Hell Is Other Planets
Oct. 9th, 2024 06:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
heya_baruI recently finished the first book in Jerzy Zulawski's The Lunar Trilogy (1905), and while I'm still digesting it, I'm struck by how much of the book's ideas changed in the adaption to the screen in On The Silver Globe (1977).
The film is first and foremost a work of anti-enlightenment skepticism: if you drop a group of astronauts on a planet, with all their knowledge of human history and philosophy, their children will still re-invent monarchies, patriarchy, imperialism, and martyrdom from first principles. There is no progress, there is only the human spirit, and its infinite capacity for chaos. The contrast between the astronauts' advanced technology, and the savagery of the civilization they inadvertently create, reminds me of a quote from another enlightenment skeptic, John Gray:
Technical progress leaves only one problem unsolved: the frailty of human nature. Unfortunately that problem is insoluble.
The book, although equally cynical, draws its grim tone from a new kind of original sin: the act of being an astronaut. Towards the end of the book, the only surviving astronaut on the moon, Jan, begs god for forgiveness:
As soon as I became a man, I was possessed by the desire to soar in space, as if being on Earth was not the same as being also in the vastness of the universe and hovering over the abyss. Then I took the first opportunity and with a light heart abandoned my nurturing mother for the Moon's silver face, so seductive for lunatics. Lord, I was sinful, and I am unhappy...
From his future grave on the Moon, he prays not only to god, but to Earth itself:
Here, abandoned, and lonely, I am praying to you. I whom you once knew as a child, and who has grown old now away from your womb: Earth! Forgive me that I left you because of my madness and appetite for knowledge that you yourself planted in me. It led me here to this silver faced but dead globe which once upon a time a time you kicked out to light your nights and sway your seas!
Jan's misery is not without reason. All is friends are dead, the moon is inhabited by murderous bird-like creatures, and the new generation of native Lunar inhabitants he fathered are homunculi, grim approximations of people, speaking a devolved and childish tongue, who even Jan describes as anthropomorphic and pseudo-people. Jan fears that they retain only the shadowy umbra of the human spirit:
Leaving these people, I could clearly see which direction their development would go. A lot of the human spirit was lost on the way to the Moon, but human evil came here with us from Earth!
Jan also makes it clear that this backward step for the human spirit can be blamed on the moon itself, and by extension, him:
We've really perverted the the majesty of the human race, by bringing it here in ourselves and allowing it to reproduce on this globe, never intended for such a purpose.
Jerzy Zulawski looks up at the sky and sees only damnation, a new apple for us to pluck from the abyss and taste at the behest of the devil. What a jarring contrast to how we view space today—the final frontier, a blank map waiting for us to draw in its borders. The amount of media and literature that romanticizes our steps into space is legion, and cannot even be listed. To Jerzy, it is Earth that makes us human, and to abandon it is to abandon our mortal Eden. It's tempting to view such a perspective as quaint and backwards, but considering how pictures of Elon Musk in his embarrassing "OCCUPY MARS" shirt have been shitting up my social media feed for days, I can't help but wonder if Jerzy was onto something. Perhaps it requires a certain amount of spiritual bankruptcy to turn one's back on on the vibrancy and fecundity of Earth, so that one may grasp at the borders of a sepulchral frontier.
At the same time, I would be remiss if I did not mention the possibility for other interpretations of Jerzy's work. He wrote the The Lunar Trilogy in the early 1900s, less than a generation after the end of the California Genocide, and while the Mexican-American wars were still burning hot. Although these events are not directly mentioned, he compares the broken children of the moon to "people somewhere int he depths of Africa or at the southern border of the USA." Awareness of the California Genocide, or the Indian Wars, would not be unprecedented for a European intellectual of the period; Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi would even devote an entire poem, The Hymn Of The Patriarchs, to the genocide in 1822: These ravished people / trained to unprecedented pain, unknown desires! Their fleeting happiness stripped naked / and driven out beyond the sunset bar!"
It's perhaps a leap, but a small part of me thinks that Jerzy, with a typically racist 19th century view of the world, saw the events happening in the New World and felt that his fellow Europeans had stripped themselves of their humanity as they traveled across the Atlantic to a land forsaken by god.
Regardless of what Jerzy thought, I can't help but find something resonant in the book. In times as vicious and frightening as these, when both the Earth and society seem to be stumbling towards perdition, it is worth a reminder that our humanity remains here with us, in our homes, our forests, our graves, and our ruins.
