Aquarius would have given much to find a truly revealing face at NASA, for that could have given a clue to these questions, but it was in the logic of such endeavor that no answers be apparent on the surface. If it would take the rest of the century to begin to disclose the real intent of the act, no lightning raid on the evidence, no single happy disclosure, could possibly offer a reply.
Still, Aquarius preferred the first assumption, that we were the indispensable instruments of a monumental vision with whom we had begun a trip. On that conclusion he would rest his thoughts. Having come back at last to earth from the orbits of the dream with such a hypothesis in his pocket, Aquarius was a little more ready to head for home, the writing of a book and conceivably the pouring of a drink. The study of more than one technical manual awaited him.
PART II
Apollo
CHAPTER 1
The Psychology of Machines
In the study of literature, much usually depends on direct confrontation with a work. Who would dare to approach A Farewell to Arms by a synopsis? It is only natural to distrust a literary experience if we have been guided too carefully through it, for the act of reading must provide by itself that literary experience upon which our senses will later work.
But the study of science is different. Much like the study of history, it begins with legends and oversimplifications. Then the same ground is revisited, details are added, complexities are engaged, unanswerable questions begin to be posed. A scientific account is a story which can always be retold, for the line of the narrative in scientific writing is to be found in the deepening of the concept.
So if we embark once again on the trip of Apollo 11, if once again we proceed to ascend from the launching tower and fire the astronauts into orbit, even take them again to the moon, if in fact we will launch them again and then yet still again, let us recognize that we are enlisted in scientific methods of instruction where our pleasure can be found only by returning over the same ground in order to discover that the story steeped in further detail has become something like another account even as a day recaptured in a dream has acquired the reality of a more extraordinary day. It seems we are off on a journey with mysterious routes, for the implication is unmistakable that a study of the trip technology took to the moon may as well commence in the inner space of the dream.
II
To speak of the unconscious is to call up the set designer of one’s imagination. He bows. Caverns and grottos appear, underwater palaces, the circles and amphitheaters of hell, the rites of barbarians in all the dark forest; we think of witches, and sniff the communions of mood in a church. Yes, the wealth of the theater is here, but it is not all that is here. Something also suggests a domain as closed from light and spectacle as the somber shelves of a library at night—it must be that part of the unconscious which serves as the servant of everyday life. From the depth of its files will it produce on demand, at a rate daily established, the varieties of practical information the conscious mind has requested. It will solve problems, offer analysis of new situations presented by the difficulties of life without, even provide working estimates of how equipped we are to encounter some contingency or meet a crisis and, if the matter is novel enough or dangerous enough, or involves preparation for the most artful kind of work, this instrument of the psyche may even send appeals for information to the mansions, theaters, and dungeons of the deepest unconscious where knowledge of a more poetic and dread-filled nature may reside. So this dark room, this functioning appendage of consciousness, is obviously the living organic embodiment of a computer: one cannot even begin to contemplate the function of the dream until one recognizes what complexity such a computer must possess in its nightly dialogue with the deep.
For years, Aquarius had had the concept of just such a guide somewhere in the human head who—on the basis of what information was available—was usually capable of piloting a man’s life through everything from the small decisions of a day to the critical dilemmas of the age. He had given to this pilot a name: the Navigator. The Navigator had varieties of conscious and unconscious information available on request. He was, if one were to think on him crudely, a memory bank of reference to everything which had been learned and was still available to recall, as well as a cerebral library of the opinions and judgments of respected authorities outside oneself. On the basis of one’s acquired experience and those worldly guidelines one was ready to accept from without, a future course of action could be estimated, and large and little decisions could be taken. The Navigator was thus the agent of the ego in the unconscious, the dispatcher at the switch.
