Stranger Than We Can Imagine

by John Higgs

  Both Beckett and Wilson made observations about the true nature of things. Yet because they had different perspectives, those observations were different. What was observed, once again, was dependent on the observer. As William Blake wrote at the start of the nineteenth century, ‘For the eye altering, alters all.’

  Existentialism also flowered in the United States, but American existentialists were considerably more engaged with life than their Irish and French counterparts.

  Jack Kerouac was an athletic, Catholic-raised writer from Massachusetts. He gained a scholarship to Columbia University on the strength of his American football skills, but dropped out and gravitated to the bohemian underworld of New York City. This subculture inspired his book On the Road, the most famous of all the Beat novels.

  On the Road was written during an intense three-week period in 1951. It was typed, single spaced and without paragraph breaks, onto a continuous 120-foot-long scroll of paper that had been made by taping together separate sheets of tracing paper. Kerouac hammered away at the typewriter for long hours at a stretch, fuelled by amphetamines and not stopping for food or sleep. The scroll meant that he did not need to stop in order to insert a new page. The result was a stream-of-consciousness outpouring of pure enthusiasm which had the rhythms of jazz. It was as if he was constantly ramping up the energy of his prose in order to outpace and escape the nihilism of the world he wrote about. Kerouac’s writings are peppered with references to the Buddhist concept of satori, a mental state in which the individual perceives the true nature of things. The true nature of things, to someone experiencing satori, was very different to the true nature of things as perceived by Sartre or Beckett.

  It was Kerouac who coined the phrase ‘the Beat Generation’. The name arose in conversation with his friend John Clellon Holmes. As he later recalled, ‘[John] and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent existentialism and I said “You know John, this is really a beat generation”; and he leapt up and said, “That’s it, that’s right!” ’

  Although many people in the underground drug culture of the 1940s and 1950s self-identified as both ‘hipsters’ and ‘Beats’, the term ‘Beat’ has since gained a more specific definition. The phrase ‘Beat Generation’ is now used mainly to refer to the American writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and their muse Neal Cassady. Original nihilistic Beat writers such as Trocchi are left out of this definition. There are also attempts to include the American writer William Burroughs in the Beat Generation, despite Burroughs’s unique ability to escape from any category he is placed in. This narrowing of focus has led the American poet Gregory Corso to remark ‘Three writers do not a generation make.’

  Kerouac had originally picked up the word ‘beat’ from a street hustler and junkie who used the term to sum up the experience of having no money or prospects. Kerouac’s imagination latched onto the word because he saw another aspect to it, and one which complemented its original meaning of referring to a societal outcast. For Kerouac, the word implied beatitude. Beatitude, in Kerouac’s Catholic upbringing, was the state of being spiritually blessed. Shunned outcasts who gain glimpses of grace and rapture are a constant theme of Kerouac’s work, and the word summed this up in one immediate single-syllable blast. The word became attached to the wild, vibrant music that the Beats were so attracted to, and it was this connection to ‘beat music’ that lies behind the name of The Beatles.

  Unlike the more nihilistic European Beats, the American Beat Generation flavoured their version of existentialism with Eastern mysticism. By the middle of the twentieth century a number of Eastern texts had become available in Western translations. Richard Wilhelm’s 1924 German translation of the I Ching was published in English in 1950, for example, and the American anthropologist Walter Evans-Wentz’s 1929 translation of the Bardo Thodol, better known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, gained widespread attention following its 1960 reissue. These texts described a spirituality that differed greatly from the hierarchical monotheistic religions of Judaism and Christianity, with their subservient devotion to a ‘Lord’. They talked about divinity as being something internal rather than external. They viewed spirituality as a matter of individual awareness.

  There are distinct differences in the definitions of words like satori, beatitude, enlightenment, grace, rapture, peak experience or flow, but these terms also have much in common. They all refer to a state of mind achievable in the here and now, rather than in a hypothetical future. They are all concerned with a loss of the ego and an awareness of a connection to something larger than the self. They all reveal the act of living to be self-evidently worthwhile. In this they stand in contrast to the current of individualism that coursed through the twentieth century, whose logical outcome was the isolation of the junkies and the nihilism of the existentialists.

  But interest in these states, and indeed experience of them, were not widespread. They were the products of the counterculture and obscure corners of academia, and hence were treated with suspicion, if not hostility. The desire for personal freedom, which individualism had stoked, was not going to go away, especially in a generation that had sacrificed so much in the fight against fascism.

  How could we maintain those freedoms, while avoiding the isolation and nihilism inherent in individualism? Reaching out towards satori or peak experience may have been one answer, but these states were frustratingly elusive and too difficult to achieve to provide a widespread solution.

