I’m afraid of Jupiter. Yeah, I’m talking about the planet Jupiter: the giant ball of gas beyond the asteroid belt. That ball of gas has scared me for about a decade now.
Listen: over the summer of 1999, I went on a family trip. Like a rock tour, the trip had distinct segments. There were two legs. Leg one: we drove from Springfield, Missouri to Toronto, Ontario. Leg two: we took a plane from Toronto to Trinidad, the island where my mother grew up.
For leg one, we stayed at the house of one of my mom’s old friends. I don’t know how long we were there. It may have been a week. It may have been more.
My parents spent the days reminiscing and revisiting old haunts. They’d first met in Canada – in Kingston, actually, but had fond memories of Toronto as well.
They also went to tiny, grimy video stores to buy pirate videotapes of Bollywood films. They took me along. I’d bring a book and sit in the corner somewhere while the clerk bragged about the high quality of the tapes on sale.
One clerk was eager to show us a sample of his wares. He hooked a VCR up to a Trinitron and slid his tape inside. Onscreen, crisp people jabbered in crisp Hindi.
“Pretty crisp, huh?” the clerk said. “You know, I transferred these tapes from DVD. They’re almost DVD-quality. Crisp. Crystal-clear.”
My parents bought one. Months later, back at home, they put it on. For the hell of it, I watched it too. It was one of about three Indian movies I’ve seen in my life.
I can’t remember what it was called, but I remember the story: a bad dude murders two brothers, and their distraught mother prays to the goddess Kali to bring them back. Her prayers are granted and the brothers are reborn, but in separate towns and with no recollection of who they were in their previous lives.
So each sets out on his respective rollicking/serendipitous journey to learn the truth, dancing in the rain with/singing to various hot babes along the way. When the brothers find the bad dude, they kill him and then live happily ever after with their doting mother. The end.
I whiled away the nights in Toronto alternately reading books and playing Super Mario Land 2 on my gray, boxy Game Boy. One of the books I read – the one that put the fear of Jupiter in me – was James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science.
I’d found Chaos in my dad’s office, the week before the trip. I’d pulled it off his bookshelf and been dazzled by the cover: the title floating stark and red over a complex, jagged image that was like nothing I’d ever seen. (The image was a fractal, but I didn’t know that.)
“Oh, do you want that?” my dad had said. “You can have it.”
So I took it. In Toronto, I read it. I now remember almost nothing about the book’s actual content, but it made a strong impression on me. The book’s more or less about how scientists find “order” in nature’s “chaos,” and even now, that concept’s something I think about all the time.
I’m always trying to filter chaos into order. But I’m no scientist, so when I talk about “order” and “chaos,” I’m not talking about equations. I’m talking about shit that’s much more vague and fruity. I’m talking about pulling some kind of signal out of my life’s white noise.
There’s this whole section of Chaos about Jupiter. Jupiter and its Great Red Spot. The Great Red Spot is a storm that’s been going on for hundreds of years. The Great Red Spot is three times the size of Earth, but relative to Jupiter it’s tiny.
Because Jupiter’s a gas planet, its “surface” is really just one big storm. The Great Red Spot’s a smaller storm superimposed on that big storm.
Jupiter is wind and current, hydrogen and helium. It’s the biggest planet by an enormous factor.
It’s bigger than the biggest thing I can imagine. I’ll never be able to understand Jupiter. Is that why I’m afraid of it?
The night after I read about Jupiter, I woke up when everyone else was still asleep. I had to take a leak. I walked down the hall to my mom’s friend’s bathroom.
Four walls: the one holding the doorframe, the one against which the toilet was shoved, the one to my left with the towel rack and the one to my right with the window.
There was a “cute” sign above the toilet. It said, “If you sprinkle while you tinkle, be a sweetie and wipe the seatie.” Below those words was a picture of an embarrassed-looking cartoon duck looking down at a cartoon toilet seat. The duck, I gathered, had just tinkled, and while tinkling, the poor little guy had also sprinkled.
I looked out the bathroom window. I’ve always hated bathrooms that have windows in them. I don’t understand what they’re for, and they make me feel naked.
I couldn’t see anything outside. Just the black sky and a few slate-like sheets of cloud. No moon, no stars. Then I imagined Jupiter up there: Jupiter appearing first as a tiny orange dot but then getting larger and larger, filling my whole field of view with storm-bands and size and terror and chaos. Jupiter the unknowable, coming to swallow me. The Great Red Spot like the beast’s gaping mouth.
I pulled my pants up in a hurry, washed my hands and got the hell out of there. I left without being a sweetie and wiping the seatie. Truth be told, I don’t think I flushed either.
I have a fear of Jupiter that overrides all rationality. I think of the planet as something that can suck me out of my home, pull me out my bed, draw me into some alien hell-world of red turbulence. Getting sucked into Jupiter would be like getting sucked back into the womb.