Over the years, it proved to be too simple a model, and Aquarius was obliged to add some conceptual accessories. To cope with that large variety of daily experiences which were not easy to anticipate or to comprehend, yet were not terrifying so much as confusing, Aquarius now added to the Navigator the services of a Novelist. It seemed to him that everybody, literate and illiterate alike, had in the privacy of their unconscious worked out a vast social novel by which they could make sense of society. Obviously, each novel was different. Obviously, some were better than others. But whether each unwritten novel was a comprehensive work of art, or an unhappy one, the psychic fact was that as life presented new evidence, the book was altered in its details. When such large events as births, deaths, marriages, divorces, successes, failures, social cataclysms and social revelations were sufficiently unexpected to indicate the conception one had of society—that conception so often forged by inferior art and entertainment—was faulty, then the outlines of the novel would be drastically revised; in effect the Novelist was forever drawing up new social charts upon which the Navigator could make his calculations.
In its turn, the dream provided another sort of information for the Navigator. It ran simulations. Perhaps they were not unlike the simulations put into the computers in Mission Control at the Manned Spacecraft Center. Indeed Aquarius began to think the dream might be some psychic equivalent of those equations of celestial mechanics which find it impossible to plot the trajectory of a moving rocket precisely because there are too many unknowns. The earth is in movement, and the moon. Their gravitational effect upon the rocket is forever shifting. Besides earth and moon have special eccentricities in their motion which forbid precise prediction of position at any instant. In turn, the spaceship is not a precise object either. While it is built within narrowly defined specifications, still within such limits, it will always prove to be a minuscule bit smaller or larger than the specified size of the rocket. These variations, while minor, still have effects on the trajectory. In such a field of imprecisions (where everything is known approximately but nothing exactly) the problem is best attacked by inserting thousands of imaginary or simulated trajectories into the computer, each with slight variations in position and velocity assumed for the earth, sun, moon, and rocket. From these thousands of simulated trajectories come a series of imaginary but definitely plotted routes from earth to moon. By such calculation, and by the aid of data which track the path the rocket is actually taking, it is possible to estimate the direction in which it will next be moving, and so determine whether it is likely to stray out of the limits of those many thousands of arbitrarily calculated trajectories. It is as if an artist drawing the curve of the arm had chosen in preference to one line, a thousand light strokes none in itself the outline, but taken all together a clear picture of an arm was present.
That was one kind of simulation. Another category of simulation was to present flight conditions to the astronauts. They worked in specially built cockpits outfitted exactly like the Command Module and the Lem, all dials and instruments in functional replica. Thousands of possible problems, dilemmas, and unforeseen breakdowns were played off before them in the simulators over the months of training. We can listen with profit to Collins. “People think we’re baked in heat chambers and whirled in centrifuges until our eyeballs fall out, and there is a little of that, but essentially we are learning an inc
redibly complex array of machines—all the nuts and bolts and wires—and learning what to do if some of it doesn’t work as advertised. We go through the intended missions tiny tedious bit by bit to make sure that we understand it and that the equipment is right and what its malfunction modes are and what our alternate plans are.”