The film is first and foremost a work of anti-enlightenment skepticism: if you drop a group of astronauts on a planet, with all their knowledge of human history and philosophy, their children will still re-invent monarchies, patriarchy, imperialism, and martyrdom from first principles. There is no progress, there is only the human spirit, and its infinite capacity for chaos. The contrast between the astronauts' advanced technology, and the savagery of the civilization they inadvertently create, reminds me of a quote from another enlightenment skeptic, John Gray:
Technical progress leaves only one problem unsolved: the frailty of human nature. Unfortunately that problem is insoluble.
The book, although equally cynical, draws its grim tone from a new kind of original sin: the act of being an astronaut. Towards the end of the book, the only surviving astronaut on the moon, Jan, begs god for forgiveness:
As soon as I became a man, I was possessed by the desire to soar in space, as if being on Earth was not the same as being also in the vastness of the universe and hovering over the abyss. Then I took the first opportunity and with a light heart abandoned my nurturing mother for the Moon's silver face, so seductive for lunatics. Lord, I was sinful, and I am unhappy...
From his future grave on the Moon, he prays not only to god, but to Earth itself:
Here, abandoned, and lonely, I am praying to you. I whom you once knew as a child, and who has grown old now away from your womb: Earth! Forgive me that I left you because of my madness and appetite for knowledge that you yourself planted in me. It led me here to this silver faced but dead globe which once upon a time a time you kicked out to light your nights and sway your seas!
Jan's misery is not without reason. All is friends are dead, the moon is inhabited by murderous bird-like creatures, and the new generation of native Lunar inhabitants he fathered are homunculi, grim approximations of people, speaking a devolved and childish tongue, who even Jan describes as anthropomorphic and pseudo-people. Jan fears that they retain only the shadowy umbra of the human spirit:
Leaving these people, I could clearly see which direction their development would go. A lot of the human spirit was lost on the way to the Moon, but human evil came here with us from Earth!
Jan also makes it clear that this backward step for the human spirit can be blamed on the moon itself, and by extension, him:
We've really perverted the the majesty of the human race, by bringing it here in ourselves and allowing it to reproduce on this globe, never intended for such a purpose.
Jerzy Zulawski looks up at the sky and sees only damnation, a new apple for us to pluck from the abyss and taste at the behest of the devil. What a jarring contrast to how we view space today—the final frontier, a blank map waiting for us to draw in its borders. The amount of media and literature that romanticizes our steps into space is legion, and cannot even be listed. To Jerzy, it is Earth that makes us human, and to abandon it is to abandon our mortal Eden. It's tempting to view such a perspective as quaint and backwards, but considering how pictures of Elon Musk in his embarrassing "OCCUPY MARS" shirt have been shitting up my social media feed for days, I can't help but wonder if Jerzy was onto something. Perhaps it requires a certain amount of spiritual bankruptcy to turn one's back on on the vibrancy and fecundity of Earth, so that one may grasp at the borders of a sepulchral frontier.
At the same time, I would be remiss if I did not mention the possibility for other interpretations of Jerzy's work. He wrote the The Lunar Trilogy in the early 1900s, less than a generation after the end of the California Genocide, and while the Mexican-American wars were still burning hot. Although these events are not directly mentioned, he compares the broken children of the moon to "people somewhere int he depths of Africa or at the southern border of the USA." Awareness of the California Genocide, or the Indian Wars, would not be unprecedented for a European intellectual of the period; Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi would even devote an entire poem, The Hymn Of The Patriarchs, to the genocide in 1822: These ravished people / trained to unprecedented pain, unknown desires! Their fleeting happiness stripped naked / and driven out beyond the sunset bar!"
It's perhaps a leap, but a small part of me thinks that Jerzy, with a typically racist 19th century view of the world, saw the events happening in the New World and felt that his fellow Europeans had stripped themselves of their humanity as they traveled across the Atlantic to a land forsaken by god.
Regardless of what Jerzy thought, I can't help but find something resonant in the book. In times as vicious and frightening as these, when both the Earth and society seem to be stumbling towards perdition, it is worth a reminder that our humanity remains here with us, in our homes, our forests, our graves, and our ruins.
Yes ...
Date: 2024-10-13 06:12 pm (UTC)Well said. At least for now, we all share one thing in common, living on Earth, which can sometimes motivate people to quit sawing off the branch we're all standing on.
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2024-10-13 11:31 pm (UTC)Re: Yes ...
Date: 2024-10-14 01:03 am (UTC)I pay a lot of attention to global awareness and what we have in common.
>> It took me a while to figure out what precisely I connected with in that book, and perhaps I was just happy to see such a different angle on space travel tropes.<<
There's a lot of variety in science fiction, but you have to dig to find it.