Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (22 page)

That was one kind of simulation. Another category of simulation was to present flight conditions to the astronauts. They worked in specially built cockpits outfitted exactly like the Command Module and the Lem, all dials and instruments in functional replica. Thousands of possible problems, dilemmas, and unforeseen breakdowns were played off before them in the simulators over the months of training. We can listen with profit to Collins. “People think we’re baked in heat chambers and whirled in centrifuges until our eyeballs fall out, and there is a little of that, but essentially
we are learning an incredibly complex array of machines—all the nuts and bolts and wires—and learning what to do if some of it doesn’t work as advertised. We go through the intended missions tiny tedious bit by bit to make sure that we understand it and that the equipment is right and what its malfunction modes are and what our alternate plans are.”

Aquarius had long ago decided, long before he had been introduced to celestial mechanics or the workings of mission simulators, that dreams, yes all that mighty symbolic and theatrical equipment of the dream could not possibly be limited to so meager a function when all was said as wish fulfillment. If there were desires which were near to unmanageable, and the imprisonment of those desires left the body charged with psychic wastes which had to be eliminated, then certainly the dream would serve in the way Freud had declared—certainly most dreams, indeed some part of every dream, must be a wish fulfillment, but surely all that panoply, horror, and pleasure, that intimation of worlds beyond worlds, that explosion of ogres in every corner of endeavor, could hardly exist in the paraphernalia of the dream merely to serve as some sort of small and large intestine of the psyche. Indeed there had been intellectual knots in all those long careful arguments through which Freud labored in order to transpose nightmares over into scenarios of wish fulfillment. No, Aquarius thought, there was a statement in the nightmare all direct, a clap of psychic thunder, a vibration from the deep. There had to be more to the dream than Freud had ever given it—the dream was like the third eye of the Navigator, it looked into many a situation the eyes of reality could hardly assess. Perhaps the dream was indeed a simulation chamber where the possible malfunctions of life tomorrow and life next year could be tested, where the alternate plans could be tried. That at least must be one essential function of the dream. For as one moved through the situations of the day, reality kept giving intimations to the senses that reality was not what it appeared to be, not altogether. A crack in a man’s voice might give a clue to an oncoming disease, an odd laugh in a friend could leave its echo of
possible treacheries and deceits. Sometimes in the middle of racing across the street in front of a car, there might be curious hesitations in one’s gait as if unvoiced but large areas of the psyche were ready for an accident. A thousand such intimations of a reality subtly beneath reality, yet ready—it was possible—to become outer reality before very long, was apparent in everyone’s waking day. And this reality was more exciting, more threatening, more demanding and more rewarding than the easier reality of the working-day surface. So as these pieces of extra-real information were noted, so might they be stored, so might they be marinated in the vats of the imagination; later that night they could be served in the dream as the ingredients of a scenario which would look to test and explore a hundred possible avenues of that subterranean future which had been offered so many curious and sometimes threatening intimations in the previous day. It was possible that in the dream, one traveled through a scenario where one was his own hero, and in the dream one might learn how one would react to the death of the man with a crack in his voice, and conceivably have glimpses of reaction to one’s own death as well? Reliving the joke with the untrustworthy friend, his laugh was now, yes, overtly treacherous. So did one face up to him, dare him, cow him? Or was one more afraid of him than ever conceived? Was there murder at his base? Running in front of that car, one was now running in a nightmare. Whole schisms of potential suicide were revealed in a more glaring light: the Navigator could recognize that matters internal were worse than his previous estimate. So next day, the charts of the Novelist would be redrawn for the trip through the social world, new reefs to avoid laid in, new channels discovered and marked. Now subtle changes in the person might be evident in his relations with the sick man, the friend, or in his own actions as he crossed the street.

That had been Aquarius’ measure of a new approach to the dream, and he liked it. It explained much. It gave dignity to the dream and to the dreamer. The dreamer was no longer consoling himself. Rather he was exploring the depths of his own ability to
perceive crisis and react to it; he was exploring ultimate modes of existence in sex and in violence, in catastrophe and in death. So the real substance of a dream was a submersion into dread. One tested the ability of the psyche to bear anxiety as one submerged into deeper and deeper plumbings of the unknowable until one reached a point where the adventurer in oneself could descend no longer, panic was present—one was exploded out of the dream. But a dangerous shoal had at least been located.

Yet even to think of the dream as a set of simulations which explore into dread is to open some obvious comparisons with the trip of Apollo 11 to the moon. For if it is in the nature of our lives to explore for meaning not only in the duties and surprises of a working day, but at night in the alleys of the unconscious (where revelations of terror beyond the terror we already know suggest the very perils of our soul), what force resides then in the parallel thought that our voyage to the moon was finally an exploration by the century itself into the possible consequences of its worship of technology, as if, indeed, the literal moon trip was a giant species of simulation to reveal some secret in the buried tendencies of our history. It was as if technology had determined to invoke the god of magic it had already slain, even as a priest might step via his nightmare into the powerful passions of sexual instinct so primitive he had once cast it out, and wished to see if he were powerful enough to cast it out again.

Such remarks are large, they are grand, they roll off into the murk of metaphysical storm. Still there are quick clues to be sniffed and landmarks in the murk. If the title of our chapter is The Psychology of Machines, the bewilderment of the reader at the notion is a hint direct to the anxieties of technology. For if machines have psychology, then technology is not quits with magic—technology is founded on the confidence that magic does not exist and so machines may be designed to perform the most extraordinary acts. It is the premise of magic that if the same act is repeated
ceremoniously enough times, it will invoke a spirit. Or at least it will if the conditions are appropriate, the servants are possessed of no unruly forces, the gods are sympathetic, the animals and maidens to be sacrificed are virgin, and the equipment is unpolluted. It is the premise of technology that spirits do not exist, and the same act repeated in obedience to a system of procedure and well-oiled machinery will produce not a spirit, but in fact, the same result as the preceding occasion. Whether the gods are well or ill-disposed, the car will start, the rifle will fire, the stereo will play. Actually, there are any number of occasions when the car won’t start, the rifle jams, the record-changer on the stereo develops a mind of its own. A mind of its own! That is the threshold of the psychology of machines. For such a psychology exists, or it does not exist, and technology is founded on the implicit belief that machines are not possessed of psychology; the rifle jammed because of a speck of dirt in the breech, the car engine was flooded by the nervous foot of the driver, and the record-changer, far from having a mind of its own, rather had its record-changing procedure altered by careless handling. For every malfunction there is a clear cause technology must argue, a nonpsychological cause: psychology assumes free will. A human being totally determined is a machine. Psychology is then a study of the style of choice provided there is freedom to choose. Even a title like The Psychology of Machines assumes that the engine under study, no matter how completely fitted into the world of cause and effect, still has some all but undetectable horizon between twilight and evening where it is free to express itself, free to act in contradiction to its logic and its gears, free to jump out of the track of cause and effect. Since such events take place, if they do take place, on those unexpected occasions when no instruments are ready to examine the malfunction, the question is moot. No one alive can state to a certainty that a psychology of machines exists or does not exist—indeed it would take a theoretician of the dimensions of Einstein to prove the presence of such a psychology or, indeed, what would be even more dazzling, prove definitively that such a psychology could not conceivably exist. If it is the passion
of technology to live as if such a proof were already here, there is a primitive residue in man which is far from convinced, face to face with the presence of a machine, that the engine is not possessed of a variety of spirits benign and wicked. Indeed the practical experience of everyday life is forever suggesting that complex machines behave in more extraordinary fashion with complex and highly charged operators than with calm and easygoing mechanics. If rational arguments sweep in immediately to speak of the lack of science in such observation (indeed even the lack of simple organized observation in the observation itself) still the enormous anxiety of technology remains. Either it has extirpated magic, or it has not. And if it has not, if magic still exists amid machines, then the reign of technology could be ended at a stroke, for where there is a little magic, there can be a mighty magic, even as the first fission of the atom inspired the terror among physicists that a chain reaction might occur which would destroy the earth. If one machine became sufficiently magical to set out on a life of its own, who could be certain that a resonance producing similar activity might not appear in all similar machines everywhere?

To the technician this fear is no more outlandish than the private terror of doctors that the whole human race may abruptly debouch into cancer. For so far as the human body is a machine, a cancer cell exhibits evidence of magic (or what we have been calling The Psychology of Machines), since the cancer cell has left the organization of human flesh and is exhibiting a mind of its own. If the doctor knows fear of a cancer plague because of the guilty departure of Twentieth Century medicine from the controls and safeties of the past—we prescribe pills before their side-effects are even detected—so the technologist has another kind of dread. He knows that technology, having occupied the domain of magic, now has a tendency to invade every last social taboo. Indeed, what is technology if it is not an ability to photograph the act and put it on television so that we may study our own creation? “Son, that’s how Ma and me were moving when you were conceived.” Yessir,
that’s technology, that’s where the box office is—the century is so full of dread at the godlike proportions man has assumed, that the only cure for dread is to extirpate every taboo and see which explosions fail to come. Yet all the while we root out the taboos, everything primitive in us which still gives credence to the taboo, all the unspoken and conceivably tribal experience in the ducts of our dream rush up primitive, even primeval findings into our profoundest simulations. So the century feels a profound anxiety. That anxiety lives like the respirations of a clam in the clammy handshakes of all too many technologists and technicians. They know their work is either sufficiently liberating to free man from the dread of his superstition-ridden past, or their work smashes real and valuable taboos, and so becomes sacrilegious acts upon a real religious fundament. Could this not yet destroy the earth as it has already disrupted every natural economy of nature? That is the primary source of the great anxiety of the technologist as he stands before the idea that a machine may have a psychology.

So it is to be expected that a discussion of the psychology of machines has more fascination for a physicist or a serious engineer than for the average student of humanities. Aquarius, armed by his four years as an engineering student, would sometimes try to tease intelligent ladies and literary critics out of their supposition that science was an exact study with certain knowledge. On the contrary, he would assure them, there was no final knowledge whatsoever in science. We knew that gravity was an attraction between bodies, and we could measure that attraction, but why they chose to be attracted to one another was nicely out of our measure. We knew that energy was required for all work and that it sometimes took the form of light or heat or electricity, we knew it was stored in fuels and in explosives, we could measure energy in its various forms, measure it as majestically as the tides of an ocean, or gauge it so finely as the drops in the sea, but we did not have the remotest notion of what energy might look like. Nor did we know what electricity was. We knew how to use electricity, we could use it with precision in uncounted different instruments, but finally we
knew no more about its nature than to say it was usually present as a flowing stream of electrons in a wire, and we did not know what an electron looked like. Certainly we did not know why passing a wire between the poles of a horseshoe magnet would have so magical a result as to cause an electrical current to run through the wire, anymore than we understood why any electrical current in a wire would in its turn produce a new field of magnetism. The entire world of communications was built on electricity, yet we did not even have the right to say that if magnetism was mood, and someone interrupted your mood, the quick impulse of irritation you might feel was electricity in your nerves. We did not know. We did not understand the ultimate nature of electricity. Nor did we comprehend time. There were numerous theories of time, but time remained as fundamentally mysterious as the notion that space was infinite, or matter consisted of individual atoms whose makeup was as complex as solar systems, and then proved more complex. Each year the number of subatomic particles discovered was greater. To laymen who had grown up on electrons, protons, neutrons and positrons, there were now mesons and photons and mu mesons, still more names and concepts no layman could follow, and science had less certainty today about the periodic table of the elements and the structure of the atom than at the turn of the century. The list could continue. If the nature of time was not comprehended, nor gravity, nor magnetism, nor the final meaning of the word electric, what did we know finally about sound? We could say that sound was caused by waves, but we could not explain why the waves made sound in the ear. That was still a mystery. So, too, was touch if one thought about it, and smell, and taste, and pain, and death, but these were all beyond physics, yes, somewhere between sound and smell the domain of physics ended. Small matter. Even in the very center of physics, before the phenomenon of light, darkness abounded. Nobody could be certain whether light was composed of little pellets, or traveled like sound in a wave, or was both. Both! When it came to ultimate scientific knowledge we were no further along than the primitive who
thought light came from God. Perhaps it did. No physicist could begin to prove it didn’t. So we didn’t even know what a flame was. We had forgotten the majesty of fire, the impenetrable mystery. What indeed was a flame? A burning gas we were told. But why did a gas burn with a light? And from where did a gas come? Savages had looked once at fire and knew. God was in the wood of the trees and in the core of everything which burned, but now one could hardly remember that to look into a fire hot as the manifest of immanence might be equal to staring into the fires of Apollo 11 as the ship of flames began its way to the moon. What confidence was in that fire.