Aquarius had long ago decided, long before he had been introduced to celestial mechanics or the workings of mission simulators, that dreams, yes all that mighty symbolic and theatrical equipment of the dream could not possibly be limited to so meager a function when all was said as wish fulfillment. If there were desires which were near to unmanageable, and the imprisonment of those desires left the body charged with psychic wastes which had to be eliminated, then certainly the dream would serve in the way Freud had declared—certainly most dreams, indeed some part of every dream, must be a wish fulfillment, but surely all that panoply, horror, and pleasure, that intimation of worlds beyond worlds, that explosion of ogres in every corner of endeavor, could hardly exist in the paraphernalia of the dream merely to serve as some sort of small and large intestine of the psyche. Indeed there had been intellectual knots in all those long careful arguments through which Freud labored in order to transpose nightmares over into scenarios of wish fulfillment. No, Aquarius thought, there was a statement in the nightmare all direct, a clap of psychic thunder, a vibration from the deep. There had to be more to the dream than Freud had ever given it—the dream was like the third eye of the Navigator, it looked into many a situation the eyes of reality could hardly assess. Perhaps the dream was indeed a simulation chamber where the possible malfunctions of life tomorrow and life next year could be tested, where the alternate plans could be tried. That at least must be one essential function of the dream. For as one moved through the situations of the day, reality kept giving intimations to the senses that reality was not what it appeared to be, not altogether. A crack in a man’s voice might give a clue to an oncoming disease, an odd laugh in a friend could leave its echo of possible treacheries and deceits. Sometimes in the middle of racing across the street in front of a car, there might be curious hesitations in one’s gait as if unvoiced but large areas of the psyche were ready for an accident. A thousand such intimations of a reality subtly beneath reality, yet ready—it was possible—to become outer reality before very long, was apparent in everyone’s waking day. And this reality was more exciting, more threatening, more demanding and more rewarding than the easier reality of the working-day surface. So as these pieces of extra-real information were noted, so might they be stored, so might they be marinated in the vats of the imagination; later that night they could be served in the dream as the ingredients of a scenario which would look to test and explore a hundred possible avenues of that subterranean future which had been offered so many curious and sometimes threatening intimations in the previous day. It was possible that in the dream, one traveled through a scenario where one was his own hero, and in the dream one might learn how one would react to the death of the man with a crack in his voice, and conceivably have glimpses of reaction to one’s own death as well? Reliving the joke with the untrustworthy friend, his laugh was now, yes, overtly treacherous. So did one face up to him, dare him, cow him? Or was one more afraid of him than ever conceived? Was there murder at his base? Running in front of that car, one was now running in a nightmare. Whole schisms of potential suicide were revealed in a more glaring light: the Navigator could recognize that matters internal were worse than his previous estimate. So next day, the charts of the Novelist would be redrawn for the trip through the social world, new reefs to avoid laid in, new channels discovered and marked. Now subtle changes in the person might be evident in his relations with the sick man, the friend, or in his own actions as he crossed the street.
That had been Aquarius’ measure of a new approach to the dream, and he liked it. It explained much. It gave dignity to the dream and to the dreamer. The dreamer was no longer consoling himself. Rather he was exploring the depths of his own ability to perceive crisis and react to it; he was exploring ultimate modes of existence in sex and in violence, in catastrophe and in death. So the real substance of a dream was a submersion into dread. One tested the ability of the psyche to bear anxiety as one submerged into deeper and deeper plumbings of the unknowable until one reached a point where the adventurer in oneself could descend no longer, panic was present—one was exploded out of the dream. But a dangerous shoal had at least been located.
III
Yet even to think of the dream as a set of simulations which explore into dread is to open some obvious comparisons with the trip of Apollo 11 to the moon. For if it is in the nature of our lives to explore for meaning not only in the duties and surprises of a working day, but at night in the alleys of the unconscious (where revelations of terror beyond the terror we already know suggest the very perils of our soul), what force resides then in the parallel thought that our voyage to the moon was finally an exploration by the century itself into the possible consequences of its worship of technology, as if, indeed, the literal moon trip was a giant species of simulation to reveal some secret in the buried tendencies of our history. It was as if technology had determined to invoke the god of magic it had already slain, even as a priest might step via his nightmare into the powerful passions of sexual instinct so primitive he had once cast it out, and wished to see if he were powerful enough to cast it out again.
