Violence and Splendor

3. Space Travel

11 3 Space Travel Let us stop admiring our heads for a moment, Georges Bataille said, and look our feet. Our big toe is the distinctively human part, the only new body part in the human ape; it stabilizes our upright posture. Just look at our feet, Bruce Chatwin said; they are long and set parallel ; they are made to move on ahead. At the southern end of Patagonia, constantly battered by the icy winds of the Antarctic Ocean, at a place the Spanish called Punta Gualich ó (Devil’s Point), we visit a cave on whose walls there are painted dashes and serpentine lines, circles and rows of dots. There are also stenciled outlines of human hands. Some archaeologists have dated them at nine thousand years ago. They can only guess at what the designs might signify . It does seem likely that these broken and serpentine lines and these dots recall the vast distances that the painters had walked to get here. Thirteen thousand or more years ago, during the last Ice Age, small bands of humans crossed what is now the Bering Strait into the North American continent—or, as now thought, ventured across and then down the coast in small boats. They pushed on, seeing hundreds of miles of glaciers finally give way to the terminal moraines and the green forests and prairies inland. They ventured down the Central American peninsula and lingered at the mouths of rivers that descended the coastal deserts from the Andes; they entered the vast jungles of the Amazon. They pushed on, across so many hundreds of miles of desert and jungle and desert again until here, before the stormy waters of the Antarctic Ocean, they could go no further. To go as far as you can on our planet, to the opposite flank, you flew from Baltimore to Chicago, changed planes in Seoul, then flew onward to Ulaanbaatar. The thrill of the first men who mounted on horses, the thrill of dashing across vast distances, is anesthetized in passenger jetliners . They are high-tech engineering contrivances to make sense perception illusory: motion of 980 kilometers per hour is felt as fixity in a stationary seat in the felt stillness of the airplane. If you can look outside during daylight, the occasional drifts of clouds below enable you to gauge neither the 980-kilometer-per-hour movement of the plane 12 V I O L E N C E A N D S P L E N D O R nor the 1,669-kilometer-per-hour spinning of Earth beneath. Already super-rich tourists are traveling to outer space, to know 190 hours of movement at 39,000 kilometers per hour reduced to an experience of immobility. In a two-week trip by camel into the featureless Sahara extending under blank skies you knew the cadenced pace of the camel over the undulations of the dunes and rhythms in your nervous circuitry and brain that induce the serenity of yogis and mystics. There are no rhythms in the cabin of the transcontinental jetliner and in your body the seat position in which you are buckled builds up muscle tensions that cannot be released. You do the opposite of meditation: your mind sucks on trivial and inconsequential distractions. You watch the in-flight movie or you read a light novel. The 12,250 kilometers to Mongolia are eighteen hours of twitchy urges to do something and a heavy lethargy smothering those urges. Finally you arrive in Ulaanbaatar. Although China has annexed the southern half and Russia a big chunk in the north, today’s independent Mongolia is still huge, three times the size of France. There are only two million Mongols here, half of whom now live in Ulaanbaatar; the rest are nomads. You asked the only Mongol you knew, the desk clerk at the hotel (what slight knowledge), how to get around and he told you where to find somebody who had a four-wheel drive. When they rent out a vehicle it comes with a driver, though he speaks no English and you of course no Mongolian. But without a Mongolian-speaking companion you could not use the vehicle: once outside the capital there are no paved or even graded roads and of course no road signs. His four-wheel drive turned out to be a Russian make, twenty-nine years old, and the guy who had the vehicle said the driver knew Mongolia from one end to the other and...