Anyway

by Claire Wahmanholm

In March of 1972, humans had not explored beyond Mars. All we knew of the outer solar system—the planets beyond the asteroid belt—was what we could see from our Earth-bound telescopes. The last major discoveries regarding Jupiter had been made some 300 years earlier. But in the late 1970s, the outer planets would move into a once-every-175-years alignment that would present an opportunity for relatively efficient exploration. On March 2, 1972, NASA launched the Pioneer 10 space probe, followed by Pioneer 11 in April 1973, which would pass by Jupiter and Saturn, respectively, and take the first close-up photos we would have of those planets. The Pioneers were designed as pathfinders for the later Voyager project, launched to see what was possible. These probes were the first human-made objects to not only fly beyond Mars, but to achieve the escape velocity required to leave the Solar System entirely.

At a November 1971 dinner four months before the Pioneer 10 launch, science writer Eric Burgess suggested to Carl Sagan that, given the momentous nature of the Pioneer missions, and the possibility that the probes could encounter alien civilizations, a message from humankind might be included on the spacecraft. With three months before the launch, Carl Sagan, Linda Salzman Sagan, and Frank Drake designed a gold-anodized aluminum plaque that would be soldered onto the body of the spacecraft.

February 25th, 1972, Sagan, Sagan, and Drake published a paper in Science titled “A Message from Earth,” in which they explained the plaque’s contents. “It seems to us appropriate that this spacecraft, the first man-made object to leave the solar system, should carry some indication of the locale, epoch, and nature of its builders,” they wrote. To satisfy these requirements, they included: a diagram of a hydrogen atom; a pulsar map; the figures of a human woman and man, with the silhouette of the space probe behind them for scale; and a schematic solar system, with the planets lined up neatly to the right of the sun.

In July of 2021, I got this simplified solar system tattooed onto my forearm. In my body’s seven-inch version of it, the Sun rests on the delta of my wrist, with Pluto near the crook of my arm. The Sun is the size of a nickel; Saturn, Jupiter, and the probe are each the size of a pencil eraser; Uranus and Neptune are the size of this O; Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and Pluto are the size of this o. These last five are so small that the circles are already starting to thicken into themselves like tiny bubbles running out of air. The diagram also shows a simplified rendering of the Pioneer probes’ trajectory: a line leaves Earth, scoops beneath Mars and Jupiter, then cuts sharply up between Jupiter and Saturn before ending in an arrow. The probe hovers half an inch above it, near a constellation of freckles.

“We do not know if the message will ever be found or decoded,” Sagan and his co-authors conclude in their article. “But its inclusion on the Pioneer 10 spacecraft seems to us a hopeful symbol of a vigorous civilization on Earth.”

. . .

Four months after I got the tattoo, on November 24th 2021, the first case of the COVID-19 Omicron variant was detected in South Africa. Within a week, cases were reported in Botswana, Hong Kong, Israel, Madagascar, Belgium, Egypt, Germany, Italy, the U.K., the Netherlands, Australia, Denmark, Austria, the Czech Republic, Namibia, Canada, Nigeria, Portugal, Sweden, Japan, Brazil, and the United States.

Someone—some two or three people—had to get from one country to another, and had to inhale and exhale while doing it; someone had to eat, someone had to sleep with their head hovering over their neighbor’s shoulder, someone had to yawn, all the while taking between twelve and twenty breaths a minute; someone had to take anywhere between 6,000 and 10,000 breaths during their eight-hour-and-twenty-minute flight from Johannesburg to Doha; had to take anywhere between 5,340 and 8,900 breaths for the remaining seven hours and twenty-five minutes from Doha to Hong Kong.  

. . .

I was rereading Juliana Spahr’s this connection of everyone with lungs on my own recent flight across the country. It’s a book I return and return to, especially in moments of political dread, which seem to amplify each other like rogue waves.

How connected we are with everyone, she writes. The space of everyone that has just been inside of everyone mixing inside of everyone with nitrogen and oxygen and water vapor and argon and carbon dioxide and suspended dust spores and bacteria mixing inside of everyone with sulfur and sulfuric acid and titanium and nickel and minute silicon particles from pulverized glass and concrete.