I had to watch a birth at the hospital last month. To use the technical term, I saw a “vaginal delivery.” I asked the mother for permission beforehand – would it be okay with her if I were present for the birth? Then I stood in the corner and watched.
“Delivery.” What’s with that term? Like the baby’s something you FedEx. Like the baby’s a package, one with a point of origin and a destination. Like the baby can be tracked.
Well, the point of origin’s the womb. The destination’s the hospital room. And yeah, we can and do track babies. We have all kinds of ultrasound shit for that. We can hook wires up to the mother and listen to the baby’s heart as it’s being born.
A baby’s heart rate gets faster as it gets closer to “delivery.” It’s because of the stress.
People talk about birth like it’s a miracle, and I guess it is if you believe in that kind of thing, but it’s also a violent, brutal process.
The mother’s face contorts into a mask of pain as she tries to push through the contractions. And when the baby’s heart rate picks up, the monitor’s thumping gets loud and rapid and ominous.
When the baby’s head erupts, it’s with a gush of blood. Once the head’s out, the rest of the body follows without much of a problem.
The baby opens its eyes for the first time, and the first thing it does is cry.
A nurse sticks something in the baby’s mouth – a “suction bulb.” A suction bulb is exactly what it sounds like. You use it to pull water or something out of the baby’s lungs or mouth or windpipe. Water or amniotic fluid or something.
I haven’t studied this shit. I don’t know what I’m talking about.
You cry when you’re born. It’s the first thing you do. Crying is weird. You’re communicating, but you’re also not. When you cry, you’re saying something but you don’t necessarily expect to be heard. When you cry, nobody knows what you’re trying to say. You may not even know what you’re trying to say.
When you cry, you’re trying to articulate something that language can’t describe or define.
You cry when you’re born. It’s a natural reaction, you know. Ripped from the womb, you open your eyes and see yourself in this bizarre new world, and then someone sticks a fucking rubber bulb in your mouth.
But when you grow up and you get used to life outside the womb, you don’t want to go back. Even if you wanted to, the mechanics of it would be too disgusting to contemplate. Nobody in his right mind would want to crawl up his mom’s vagina.
Birth is a violent absurdity and so is death. Life makes a little more sense than either, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be absurd too. It’s like the Great Red Spot: tiny compared to Jupiter, but still three times the size of Earth.
If you could be born into a world that made complete sense, I don’t think you would cry. I think of the end of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey: David Bowman is reborn as the Star-Child, a being that transcends humanity. When the Star-Child opens his eyes for the first time, he does not cry. He doesn’t see fear and confusion. He sees understanding and possibility.
The day we went to the airport for leg two of the trip, I picked up the latest issue of Time. Summer 1999: there were articles about the Sega Dreamcast and about Stanley Kubrick’s then-new movie, Eyes Wide Shut. The critics thought it was good, but not as good as 2001.
The in-flight movie on the way to Trinidad was 10 Things I Hate About You. Rather than watch that bullshit, I focused on other bullshit: I played Super Mario Land 2. I finished the game on that flight.
After the credits rolled, I did what was the natural thing: I started the whole game over again. Man, I wasted so much time with videogames back then.
My grandparents had a house in Trinidad, the same house where my mom grew up. We stayed there. I read a bunch of my mom’s old books.
She had a science fiction anthology that contained what’s probably my favorite Arthur C. Clarke short story: “The Nine Billion Names of God.” He wrote it early in his career, well before he and Stanley Kubrick made 2001.
“The Nine Billion Names of God” is about a group of monks who believe their sacred duty is to write down every possible name God could ever possibly have. Once they do that, they think the world will come to an end.
The monks have taken their duty very seriously for centuries, recording the permutations of God’s name with painstaking diligence. But then one of the monks gets a bright idea. He decides to go to America and rent a computer to get the job done faster.
He’s done the math. Without a computer, writing the nine billion names of God down could take thousands of years. With a computer, it could take a few short weeks.
So the monk gets a computer. He also also hires two technicians to help operate the machine. This is because “The Nine Billion Names of God” was written when computers were still room-filling mini-Jupiters. Racks and racks of vacuum tubes and switches of mind-breaking complexity.
The technicians fly to Tibet and watch the monks glue pages and pages of computer-tabulated names into books. At first they just shake their heads condescendingly, but when the task’s almost over, they start to worry.
After all, when the monks print out all the names and the world doesn’t come to an end, they’ll probably be angry. What if they smash the computer? What if they attack the technicians?
They decide to skip out on the monks and go home a little early. It so happens that they’re getting ready to board their plane just as the last few names of God are being written.
Those poor monks, one of the techs says. Right about now they’re probably realizing it was all for nothing.
The other tech doesn’t reply. He’s just staring up at the sky. Look, he says. And of course, the first guy looks. And of course, up there, one by one, the stars are disappearing.
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