Welcome to part 3 of our ongoing series (check out part 1 and part 2 if you missed them). For this installment, a number of nonfiction-y writers will focus on the Voyager Golden Records, responding to the query, sure it’s great, but is it an essay?
The Voyager probes were launched in 1977; since that time, they have traveled a greater distance away from the earth than any other object made by humans, gathering data with triaxial fluxgate magnetometers and plasma spectrometers and the like. In addition to accumulating facts, the probes also carry information, as each contains the Voyager Golden Record, a gold-plated copper record that plays sounds from our tiny blue dot. At the insistence of scientist Carl Sagan, the words “To the makers of music—all worlds, all times” are inscribed on the record, which also comes with some basic diagrammatic information about our home planet. The hope is that either alien civilizations or future humans will discover this, hearing the recorded greetings in 55 languages, the sounds of volcanoes and trains and kisses, the song “Tsuru No Sugomori” and the panpipes from Peru, the hour-long recording of Ann Druyan’s (Carl Sagan’s wife) brainwaves, and all the other bits selected to stand in for humanity.
So, is it an essay? Read the responses below from Matthew Gavin Frank, Jenny Boully, Margot Singer, Eric LeMay, April Freely, and Elena Passarello, and share your own thoughts in the comments:
Above us, the Andromeda constellation is comprised of 90 “notable” stars, and a shitload of unnotables. The Andromeda galaxy contains over one trillion stars. She’s so zaftig, she has to be measured in “solar masses” just to make her poundage accessible to our three-pound brains, ten-ounce hearts. She’s 7×1011 solar masses (1 solar mass=2×1030 kilograms). When she eventually burns-out, her mass, which once took up so much space in our universe, will, in a series of flashes, be gone. Given such astronomical entropy, Joni Mitchell got it half-right. We are stardust, but not yet golden. Astronomers stress that the hemoglobin in our blood carries the same iron atoms that once belonged to now-dead type 1A supernovae, which themselves resulted from the violent explosions of white dwarf stars. Eventually, the Voyager Golden Records and the vessels that carry them will be rendered to smithereens and, if we’ve learned anything from the behavior of prior space dusts, said particles will find their way into our bloodstreams. Bach and Berry will be returned to us, inside of our new alien breed. Until then, the Voyager flies. And if something is this busy revising Andromeda, it’s clearly an essay.
I have always been fascinated by the Voyager Golden Records, because they detail silence and hope. That is, NASA sent the records into space, but it did not send the requisite technology with which to listen to the recordings or decode the analog images embedded within the record. I am interested in the extreme slimness of a chance encounter between the record and a receiver.
What appeals to me about the Golden Records, more than the silence and infinitesimal chances of it being discovered and fully decoded, is that it contains a snapshot of the world—albeit a highly curated one—when I myself was being formed and then born. When the Voyager probes were launched, in 1977, I was a little over one year old.
That the records attempt to show the world as it was at a particular moment in time makes the records akin to the essay. That they catalogue in order to fully exhaust or excavate their subject also makes them akin to the essay. That they speak to who we were then as a society and what we valued makes the records a bit like the Victorian essay. That the society that choose to launch what is perhaps less of a scientific proof and more of a sentimental token of that culture’s faith in the notions of timelessness and interminable beauty, makes that culture an essaying one.
There is, however, two gaps that I cannot overstep. And it is these gaps that make me cautious and not so hopeful. One: the Voyager probes, according to NASA, will be unable to send back information beyond 2025 (a year that, being that I was born in 1976, looks artificial, futuristic, beyond what is possible). Two: it will take 40,000 years for the probes to approach the stars they are bound towards.
I do not know exactly how it is that essays that have been fortunate enough to linger here today speak, but 40,000 years is a long time to wait for a chance encounter. Only love is that foolish. So, when I think on the question of whether or not the Voyager Golden Records are or are not an essay, I keep circling around the matter of its intended recipient, and it seems to me that the hypothetical addressee, being an abstraction and hope, make the records more akin to love letters or prayers.
- As Magritte put it: Ceci n’est pas une pipe (The Treachery of Images, 1929).
- So no—not an essay, but a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk in interstellar space, a collection of encoded images (vibrations etched in grooves) which, traced by a stylus at 16⅔ revolutions per minute, will transmit a record of intelligent life on earth.
- On the other hand, what is this essay but a stream of bits in cyberspace, a collection of encoded images (electrical impulses on copper wires, pulses of light on glass fibers) which, pulled up in a browser on a computer screen, will transmit a record of my thoughts to you?
- A record is not an essay. But all essays record.