Spahr is writing in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, but it always exists, this connection of everyone with lungs. It exists despite any disaster, despite any delight. It is always happening, this everything turning and small being breathed in and out by everyone with lungs during all the moments.

How lovely and how doomed this connection of everyone with lungs.

. . .

Omicron flared across the globe. New records—number of new cases per day, number of hospitalizations per day, number of deaths per day—were set and broken almost instantly. Five weeks later, almost everyone we knew had it, and one week later, after avoiding it for twenty-two months, so did we.

January 2022 would later be seen as the peak of the pandemic, with 3.7 million new cases reported every day. On January 3rd, the first day of our quarantine, the temperature reached 18 degrees Fahrenheit. There was a light snow, and a night that lasted fifteen hours. The next ten days were claustrophobic and relentless. I made lists of activities that would entertain our two small children. We played Go Fish; we read every Magic School Bus book we owned; we did science experiments with food coloring; we watched Story Time from Space—a series of videos of astronauts reading children’s books from aboard the International Space Station.

In some of the Story Time videos, you can see the blue and white of Earth moving almost imperceptibly past the space station windows. In others, you can only see a momentous snarl of wires and tubes. The astronauts use foot loops to anchor themselves to the floors or walls, but you can tell it’s an effort to stay still as they read. They sway like sea kelp.

One of the featured books is called Give Me Some Space! by Philip Bunting. It’s about a girl named Una who is desperate to escape life on Earth, which she thinks is so-so, humdrum, ho-hum. She dreams of becoming an astronaut and leaving the Earth behind. She builds herself a rocket and sets out on a journey of interplanetary exploration, with the mission of finding life in space.

The idea of someone wanting to escape, and then doing it based on nothing but her own determination, was almost painful to me. I felt so pinched, so tight, so out of control, so without options.

In early January, the sun was down by 4:45pm, so if it wasn’t too cold or too cloudy, there could have been plenty of time to stand outside and look at the sky; to make eye contact with the stars across that miraculous distance; to sip at the planet’s atmosphere, whose sublime slimness shields us from death.

But it was always too cold or too cloudy, or I was always too angry or exhausted, and so I never did, not once. 

. . .

Can we do the names? Yes, we can do the names.

Sun, kiss, Mercury, kiss, Venus, kiss, Earth, kiss.

And what’s this one? That’s a spaceship. That’s us? No we’re this one right here, where the spaceship is leaving from. See the arrow? That’s an arrow? Yes, that’s called an arrow. It shows you the direction something is going. Can I kiss it? Yes.

. . .

My children have been enthralled by the tattoo. My older daughter can name all the planets on her own, but my younger daughter asks me to name them as she points. Her fingertip is the size of Jupiter. It blots out every circle but the sun.

Scale, proportion, magnitude—all of these had started slipping away from me in the early days of the pandemic. Everything was alternately mindcrushingly devastating or mind-crushingly boring. Time dragged or it raced. My heart was hammering with fury, or it was sodden with despair. People were speaking declaratively, definitively, as if they knew things. Everyone was exasperated and shouting. I, too, was sure of what would happen if a, or b, or c were allowed; or if x, or y, or z were not enforced. But I was always wrong. No one really knew anything.

I was learning nothing useful out there. Exhausted, I curled into myself, where it was at least quiet.

Before the pandemic (and the fascism that preceded it, and the extremism that nourished it), I remember feeling excited about the future. But at some point, I stopped looking forward to things. I became afraid of casting myself into the future only to find that there was nothing there to land on—just the darkness that is the equivalent of time.

And I became—have become—a conduit for it. I take the darkness in. I dress my poems in it, then ferry them out into the world.

Do they darken the water they float on? Or do they make it shine more brightly in comparison? In 1994’s Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan writes, “I do not think it irresponsible to portray even the direst futures; if we are to avoid them, we must understand that they are possible.” But hope was at the root of Sagan’s scientific ethos. He urges us to push beyond cynicism, despair. “Where are the alternatives?” he asks. “Where are the dreams that motivate and inspire? We long for realistic maps of a world we can be proud to give to our children. Where are the cartographers of human purpose? Where are the visions of hopeful futures […]?”

