Chapter Thirty-One #2
I understood the Golden Record, and why it meant so much to you.
It wasn’t the record itself exactly, was it?
It wasn’t the sounds, or the images, or the attempt to describe what it was like to be a human on Earth.
The fact that it was made at all—that’s what mattered.
The wild, beautiful idea of it, the outreach, the pure and improbable hope of that record said more about us than anything on it.
It revealed the most essential things about us human beings.
Our goodwill, for sure, yeah. But even more, our deep desire for connection.
Our against-all-odds and everlasting faith that there is more out there, that there are mysteries worth believing in, even if you can’t see them.
A shift, and then another, and another, and now here I am, ending one of the longest letters that ever was.
Hurrying, because I want to finish this, I need to finish this, before I pack it into my bag along with your Golden Record.
This record of the record, it’s going with it.
It’s my Murmurs of Earth, the accounting of how our record was made.
I won’t let that bag out of my sight on my way to Orlando, that’s for sure.
I’m a nervous wreck, and working hard to let the love be louder, because it’s anxiety-provoking, to say the least, to carry something so precious.
And to meet the person who will carry it in her actual arms as she boards that ship.
To look into her actual warm, brown, compassionate eyes. To hand it over.
I have to finish this, is the point. But one thing is very clear by now. I’ll never stop talking to you. I’ll never stop hoping that you can hear. There are mysteries worth believing in, even if you can’t see them.
And, you, Mars…You’ll never stop talking to me, either. You have been, all along. Your whole life has been speaking to me.
This letter will already be with the record, golden and imperfect, an object in space joining other unlikely objects in space, Legos and guitars, dinosaur bones, a gorilla suit, and that pizza, of course.
So, in these pages, I can’t tell you what’s going to happen.
I’ll be taking photos, though, and writing it all down, most definitely.
Recording for the record what happens in this briefest of moments in the longest span of time.
But I can imagine it, because I understand how we got here: A man puts on a turtleneck and contemplates connection.
Two people stand naked, holding hands; someone records a heartbeat, and a laugh, and a dog barking, a rainstorm; an engineer designs a piece of a rocket that connects to another piece.
A record says, Here I am, here we were, to anyone who might find it.
You can’t even see these pieces, or even the spacecraft in the cosmos that carry them.
You can’t hear the laugh or the dog or the rainstorm on this tiny blue dot, but something has happened that matters.
A shift, and then another: A song leads to a kiss, and a kiss to more, to DNA merging with DNA, to a baby, to tiny fingers that will one day become a young man’s hand reaching for a young woman’s hand, as they play a song that leads to another kiss.
A circle and then another circle, a shift and another shift.
Someone receives a recipe for espresso brownies, handwritten on notebook paper, and something shifts; someone gives a bulb to someone else to plant, and something shifts.
Someone says, Don’t fall off that chair, and someone says, Here was that chair, here was that fall.
A record says, Here I am, here we were, to anyone who might find it.
And in a few days’ time, that tiny, tiny record will be carried aboard that ship, as a tiny, tiny girl watches, anxious while trying to be brave, to be open.
Elsewhere on that tiny, tiny planet, a tiny singer on a tiny stage sings a small song, silent from space, but here on Earth, hundreds of tiny feet tap, and somewhere else, a minuscule woman watches her minuscule television while holding a microscopic photo of a cherished son, and elsewhere, other tiny friends and loved ones gather around their little TVs like it’s 1977, and elsewhere still, a tiny man makes a tiny pizza, and another sails a tiny boat, and an old woman looks into a tiny telescope on a tiny mountain.
They are invisible, but they are there, no doubt about it.
That girl—she puts her tiny hands over her tiny ears now, because there it goes.
The blast is enormous; it is so, so loud, but it’s a blip, a bleep, a whisper.
As that rocket rises, as it disappears, she sends her love straight up, up and outward, and she will go on and on loving, as that record spins, too, as those records spin, in parts of space that she can only imagine.
Those Golden Records, about a golden boy, and a golden humanity, on a tiny spinning world.
We connect, we bind. We’re ropes, coils, strands, figure eights.
On this invisible spinning dot, we are the tiniest human beings giving the biggest something we can, not an object you can see and hear, but a force you can only feel, a force that moves and shifts, that creates a chain of change, that matters.
Something large, large, large—love. Love plus love plus love. Invisible, ongoing.
Lasting a billion years, Mars, my voyager. Lasting a billion years, at least.