It’s a trite cliché that artists have to draw what they see, and with twentieth and twenty-first century art it seems to be false. Perhaps with Fauvism an artist might attempt to concentrate on how she might see a particular shade or hue and paint it as that colour throughout, or at least that’s the impression (!) I got. In fact it seems to be nothing like that, but it does force the viewer to see the geometrical components of a scene while retaining one’s emotional relationship therewith, or maybe the artist’s feelings. Cubism, a couple of years later, concentrates on geometry while removing emotion.
Right now I feel that my tour of the Solar System has to some extent placed me in the second category, but only somewhat. I expect, if someone had genuinely visited other worlds, if their experience of Earth on their return would be more emotionally charged. I’m sure they’d never be the same again.
There will be something like poetry. Where it starts is another matter.
In the park near us, there’s a small fountain in a pond. Its drops describe a series of parabolas. These parabolæ radiate from the central showerhed and rise maybe fifty centimetres from the water surface. They remind me, right now, of nothing so much as a volcanic eruption on Io. With its exceedingly tenuous atmosphere and gravity less than a fifth of Earth’s, the fountain of ejecta from Io’s volcanoes resembles the fountain in the park but is cyclopean in extent, being over 150 kilometres high. However, the same laws of physics govern the movement and form of the drops. This was the first alteration in perception I became aware of.
Swerving into herbalism territory, like most Western herbalists my stock-in-trade substantially comprises a series of bottles containing what probably look like thick brown liquids to most people. These are usually ethanol and water solutions containing dissolved active ingredients of the plants in question. I could go into more depth about the more subtle distinctions herbalists perceive in the appearance of these tinctures, but for quite a number of them the residue remaining if some is spilt and the solvents evaporate becomes a tarry, often reddish-brown substance which is often a mixture of tannins and other compounds. Tannins are generally linked rings of organic molecules with hydroxyl and oxygen groups. Bakelite is another example of a substance made of these phenolic rings, and the brown or black appearance of a caster, mains plug or saucepan handle is often due to this. And out there in the depths, or maybe heights, of the outer Solar System are countless worlds covered in tholins, which are in some ways similar to this residue, though not necessarily phenolic. The sticky, reddish-black tincture residue is substantially similar to the same stuff coating the surface of many TNOs.
Another parallel with herbalism occurs when certain worlds are cold enough to have frozen nitrogen on their surfaces, such as Pluto and Triton. This brings tholins into contact with the element, leading to the formation of organic compounds containing nitrogen. These are quite similar to alkaloids. Alkaloids are a group of compounds which each have some of the following characteristics: they all contain nitrogen and have a markèd physiological action, tend to have rings including a nitrogen atom, and originate from plants. There are exceptions to the last two and the function of the alkaloid for the plant in question isn’t clear – they may act as reserves of fixed nitrogen. Alkaloids include caffeine, nicotine, atropine and cocaine. There are research programs to find novel alkaloids in rainforest plants for medical use, a race against time thanks to deforestation. Well, heinous as that may be, it so happens that many outer system worlds are coated in nitrogenous organic compounds, and this is just me but I do wonder if there are many such compounds out there. Maybe there could be heroin mines on Charon. The Universe doesn’t care about that.
The way tholins spread across the surfaces of the likes of moons and asteroids is reminiscent of how mould, lichen or plants colonise a new habitat. They are, as I’ve said before, a fork organic chemistry can take when free from technological influence instead of coming alive. It’s literally true to say that there’s an organic quality to tholins. Alternatively, maybe the way tholins went on Earth involved a freak accident with them coming to life. Consequently, when I look at a road surface, wall, pavement or other stone-like artifact, I see a parallel to the surface of a distant planet, where reddish-brown tar is gradually being deposited, just as moss and lichen gradually creep across these fresh plains. The difference is that in spite of the amazingly gradual encroachment of lichen at about a millimetre a decade, it’s still thousands of times faster than the rate of tholin deposition.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Dungeness. This area of Kent, held constantly in place by shingle lorries shuttling to and fro 24/7, is an example of a rare type of habitat known as a shingle bank whose largest examples on Earth are it and Cape Canaveral. The delicacy of this landscape is such that walking across it will leave footprints visible decades later due to the slow-growing foliose lichen living there. It has to be said that putting one of NASA’s main launchpads there is rather questionable, and much of what I’ve been able to write about in this series is contingent on environmentally questionable launches from that location. Dungeness at least has a lot in common with the lunar surface in that the footprints and human influence there, and doubtless in Cape Canaveral too, are extremely durable. Dungeness has been compared to “the surface of the Moon”, and this could equally well be inverted to comparing the surface of a distant planet to Dungeness. Titan in particular springs to mind.
