Good morning Hank, it’s Tuesday. This is a
story about space walking cosmonauts and why we make art.
I often think about this passage from You Are An Artist, about
this 1515 etching of a rhinoceros by the artist Albrecht Durer in which
he depicts the animal as having literal plates of armor complete
with rivets. Durer had never actually seen a rhinoceros, he’d only read a
description and seen a small sketch. And the fact that his etching looks
anything like a rhino is a real testament to his genius. But in the places where
Durer’s rhinoceros is different from an actual one, something else is
betrayed about the human imagination, which is that we tend to
fill in blank spaces or unknowns with guesses that are deeply shaped by
our human-ness. When Durer read that the rhino had skin like armor, he
imagined 16th century European human armor, because what else
could he imagine? Sort of by definition, it is hard to think about what we cannot
imagine. But perhaps art is one way to bridge that divide. And thinking about
that, makes me think about the first work of art made by a human in space.
The International Space Station orbits Earth every 90 minutes. And with each
of these orbits, the sun rises from behind the Earth, darkness giving way to an arc
of blue light that soon gives way to more colors. To hear space visitors talk of these
orbital sunrises is to glimpse how amazing they must be. The American
astronaut Victor Glover wrote of the bands of color, “They remind me of
the scripture in Psalm 30, ‘weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh
in the morning.’” Many space travelers have written of experiencing so-called
“orbital perspective”--seeing the whole, profoundly interconnected planet from
afar, teeming with life, vast and resilient and fragile and tiny.
Astronaut Mae Jemison said that in space, “I feel more expansive,
very connected to the universe.” The Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov
wrote that, “Looking back at our blue globe from such a distance
profoundly changed my vision of space and time.”
Leonov is most remembered today for taking the first spacewalk, but he also
made the first space art. In March of 1965, when he was 30 years old,
Leonov visited space with his friend and colleague Pasha Belyayev.
The two men orbited the Earth in a tiny spherical spacecraft that was
just over two meters in diameter, and so they were only allowed a
few personal belongings on the trip. Leonov chose to bring a drawing
pad and some colored pencils. He’d loved making art since
childhood--he wanted to go to art school but it was too expensive,
so he became a pilot. Their mission was known as
Voskhod 2--Voskhod means sunrise in Russian--and despite lasting for
just over one day, this space flight contained quite a lot of firsts--not just
the first spacewalk and the first art made in space but also the first
spacecraft landing to occur 1,500 miles off-course after its occupants nearly
died on several separate occasions. The mission started out as planned,
shortly after entering orbit, Leonov-- wearing a spacesuit--exited the
Voskhod capsule via an airlock and floated in space connected
to the spaceship only by a tether. The event was broadcast live on
Soviet radio and television, and whenever my palms feel in need
of a bit of sweat, I watch as Leonov pushes away from the
spacecraft, drifting into the void until his tether snaps taut.
After a few minutes of space walking, it was time for Leonov to
reenter the space ship. But there was a problem: His pressurized suit
had dramatically expanded in the vacuum of space. In his memoirs,
Leonov recalled, “My feet had pulled away from my boots and my fingers
from the gloves attached to my sleeves, making it impossible to
enter the airlock. … The only solution was to reduce the pressure in my suit
by opening the pressure valve and letting out a little oxygen at a time as
I tried to inch inside the airlock.” And so as his oxygen leeched out
into the void, Leonov tried to wedge himself back into the capsule, which
he described as, “an almost impossible maneuver.”
This was not broadcast live on television. “From the moment our mission
looked to be in jeopardy,” Leonov wrote, “transmissions from our spacecraft
were suddenly suspended without explanation. In their place, Mozart’s
Requiem was played again and again on state radio. The custom
in the Soviet Union at that time was for such solemn music to be play
after a senior political figure had died, but before an official announcement
of their death was made.” Leonov’s family and friends, who of course
knew what the music might mean, waited for the news, with no way of
knowing what was happening miles above. As his suit shrank and his oxygen
dwindled, Leonov eventually managed to get back into the Voskhod capsule.
He was drenched with sweat, breathless, and overwhelmed with adrenaline.
His compatriot Pasha calmed him down, saying that they had ninety
minutes before they needed to eject the airlock. Maybe Alexei could use
that time to rest, or to write up a report of the spacewalk?
But Leonov found that he could neither sleep nor write. Instead,
to calm himself and capture the moment, he took those minutes
to make some art. “I reached for my sketch pad and colored pencils
and sat quietly drawing my first impressions of the panorama I
had seen while floating free in space. I tried to capture the different shades
of charcoal rings that make up the Earth’s atmosphere, the sunrise
or air glow over the Earth’s horizon, the blue belt covering the Earth’s crust
and the spectrum of colors I had observed looking down at the globe.”
The sketch is simple--it was made quickly in a weightless environment
with simple drawing instruments, but it is also stunningly beautiful.
It says something to me that the first art made by humans from outside of
Earth’s atmosphere depicts Earth’s atmosphere. Leonov was astonished
by the brightness of the stars from space, but he did not draw that, nor did he
draw himself floating, looking up at the spaceship. He drew home.
He drew what Mary Oliver memorably called “this, the one world we all belong to.”
I will never see an orbital sunrise in real life. On many levels, I’m not cut out for
space travel--an inner ear disorder has damaged my sense of balance, for starters,
but also I’m not a pilot or an engineer or a billionaire. I tend to side with Eudora
Welty on matters of adventure, who once after acknowledging that she
had lived a sheltered life, added, “A sheltered life can be a daring life
as well. For all serious daring starts from within.” My daring also
generally ends within. And so I will only ever have
descriptions and depictions of space-- like Albrecht Durer and his rhinoceros,
when it comes to orbital sunrises, I am wholly dependent upon the words and
images made by other people. And that is one gift of art, it can be a
window, albeit not a fully transparent one, into other worlds, and other lives.
After making his sketch of the orbital sunrise, Leonov returned to the
business of space travel, and when he and Belyayev ejected the airlock,
which led to an unexpected and uncontrolled spin of their aircraft.
There was no longer the pleasure of a sunrise every ninety minutes; now, their
spacecraft was spinning wildly, with the sunlight streaming in through the only
window creating a strobe light effect. On the ground, Mozart’s Requiem played
over and over on the radio, while in space, the emergencies multiplied: the
automatic guidance system of the craft failed, so the cosmonauts would have to
manually choose a landing site. Leonov couldn’t navigate toward
the original landing site, so after extensive calculations made while wildly
spinning in space, he chose a site 1,500 miles to the west, in a vast wilderness.
That way, if they crashed, they at least wouldn’t kill anyone on the ground.
They landed in a forest, in two feet of snow, with their escape hatch blocked
by a tree that had fallen as the spacecraft barreled into it. It took the two cosmonauts
hours of rocking the capsule back and forth from within to free the escape hatch.
And then they spent a very long, and very cold night in the Siberian wilderness
before rescuers arrived the next day. At last, the two men skied nine kilometers
with a rescue party to a site where a helicopter could land, and that is how the
cosmonauts of Voskhod 2 survived, and with them the first picture of an
orbital sunrise. I like to look at Leonov’s drawing when I am feeling exhausted
by despair and drudgery, or when I feel the weight of longing and fear pressing
in on my chest. I look at the picture and think of all that had to happen for that
drawing to exist, for Leonov to exist, for anything to exist. I look at the drawing
and take a long, slow breath, and think of how my lungs were made for this air.
For me, art is a kind of landing site in the wilderness. Art is where I go
when I do not know where else to go. Through art, paradoxes of
consciousness resolve for me. I see what I will never see. I know
what I will never know. And I survive what I will not survive.
I will never see an orbital sunrise, but thanks to Alexei Leonov, I can
still feel the wonder and consolation of it. Hank, I’ll see you on Friday.