Such remarks are large, they are grand, they roll off into the murk of metaphysical storm. Still there are quick clues to be sniffed and landmarks in the murk. If the title of our chapter is The Psychology of Machines, the bewilderment of the reader at the notion is a hint direct to the anxieties of technology. For if machines have psychology, then technology is not quits with magic—technology is founded on the confidence that magic does not exist and so machines may be designed to perform the most extraordinary acts. It is the premise of magic that if the same act is repeated ceremoniously enough times, it will invoke a spirit. Or at least it will if the conditions are appropriate, the servants are possessed of no unruly forces, the gods are sympathetic, the animals and maidens to be sacrificed are virgin, and the equipment is unpolluted. It is the premise of technology that spirits do not exist, and the same act repeated in obedience to a system of procedure and well-oiled machinery will produce not a spirit, but in fact, the same result as the preceding occasion. Whether the gods are well or ill-disposed, the car will start, the rifle will fire, the stereo will play. Actually, there are any number of occasions when the car won’t start, the rifle jams, the record-changer on the stereo develops a mind of its own. A mind of its own! That is the threshold of the psychology of machines. For such a psychology exists, or it does not exist, and technology is founded on the implicit belief that machines are not possessed of psychology; the rifle jammed because of a speck of dirt in the breech, the car engine was flooded by the nervous foot of the driver, and the record-changer, far from having a mind of its own, rather had its record-changing procedure altered by careless handling. For every malfunction there is a clear cause technology must argue, a nonpsychological cause: psychology assumes free will. A human being totally determined is a machine. Psychology is then a study of the style of choice provided there is freedom to choose. Even a title like The Psychology of Machines assumes that the engine under study, no matter how completely fitted into the world of cause and effect, still has some all but undetectable horizon between twilight and evening where it is free to express itself, free to act in contradiction to its logic and its gears, free to jump out of the track of cause and effect. Since such events take place, if they do take place, on those unexpected occasions when no instruments are ready to examine the malfunction, the question is moot. No one alive can state to a certainty that a psychology of machines exists or does not exist—indeed it would take a theoretician of the dimensions of Einstein to prove the presence of such a psychology or, indeed, what would be even more dazzling, prove definitively that such a psychology could
not conceivably exist. If it is the passion of technology to live as if such a proof were already here, there is a primitive residue in man which is far from convinced, face to face with the presence of a machine, that the engine is not possessed of a variety of spirits benign and wicked. Indeed the practical experience of everyday life is forever suggesting that complex machines behave in more extraordinary fashion with complex and highly charged operators than with calm and easygoing mechanics. If rational arguments sweep in immediately to speak of the lack of science in such observation (indeed even the lack of simple organized observation in the observation itself) still the enormous anxiety of technology remains. Either it has extirpated magic, or it has not. And if it has not, if magic still exists amid machines, then the reign of technology could be ended at a stroke, for where there is a little magic, there can be a mighty magic, even as the first fission of the atom inspired the terror among physicists that a chain reaction might occur which would destroy the earth. If one machine became sufficiently magical to set out on a life of its own, who could be certain that a resonance producing similar activity might not appear in all similar machines everywhere?
To the technician this fear is no more outlandish than the private terror of doctors that the whole human race may abruptly debouch into cancer. For so far as the human body is a machine, a cancer cell exhibits evidence of magic (or what we have been calling The Psychology of Machines), since the cancer cell has left the organization of human flesh and is exhibiting a mind of its own. If the doctor knows fear of a cancer plague because of the guilty departure of Twentieth Century medicine from the controls and safeties of the past—we prescribe pills before their side-effects are even detected—so the technologist has another kind of dread. He knows that technology, having occupied the domain of magic, now has a tendency to invade every last social taboo. Indeed, what is technology if it is not an ability to photograph the act and put it on television so that we may study our own creation? “Son, that’s how Ma and me were moving when you were conceived.” Yessir, that’s technology, that’s where the box office is—the century is so full of dread at the godlike proportions man has assumed, that the only cure for dread is to extirpate every taboo and see which explosions fail to come. Yet all the while we root out the taboos, everything primitive in us which still gives credence to the taboo, all the unspoken and conceivably tribal experience in the ducts of our dream rush up primitive, even primeval findings into our profoundest simulations. So the century feels a profound anxiety. That anxiety lives like the respirations of a clam in the clammy handshakes of all too many technologists and technicians. They know their work is either sufficiently liberating to free man from the dread of his superstition-ridden past, or their work smashes real and valuable taboos, and so becomes sacrilegious acts upon a real religious fundament. Could this not yet destroy the earth as it has already disrupted every natural economy of nature? That is the primary source of the great anxiety of the technologist as he stands before the idea that a machine may have a psychology.
Of a Fire on the Moon Page 17