On the whole, the view from moons, planets and asteroids on the Universe is either obscured or clear. There is a strong tendency for conditions to be close to extreme here. Either the sky is completely clear or completely cloudy. This is not universally so. For instance, on Mars clouds do occur but on the whole the sky is empty of them. Earth is cloudier than Mars but not as cloudy as Venus. This is one situation where I may not be aware of conditions outside the British Isles and over much of the planet the sky is either usually clear or mainly cloudy, but there are even so areas where there are, for example, little fluffy clouds in a blue daytime sky. The clouds on this planet are usually mainly water ice or water vapour, but the volcanoes are usually silicate rocks.
It needn’t be this way. Martian clouds are generally either water ice or dry ice, i.e. carbon dioxide. On the outer planets they’re various, sometimes evil-smelling, substances like ammonium hydrosulphide or hydrogen sulphide. On Titan they’re methane, and form a largely uninterrupted deck of obscurity. One notable thing about all these clouds is that none of them actually constitute a substantial part of the world in question’s atmosphere. Our own atmosphere, for example, is not mainly water vapour, and if it was this planet would be very like Venus and completely uninhabitable with no rivers, lakes, seas or oceans, because steam is a much stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Likewise with the prominent clouds elsewhere in the Universe. Even so, there are circular storms, thunderstorms and plenty of cloud types approximating our own, as well as the same formations. On Mars, Earth and perhaps elsewhere, a peak can push a body of air up past the point where it starts to form clouds, and on its leeward side chains of clouds can develop in similar manners. This is of course not always so. Rain clouds of any kind whose drops actually reach the ground are only found on Titan and Earth in this star system. Something like snow is more common, but is sometimes the atmosphere itself freezing. Hence when you look at the sky, you’re seeing clouds like those on countless billions (long scale) of worlds throughout the cosmos.
These processes and structures can be composed of less expected materials in other star systems. A particularly easy kind of planet to detect by the method of looking for light being dimmed by a large body passing frequently between us and the star is the “Hot Jupiter”. These are, as the name suggests, somewhat Jupiter-like planets, but differ from our own largest planet in that they orbit their primaries in a couple of days and are far hotter at their cloudtops than any planet’s surface in our own system. Consequently, although they too have clouds “like” ours, they’re actually made of substances like droplets of molten titanium or quartz, or perhaps crystals of the same. Meanwhile, circling the Sun and doubtless innumerable other stars further out than Earth, the converse situation exists, with volcanoes made substantially of water ice and erupting water instead of silicate, while the clouds are made of ice or water vapour instead. This is as extreme compared to a world like Enceladus, Titan or Pluto as the silicate clouds are to us.
Taking the comparison a bit more deeply, the water that erupts out of volcanoes in the outer system emerges from a mantle of flowing slush analogous in the same way to our own rocky mantle, which does flow but is not really fluid as we understand the term as it’s extremely viscuous, but just as far out moons hide internal water oceans beneath a superficial veneer of ice, though sometimes a very thick crust thereof, so does our home world secrete a deep ocean of rock. It’s easy for us to imagine that somewhere like Europa or Enceladus could be concealing a vast reservoir of sea water replete with its own version of fish because we are ourselves familiar with that from our own seas. Extending that to our own mantle, who are we to say that there are no “fish”, perhaps silicon-based, hundreds of kilometres beneath our feet? After all, the ocean of rock is hundreds of times larger than the ocean of water on our home world. This can only be speculation, at least right now, and it’s hard to imagine how it could become anything else. Maybe there is an extremely hot Earth-sized planet whose lava oceans do contain life forms, or maybe not, but we’re looking for “life as we know it” when the one thing we really do know about life elsewhere is that we know nothing of it, or even of its existence.
