Space Bursts

Hello friends, happy Sunday, happy (official) springtime!

I was at the pub last night, talking about outer space, and the famous Earthrise image — the first full-colour image of earth — captured on Christmas Eve in 1968 by the astronauts of Apollo 8. This was the first time humans had seen their home from afar and in full colour. We saw how majestic our home was — how green and fertile and life-filled against infinite space — and also how small, how fragile. This was perspective: the strange comfort of earthly insignificance. Of course, humans are very good at disregarding such perspectives. We can’t live life as if viewed from a satellite. We are sacks of bone and flesh preoccupied, quite rightly, with our own pleasure and pain, fears and desires. But perspective is something you can practice, that you can access in bursts, and the more often you practice it, the easier it is to access when life tends towards overwhelm.

A few years ago, I had a student who was having a difficult time at school. She was struggling with the usual teenage things — friends, comparison, the pressures of schoolwork and of having to grow too fast into womanhood. One of my favourite things to teach young people is creative writing, because so often all the affects of adulthood fall away and they become kids again. Often, you discover their brilliance. (I once had a student who detested reading and the whole concept of figurative language. I tried to teach him personification by asking him to describe a creaky old chair as if it were a person: how might it respond when sat on? Would it groan maybe, or grumble and complain? He wrote: “He sat down on the chair, which was called Susan.”)

With this student, the student who was having a hard time at school, I’d set a prompt I’d been using a lot at the time. The prompt was to imagine that you had discovered a new planet and to describe it. What might you discover there? What would it look like, what colours, sounds and smells would there be? What kinds of creatures, and landscape? My student was a little stuck, and didn’t know where to start, so we started with the basics — the five senses. I asked her, what might a planet sound like. This was a question I hadn’t considered before, one I assumed my student hadn’t thought much about either. She asked me, amazed, hadn’t I heard all the planet sounds from space? She said that she’d show me, and — always dangerous — I handed her my laptop so she could pull up the video on YouTube.

Of course, sound waves cannot travel through space. What we were listening to were the electromagnetic waves, plasma fluctuations and pressure waves, recorded and then translated by NASA into audio form. The sounds, some of them, were like a brain massage, or a gong. Some were like listening to the audio to a Roger Moore era James Bond film (underwater, or in space). Others were demonic (see the comments section for more elaborate descriptions). My student and I sat listening to the space sounds for a good portion of the lesson, and my mind was blown. This little burst of space, of perspective, shot through all the little concerns and worries of my week, and I felt very calm. The idea of planets creating waves that move — and have moved, for billions of years — in such synchronicity and such harmony was, is, wonderful.

My student ranked the planets from favourite to least favourite, and she started to come up with descriptions for the sounds she liked the most from which to start writing — a short story about a spaceship that crash lands on an as-yet-undiscovered planet upon whose surface grew delicate trees made of silver and is covered in large lakes of lava, in which lurks a many-headed monster. She wrote the story in a single sitting and used metaphor and simile and personification at every possible opportunity. At the end of the session, she marched into the living room to read the story to her family.

I forgot about the planet sounds, but every now and again and I remember them and I look them up and they fill me with wonder, and take me entirely out of myself. They are space bursts, a burst of perspective that can, just for a moment, transport you. So, my gift to you this Sunday! The planet sounds, below, and if you are particularly interested, an article from Nasa about how they recorded these sounds.

With love, Rosie xxx