed is an enemy greater, more unknown, more terrible, than ever encountered in the lists of old battles. Here indeed is the evil giant waiting on the immense beanstalk that must be climbed.

For our enemy is everywhere. He is all of the deeps that know no warmth. He is the great winter of time that would snow us to sleep forever. All that has never lived, all that has never loved, confronts us.

So the great war, the best war, the one worth declaring and fighting, still lies ahead. We gird ourselves in rocket armors to struggle with idiot cold and the untaught stars which must learn our ways.

So even as our priests and parsons look to the sky, so must our makers and implementers of war.

Where now Pope and military general and political planner of national purpose meet on common ground, or rather star-filled, tenuous, but common air.

We have saved national purpose until last, as must be obvious, because it must begin to echo more and more strongly this new image of God and the peaceful militarism similarly informed and dedicated to the preservation of the Godhead by doing rightful combat in space against the very essence of annihilation itself. We are the Host, which the military must protect in rockets, and which the religions of the world must help carry upward away from our seedbed earth.

So the cycle begins.

What is now national purpose becomes international, what was international becomes planetary, and what was planetary becomes interplanetary, and finally, at the end of the long corridor of eternity, interstellar.

It is a long way for small frail man to look, to try to make out, to comprehend. But the vague fumbling rare strange starts at comprehension must be made in our time, here, now, this day. We are privileged to be among the few who first make metal that will nail together the shoes that will tread us across the new wilderness of stars.

True, we have not as yet solved all our problems of race, color, overpopulation, disease, starvation and strife upon this earth. These must be tended to. These will be solved. But solved, again, to what purpose? Now is not too early to pose such questions and begin the multitudinous answerings.

The human race should be our national purpose, ourselves discovered to be God our new religion, and the elimination of war through dedication to space our first order of the day to insure the race and thus insure God.

These labels will one day be meaningless. They are all, in sum, one thing.

If reaching for immortality is our purpose, if we are God wishing to live forever on out through and past the coalsack nebulae, then our national purpose is indeed international and beyond. We plan for the one single race of men upon this world. We plan for Him.

God stirs in His long sleep. We have found Him wakening in ourselves. He has found us stirring in the mineral deaths. We have found each other. We are one.

Now, looking to the sky, our intelligence must warn us how to travel in radioactive emptiness. Our passion must inform us with desire to keep us in ceaseless motion. For if we fail, pause, stop, we are no better than alkaline dusts and mindless seas of brine that move only by the gravitational pull of dead moons.

We are more than water, we are more than earth, we are more than sun. We are God giving Himself a reason for being.

So shape our next one hundred American years.

So shape the thousand years ahead for man on earth. So shape ten thousand years of men gone strange in space. So shape ten million years, on to a billion.

God says He wishes this.

We hear.

And, one flesh go to make it so.