  The writers of Casablanca had difficulty finding the right ending for the film, but the script they turned in at the last minute created one of the great scenes in cinema. It takes place at Casablanca airport during a misty night, and includes a waiting plane, a dead Nazi, and a life-changing decision. Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine makes the decision not to leave Casablanca with Ilsa, the love of his life. He instead convinces her to leave with her husband and help him in his work for the Resistance. ‘I’m no good at being noble,’ he tells her, ‘but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.’ This is the moment when he admits that there is something more important than his own individual perspective and desires. Although he previously declared that he stuck his neck out for nobody, he now risks his life and liberty in order to allow the Resistance leader to escape. Rick ended the film leaving for a Free France garrison so that he too could fight the good fight.

  Hollywood movies fought off nihilism by offering hope, either through personal love, symbolic escape or the vaguely defined better future of the American Dream. Occasionally, they would offer warnings. Oscar-winning films such as Citizen Kane, There Will Be Blood or The Aviator were tragedies which depicted the ultimate isolation of those who got what they wanted.

  Casablanca’s screenwriters were helped by the fact that the film was set and made during the Second World War. This gave them a clear ‘greater good’ which they could appeal to. Rick was able to leave his spiritual and personal isolation in order to dedicate himself to the anti-fascist cause. But the film continued to resonate with audiences long after that war had been won, because Rick’s escape from nihilism remained powerful on a symbolic level. The promise that there was something better than individual isolation was something that audiences craved. That something better, whatever it was, would take effort, and involvement. But that effort would make it worth working towards.

  Existentialism lingered in Europe, but America was too industrious to navel-gaze. As the Second World War receded into memory, the United States was about to show the world exactly what mankind was capable of. It was time, President Kennedy boldly announced, to go to the moon.

  The first test of a captured German V-2 rocket in the United States, 1946 (Universal History Archive/UIG/Getty)

  NINE: SPACE

  We came in peace for all mankind

  The moon has cast a spell on us since before we were human. After our nocturnal animal ancestors evolve
d the ability to focus on distant objects, they looked out from the treetops and saw that the moon was something different. It crossed the night sky in a manner unlike every other part of the natural world. It moved smoothly. It grew full and waned to a regular rhythm that was unaffected by events in the rest of the world, but which cast an inescapable influence over that world. It was separate from us, unreachable.

  In time the moon became associated with dreams, love, longing and imagination, and all that was intangible. It was something that we yearned for, but could never claim. This didn’t stop people fantasising about travelling there. The second-century Syrian writer Lucian claimed that a waterspout had transported his ship to the moon, in a book admirably entitled A True History. He found himself in the middle of a war between the King of the Moon and the King of the Sun. There were no women on Lucian’s moon, and children had to be born from men. In the early seventeenth century the Welsh bishop Francis Godwin wrote of travelling to the moon in a vehicle pulled by wild swans. The moon was a utopian paradise, he reported, populated by lunar Christians. When Jules Verne wrote his novel From the Earth to the Moon in 1865, in which members of the Baltimore Gun Club built a giant cannon and fired themselves into space, it seemed just as fantastical as the stories of Godwin and Lucian.

  In the 1960s the unreachable was claimed and the dream became reality. Going to the moon required romantic madness in order to believe that it could be done, and practical genius to make it happen. This is a rare and complicated psychological makeup, and one which has its dark side. Landing on the moon is still the single greatest achievement in history, and one dedicated to ‘all mankind’. Yet it was also an act of single-minded determination and it took wild, dedicated individuals to achieve it. As the sociologist William Bainbridge observed, ‘Not the public will, but private fanaticism drove men to the moon.’

  The cosmos itself, as we understood it when Einstein’s theory was first published, contained the planet Earth and seven other planets revolving around the sun. Pluto was not discovered until 1930. It was clear that, beyond our immediate solar system, there did seem to be an awful lot of other stars out there, but quite exactly what that meant was open to debate. This ignorance did not last, and the story of cosmology in the twentieth century was one of a continuous expansion of both our knowledge and our sense of awe.

  In March 1919 the English astrophysicist Arthur Eddington sailed to the African island of Principe. His goal was to record the position of the stars during a solar eclipse, in order to find out if Einstein was right. Common sense and Newton’s laws said that light from distant stars would be unaffected when it travelled close to the sun. But if the fabric of reality did curve in the presence of mass, then the path of light from distant stars would also curve. Those stars would appear to be in a slightly different position when the sun passed them. This could only be tested during a solar eclipse because the brightness of the sun made recording the position of the stars around it impossible.

  Eddington’s mission was a success. The universe behaved as Einstein’s theory predicted. But Einstein’s work predicted a lot of other strange things as well. It suggested the possibility of ‘black holes’, areas of matter so dense that everything nearby was pulled inescapably into them, including light. Relativity also claimed that the curved nature of space-time allowed the universe to be a finite size, but not come to an end. A spaceship travelling the length of the cosmos would not eventually fall off the end of the universe. Instead, it would find itself back where it started, like an ant walking around the circumference of a football wondering when the damn ball would come to an end. The concept of the centre of the universe, which made perfect sense in a three-dimensional universe, was meaningless in the four-dimensional universe of space-time. It was simply not possible to locate the edges of the universe, let alone work out a midway point between them.