I find Sagan’s vision poignant, primarily because I cannot fully inhabit it. I approach it with the same hunger that I approach many novelties—preserved lemons, for example, or equanimity in the face of death. It seems to belong to another time and place. It is a quirk suspended in pickling fluid. I can pick up the jar and hold it to the light, rotate it, give it a shake—but I can’t touch it.

. . .

At the conclusion of “A Message from Earth,” Sagan, Sagan, and Drake express hope that further messages will be sent beyond the solar system. In fact, The Pioneer Plaque ended up being the model for the more famous

Voyager Golden Records, which were attached to both the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecrafts in 1977. These records include 115 images of Earth, 90 minutes of world music, and spoken greetings in 55 languages. They also contain a sampling of sounds that its curators considered representative of life on Earth. Among them: crickets, fire, the howling of a wild dog, a heartbeat, the sound of a kiss. 

Sometime in 2020, my younger daughter started showing an interest in kissing. At first she offered to kiss our scrapes, paper cuts, stubbed toes. Then she started kissing things that particularly delighted her—her favorite bath toy, her square of pancake. This was, in all respects, adorable behavior, but we felt compelled to warn her. You can kiss us, we say, and you can kiss your sister, but you can’t kiss your buddies at school, ok? You can’t kiss Pops or Nana or Grandma Karen right now. Because we have a virus. Because it could make someone very very sick. Because we need to give everyone plenty of space.

So she blew kisses after each video call. She kissed the characters in her books when they looked sad. She still kisses my forearm as I name the planets. Mars, kiss, Jupiter, kiss, Saturn, kiss, Uranus, kiss, Neptune, kiss, Pluto, kiss.

On my arm, her kisses are warm sounds. I can hardly feel them. They are ideas more than anything.

I was not a physically affectionate child; was not extroverted, vulnerable, exuberant; was not quick to laugh, or to cry; was cautious, stubborn, serious, contemplative; was private. The impulse to put my mouth to something I loved was not—is not—mine in the way it appears to be my daughter’s. Like Sagan’s hope, it feels simultaneously alien and wonderful. It shows me my own failure of imagination. Like the discovery of an Earth-sized planet orbiting a sun-like star. Something like us, but better, maybe. Far away, but not impossibly so.

. . .

The young heroine in Give Me Some Space! visits all the planets in the Solar System but finds that none of them are hospitable to life. Disappointed, she pulls up a rock in the Kuiper Belt and looks out into space, back in the direction she came from. In the distance, she sees a shimmering blue planet she hadn’t noticed before. It even looks like it has an atmosphere. She’s thrilled! After seven failures, she has finally discovered life in space! \

She journeys closer and closer to it, only to eventually realize it’s Earth. There is life in space after all, just like she was hoping for. It just wasn’t where she expected it to be.

Of course I saw the ending coming. When Una sees the shimmering blue planet, of course I knew it was us, even before she begins to swim toward it, before she sees its atmosphere, before she sees the enormous star at the center of its orbit, before she sees its blues and greens. But my daughter was delighted. And sitting with her on my lap, watching the astronaut triumphantly hold up the book for children she could not see—rushing as she was at 17,000 miles an hour, 258 miles above us—I actually grunted with soft pain. I did that thing where I widen my eyes and tip them toward the ceiling to stop myself from crying.

“We are all the crew of the most spectacular spaceship in the universe,” the astronaut read. “Everything we need to explore the cosmos is already on board.”

How many times have I said aloud, or just thought to myself, after reading another terrible piece of news on the internet, after another night of sleepless seething, just burn it all down?

But this is all we have. There is nowhere else to go.

. . .

Pioneer 11 is currently nine billion miles from Earth. It will take 928,000 years for it to reach the nearest star. Pioneer 10 is farther out, but its nearest star is only 90,000 years away. Deep space is so empty that scientists anticipate that nothing—nothing—will cross their path in all that time.

In 1994’s Pale Blue Dot, Sagan writes, “Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”

There is no hint, but we sent messages anyway. The chances are literally infinitesimal, but we gathered teams, we engraved plaques and tucked their golden faces away from interstellar debris; we took a picture of children surrounding a globe, we took a picture of the Taj Mahal, we recorded the sound of footsteps, we recorded each other saying may all be well and hello to the residents of far skies. I almost don’t believe it.

. . .

In addition to all the images, sounds, and greetings, The Voyager Golden Records contain an introductory message from President Jimmy Carter, addressed to whatever extraterrestrial life might intercept the records. “This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings,” he writes. “We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.” \

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, 1,129,838 people in the United States alone have not survived their time. 6.93 million people worldwide. That number is enormous. But people have gotten used to it. People are furious about other things now. I say “other things” because the social media-inflected news cycle—the algorithms, what passes for journalism—chops things into isolated incidents, disguising the fact that it’s all one disaster. But it’s all one disaster.

. . .

In May 2023, the WHO declared that Covid-19 was no longer a global health emergency, though it acknowledged that the virus was still killing one person every three minutes. This pandemic, which we thought might last two weeks, ended up filling 77% of my younger daughter’s life.

And of course our quarantine ended. The temperature rose, night’s tide went out again. Spring came, and summer. Our family recovered, we went back outside, we saw our friends, we traveled; we went to the circus, and movies, and plays, and museums. Things felt—feel—mostly normal. Sometimes I worry about how normal things feel. Sometimes I worry that with space and time, we will look back at all the articles, all the essays, all the art and artifacts of these years, and find them quaint. Our relief will eclipse our trauma. We will move forward and be rewarded for doing so, for pushing through, for being impatient with other people’s fear and grief. This is the American way. It’s already happening, even as our hemisphere leans away from the sun and cases begin to rise again.

And though we may be moving on from the pandemic in larger and larger numbers, I don’t think I can un-see what the pandemic has shown me. For example: how deeply alone Americans are, and how deeply so many of us seem to be committed to that aloneness.

When I wake up this morning, Spahr writes in “March 5, 2003,” the world is a series of isolated, burning fires as it is every morning. I have underlined this section. I have drawn a small heart in the margins. I feel it deeply.

I know, in a way I did not know before, how quickly so many of us will jettison our connections with others if it means we will feel “safer” or more “free.” And having seen what I have seen, it is hard for me not to be cynical. Over the last three years, I have felt myself hardening into a wall. I have been trying so hard to keep the pain of other people (other people’s pain, yes, but also other people as pain) out.

But I am trying to return to tenderness. I am trying to be permeable to the world, to let its ink mark my skin. I wove hope into my skin so that I would see it every time I waved at someone, every time I swung my arms open to hug my children, every time I twisted the soft, vulnerable part of my wrist toward myself. And so that every time a stranger asked about it, I would have to put these words into my throat and mouth—that a small, hopeful group of scientists believed that human endeavor was valuable; that they believed we might have something worthwhile to tell the universe; that they dared to send a message saying we are human beings, we exist here, we want to find and understand, we want to be found and understood.

That human beings are not destined for greed or cruelty. That we are destined for something beyond our destruction.

I will make myself believe it.

. . .

Who lives here? No one lives there, that’s the sun. Who lives here? No one lives there either. No one lives anywhere but Earth. We live at Earth? Yes. Can I kiss it? Yes, you can kiss it.

Right now, my arm is simultaneously my arm and deep space. When my daughter kisses the Earth, I feel it on my arm. When she kisses my arm, she is meaning to kiss everything she knows. For all she knows, things have always been this way. She kisses it anyway.

Claire Wahmanholm is the author of Meltwater (Milkweed Editions 2023), Redmouth (Tinderbox Editions 2019), and Wilder (Milkweed Editions 2018). Her work has most recently appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Cream City Review, Missouri Review, TriQuarterly, Sierra, Ninth Letter, Blackbird, Washington Square Review, and Copper Nickel. She was a 2020-2021 McKnight Writing Fellow, and her poem “Glacier” won the 2022 Montreal International Poetry Contest. She lives in the Twin Cities.