Revisiting the Cosmos

After all these years, the sense of wonder still remains.

As a young man, I found it difficult to find a place for myself. Perhaps this is universal, and adolescence is always a period of struggle. We are unsure of ourselves, and for many of us, we have difficulty accepting the boundaries that seem to circumscribe us. We lash out at our parents, are our siblings, at our teachers, and we have little understanding of the grander processes in motion.

As a child I remember the first promotional ads that announced the premiere of the show Cosmos. I didn’t quite know what to make of it, but all I knew was that they featured planetary images, and I was desperate to escape from my own circumstances. I was already an inveterate reader of science fiction, a type of imaginary literature that promised wonders that were otherwise lacking in the daily grind of a working class upbringing.

When I saw the series, thought I had found a welcoming place. There was something that was both other-worldly about Carl Sagan but also comforting, and he began a grand journey that I and millions of others from my generation were fortunate enough to share. It was a poetic ode to the science, and for someone who had always been entranced by planets and stars, it was a natural fit.

There were imaginative leaps and lyrical descriptions that seemed to offer a sense of hope. Carl Sagan had a knack for rendering accessible what might otherwise have been sterile and distant, and of making connections with rhetorical flourishes that seemed to hit home. He couldn’t have been more on target than when he evoked the dawn of the western scientific tradition, in the early work of the classical Greek scientists, and speculated on what might have been if that early tradition not been truncated. Might we not, now, have spaceships with Greek letters commencing journeys to the nearest stars?

I suppose it takes people with a certain imagination to grasp these lyrical evocations and to absorb them. As youngsters, many of us tended not to be receptive to poetry. We are consumed, instead, by what is momentary but flashy, by the pageant of junior high and high school life, and the evident polarization between the “in” and the “out” groups. I was, of course, most manifestly in the “out” group, not finding a place among the popular kids, not venturing out at lunch to eat burgers at In N’ Out and listening to the rock music of the 80s, and not maintaining a feverish social life that consumed weekends in a haze of alcohol and frantic groping between the sexes.

My time was spent in the libraries, looking at the encyclopedias during the lunch hour, or reading Goethe’s Faust, and talking to a few like-minded souls who also claimed seats next to their favorite sections. One like to read detective novels, and read and reread the same Sherlock Holmes stories. Another, Jennifer W., loved the James Herriot memoirs (All Things Great and Small) that were so popular back then, and always chastely sat with her little circle of friends, venturing from time to time to also include books on animal husbandry. I was in no league to compete with the stallions with colic or the dogs with liver diseases that occupied those books.

But Cosmos was another matter. There, somehow, these little frustrations didn’t seem to matter. Perhaps it was part of being an ungainly young man, but I did find myself able to appreciate the narrative of a grandiose creation that enveloped and included us all. There were no cliques in the Cosmos, no “in” and “out” groups, although I did tend to believe that an interest in the universe, and in the pageant of human struggle that was expanded to include all life, set me apart.

In the 80s, when I was in college, I still harbored an abiding affection for this television series. I would watch it on reruns, and find myself, with Carl, wondering at the scale of such a marvelous creation. We had not need to entertain notions that couldn’t be investigated by science. Had there been a creator? Well, if there had been, we would need to devise a scientific test to prove this. Otherwise, as the host wandered in the television series, one question necessarily begat another. Who created the creator? Would we go back to the conception of the ancient Greek philosophers, the sophists who were adept at argumentation and conceived of the Earth (or the known lands) as a construct that was akin to floating matter on a bowl of water, carried on the back of a turtle, which was also perched on another turtle, ad infinitum.

Thus, it was with a little trepidation that I greeted the news that the series Cosmos was to be remade with a new host, Neal DeGrasse Tyson. Now, I’m all in favor of encomiums to worthy creations, such as the first series, but I had no idea of what to expect from the remake. I do, however, tend to trust the work of this figure, and find him to be both thoughtful but also sensitive to how outsiders might tend to be distrustful or wary of science.

After watching the first episode of the remade series, I found myself struggling to reconcile the two versions. Of course, no remake will capture the sense of magic that I felt when I first saw this television series. I am, of course, no longer a that Mexican-American child who felt excluded and who couldn’t find a place for himself. But at times I see a new magic at work, and I find myself transported once again. It isn’t about the material, of course, for a lifetime of reading astronomy books and keeping apace of new discoveries has familiarized me with the concepts being presented. It is, of course, about the poetry.