  Observations of the universe improved continually over the century. It became apparent that the air pollution over London hindered the work of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, so the telescopes were packed away in 1948 and moved down to the clearer air of Herstmonceux in Sussex. Omphaloi may claim to be fixed points, but they never last. By 1984 Sussex was also deemed unsuitable, so the observatory was moved to the Canary Islands. High altitude and remote locations provided the greatest views of the heavens, so telescopes were built in locations in Chile, California and Hawaii. Even these began to show their limits, and some of our greatest telescopes are now placed above the atmosphere, in orbit around the planet. As a result the level of detail in our images of space increased exponentially during the twentieth century.

  It gradually became apparent that the cosmos wasn’t just sitting there, eternal and unchanging. The universe was expanding, like a balloon being inflated. And if the universe was expanding, then it stood to reason that it used to be smaller. If you went far enough back in time it would get smaller and smaller until it had shrunk down to nothing. This was the birth of the universe, the moment when the cosmos was born out of the void. In 1949 the English astronomer Fred Hoyle memorably described this as a ‘Big Bang’, although the event he described wasn’t big and didn’t go bang. This was, in theological terms, something of a game-changer. The universe was no longer ‘just there’, supporting us. It had been born, it was growing and one day, perhaps, it would die.

  Our knowledge of the universe grew as our telescopes improved, and as a result mankind’s relative importance grew smaller and smaller. The universe turned out to be full of clumps of stars called galaxies, such as our own local clump the Milky Way. These vary in size but can contain as many as a hundred trillion stars. There are believed to be more than 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Writing numbers like ‘170 billion’ or ‘a hundred trillion’ is in many ways a pointless exercise, because those words in no way convey the quantity that they represent. Should a person even begin to glimpse what those figures represented, they would immediately need to sit down and have a strong drink. If they truly understood the scale of those trillions they would be off work for quite some time.

  In the twentieth century we looked out into space, and discovered that we couldn’t grasp how big it was without causing our minds to snap. This, then, was the frontier we were planning on crossing. This was the final frontier, a non-infinite infinity which could generate awe like nothing the human race had encountered before. It was time to leave home and take our first steps outside.

  When he was a young boy growing up in pre-war California, Marvel Whiteside Parsons loved science fiction stories such as those found in Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories magazine. A particular favourite was Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon.

  The idea that a rocket could leave the earth’s atmosphere and travel to the moon was considered as fanciful then as a time machine is today. Rockets had existed for thousands of years, ever since the Chinese invented gunpowder, and their inclusion in ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ (‘… and the rocket’s red glare’) gave them a place in the American psyche. But they did not scale in a way which made journeys into space appear possible. The weight of the required fuel and the structural integrity needed to control such force seemed to be insurmountable obstacles. A 1931 textbook declared that there was ‘no hope’ that rockets would lead to space flight, and that ‘only those who are unfamiliar with the physical factors involved believe that such adventures will ever pass beyond the realm of fancy.’ As late as 1940 Dr John Stewart, the Associate Professor of Astronomical Physics at Princeton University, wrote that while a rocket trip to the moon wasn’t theoretically impossible he didn’t expect it to happen before 2050. He had no idea that, the previous October, Nazi rocket scientists had launched a rocket to an altitude of almost sixty miles, very close to the 62-mile-high Kármán line, which marks the boundary between earth’s atmosphere and outer space.

  Regardless of what the experts thought, young Marvel Parsons was going to build such a rocket. He knew that Captain Nemo’s submarine Nautilus
had seemed unbelievable when it first appeared in Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1869), and similar vessels had since become a reality. Over the course of his short life Parsons would experiment, invent and, through hard work and a dash of genius, pioneer the solid-fuel rocketry that would take America into space, most notably in the solid rocket boosters that launched the Space Shuttle. He also invented jet-assisted take-off (JATO), which was a significant help to the American war effort, and was a co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Aerojet Corporation. In the opinion of his biographer John Carter, ‘everything today in the field of solid fuel rockets is essentially Parsons’ work, if slightly modified.’

  But Parsons was a complicated individual. He signed a document stating that he was the Antichrist. He dedicated his spiritual life to summoning the Whore of Babylon, the lustful, beast-riding divinity prophesied in the Book of Revelation, in order that She could claim dominion over the entire world. Parsons was born on 2 October 1914, which happened to be the date that Charles Taze Russell, the founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, claimed would usher in Armageddon.

  He rejected the name Marvel, in favour of Jack or John, when he was still young. Marvel was the name of his absentee father, whom he had come to hate. Parsons wrote about his desire to ‘exteriorize [his] Oedipus complex’, and there are rumours that home movie footage existed of him having sex with his mother. And also with his mother’s dog. The only person Parsons would call ‘father’ was Aleister Crowley, who he both idolised and supported with money earned from his career as a rocket scientist. Parsons would chant Crowley’s Hymn to Pan before rocket tests, slowly stamping along with the words: