Extract — Feedback, by Nicholas Golledge

We live in a world where things come and go, rise and fall, grow and decay, tracing out cycles of change that are ordered and predictable. But amongst those well-behaved rhythms hide other phenomena, pulsing and fizzing and refusing to play by the same rules. Earth and the life upon it have evolved over billions of years to be right where we are now only because of feedbacks that pushed those systems until they broke. And then those systems adapted, reorganized, and rebuilt. In Feedback, we embark on a backstage journey revealing how these lesser-known processes keep us operating right where we need to be, poised at the edge of chaos. Nicholas Golledge has kindly shared this extract with Kete.

Feedback by Nicholas R. Golledge, published by Rowman & Littlefield, available now.

For 28 hours in July, 1969, Major General Michael Collins was 238,855 miles from Earth, entirely alone. During each one of Columbia’s 30 lunar orbits, Collins was invisible for 48 minutes, tracing a silent arc through the distant black vacuum of space on the far side of the moon. Relaxed and assured in his experience, Collins reported that he felt no fear or loneliness, just, “awareness, anticipation, satisfaction, confidence, almost exultation”.

But Collins was not the first to have seen the dark side of the moon. One year earlier, in December 1968, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders flew the Apollo 8 spacecraft around the moon ten times, without landing. Escaping Earth’s gravitational pull by accelerating to 24,200 miles per hour – around seven miles per second – Apollo 8 was the first time our species had left a low Earth orbit and reached deeper into the unknown emptiness of space. As with Collins, the crew were on their own, out of radio contact, for 34 minutes of every orbit. “We’ll see you on the other side” said Lovell, as Apollo 8 prepared for the first radio blackout and its insertion into lunar orbit on the dark side of the moon. See you on the other side – a simple linguistic construction suffused with symbolic association. We say this to one another as we face hardships, even death. Yet to the astronauts of Apollo 8 it was meant literally, a nonchalant sign-off as they embarked on a feat never yet attempted by any other lifeform that we know of.

And it was with this undiminishable evolutionary significance in mind that NASA manager Abe Silverstein had named the lunar program after the Greek god Apollo, a charioteer whose daily task was to move the sun through the heavens and in doing so bring light and life to Earth. From the 8th century BCE Apollo was one of the most favoured gods amongst the Greeks, considered the most beautiful and wise. Apollo was the oracle at Delphi who offered prophesies and protection. He was the god of colonization and patron of seafarers, of music, poetry and dance, of healing and disease. And so it was that through his symbolic association with education, reason and order that Apollo was also the guide who saw to it that boys became men, and that the wisdom of the gods was shared with humankind.

But whilst Apollonian virtue was adored by the Greeks, they accepted also that god’s darker brother, Dionysus, a representation of chaos and disorder, religious ecstasy and insanity. The coupling of these duelling deities – artistic Apollonian spectacle and the Dionysian personal destruction – found expression and meaning in Greek theatre through the tragedic plays popular at that time. In The Birth of Tragedy Friedrich Nietzsche conceived of two separate worlds, dream and intoxication, in which the former (Apollonian) world yields unto us ‘beautiful illusion’, and the latter, Dionysian, world, ‘a complete forgetting of the self’. Through tragedy, the myths of the gods were made real on Earth, with all their beauty, violence, and despair. Nietzsche believed that with the decline of tragedy, so came the decline of the myth. But maybe our myths just changed. The Greeks looked out from Earth to the stars to create their legends; now, in the space-age, we create new ones not just by looking out ever further into the void, by also by looking back down.

For our ‘coming of age’ as a species that enabled the safe escape from our planetary bounds brought with it an entirely new perspective. During that first crewed exploration of the moon Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders took a photograph of the Earth, a distant crescent rising above the lunar horizon. ‘Earthrise’ was called “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken” and considered by some to mark the beginning of the modern environmental movement. Poet Archibald MacLeish commented that, “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together”. This framing of a primarily technological feat in such emotive language speaks to us deeply, connects with us fundamentally, and resonates with us honestly and humbly just as the myth of a charioteer god pulling the sun through the heavens did for the Greeks. And for us, like them, the power of such a vision is that it connects us as individuals to one another, and to the planet we call home.