See You Space Cowboy…

The Metaphysics of Astronauts.

The ghosts of men with cigarettes, short ties, greased hair are so easily pulled to imagination they almost materialize on the other side of the glass.

Tube TVs to my left and right play documentary footage of the events leading up to the moon landing. An ashtray is built into the armrest of my seat, the same seats where the wives of the astronauts held their breath as they sat sentinel over the smokers and their spinning and blinking “computers,” whose technical mysteriousness they hope are somehow keeping the boys alive against the inhuman vacuum.

That incredible audio clip plays: “One small step for man…” I feel tears in my eyes and don’t even need to turn to my wife to know the story is the same. Then, of all people, the grumbling and awkward President Nixon comes on the screen to make an on-air phone call. “Because of what you have done, the heavens have become part of man’s world, and as you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquility, it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquility to earth. For one priceless moment in the whole history of man all the people on this earth are truly one—one in their pride in what you have done and one in our prayers that you will return safely to earth.” Now the tears are outright rolling, to perhaps the mild surprise of our less sentimental neighbors. I try to repress sniffles.

The reason we beat the Russians to the moon seems simple to me: little boys want to be astronauts, not cosmonauts. The distinction is subtle: The cosmonaut is a secular governmental cog who looks into the ordered and post-Christian “cosmos” which on the surface actually may seem like an explicitly more religious term, but really only worked to imply that the rational faculties of men could put that great mystery into bureaucratic and manageable order.

The astronaut, on the other hand, is a sailor on a sea of “stars.” To the more Christian mid-century American man, this has a probably unconscious Luciferian (Morning Star) spice to it, which works as a vitalizing tension to our more consciously Christian cosmology. The American writer who most informed the American religious sense was Emerson. Emerson himself was most deeply influenced by Milton, specifically Paradise Lost, which is the first of western literature to feature Satan as an almost tragically romantic figure. In the story, he is given a specific warning by Raphael to not wish for other worlds to conquer. Then, in some of the first literary images of space, he descends from heaven, through the hostile sea of stars, to find somewhere his own outside of the bounds of his place in Creation.

It makes sense, then, that Americans would borrow that romantic frontier energy to make all of space an extension of the endless Western ocean off the coast of San Francisco. The Astronaut, it is obvious why, is symbolically a space cowboy. You can smell that in every word in Nixon’s phone call: Neil plants his flag on the alien world for the benefit of all who follow in his trail. We are scandalized and yet enthralled by the audacity of that stake.

That Space Cowboy is fundamentally a loner, secretly fueled by the spirit of Milton’s Satan through the American tradition, borrowed from the European secular Christians and made more extreme, more courageous, more romantic. The Russians never stood a chance, their own post-Christianity clumsily borrowed from Enlightenment Europe and slapped on Eastern mysticism. A cosmonaut was never much more than a KGB agent for space, motivated to be granted bureaucratic access to power, but with little of the romance of risking life and limb for family back home, to make everyone proud, and to master creation as a loner hero, temporarily elevated above that of even the American king; Nixon bowed to Armstrong in front of the world. I can’t picture Khrushchev doing that.

Our mythological tradition reaches down into the spinal cord of each of us and turns our eyes to the stars, who are suddenly shining with the possibility of going to them and being quite brave. Every boy can feel that story almost before he can speak, seeming to float on the American air waves and ready to crystallize his brain cells in a lattice that won’t ever be melted into its previous configuration.

We stopped going to space shortly after that. This has caused a permanent irritation about lost potential in the American mind. Any time a piece of technology did not work as intended, my parents used to mutter “We can send a man to the moon…” The reason we stopped going, of course, has nothing to do with technology. Famously, all of the compute power on the Apollo mission could fit easily on my first Gameboy or something. The reason we stopped going is because the American mythos was already dying of irony by the 60’s and was fully asphyxiated by the late 70’s.

The late American mind has a hard time believing a rocketship could be fueled by a story written by a blind guy a few hundred years ago. We think that rocket fuel fuels rockets, naturally, so maybe it was a lie we ever went at all. My wife and I getting emotional at NASA is strange in light of the fact that most Americans carry around thick incredulity. Why?

It was at once the rise in the powers of self-conscious mythmaking by global media and a world-wide secularization. America went to the moon to beat the Russians and to show dominance to the world. On some level, it wasn’t really about the romance of exploration, it was about harnessing our authentic feeling as a weapon of media warfare to help win the Cold War. Once the American public realized they had been used, their vulnerable feelings of awe and the brotherhood of men had been made into soundbites, they got cynical, and the American myths began to lose their force as they were bought and sold as commodities.

