I tell her about Voyager 1 and 2 and the Golden Record. They were like messages in a bottle, I explain, but thrown into outer space instead of the ocean. My daughter is mildly interested. She wants to know what sounds were recorded for the aliens. I find the list and read it to her.
Music of the Spheres
Volcanoes, Earthquake, Thunder
Mud Pots
Wind, Rain, Surf
Crickets, Frogs
Birds, Hyena, Elephant
Whale Song
Chimpanzee
Wild Dog
Footsteps, Heartbeat, Laughter
The First Tools
Tame Dog
Herding Sheep, Birdsong, Blacksmith, Sawing Riveter
Morse Code, A Ship’s Horn
Horse and Cart
Train
Tractor, Bus, Auto
F-111 Flyby, Saturn 5 Liftoff
Kiss, Mother and Child
Life Signs, Pulsar
My husband is hunched over his computer, just as he was when I went in. All day long he has been following the news about an earthquake in another country. Every time the death count is updated, he updates me. I open the window. The air is cold, but it smells sweet. Outside, someone is yelling something about something. Give the people what they want, I think.
A few weeks later, the almost astronaut calls me to tell me that Voyager 2 may be nearing the edge of our galaxy. “Perfect timing,” he says. “We’ll tie it into marketing.”
I tell him I have too much work to do already, but he insists that we move quickly. “I’ll pay you more,” he says. “Much more.” He even hires an intern to fact-check for me.
I have an intern. All of my life now appears to be one happy moment.
It turns out there is a famous love story attached to the Golden Record project. A “cosmic” love story is how I describe it to the intern because who can resist the urge to say silly things about Carl Sagan? If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the Universe. I remember how he stood there in that turtleneck, an oven mitt on his hand.
I fill him in on how the project started in 1976 when NASA asked Sagan to assemble a committee to decide what exactly this celestial mix tape should contain. It took almost two years to decide everything. Carl Sagan and his wife, Linda, collaborated on the project. They even enlisted their six-year-old son to do one of the greetings. Other key members of the team included the astronomer Frank Drake and the writers Ann Druyan and Timothy Ferriss. The engineers constructed the record so that it might survive for a billion years.
The Golden Record included greetings in fifty-four human and one whale language, ninety minutes of music from around the world, and 117 pictures of life on Earth. These pictures were meant to suggest the widest possible range of human experiences. Only two things were off-limits. NASA decreed that no pictures could depict sex and no pictures could depict violence. No sex because NASA was prudish and no violence because images of ruins or bombs exploding might be interpreted by aliens as threatening. Ann Druyan tells what happened next.
In the course of my daunting search for the single most worthy piece of Chinese music, I phoned Carl and left a message at his hotel in Tucson … An hour later the phone rang in my apartment in Manhattan. I picked it up and heard a voice say: “I got back to my room and found a message that said Annie called. And I asked myself, why didn’t you leave me that message ten years ago?”
Bluffing, joking, I responded lightheartedly. “Well, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that, Carl.” And then, more soberly, “Do you mean for keeps?”
“Yes, for keeps,” he said tenderly. “Let’s get married.”
“Yes,” I said, and that moment we felt we knew what it must be like to discover a new law of nature.
So there it is, the famous cosmic love story. But like most love stories there turns out to be more to it. This timeline doesn’t make sense, the intern writes in the margin. Isn’t Sagan already married?
That night, my husband complains that I’m working too much. He grumbles about the overflowing trash and the out-of-season fruit rotting in the fridge. I clean out all the moldy things and empty all the trash cans. I line the garbage bags up by the door before I take them out, hoping he will comment. He gives me a look. The one that means: What do you want? A medal?
The kiss was the trickiest sound to capture, the engineers said. Some of the ones they tried were too loud, others too quiet. In the end, the kiss that landed on the record was one that Timothy Ferriss planted on his fiancée Ann Druyan’s cheek. The intern takes his yellow marker and highlights this for me.
The blip in that cosmic love story then. Ann Druyan was engaged to marry Timothy Ferriss while they were working on the Voyager project with Carl Sagan and his wife, Linda. Then Carl and Ann decided to get married. The news took a while to reach Linda and Timothy. Or so my intern says. But when Ann Druyan tells the story, that part is missing, like a record that skips.
She talks instead about how she went into a laboratory just two days after that phone call. She was hooked up to a computer and began to meditate. All the data from her brain and heart was turned into sound for the Golden Record.
To the best of my abilities I tried to think about the history of ideas and human social organization. I thought about the predicament that our civilization finds itself in and about the violence and poverty that make this planet a hell for so many of its inhabitants. Toward the end I permitted myself a personal statement of what it was like to fall in love.
According to People magazine, Carl and Linda Sagan’s divorce was “acrimonious.”
21
The Yoga People always travel in pairs, their mats under their arms, their hair severely shorn in that new mother way. But what if someone sucker punched them and took their mats away? How long until they’d knuckle under?
Would you like to run the fun fair? Would you like to join the compost committee? Would you like to organize the coat drive? Would you like to teach a puppetry elective?
A student asked Donald Barthelme how he might become a better writer. Barthelme advised him to read through the whole history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics up through the modern-day thinkers. The student wondered how he could possibly do this. “You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping,” Barthelme said. “Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature.” Also art, he amended. Also politics.
There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 52 weeks in a year, and X years in a life. Solve for X.