And perhaps we will never know. Clearly nothing we’re aware of now could rule out the presence of other life off Earth, because we have an example of life here, but although there are numerous reasons we could project onto the sky that might make it implausible, it’s entirely possible that we’ll simply never know if we’re alone in the Universe, and that might apply even if we embarked on an exploration of it. Even if our entire Galaxy proved to be lifeless apart from us, there might be no particular reason for it other than luck, and another galaxy, such as Andromeda, could have life, and if not that a different galaxy so many gigaparsecs from us that we’ll never know it exists. Right now there doesn’t seem to be any kind of mathematical or scientific argument which would be able to give us an answer to this question. It’s rather like the existence of God. You can be “theist”, believing that there is life elsewhere. You can be “atheist”, observing the Universe and the physical laws which decide what can be in it and deciding that life is just a fantastically improbable freak accident, thus committing yourself to the probability that terrestrial life is all there is. Or, you can be agnostic, and simply withhold an opinion on the matter, while holding out for the possibility that there is or is not on a kind of faith-like basis. It’s even possible that we will never know if there’s life within our own planet.
Getting back to precipitation, there is a line from the TV series ‘Wonder Woman’ which seemed highly dubious when I first heard it. A man from the future visits the late 1970s and remarks to her that there are planets made of diamond where a stick of wood would be a previous commodity. At the time I suppose I assumed that other planets were more like our own than they in fact are, because remarkably for such a soft and unscientific franchise as ‘Wonder Woman’, with the likes of disappearing handbags and invisible aircraft, this is in fact so, and you don’t even need to look outside our own star system to find such planets. Both our ice giants are probably so rich in diamonds that they’re as common as icebergs in the Arctic or hailstones on a spring day, and wood would naturally be unheard of. Wood is also associated with life of course, and we have no idea how specific it is to Earth. If it is, it’s like blue john, which only occurs in one place in our Solar System and probably for many light years further than that, in the Derbyshire Peak District.
Water has influenced the appearance of the Peak District in a couple of significant ways which give the area its distinctive character. One is through the erosion of potholes and other caverns and another is the various effects of glaciers, such as causing lakes to form by blocking rivers and the presence of isolated boulders a long way from their original locations. It isn’t clear what actually happened there in that respect during recent ice ages, but it seems that ice-related erosion and weathering relatively close to melting point where ice expands as its temperature falls is likely to be characteristic of Earth as an ongoing process rather than anywhere else in the system, although during certain relatively short-lived catastrophes this does seem to become significant. The difference here is that in many places the temperature has fluctuated around the range where this takes place, making it a dynamic and repetitive process.
Looking up, we may see Cynthia. I’ve been rather startled to find recently that for some reason flat Earthers perceive her as luminous! She looks like nothing so much as a ball of grey rock to me. A varied and beautiful one to be sure, but not luminous. This impression, though, is not confined to our satellite. The other planets in the system do in fact look like bright stars to the naked eye. Even so, there are noctilucent clouds, which are so high in our atmosphere that they reflect sunlight considerably later or earlier than sunset or sunrise. It’s simply that unexpectedly daylit items in the night look so bright by contrast that they’re practically luminous, but not literally so. It illustrates how much the human eye can adjust to light and darkness that Cynthia can appear to shine. Yes, there is moonlight. Also, the light from the white door in our bedroom reflects onto the blue-painted wall, almost bringing us back to Fauvism.
When Sarada became aware that I tended to get bogged down in details, she recommended a book to me which I very much enjoyed: ‘The Mezzanine’, by Nicholson Baker. Baker’s book, which can hardly be described as a novel, focusses on the minutiæ of the quotidian in a manner possibly reminiscent of «A la recherche du temps perdu». Whereas I find the latter unhealthily self-absorbed (though I haven’t read it), the former caught my attention and was easy to relate to. It has no real plot and has been described as having a “fierce attention to detail”. As a young adult, I used to write long descriptions which I couldn’t turn into stories. Fortunately, Baker has succeeded in getting a work using a similar approach published. Most of our experience, mine at least, consists of such thoughts and unfinished mental doodles. One difference is that ‘Mezzanine’ finishes these. The approach taken is somewhat reminiscent of a minor poetic movement of the late twentieth century called “Martian Poetry”.