By the time Vietnam was in full swing, it was really over. We just had to watch the gas tank empty for the next fifty years. We were already a fully ironic and cynical nation who could no longer send a man to the moon. To those less able to think symbolically, this sudden crippling will be so mysterious that they will come to conclusions like that we faked the moon landing and that Paul McCartney died. The Artemis missions are not a new spark, but more like an endlessly replayed radio hit: retrospective mythic force borrowed to fuel enthusiasm for a short, hacky jolt.

Media and cynicism have been in an arms race. Hollywood started as the place where creatives went to make powerful myths about the American cowboy hero. We in the audience had the great pleasure of having our favorite mythos projected back onto us. We were happy to make the storytellers rich. They slowly get more cavalier, though, more disdainful of us their audience and therefore lazily rehashing what they think we want to see. They become, in this way, kitsch and old-fashioned. To correct for that, moviemakers had to go into cynicism and social taboo further and further. Over the decades, we go through short periods of returns of sincerity, but ones quickly made gauche by hacks.

The image of the cowboy never fully dies, because he is the one who can ride these waves of cultural madness and make sense of them for other people. On a meta level, the cowboy himself becomes the auteur film director, the brutally honest author, the jazz musician. He promises to not “sell out” but to ride the bucking bronco of the battle of irony and sincerity and to share his little victory with everyone else, if he survives. To fail, as many have before him, is to become a hack and give the people what they think they want, or to never find his audience and die in obscurity, never quite sure if it was because he refused to sell out or if his worst fears are true and he indeed never had the talent.

When people would visit the Buddha, they would ask “Are you a god?” and he would say no. It’s easy to read that and imagine that people saw a man floating six inches above the ground or glowing with ethereal light. But I suspect it was something closer to the feeling we get watching a great jazz player completely in the zone, fully inside himself and his craft, doing something so extraordinary that it seems to shine beyond the crass material of the body and suggest connective tissue to the source of all things. My wife and I watched I, Tonya the other night, which is mostly a deeply mediocre film, self-consciously mythologizing but unable to quite land the Axel. But at the end, they show actual footage of Tonya Harding skating, and it immediately brought tears to my eyes. She was so instantly, recognizably gifted at that sport that it was an embarrassment to the movie. The real thing humiliated the imitation. Every movement contained that strange grace that only appears when someone is perfectly fused with what they are doing. And so when people asked the Buddha if he was a god, I think what they were really saying was: every movement you make is so balanced between order and chaos, so graceful and inevitable, I perceive it instantly as beautiful. My hair stands on end like a cat seeing a snake. That is what we feel when we watch a great film. It is what I felt watching Tonya Harding skate.

Sometimes foreign artists understand America even better than we do. Something about seeing us externally allows them to distill us into symbols with terrifying purity. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly remains one of the greatest westerns ever made precisely because Sergio Leone looked at the American myth from outside of it and extracted its core. And Clint Eastwood, especially at that age, in that film, at that exact cultural moment, glows with something almost supernatural. If you saw a man like that in real life, fully inhabiting himself that perfectly, you might genuinely wonder whether he was some kind of divine being. We lack the words to say how we feel and so chalk it up to “good actor” or “handsome,” which is embarrassing in its understatement. Every movement, every shift of his hips, every lay of the poncho feels exactly correct for that character and that world. We perceive a connection to something beyond the material, he straddles the bull so perfectly. That is the true cowboy of the modern media landscape: the figure balancing irony and sincerity, disclosure and performance, authenticity and theater.

It is that exact dilemma (the performance/disclosure paradox) that I believe finally killed David Foster Wallace. He was trying to fight his way back to sincerity through irony itself, and the irony eventually consumed him. He was a space cowboy too, impossibly far from anything recognizable, drifting out where the atmosphere gets thin. We were proud of him. But his shuttle exploded. One of the hazards of the job.

This is also what makes jazz feel spiritually unique. Music had always been composed, arranged, perfected. Mozart obviously reaches transcendence through time, but jazz introduced something else entirely: the possibility of revealing a transcendent individual character improvisationally in real time. The jazz musician becomes a cowboy poet riding a bucking bronco on his instinct alone. He responds moment by moment to mistakes, tonal shifts, interruptions, new leaders, sudden openings. And through that improvisation we are not merely hearing music; we are watching his character unfold live in front of us. We see how he reacts, and just as importantly, how he refuses to react. He is alone out there in space and we are proud of him and pray for his safe return.

Again, foreign media captures this American metaphysical structure more clearly than we do: Cowboy Bebop, which is where the title of this essay came from, is a Japanese story explicitly about space cowboys, fusing in American jazz, American loneliness, American racial harmonies and disharmonies, melancholy wandering, improvisation, and the strange romantic belief that a person can step outside the structure of Creation itself and briefly turn himself into a beautiful explosion of light.

See you space cowboy…