I notice that
Miriam
Nadel's entry on the loss
of the shuttle Columbia makes the connection between
space exploration and seafaring. I'd been thinking along
those lines also, probably because after this year's
Moby Dick reading I immersed myself in stories of
actual New Bedford whalers. Almost the first thing I
noticed in those stories was the acceptance of danger and
loss. Going to sea in ships was and still is dangerous
business. Going to space is dangerous business. Going to
war is dangerous business. Mankind has been seafaring for
thousands of years. Mankind has been going to war for
even longer. However, mankind has only been space-faring
for a few decades.
We have more experience with the
costs of seafaring. We have the Seamen's Bethel and the
Gloucester Fisherman's Memorial to remind us of the lives
lost and the danger faced. You really have to see the
cenotaphs in the Seamen's Bethel in New Bedford. The
first thing that strikes you is that the dates are not
all centuries or even decades ago. The next thing that
strikes you is that the reason the plaques are there on
the walls of the church is that the families had no
bodies to bury. Their mortal remains sank in the vast
sea. And when you're done with New Bedford, drive on up
to Gloucester and run your fingers over the names of the
crew of the Andrea Gail on the fisherman's memorial. The
Andrea Gail went down in 1991. It was a swordfishing
boat. You might have seen the movie, The Perfect
Storm. It gives you a dose of reality to see the
names and dates on the memorial. Think of them the next
time you go out for a seafood dinner.
Our experience with the costs of
spacefaring is more limited and more recent. The
Challenger and Apollo 1 are already seared into our
memories. I can recall everything about where I was, who
I was with, and what was said when we heard that the
Challenger blew up on takeoff. And now we have lost the
Columbia. Maybe we should inscribe their names on the
walls of the National Air and Space Museum: all the
astronauts and cosmonauts lost in the pursuit of
knowledge of the universe we live in. Think of them when
you look at the moon, planets, and stars.
I found that I couldn't write about
anything else until I wrote about the Columbia, and I
found that it took a few days for my thoughts to cohere.
For me that's one of the big problems in trying to write
an online journal. I can't whip off a coherent essay on
something as it's happening. I need to reflect, write a
draft, revise, reflect, and revise a little more until
the essay makes sense. I envy journallers who are able to
turn out a well-crafted essay every day on matters of
depth and consequence or even about the deeper meanings
of the ordinary unfolding of their everyday lives.
When I read the recovery
entry aloud to Nancy, she
pointed out some things that would have made clearer what
I disliked about the approach The Connection took to
faith based recovery and suggested that I try to rework
it. I tried to say that people don't rework journal
entries. What's there is there. Then I thought that I
would simply write a whole new entry on the same topic,
essentially a revision explicitly presented as a
revision. But in the light of such an overwhelming public
event as the loss of the Columbia, I couldn't bring
myself to post a new whiny entry about my own petty
problems. Now I realize the entry may have been whiny but
the problem isn't petty and maybe a coherent essay on the
topic of the intertwining of issues that I touched on in
that entry would be worth doing. Some other time. I'll
put it on the list.
And while I'm reflecting on
previous entries with separate thoughts, apropos of the
January
21 entry a friend reflected
that we are always relieved when it's someone else's
brother that got shot. It's human nature. A lot of lives
are going to be lost in the upcoming war, American and
Iraqi. Those are brothers, fathers, sisters, mothers,
sons, and daughters to someone. Think of that when the
bombing starts.