I loved the opening sequence of the new series, with a host who is standing on a rugged coastland, introducing the viewer to the concept of a universe waiting to be discovered. As the camera panned back, we see the host, Neal DeGrasse Tyson, in a sleek spaceship that lifts up impossibly, and ventures up into the sky. It is an invitation to travel, to follow along, and to leave behind the petty worries and the myriad tasks that beset us in our daily lives. The music is sweeping, but also, majestic in an intimate way.

However, there are points at which the series was, quite frankly, tone-deaf. First of all, the visual effects are magnificent, as was to be expected. I remember as a child the concept of Maxwell’s Demon, the hypothetical creature that the famous scientist imagined as a way to focus our perspective on phenomenon that was too small for us to perceive directly. I had a chemistry set as a child, bought second-hand from a swap meet, and that set invited us to take the point of view of such a “demon” as we watched the way molecules were being reconfigured during experiments. Well, we have such a “demon” in the expanded perspective that takes the form of this space ship, and it serves its function impressively. But, at times, it seems too much of a lonely vantage point.

I reflect on this because, I suppose, there was always a melancholic air to this series, both in its first and second incarnation. For a perspective that purports to be an examination of a whole and breathtaking structure, it is much too lonely to have only one host. This is a collective experience, after all, and the disembodied spirit, for such he must be in order to venture into a sun and traverse the asteroid belt, points once again to something that is more of a spiritual quest. I think it is still all too much in keeping with the idea that we are still involved in personal ventures, personal explorations, and while the host earnestly talks to us in an intimate tone, at times I wish that this intimacy was expressed in other ways.

Carl Sagan did it by sitting in front of a burning campfire on a dark and starry night. Here, in this series, the spaceship doesn’t necessarily contribute to this sense of intimacy and inclusion.

Also, there are also vignettes that portray the lives of famous scientists. These were present in the original series, and I remember the portrayal of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, the genial and expansive figure whose data was to prove so crucial for the mathematical calculations of Johannes Kepler. Tycho laughed and ate, Kepler scowled and eagerly waited for the data that the astronomer, a gifted observer, had been collecting for most of his professional life.

Here we had the first vignette, which involved the figure of Giordano Bruno. These vignettes, quite evidently, will take animated form, and while I am not averse to this, I did find the treatment of Bruno and the portrayal of his adversaries as somewhat simplistic. In particular, Tyson’s need to hark on the inspiration of Bruno, which seemed, after all, to have little more basis in fact than the reasoning of Aristotle, however much he may have been accused of having rejected that classical philosopher.

Did the vision have no other inspiration than a dream or trance? If he seeks to underscore the solid scientific foundation of this quest, and the idea, as Tyson explained so clearly in the opening, that science involves coming up with explanations that involve processes that can be tested and verified, what motivated Bruno? Was he a scientist if he seemed to be motivated by a vision? Perhaps there were things that were left out in this vignette, but it struck me that Bruno was not portrayed as a particularly scientific figure, and the presentation of dogmatic and scowling Catholic figures who assumed almost cartoonish expressions of malevolence fails to take into account the complexity of the dispute. It almost seemed like the infamous “Leyenda Negra” at play once again, but substituting Catholicism and religion in general. It seemed, in other words, purposely polemical, rather than matter-of-fact the way Carl Sagan had portrayed his skepticism.

But the ending sequence, with the personal anecdote that was shared with us, was touching. I appreciated this recounting of how Carl Sagan had mentored Mr. Tyson, and had met with him when he was a 17 year old child. There is a wistfulness and the acknowledgment of a debt that is being repaid, and it is perhaps inevitable that this series will be a homage to the figure of this famous scientist who did so much to touch our imagination.

I am looking forward to continuing this journey. The Cosmos, with a capital “C”, is a place of wonder, and I wish to see how they will portray the ongoing social dimension of the controversies that affect us nowadays. Science is no stranger to polemics, and the visionary aspect is not lacking as well, for dreams represent ways of connecting the dots and finding hidden patterns. (I am thinking about the work, for example, of the German scientist August Kekulé, who related how he had come to envision the structure of the Benzene molecule in a daydream of a snake eating its own tail, the Ouroborous dream.) Dreams are intuition, and intuition is a preliminary attempt at representation.

 

The wonder is still there. I hope that this series will connect with a wider public the way the first one did a generation ago, during what seems like a more innocent time. But when has the past never been more innocent than the present?

Copyright (C) 2014 Oscar G. Romero