Martian Poetry is a small and fairly transient subgenre of poetry whose most famous piece is Craig Raine’s ‘A Martian Sends A Postcard Home’. This can be found here. It can take a while to puzzle out, but refers to such things as books, telephones and sleeping together. It’s a series of riddles, but more than that. Published in 1979, it uses unusual metaphors to make everyday objects and experiences fresh and unusual. It’s a little like the real-life ‘Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat’ and it raises the question in my mind of who the narrator is. When I wrote the previous post, I realised I’d created a problem. I had no idea who the aliens describing Earth were and I had to come up with a semi-feasible model of their own world, anatomy and physiology before I could begin to portray our home planet. In particular, I had the alternatives of making their comfort temperature hotter or colder than ours, and chose colder because more of our own star system, and in fact the whole Universe, is colder than Earth’s surface rather than hotter. Once I’d done that, I had something I could relate to and a perspective from which to conceive of Earth as others see it. Craig Raine, unsurprisingly, doesn’t do that. We can, however, glean something about the narrator because of the metaphors used, which can be contradictory. For instance, he uses the word “caxtons” to describe books, which he sees as avian, multiwinged creatures. This is a spiky-sounding word with its C and X, and calls to mind a rustly, fluttering thing which one might imagine capable of flight, and certainly it confers that capacity to its reader’s mind, but calling it after the fifteenth century printer anchors it in human life, and even in England. Nor does Craine play fair with the reader when he later describes mist as making the world “bookish”. The problem Craine sets himself is that of not being able to make the narrator Martian enough, because that would seem to make the poem less comprehensible.
I tried fairly hard to find another example of a Martian poet, but all I could uncover was Christopher Reid’s ‘The Song Of Lunch’, and even then I was only able to see the Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman TV movie version. It has a somewhat similar quality but as the action, such as it is, proceeds, it injects elements of plot and tension into the story and is much more conventional. It can currently be viewed here.
What makes these different from my own perspective of seeing a fountain in the park and thinking of the plume on Io’s Tvashtar Patera is specificity. I’m looking at the world in a kind of Cartesian way. I see the parabolas described by the water and consider the similarity, which does make me view them afresh, but there are only specific and sparse details and the comparison is with a specific alien environment. This cognitive estrangement can, however, be broadened and make the whole world surreal. I can remember one guy describing the experience of going swimming as stripping naked, putting on a pair of turquoise pants and immersing himself in a bluish liquid in a large blue room with various other similarly-attired people, and this is indeed surreal, and is more general than the constrained and sporadic examples I’ve mentioned above.
Neurodiversity has sometimes been described as being on the wrong planet, and there’s a website, wrongplanet.net, with this name. But which planet is wrong? Maybe it’s this one. “We” who are neurodiverse might be on a planet which, as a whole, treats us badly and makes assumptions which the rest of us will never be able to guess. This planet could be morally wrong. However, that’s unfair. In fact it isn’t the planet which treats neurodiversity so much as Homo sapiens. And the planet we come from isn’t wrong either. It’s actually the same planet: a conjoined twin Earth with as much right to life as Neurotypical Earth.
That brings us to the Véronique Sanson «chanson» quoted above. The line from Kiki Dee’s English version of the song has always puzzled me – “I feel the rain fall on another planet”. It comes across as a complete non sequitur. Sarada says I’m overthinking it. The original makes more sense: I have undergone such a life-changing experience that I am sensitive to the whole Universe. Now I have a grandchild (and a teenage grand-niece as of the other day, incidentally, which makes me feel really old), and I’m not comparing the experience of considering the Solar System’s other worlds in their own right to losing one’s virginity, but yes I am. I haven’t undertaken a project as grand as the so-called “Grand Tour” because all I’ve done is sit in the living room and typed stuff about the likes of Enceladus, but even that relatively mild enterprise has changed the way I see the world, and we all know about the Overview Effect, so who knows what would await us out there culturally or psychologically if any of our species crossed the lunar orbit?
A Box Of Chocolates 