- To voyage is to essay: to attempt, to test, to try to accomplish or to prove, to undertake. As in, “It is a fine thing for a young man who goes to essay the world, to travel and see much (Prodigal Son, 1593). An essay is a kind of voyage, too.
- At this precise moment, the Voyagers are traveling through the heliosheath, 19,492,563,197 km (Voyager 1) and 15,974,950,577 km (Voyager 2) from Earth. In about 40,000 years, they may pass near another star. By 2020, all instruments will be powered down and communication will be lost.
- In 1977, the year the Voyagers were launched, you could draw a map of the entire Internet, or ARPANET, on a single page. In 1977, the word “blog” did not exist. The very first Web page, created in 1990, has been lost.
- The Voyager spacecraft has the body of a satellite dish studded with two plasma wave antennae, three radioisotope thermoelectric generators, and a 13-meter long magnetometer boom protruding like the proboscis of a giant bug.
- Brain cells—firing electrochemical impulses as you read this essay—have round bodies studded with hairy dendrites and long, thin axon tails. On an fMRI scan, they look like jellyfish, or stars. A map of the human nervous system looks like a galaxy in space.
- Will the Golden Records survive? Will some alien life form detach them from the outer shell of a strange craft crash-landed on its planet, decode the cryptic instruction icons etched onto the surface, lower the needle, spin the golden disk? What will they think? What will they understand?
- And when you read the essays of Plutarch, Sei Shōnagon, Bacon, Lamb, Montaigne—when you read this essay on this blog—what do you think? What do you understand?
- Will this essay last?
The Golden Record isn’t the essay, but the essay is the goldenrecord.org.
This is an impossible communication: but that’s the only kind we want.
Some essays you want to call desperate when you recognize a certain out-sized flourish: other essays you want desperately.
The Voyager Golden Record is the furthest edge of longing.
Yes, you. You know who you are.
This is not a desperate experiment, or an essay “about” desperation. It is in no way “loose”—we are simply looking for “the one.”
When engaged in rigorous, intense calculations, you are otherwise occupied: this is a kind of sexy.
We sometimes have trouble deciding: clothes, no clothes.
Data in Voyager Golden Record is only a substrate of difficulty, a veil that makes essayists even more beautiful.
Exactly: gold-plated copper.
This essay finds longing even for itself, taking care to teach you how to read it as you go: we calibrate you through every light year.
Yet, in the whirling blue-green body, essayists really are quite small.
The sound of surf, wind, thunder is the lonely backdrop against which all the rest: this is how and why the Voyager Golden Record wants you.
Such vulnerability is the sexiest thing about us.
An essay is a kind of powerlessness. The record runs out of juice out of the range of the artists’ control.
Because some readers, you know, will hear anything: an essay is an attempt to survive itself.
I am wary of my essay-meter and my beauty-meter intersecting. I know I’m taken by the absolute beauty of the sounds of Chuck Berry, Glen Gould, Bach, etc. riding the farthest man-made object from our planet. But a work of art cannot be an essay simply because it is beautiful. That’s a different kind of art-making—or at least I think it is.
Still, I label this beautiful gesture as not just as an essay, but THE essay. I have an essay-gasm every time I think about the Golden Record, and I think about it waaaaay too often. For me, the most essayistic thing about the whole endeavor is that it was doomed from the get-go. I see something in nearly every great essay that expresses a similar kind of doom.
I wasn’t there, but it seems like 1977 had much in common with the most damning aspects of current American life—energy crises, gridlocked lawmakers, huge social inequities. So, in a draining time not unlike ours, a bunch of brilliant yahoos—Carl Sagan and the great Alan Lomax among them—asked NASA to stick the sounds and images of Earth to the side of a space probe for the aliens to hear? I can’t imagine NASA even taking a meeting with a similar team of brilliant yahoos today. Add to this the fact that the yahoos only had a few weeks to find clean hard copies of Indian ragas, Bulgarian shepherdess songs, court gamelans, and Peruvian mountain arias, and greetings from as much of the UN as possible. That’s another doomed enterprise (the story of which is detailed to wonderful effect in MURMURS OF EARTH).
Most doomed of all is the intention for the record to reach its intended audience. Voyager 1 is slated to run out of power in a decade. And of course, we don’t know if anyone is out there, anyway. What’s more, even if there were, would the record still be in tact when it reached them? Would they actually be able to read the instructions (etched on the record in binary code) for how to view and listen to the record? And would they even have ears to process the mixtape we sent them?
This doom is beautiful, yes, but it also puts this active pressure on us, the Earthbound, contemporary audience, to receive it as a doomed mode of expression. We must unpack that expression from our indirect place as listeners. Because a doomed enterprise gets to be about much more than whatever its original intention was. And that, to me, is the most beautifully essayistic thing I can imagine.